Hi. This telephone call is part poetry.
You ask how many rooms and beds I’ve slept in.
I remember a furnished room in Dublin.
The porter said a pram in the hall “had fallen asunder.”
I heard a whale splashing like church bells
sounding different hours, Irish and Roman
laughter in the streets. Now a bird sings
I do not want to meet you if you believe in nothing.
I kiss my friends goodnight while they sleep.
I kiss you all after you’re dead.
You say, “That’s a good reason for departure.”
I am my own student and my own master.
I am a poor student, but a good master.
I’m soaking wet with reasons—it’s raining hard,
and every raindrop is a reason.
Far from my neighborhood in Queens,
another time, same life, Teresa of Avila
and her little brother were my childhood friends.
I went with them to be murdered by the Moors,
but I was stopped by the snarling wolf of Gubbio,
before he went with St Francis to a notary,
signed the famous contract not to eat children.
There were wolves in our house. My family used to play
Rossini’s Largo al factotum when I was 3
to stop me from crying. I remember angry laughter.
I am tall, but bamboo shaken by wind and rain
may grow 3 feet in a day. I saw forbidden
chocolate Easter bunnies in store windows.
Later, it seems only a few days after childhood,
I bought a sack of candies in Cordoba,
a little glass crucifix—tucked into the cross
two knife blades. To make a crucifix a knife
that kills, that can also peel potatoes,
sounds like Andalucía.
I feel chilled, pull up the blanket.
Awake, it comes to mind when I was eighteen,
I watched a sailor in uniform wade into the ocean.
I thought he was going for a swim. Then I understood,
I had no time to kill, he was drowning himself—
half naked, I ran into the water, couldn’t find him.
I felt the undertow, went with it
till the whale opened its mouth,
and I swam back to the bloodless beach.
At liberty, in a rented rowboat, I went fishing
with a Marine suffering from elephantiasis,
“moo moo,” huge swollen testicles
he got from a South Pacific bug bite—
his balls strapped to his waist, mine hardboiled eggs.
We caught a few flounder we gave back to the ocean.
He said "lake fishing is Mozart, the ocean is Wagner."
I knew our ocean was two-thirds of the earth
a half note in the universe. I was an eyelash
flying with a flock of red-winged blackbirds.
I was a gob, medically discharged,
with a 4 point average because I obeyed orders,
not because I’d learned how little I mattered.
(Sorry, PhD’s to me are anchors on freighters.)
I’m a poor student and a good master.
Still in bed, I thought of the good flat tires in my life:
in the Sahara, a Michelin flat
while driving toward the Atlas Mountains,
sounds like Camus, tires deep in sand—
I walked an hour, leaving a frightened Francine,
found an Arab village, trusted my French,
received kindness and sweet tea.
Another apocryphal chapbook revelation:
I had a Citroën quinze splendid flat tire in Tarifa,
southern most town of Spain,
with its Atlantic and Mediterranean winds—
not long ago the “Pillars of Hercules,”
the end of the known world—
I knocked on a door of a white cave house,
was received into a peasant society
I never hoped to enter. I felt I belonged,
being ancient Iberian on my father’s side.
Before there were cities, countries, or religions,
there were olive trees and goats.
A fire by a stream was high civilization.
There were limestone cliffs, unattended fields,
no alphabet—there were cave paintings
fashioned with shells and sharpened stones,
black animal blood, oil from bogs—
pre-Magi horned beasts, sacred giant human hands.
In my tradition, I had a distant grandfather who painted
giant Godly eyes in a self portrait.
His tribe threw rocks at him, exiled him from shelter.
He wandered along a path made by wild goats.
He dined on figs and dates, goats’ milk.
The goats looked like him and me,
with their long faces, a big nose. From time to time,
they danced on their hind legs, bucked each other.