Made in Detroit: Poems Read online

  Off Alaska when humpback whales

  leave in fall as the waters freeze

  and the world turns white, heading

  for mating grounds off Hawaii

  and Mexico, certain whales remain.

  What makes a creature stay when

  almost all of its kind have moved on?

  In burned-out areas of Detroit,

  you’ll notice one house still wears

  curtains, a bike locked to the porch.

  Sometimes in the suburbs among

  tract houses with carpets of grass

  one farmhouse lurks, maybe even

  with a barn. I imagine its owner

  grey and stubborn, still growing

  the best tomatoes for miles, refusing

  to plant inedible grass, fighting

  neighbors about her chickens,

  a rooster who crows at four,

  her clothesline a flag of defiance.

  The constant exchange

  The ocean gives; the ocean takes away.

  I walked the old coast guard road many

  afternoons, just behind the last dune.

  Storms slammed it down, the waves

  ate it entire with the whole front dune.

  I remember a summer house where we

  dined with friends several times, remember

  how one winter it hung awkwardly half

  over the cliff and then it was gone.

  A lone pipe remained for another year.

  On old maps the hills on the Bay called

  Griffin Island, Bound Brook Island were

  just that and now solid land. Only

  marshes of reed and sedge seethe

  and ebb where tall ships docked.

  The sea is restless and greedy. It mocks

  the summer people with their million

  dollar houses with huge decks, vast

  glass, chews them up to splinters, then

  totes their flotsam away to dump on some

  beach fifty miles distant as grey drift-

  wood. Every spring we visit town beaches

  to find the parking lot broken to rough

  chunks, the stairs washed away. Ocean

  takes no guff from us tiny creatures

  but we get ours back by poisoning it.

  May opens wide

  The rain that came down last night

  in sheets of shaken foil while thunder

  trundled over the Bay and crooked

  spears of lightning splintered trees

  is rising now up stalks, lengthening

  leaves that wave their new bright

  banners tender as petals, seventeen

  shades of green pushing into sun.

  The soil feels sweet in my hands

  as I push little marigolds in.

  Bumblebees stir in the sour cherry

  blossoms floating like pieces of moon

  down to the red tulips beneath

  the smooth barked tree where a red

  squirrel chatters at my rescued tabby

  who eyes him like a plate of lunch.

  Wisteria can pull down a house

  The wisteria means to creep over the world.

  Every day its long tendrils wave in the breeze,

  seize the bench under its arbor, weave

  round the garden fence obstructing

  the path. Its arbor’s long outgrown.

  Such avidity. Such greed for dominance.

  It has already killed the Siberian irises

  it shadowed, stealing all their sun.

  Should I admire or resent? Neither.

  I go out with loppers and hack and hack.

  If it could, it would twine around my neck

  like a python; like an angry giant squid

  it would pull me into a strangling embrace.

  I will grow back, it swears, and outlive you.

  Its vigor outdoes mine. It will succeed.

  June 15th, 8 p.m.

  The evening comes slowly over us,

  over the cardinal and the wren still

  feeding, over the swallows suddenly

  swooping to snatch up mosquitoes

  over the marsh where the green

  sedge lately has a tawny tinge

  over two yearlings bending long

  necks to nibble hillock bushes

  finally separate from their doe

  mother. A late hawk is circling

  against the sky streaked lavender.

  The breeze has quieted, vanished

  into leaves that still stir a bit

  like a cat turning round before

  sleep. Distantly a car passes

  and is gone. Night gradually

  unrolls from the east where

  the ocean slides up and down

  the sand leaving seaweed tassels:

  a perfect world for moments.

  Hard rain and potent thunder

  An elephant herd of storm clouds

  trample overhead. The air vibrates

  electrically. The wind is rough

  as hide scraping my face.

  Longhaired rain occludes the pines.

  This storm seems personal. We

  crouch under the weight of the laden

  air, feeling silly to be afraid.

  Water comes sideways attacking

  the shingles. The skylight drips.

  We feel trapped in high surf

  and buffeted. When the nickel

  moon finally appears dripping

  we are as relieved as if an in-

  truder had threatened us and

  then walked off with a shrug.

  Ignorance bigger than the moon

  A fly is knocking itself senseless

  against the pane. That is, if a fly’s

  brain is in its head. Lobsters

  do not lodge the center

  of their nervous system there

  if one is to think of a fly

  as an inconvenient lobster,

  arthropods all. I’ve been reading

  about the ways plants commu-

  nicate by chemicals, wondering

  if a tomato plant minds more

  if a chipmunk bites into its fruit

  or if I pick its ripe globes.

  A moth is trapped between

  the screen and closed window.

  If I had super hearing like

  a vampire, would I be bothered

  by its screaming? The world

  surrounds me with small

  mysteries. How ignorant I am.

  Or bigger ones. Does a tree

  suffer when it’s chopped

  down? Is earth weary of us

  who poison it? Is she calling

  even now to sister meteors?

  I go through my muddled life

  like a pebble pushed by currents

  I don’t acknowledge. I notice

  perhaps a hundredth of what

  swarms about me on every side.

  Yet if I could feel it all, hear

  every whisper or cry, notice

  all the faces in a crowded street,

  would I really be wiser? or only

  more confused, dumb and deafened.

  Little house with no door

  For decades it stood in the oak woods

  not on any road but found only

  by an old path half grown over:

  a one-room house with no door

  left to shut anyone out, windows

  long bereft of glass, a few holes

  in the roof where sky poked through.

  I met a lover there one summer.

  I had a tense political argument

  with a fugitive there. A woman

  who’d left her rich husband

  for poverty spent two months

  camped in it. Raccoons explored,

  squirrels bopped in and out.

  Rain sidled through the floor.

  Once in a while someone or other
/>
  made repairs till bloated houses

  of summer people blocked access

  and gradually it knelt down into

  the forest floor and collapsed

  taking all that history with it.

  I never knew who built it way

  into the woods, perhaps a hunter,

  perhaps a hermit. Perhaps a ghost.

  Still it sheltered with its ravaged

  roof teenagers drinking and fucking,

  romance and the end of it, and for whoever

  most needed it, privacy, maybe peace.

  There were no mountains in Detroit [haibun]

  When I was a child, my parents would drive to Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, in soft coal country in the Appalachians a couple of times a year, often just as summer was ending—before school started. My father had grown up there and his sisters still lived in the narrow house resembling a red brick tombstone that stretched back from the highway where trucks groaned up the steep hill all night making me think of dinosaurs in books. I was never comfortable there, feeling alien, feeling very Jewish and judged, but I loved the mountains. When we left for home with my father at the wheel, early in the morning to reach Detroit the same day, there would always be fog, low clouds along the twisty highway. My father drove fast past the company coal towns, past the rock faces often stained with rust, the abandoned coke ovens, the mine entrances that looked foreboding where my uncle and second and third cousins worked under the mountains, the occasional stream dashing itself against rocks, the dark forests where my uncle Zimmy hunted deer on Sundays.

  A cloud rests white on

  a mountain’s shoulder: snow’s hand

  on the back of fall.

  But soon there will be none

  The garden is oppressing me

  with its rich bounty that is so

  many debts to be paid. Tomatoes

  I tucked into the ground up

  to their hips in late April, little

  miniature trees only so tall

  as the space from wrist

  to elbow, now they are shaggy

  giants that tower over me.

  They are laden like bizarre

  Christmas trees with red,

  with purple, yellow, pink,

  orange and maroon fruit, all

  to be gathered, heavy as

  a small child in the basket.

  All to be spread on platters

  in the diningroom where we

  dine with elbows tucked

  in the two square feet they

  leave us. Can, make into sauce,

  Italian, hot, simple. Shove in

  the dehydrator to make sweet

  dry slices like candy. Freeze

  as soup. Cook into chutney.

  Fill the bathtub and jump in.

  Force them down the cats.

  And eat and eat and eat

  and eat and eat. I dream

  they are crawling through

  the window into my bed

  red and huge and hungry

  where they’ll devour me.

  Missing, missed

  We lived in the same brownstone in Brooklyn, shared clothes, meals, chores. We each had a man who went into Manhattan. We got political together, joined groups protesting the war. We danced to the new relevant rock. We ogled the longhaired men like lustful angels who blossomed suddenly everyplace. Our marriages loosened and we spilled out.

  Sometimes we shared lovers. Sometimes you stole men I was flirting with. Finally we made love and you fled into something that felt less dangerous but wasn’t.

  After a few years of silence, we began to write from opposite coasts and you came to visit me. A whirlwind of fragments of undealt with past spun around you till the air was heavy with noise and flying objects.

  Every six months you found true love. You met a charismatic Mexican politico and followed him to Paris. And disappeared. No address, no internet presence, no Facebook, all connections broken. No one knew what had happened to you, dead or alive.

  Darkness swirls

  a hole still darker

  no one there

  Death’s charming face

  I greet dragonflies zipping

  into the garden like fighter planes

  glinting red, turquoise, transparent

  as they attack their prey.

  Why are predators often gorgeous?

  The tiger prowling like striped silk

  rippling: the leopard, ocelot,

  the polar most beautiful of bears.

  Even sharks have their streamlined

  aesthetic. Moon snails that drill

  clams to death have shells

  beachgoers seek to collect.

  Pythons are patterned like Oriental

  rugs. Hawks we find majestic

  as they soar tiny and crying

  mate to mate, then dive talons

  outstretched to mangle their prey.

  How often women have dashed

  themselves senseless on killers

  in anthems and arias of blood.

  The frost moon

  The frost moon like a stone wheel

  rolls up the sky. The grass is tipped,

  the green life pressed out of weeds

  and flowers alike.

  A morning powdered with white

  and then as the sun inches up

  into the trees, glitter. Sequins

  rhinestones, broken glass.

  Finally it dissolves into the air

  leaving stalks that look scorched,

  a rim of ice in the shadows,

  dry wigs of petals.

  The birds mob the feeders.

  No moths, no flies, no hoppers

  just an occasional bright or drab

  leaf eddying down.

  Sun still warms the skin or fur

  through glass, but the outside

  air bites the nose and ears,

  the wind whispers hunger.

  At night we feel the earth

  like a fast freight train hurtling

  into the darkness that closes

  around us like a tunnel.

  December arrives like an unpaid bill

  The moon is a fishhook of bone.

  Shoals of grey clouds dart past it.

  Occasionally one seems to catch

  and hang. Tomorrow it will be bigger

  sticking like a slice of cantaloupe

  out of the sea. Every day less sun

  as it crawls out of the seabed later

  and sinks into the hill of pines

  long before supper. The birds turn

  avid at the feeders. The flocks

  of wild turkeys grow, the tom

  collecting his harem if he pleases

  them, or they’ll drift to another.

  The tail of the red fox is bushy

  and he hunts earlier. Every tree

  even the stubborn oaks that

  clutched tight to their ragged

  brown leaves are stripped,

  turned to wooden bouquets.

  Time to haul wood for the fire.

  Time to heap more protection

  on the hardy parsnips and pluck

  the last nubs of Brussels sprouts

  and pull the kale leaves like tough

  green lace and dig the final leeks.

  Batten down, hill up, stow. We’re

  heading out into the stormy seas

  of winter, no safe harbor in sight.

  III

  The poor are no longer with us

  The suicide of dolphins

  No one, not even the scientists who study

  you, knows why you beach yourselves

  whole family groups, communities

  on our beige sand to gasp and die

  unless the volunteers, called phone

  to phone quickly in a spiderweb

  of summoning, can keep you wet

  and push you into deep water again

  like shoving a
huge wet sofa. Some

  think it’s disease or following your

  leader into danger or chasing fish

  into water too shallow so you run

  aground. An old fisherman said to

  me, they remember how they used

  to live on the land, they remember.

  We know nothing but still we grieve.

  Is your act any more opaque than a friend

  who drinks himself into a fiery crash?

  Another who burnt his brain to a crisp

  on crack; the woman who could not

  walk out on her husband even after the fifth

  trip to the emergency ward, leaving only

  feet first when he shot her? Or my friend’s

  daughter who hanged herself at fifteen

  because of names she was called,

  because of words on a computer

  screen, because of a boy. We cannot

  stop each other but still we grieve.

  The poor are no longer with us

  No one’s poor any longer. Listen

  to politicians. They mourn the middle

  class which is shrinking as we watch