This summer Sandi Leibowitz has joined my poetry group for its workshops even though she lives in NYC. Isn't Zoom wonderful! The second poem in this entry is from one of the workshops, by the way.
Memorial Day
May 25, 2020
People throng the beaches,
worse than those islands where walruses
flop to shore to mate and bask,
so many bodies toe to toe
rather than tusk to tusk.
So much bare skin,
all those jeans unzipped,
T-shirts ripped off revealing
sun-starved flesh,
and nakedest of all,
unmasked faces.
It makes me shudder,
the thought of all those bodies,
all those mouths breathing
in and out contagion.
If the beach-goers are exhibitionists
of pinniped dimensions,
I am a tortoise,
sheltering in place
within the shell of my apartment.
Even indoors, my white skin’s
duly layered.
At three p.m., from my window wafts
the sound of someone honoring
other bodies:
a bugler playing Taps.
The Boat
For Bay Thi Huynn, who fled from Vietnam in a boat with her husband Joseph in 1980. They died in Worcester, MA of the coronavirus on the same day.
Sixty years ago, the boat of marriage
carried me to you.
It was not a ship of our own making,
but it was our labor
that kept it from foundering.
It had no engines, no sails.
Always, we rowed together,
sometimes through desperate currents.
I counted on you,
as you did me,
to work the oars
despite the ache of muscles
pushed too far,
exertion almost beyond endurance.
If you pulled too hard,
we went off course.
If I stopped rowing,
the boat went in useless circles.
When our land grew too dangerous,
you built in secret a real boat.
We used one of my old dresses for a sail
and gave ourselves and our children
to the sea,
risking everything.
We were lucky ones;
we survived and built
new lives in a new country.
Now in the same hospital
we lie for the first time
in separate beds,
the rhythm we hear not
the splash of waves
or each others’ heartbeats
but the labored intake
and outtake of our breathing,
the machines’ chirps.
Take my hand, Joseph,
let us pull away
together
as we did in life,
in sixty years of love,
traversing this new ocean.
What is one more journey?
The Word
There are no nuances
in my students’ vocabularies.
They don’t even know
simple words like “faucet.”
So I assumed they have no belief
in the potency of words.
But from the massive continent
of the school library’s
Unabridged Dictionary
someone has carved out
and set adrift the island
of a single word—
sex.
In someone’s pocket, the noun
bulges like purloined diamonds;
it rolls unspoken on someone’s tongue
like ice cream before dinner.
-- A version of the above poem was previously published in Bigger Stones.
After the Dentist, I Long for Sweetness but Can’t Console
Myself with Cake and So Stop at the St. Mark’s Bookshop
Before Going Home in the Stinging Winter Rain
A book of old Chinese poems.
That should do it.
I want to imagine a lake.
It’s summer
and there are cranes.
They cross carefully
like courtesans
lifting silk skirts
in
the emperor’s
marble
courtyard.
-------------------------------
Sandi has just published a new book, Ghost Light, a quarantine journal in verse. The first two poems are from this book. I encourage you to purchase it; here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GFX3NM2/ref=sr_1_17?dchild=1&qid=1598129395&
Let's post some music from Smalls Jazz Club, a venue that has broadcast performances daily despite the quarantine, despite the curfew.
The first video is of a jam session with Roy Hargrove, Stacy Dillard, Sebastian Rios, and others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IbxsofzgSA
Here the Jonathan Kreisberg Quartet plays "The Song is You": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kII6gvHHzAE
The Eric Wyatt Quartet plays "One for Hakim": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KriD4EBdLo0
I'll finish with the Ari Hoenig Trio and "Take the Coltrane": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL2GqPujiZU
