Daniela GioseffiTHE UNBORN CALF AND THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS The calf could not be born in the icy rain Pouring through the grey sunrise. The mother lay in mud grunting, scrambling to rise, and the white and black lump bobbed, dangled, hung wet and dripping blood from her hind. She tried to gallop away, but the lump flapped from side to side, a sack of swollen muck with mouth yawning agape. The old farmer roped her, pulled her down on her side in a skid of flying mud, and tied her. He put his hand up inside, beside the slithering calf which still hung a bag of half-life from her, born to where the hooves were caught and would not come. He wrestled until sweat poured from his forehead in the cold, and the cow groaned until all thrashing stopped-finally, as he took a rifle from his wagon and aimed for the soft temples one, two, of both heads of flesh from which we come half born into cold light for the pain, the shooting of the young Mother and child tethered into death. ____________________________ LOST BUDS These Bach cello suites grate on old bones, stir memories that tickle my teats with sensational sorrow, lost buds, fields gone fallow. I think of how there are no tomorrows in which I'll give birth. Now, it's not pregnancy or the hope of it, no new bouncing baby to come. Only middle age girth makes me look maternal. Menopause has left not one kernel of hope in my old ovaries. I'm out to pasture, a sagging nag who's never tasted a fruition of love, cornucopia of sharing the labor with him, the supreme moment, that most fertile union together, hand in hand, eye to eye, smile upon smile, kiss of joy, lips and minds met in the shared ecstasy of birth, seeing our bodies fused in new creation come to the occasion of our rebirth together in one being made from us, blended in a new person Those who live that moment together can't know how desolate never to. ____________________________ THERE ARE "LOTS" OF POETS Whole shopping mall asphalt parking lots full of them trying to seduce truth with carloads of words packed in plastic shopping bags deeper than the bags under their cyberspace eyes, but there are lots more just baking in the sun eating pizza, licking ice-cream cones under the disappearing ozone layer getting cancers of the tongue crapping out smart laughter and sardonic wit, hah hey, while everything burps to an end exhausted and glutted, pinched and putted, burped out in junk food indigestion in shopping malls full of B-movies of sexy gun molls and gourmet foods while their "Country Tits of Thee" buys dictators' allies--Papa Doc, Marcos, Mobutu, Hitler who eat corpses and nail Third World children to racks for sale and sail them into smut movies like Boat People to please white First World decadents who love to see exploding guns, blood splatter, speeding cars, torn sex organs--a cheap rag to be sold to flatulent CEO's with multi-million dollar suck-up salaries who vote for religious hypocrites. Right, right and righter. Did you know that the word "salary" comes from the word "salt," as in "worth your salt" from a time before money when labor was paid in "salt" a valuable commodity to live by. Oh, well. boogey down to The Ninth Circle of Hell with loud, hard, bad rock guitars strummed like flying penises headed for the stars. Listen to the thrum thrum thrum with faces all pinched seriously as if bad music were important in the Ninth Circle of Hell-- as if clanging the doomsday bell. Look at them dance their heads right off so that they float among the dead stars where the words are: "Oh well, oh well, oh well!" ____________________________ GOD IS A GASEOUS VERTEBRATE I can't think of a poem that talks about what gaseous creatures we are putrid and full of methane --though even God is a gaseous vertebrate- as I've never seen him except maybe in a baby's smile or smelled him in a rose or a lover's breath or a dying body. We don't talk about how our lover sometimes farts walking down the hall in a hurry. It's not polite of me to mention it, always smelling of roses, always sweet like apples baking, always a lady with a handbag just so like The Queen of England I never shit or smell of sweat so socialized into society, such an intellectual poet am I, like John Ashbery, Jorie Graham and Charles Bernstein who never stink a bit-- their poetry all gaseous, their guts and armpits clean, super clean and sweet as roses, apples, potpourri and lemon balm and an incense called "Nonsense!" offered up as exquisitely gaseous entreaty. ____________________________ THE UNITED FRUIT CO. --after Pablo Neruda When the trumpets had sounded, and all was prepared on the earth and Jehovah divided the world into Coca-Cola Incs, Anaconda, Ford Motors, I.G. Farben, and other entities: the United Fruit Inc. reserved for itself the succulent, central coast of my land, the sweet waistline of America. The executives baptized our lands naming them "Banana Republics," and over the sleeping dead, over the disquieted heroes, who had conquered their greatness, their liberty and flags, established an opera bufa: raped all industry, awarded crowns like Caesar, unleashed all greed, and created the dictatorial "Reign of the Flys"-- flys Trujillos, flys Tachos, flys Carias, flys Martinez, flys Ubico, flys all of them wet with the blood of their marmalade extracts, drunken flys buzzing over the tombs of the people, flys circus flys, scholarly flys trapped in tyranny. Then the bloody kingdom of the flys, The United Fruit Company Incorporated unloaded coffee and fruits; cargo boats overflowed, trays of spoils floated away from our drowning dominions. And all the time, somewhere, in the sugar factory, purgatories of our seaports, smothered by gases, a native fainted away in the fumes of the morning an anonymous corpse floating in marmalade, a numberless thing, a spiraling number, a branch of dead fruit ____________________________ THE SUN WAS A TRUMPET THEN Mornings were treaties like mysteries-- the sea, a hand on the library! Cold, restless, I touched you with peaches, and we left our footprints in smoke. We were purer than hope, a clean glass of cool water on a sky-blue table cloth Wet night, rubbery black raincoats of ice! We were rivers, opinions, angry with love as if our musings mattered enough to change murders to silver ink, paint on the nickels, books we'd hum to rescue children from beasts who lived in secret sewers of Capitols, but wars went on and on bleeding us, until your eyes grew alarm clocks. We retreated in fires like candles. Our toes were as tired as rocks. Our heads grew heavy with gray webs and hung over our chests -- limp branches creaked in winter, snow slid from our roof to the ground where it splattered to mud, running in rivulets down gutters to nowhere beyond the dark where "the gray man dances" and coughs with lunatic laughter in his torn and tattered coat. ____________________________ "Don't Speak the Language of the Enemy!" reads the poster at the end of a grey alleyway of childhood where the raggedy guineas of Newark whisper quietly in their dialects on concrete steps far from blue skies, olive groves or hyacinths. Bent in a shadow toward the last shafts of sunlight above tenement roofs, Grandpa Galileo sadly sips homemade wine hums moaning with his broken mandolin. Children play hide-and-seek in dusty evening streets as red sauce simmers, proverbially, hour after hour, on coal stoves, garlic, oil, crushed tomatoes blended with precious pinches of salt and basilico- a pot that must last a week of suppers. The fathers' hands are ugly with blackened finger nails, worn rough with iron wrought, bricks laid, ditches dug, glass etched. Wilted women in black cotton dresses wait in quickening dark, calling their listless children to scrubbed linoleum kitchens. In cold water flats with tin tables, stale bread is ladled with sauce, then baked to revive edibility. Clothes soak in kitchen laundry-tubs, washboards afloat. Strains of opera caught in static are interrupted by war bulletins. The poster pasted on the fence at the end of the block streaked with setting sun and rain reads: "Don't speak the language of the enemy!" But, the raggedy guineas can speak no other, and so they murmur in their rooms in the secret dark frightened of the *government camps where people like them have been imprisoned in the New World. They teach English to their children by daylight, whispering of Mussolini's stupidity-- stifling the mother tongue, wounding the father's pride, telling each other, "We are Americans. God bless America!" NOTE: *It's a little remembered fact that there were concentration camps for Italian immigrants in the United States during World War II, similar to those in which Japanese immigrants were unjustly incarcerated. ____________________________ THE BALLAD OF SELMA, ALABAMA, 1961 With his white robe and cop's hat, he bent over my cot in the Selma cell, then he laughed, pushed me down and sat over me, as if to kill. I heard the bell of the night curfew ring in sudden dark. His heft pressed down as if I'd escape through the bars to sing "We shall overcome," song of haunting renown. There was no way out of his groping hands. Trapped, a shuddering virgin of twenty, Northern white child of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, was sapped of all innocence, robbed of feelings as mild as silly idealism. "Um gunna' teach you a lesson you'll never forget for commin' down here to interfere! We don't want no desegregation! We don't need no guinea girls ridin' with niggers in the rear!" I trembled as he'd torn my blouse from my heaving chest, then pushed hard into me biting my mouth shut so I couldn't scream, though the louse in white sheets was a sworn deputy sheriff of Montgomery County -- the only law for miles around the jail where I was dragged in an unmarked police car through the dark of night. No one would know or offer bail-- away from my friends and family far north from where I'd dared to come to enter hell where the Ku Klux Klan ruled over all, no matter who you were, your blood was theirs to spill There were no officers of the peace, to call. I followed Rosa Parks into a trap laid for me where a white-robed supremacist with his hate justified and said took my young body, a vessel of naivete, the child that had been me, and carved on my face the look on the dead. ________________________________________________ COPS, COPS EVERYWHERE AND NOT ONE DROP TO DRINK I. --Central Park, Puerto Rican Day Parade 2000, New York City They grabbed my breasts as if they were meat, my buttocks, as if they were market hams to take home and eat. My body isn't mine, but theirs as they squirt spermy soda bottles up my skirt, and I wrestle with them for my shirt, pull at them to take back my own arms, struggled with them for my life, and my purse. My hair is yanked, my head jerked back, some geek sticks his tongue in my mouth as I scream, "Please, let me go!" and all goes black as I hit the sidewalk. Alone in the center of some circle of Hell, I feel strange eyes, hands full of nails grab at my bruises, scratch; sweaty mouths spit dirty words in my ears, fingers knead at my crotch, crucified for my sex as they stand over me and laugh. When I struggle free and run clutching my clothes, wet and scared like a rat out of a hole chased by hungry cats, to finally find the cops, cops everywhere, I tell them in breathless speech: "I need help, others too, back there, go look, see, it's not just me!" --but they, too, laugh and eye my wet torn shirt clinging to my breasts, eye my wet legs, scratched blood red, grab me with their eyes and join in the big guffaw and say:"Go home, girl, 'cause you need a good bath! We have real work to do. No time to listen to what you say?" They smirk at each other: "We've had a long day." ____________________________ TRANSIT COPS AND AN N.Y.P.D. ROOKIE II. Later, burning at home, I remember the day I walked through the subway tunnel near Times Square. Two transit cops were chatting as they walked ahead of me. Abruptly, they stopped before a homeless man, small, thin, maybe Puerto Rican, pale and sleeping on the ground. One cop lifted him, jerking him suddenly to his feet. He stood like a rag doll, disoriented, groggy, sad and so thin. The other cop poked him hard in his rib and shoved him forward up the stairs into the cold night. "Walk, ya bum. Ya stink!" he said under his breath. Impulsively I said: "Officer, did you have to poke him so hard? You could've broken his ribs!" Why be so rough? He's starving and fainting. He's not going to give you a hard time or resist." "Mind your own business, Honey. Wanna' do our job for us? Maybe, we should give you a poke to shut up!" They laughed and walked on, but, I recall the time I was lost in a strange neighborhood, late at night, during the subway strike, and a young cop in a car I flagged down in desperation, drove me home, right to my door and said politely, "Have a good night and stay safe, Mam." He was young, doing his job to protect, maybe a rookie, not jaded yet. _______________________________ RESPECTING THE MYSTERY WHILE HEARING JACKHAMMERS Eyes of eagles ears of owls, dance of octopus, depths of the sea, speed of the cheetah, the reason love blooms or dies, the look we drink from our lover's eyes, the child's first cries, mysteries lost in lusty sighs. We who live in cities, in concrete captivity whose sense of smell is the dust of oil, whose ears are full of jackhammers, whose nose is full of the stink of a homeless man, sleeping on the subway, whose fingers touch plastic computer keys whose eyes are focused on the screaming screen of make-believe murders and special effects horrors, whose designer jeans are too tight because fast-junk-food tempts to guilt, who breathe carbon dioxide and ignore global warming- feel nature poetry is obsolete and language poetry is alive but if we're contrived to love words over the things they symbolize, and to feel the poem should just be not mean, then what will happen to the speed of cheetahs, ears of owls, eyes of eagles, flight of humming birds, God who smiles with a baby's mouth, agility of octopus, the love we drink from our lover's sighs? |