My knees were never bent in prayer.
I have a very busy mouth,
experienced eyes that look straight into your eyes, baby,
my nose broken by a friendly fist—
shaking paws, and the back of my head scarred:
age 12, I put my head in front of a rock
thrown by a pal in our rock-throwing contest.
I have a World War II limp that goes and comes back.
The keloid scar across my belly
doesn’t show if I wear a shirt.
I almost forgot my severed Achilles tendon.
I’m a volunteer—
following orders, a prenatal hate.
I respect the tip of my tongue scar,
acquired age two,
when I fell down a bluestone stairway,
forked my tongue
making my way to my grandmother’s piano.
There is the duplicitous
suicide scar on my left forearm
because I was nineteen, and Marion Greenwood
was not in her studio when I arrived
after a long bus ride, and a five mile walk.
I sliced my arm, bloodied the place,
then cleaned up, said “I cut myself on a nail.”
(Twenty-three years later, I got the news
from a mariner poet walking across a bridge
that Marion was killed on a Woodstock sidewalk
by a truck backing up.)
I take responsibility for what I was not given,
found by chance, hidden behind waterfalls.
Off Roosevelt Avenue, I was taught a lesson in reality:
I saw a man who had stood on the moon, pass in a parade
in an open car. He was so different from his TV face.
I said to myself, “That guy is human. I’m watching him.
He stood on the moon. He’s right in front of me!”
An opposite story: years before, in a cinema
on Viale Trastevere, just passed Dante’s house,
across the Ponte Garibaldi—the film Marie Antoinette,
90% of the audience Togliatti “Felice Comunisti”—
Louis XVI and his family about to be guillotined
on the Place de la Concorde, the theater audience
wept in the cheap seats, and the loge,
“Oh no, i bambini, no! I bambini, no, no!”
The movie was happening then and there before their eyes.
I’ve forgotten my Roman scars from the heart’s cuts
beginning July 2, 1948. Nothing writ in water.