RED BANK
RED BANK
By Gregg Glory
Copyright © 1990
Published by
BLAST PRESS
May Fire
In Red Bank, painted red, the heat
Kills infants, sprawling at their mother's feet,
Packing into Woolworth's for Easter flowers
And rattling water pistols now on sale.
At Reckless Place a barbecue begins,
Matches flash and blacken on wet coal, near
A gallon tin of gas, waiting to explode.
The children hang like lilies from their necks;
Open-mouthed, alive, they squab the mall
In summer cut-offs, roiling at the sight
That floats in marijuana spikes of color
Of Barbie's head of smiles ghosting the Navasink
In dream apparel, while a plastic Christ
Bobs wished-for and haunted on black swells.
In Red Bank, where a squall of heats
Unhouses God from a fitful sleep
Like dozing Godzilla from the China Sea,
And ferries hellish stenches noseward in fuming oils
As far as Prowns, the parade
Which vaulted Christ among us, an Olympic star
Bright and burning on chrysanthemums,
Was over weeks ago. White as milk,
The holy faces melt in boredom as they pass
In lowing Volvos, while, near the fire, red men
Stutter useless baptism from a firehose....
Everything in cinders is coming down!
O Jesus, Jesus, standing in the rainbow
Of the hose, shout deliverance again
And scald these unbelievers with your breath.
Drenched in dreaming sweat I saw
Souls wake in blood, behind
The Broad Street Exchange, butcher-red, and rise
In dead march ordinance against the skies
Shuffling to the stocks, and the bell
Of RBC came clanging straight from Hell
While trumpeting sirens foretold the fire
That has risen, skimming every street
Until the sun and mud-baked river
Is fire. Resurrection will visit us after death
Has burned our smoking bones of sin, and we wake
Purged from the grave, waist-deep in the flaming
Shallows of our lives, and stand, and wait,
For Heaven's hissing flesh to drop on us like cloth.
The Fourth of July
Unevenly the party yachts contend
Against windy effulgences and mud...
Foghorns blast our darkness, and stuttered flares
Move with the moving simpleness of girls.
Our outboard motor's intake coughs and starts to catch
In the open throat of summer, this July;
And the coal-black bones of Christ,
Crushed diamond by mountains of our love,
Dance pewter in this light. Upright and bare
A billion angels on this head must whirl
And orgy in the air.
This July, sparks are hissing down like sleet
Over all our wreckage into the water's side
Which sighs with the resigned, ovoid sigh of Mary,
The mother of Gad, the green swerver,
Who knows the bottom of the sea is full
And pulls us battered up to bell and tide.
Lord, the wind is westerly and knocks
Our prayers in our faces.
Shrieking seagulls stab and pin their fish,
Winged anglers, falling to the vails
And heavy weather. God will toss
The innocent away and maw
All our holy relics in a waterspout;
Time, the belly dancer, jigs to display
His horned speeches, racked with lamb
And jellied by green gobbets our sins.
What else is rotoring on the devil's spit?
Our anglers dive and swallow in blue mud;
Rootless seeds are piling into drifts;
Landscape men and fathers go mowing to the caw
Of death, the black charmer, who shuts their eyes;
Speckle-pated crows are laughing by the dam
And water spillage; lightning strikes the barber pole
And melts the colors of the flag.
Unplummeting sailboats snap the water, the virulent ebb
Of day's graven clouds lowering to the swamp,
An abyss of images. Crowds of lights
Are bursting above our docks, while the crash
And rush of screamers go hurtling overhead
And die to silence in the silt.
Something solid
Moves in the mud.
Fall, 1989
In this year of peace, thwarted blockages,
no gangs of children clot
the open door
as Stalin or Lenin anymore;
the costume's faded.
At Fort Monmouth where
our iron eagle stares
blinkless eastward
to the Atlantic churning and its grey sleet,
their spattered laurels rust
and haemorrage in a truss
of antique victories.
Winter hovers nearer, and you madden.
The orange,
too-large, too-humorless,
fangs on the pumpkin-goblin
sharpen and glitter in the dark.
A blackbird shifts on the orisoned bough;
Our ramrod
Police Chief thought you due
for a salted season in Wing 6, behind
the chicken-wire window that dices up the sky
in blue diamonds; blue
as the Xanax
tablets that they'd doled
to fog and finish
your everlasting fire.
Forty in an hour
refused to soak
your burning for the afterlife
to dimness.
On the neat brick wall
useless as Homer's chorus,
or Linus telling Charlie Brown a joke,
the old generals sit,
deprived like you
of the ecstatic quaver
of their insanity
and fold their hands.
You stare into the darkness that you brought.
"Why, we had better eat
this time up quick, quick,"
your numbing voice explains
with painful exactitude. "Before
the unexpected
bread begins to stick
and sugar in our throats."
The black
rinds harden and go sour.
Perhaps now we have
a futile hour
to donate to the mad.
All Hallow's Eve
Each day flamed with terror as before
Rumson double-taped keep-quiet warnings to her door
Of hollow polished brass. Her strafing tongue
Had killed three husbands by forty-one.
The Hell-faced knockers clanged with the cold
Doom of white-knuckled death scything into town
For restful autumn. She was marked
By the thin hand of cancer, and she bore
Its incongruous, leaking fingerprint
On face and bone. Armed with the Great Faith
And real estate holdings out of state,
She owned an antique bible that the Sorbonne's
Near holy medieval French department
Would rob or kill for; she wept, and ground
Her school marm heel at noon in time
To the molten passages that she howled
Out loud from Solomon. Her hysterical,
Outbound faith and stilted
Domestic majesty even made her answer
The skidding halloweeners dressed as indians
In pilgrim English. "Take these and eat
Them with the name of Jesus on your lips.
Now pray, pray," she'd say, and lavish
Johnny Appleseed apples to vanished faces.
The bridge to Belmar still gapes this span
Of the chill Atlantic, wrestling to the shore, beside
The closed clubhouse perched on painted stones
The color of water, while the dumb, vortexing gun
Of night releases stars over candy-littered lawns. And now
The wind is tearing through the oaks, and more
Than oaks. She speaks, "God's breath's a kiln
Of salvation." She hooks the door shut with her foot,
The apple falling rotten from her hand....
Our runty graveyard is filling to the brim
With sticks and stones. Kneeling in the chalk
Dust of her unfinished basement, she stoked
Her gaudy bible to the furnace, page by page,
Until the Spirit itself had raged and came
Inspired to the twisting entrails of the flame.
The cold voice was clarifying and was clear.
She heard its crystal mumble, and she swung
The tiny grate on its small hinges wide, and saw
God's face smiling. Only her head, crowned
With the spent light sizzling as it went
Could fit itself inside. "It's hard, oh, so hard
To just laugh and laugh enough to die."
Dockside
The vanishing marina sees our backs as we crown
The steep grass bank still slick with rain.
The chill of remembering infects us, and the sound
Of a few, lost cars that nose our roads in pain
Whines in the darkness, searching for a spot
To dry and die in;
Like the terrified opossums that they crucify
And flatten in the gristle of the year. Tonight,
The whirr of stars is stopping, and their gear
Drops like a stopped man from the roof
Of the Olde Union House; we stop, and soon
All the river's leaking contents pour
Into our lagoon of knowing.
The potent cocktails have us half amazed---
There is nothing ominous in all this buzz
About growing middle-aged. The unending
Labyrinth of our loving us still gores
The sore spots of our marriage.
Everyone in the hospital is on the mend!
Our psychoanalyst friend in his jaguar
Dupes the clock
And races past. Pinned in the wooden balcony
By guilt, eternal voyeur, eternal recur, we
Sway out of our seats. And the pulsed spur
Of the Atlantic Red Eye goes roaring to the ocean overhead
And leaves a line of red. What else
Is flashing into darkness from this dock?
Dr. Reverend in Ohio
"Pacing the thin streets made long by thought,
I jingled metaphysics in my purse, caught
the lecture circuit and cleaned-up with bunk.
My brother in the arts, Dr. Blank, got skunked
by every whorehouse publisher to come
down the twisting pike. 'Some
of my best friends...' he would say, and stop.
He was forgetting syllables by this time, on top
of everything else. Fifth in my class
at Harvard (seminary) I used to pass
my historic heirloom polo shirts around like greeting cards
and prostletized humility. A liberal education's hard
to come by these days. We would sit and stare.
If only to live one did not eat the air!
Safe on my white soap-box, I did drool
and gibber liquid like a priest. The fool
who made me call him mentor did me in.---
He thought my thesis too encyclopedian
and useless to the race. Why I'd hold the hand
of any povero insensato in the land.
The blue air cracks against the chimney-smoke
of this midwestern coal town. These days I have to choke
the hissing words back down my throat
to save my shovelling job, the boss' swelling goat.
Now lost and dazed beneath the white camellia,
I meditate at lunch-time on the sacrosanct and familiar."
Her Words
"One dark night, unjust soul's repose
sunk in a midnight past my midday's cure,
I rattled blind down corridors, stuffed
my loud bright watch beneath a pillow
to keep the silence out (the between ticks tick).
I danced with mirrors, slept in blinks,
threaded whiskey like a life-line to my glass.
I spun our wedding ring to a gold globe
and waited the balance out; how it rang against the stone!
I cannot think; the one world whirls....
The world's pink ears are crammed with speech;
I, I, I, I, becomes a hollow sound, you
infect my eye, enlarge to a troll....
My bruised head floats in a goldfish bowl."
Xmas Eve
Whitewashed in our Cuban spats and pale fear
we watch the ocean go under the snapping prow
of Rigor Mortis, our rented sailing vessel
pulled by shrouds across the immense sea, gem-green.
Coke cans leap the rail and bleed soda to the waters....
"Life is a sequence of sequential events,"
you say, and nod, loosing the popcorn that noosed
our tilting Xmas spruce in a hash of fish-lines.
Candles in seashells nod and glow and go out;
a final star drops from the clipped sky.
Our neurotic engine stutters out on windy rocks....
Time, the big boat, heaving its heavy carcass
westward everyday, drags its smashed golds nearer,
throws a line, and hooks us safely into port.
Rigor Mortis
Our bodies fasten to whatever's nearest;
something hidden nibbles on a clear line
and we yank it home. All day, inverted billows
swallow our offerings, raw life red inches of flesh
pinned like a college sweetheart, thrown
to silver bodies that come thwacking through the sky
to stiffen in our below-decks ice chest.
Live nets coil in our hands and slacken;
we cannot master the minutest mysteries....
heavy waters trouble our pumps, and we heave
into evening; it is dark; everywhere
the slightest events evade us; a fly specks the fish.
Packed in the lamplit cabin, I claw a book, written
by one drunk for you, the other.
Mahatma Ghandi
He started with a pebble of conscience
under his heel, in his new black shoe,
a small-town lawyer with the hots for God.
Released from the lassitude of law school
he opposed the British lion with a tiger-heart;
he laid his heart on the rail-ties at Kapur:
"We cannot let them move, or they will pounce..."
the blood-waves drying to coal in the sub-tropic sun.
And, "Love contains the solution to evil."
Who knew you'd end on the celestial mountain,
famished like Kafka's hunger-artist? Bearded and pleased
at how your life-gamble fell out,
you did the dark, brave thing--
Imagining a love, like cement, that mortised the blanks
in our lives, the pauses between our words.
Moses
The bluejay in his monarch's robes spills water
from the rhododendron's spikes; harsh gabble
of the adoptive son, the worm-eater, too big
for the other children at the table
to play or pray with. Moses growing up
was laughed at for his big nose or big laugh
by the fair-limbed sons and daughters
of Egypt, each fine hand or foot an exampled branch
of old Pharaonian power reaching through to new grain.
Adult at last, expulsed from the blue palace
into unleavened light,
Moses got his bellyache straight from God
and belched the ten commandments on command.
The Lord God himself beaks his kill.
The Killers
We have killed to have ourselves go on,
white egos in envelopes, a teeming sack
of spider eggs nourished to bursting. We go on
at the ripe edge of death, the rich slit
in the Nazi's side, or evil VC opened up
who could not duck the waver
of bullets that pass too near and are not named
home or religion or spouse-- each ready
to penetrate and save, to transfigure the flesh
like a monarch exploding its green chrysalis.
At the focusless eye of my window,
boundlessly blue from the outside in,
in the catbird's nest awash with grief still lies
near the murder, in eggy resins, still lies
a bluejay's egg unhatched, still unhatched.
JFK
The wasp is still in the columbine's shadow,
the one black among differing greys; shelved
by time now, and available only through the abstract haze
of fathers and mothers talking--- the dour song
of the 60s gives them something to raise voices over.
"If I knew that man's mind, I'd know the country."
A few well-soldered speeches carry through,
the New England intonation, a fretted film....
He has the stiff, sweet elegance of dust,
wafting through the White House's castled banquets
in his thin-waisted tux. Over the open, boiling
spaghetti pot you stand and sing and talk all morning.
The waters lash; you speak. Of the dead:
"We'll own their laundry soon enough."
Ronald Reagan
Familiar as a rerun, he dazzled in the glass---
the resurrection of euphoria, fathered on our wants.
Still high on Nixon's drowsy hemlock
and love of self, we passed
the absurdity from hand to hand, and drank.
Balloons fell and blistered in the elected dark
on the metronoming sign of every state
the Union still possessed, and we were glad;
he even made our incandescent sadness dim....
He dazzled; the Columbia, our one experiment,
flowered and faded out, a burst of scents.
And still we held ourselves hypnotized like fish
to the television's bowl, trying fin on fin
to shatter it and disappear within.
Reading in a War Park in England
All the poets die, one by one,
words confirmed in alabaster, forms propped
by shadows; they rocket to the sky on the strength
of one last good word... somebody's swans.
Tarred by youth's pretentious trauma,
I was too bad an imitator of pose or voice
to have those heavenly feathers drop & stick.
My tarred heart flubs in its rubble.
England in its velvet weather; crushed heather
speaks in an ear that sleep has poured too full
of books' windy memorials one time too many;
overhead, a spearshead of geese release a wet
whistling where the arrows rose
and came to confusion as to rest.
Last Days
The reign of the kingfisher was short, and short
our lives, crawling under the killing heat
of the nursing lamp that brings
flowers to phosphorescence, a livid foam
that exaggerates its root ebb and flow;
the practical nurses were impractical
with their acorn-colored Haitian or Philipino stare
and indifference to medicine. "Everthin' goen to be
da way tha the Lord wants it be, child."
Child-handed in your polychrome hospital bed
and too timid to be wheeled to the greenhouse
for fear of falling, you asked for a palmful of zinnas....
Surrounded by a bon voyage wreath of the little mouths
you slept and shrivelled and died.
In the Car
The tender wipers whisper back and forth,
smearing the rain to a moment's clarity
flattened like the fallen leaf honeyed
to our advancing glass. The rain advances.
Trees stand out like lightning in our wet headlights---
finding anything is a minor miracle
in this beery weather, the old road a yawn
of steam. Staccato your voice dissects
Milton's lunar prosody, moon-smooth, moon-real:
"all his sullen adjectives were mere minks,
like Ivana Trump's dead furs, a comfort in her sleep...."
Sweating and smiling in our nightlong drive
from bar to bar, I microscopically examine
the copper hinged jaw of a fly, bright
on the inner windshield as I drive;
too soberly drunk to tend or exhaust inspiration.
Mid-Afternoon
The sun's a botch of blacks, queer spumings
in a night sky white as absence, where
my unconsoling finger filches the new negative
postmarked Malibu Observatory. Rick squints at stars;
tumescent inks roll from my soul like a squid.
I am bathed in daylight. Sidetracked in a lawnchair
on the brick porch trimmed with ignited marigolds
I spend each wasted, one-starred day
hunching into words for a clue;
a girl ferries a cup of honey like the grail
to my droning chair.... I drone and follow
the blue, botched line dribbling from my pen, overfull
of metaphors. My puppets sing and hang themselves,
harmless Hamlets drenched with a wish to live.
Daybreak
Our closed lake lightens against the distance;
secret fish are already starting circles
past the shade-edge, trembling, troubling
the burning surface etherialized in bronze.
We cast our weights and watch the exalted sun
shatter and recover its thousand wood-shavings of light.
Itzak Perlman goes on loving his loving bow,
striking the guessed-at multiples in the scale....
Together on the wilting dock we read
of the obsessive-compulsive jigsaw master, at 80,
who drops the puzzle and completes his life;
how much longer will we go on sinking
into our bodies? When the wind's unseeing hand
shakes the houses of the trees what will bend?
What rosin will we soften on our souls?
Boston Harbor
Ripe blueberries wax leaden on the bough;
it is our summer; Boston's breakwater blackens
in awkward slaps and thoughtless motherly shushes.
Motherly absences star the North Street's church
for us. We are moored by our early loves
to these crags and backwaters. Remember the neon
of the all-nite bait and tackle shop
we rushed to and scrambled from?
Constellations of starfish nailed to the cork interior.
Against the dull beach light on the docks
we lower and drag for crabs til dawn.
Child-ecstatic at your first catch in the night,
you hand me the whirring blue crescent fished
from your pyramidal cage. Which one of us smiled in the dark?
Back-handed, I handed it back.
Last Days
We were almost alone
in the divided hospital room.
Flowers on the wallpaper reminded us to cheer up.
We couldn't see the traffic
that crossed the cobbles under us. And yet,
everything was plainly itself and was plain.
Even the new sky behind the telephone lines was flat blue.
Monmouth Medical's institutional kitchen always served
their rippled carrot-coins cold. At one,
the scholar-doctor's colossal
geniality had shocked us,
whispering his Mid-Western college guesses
at Schopeanhaur's tantric
worm of will in the apple of the world.
We thought in secret
that he had grown
since the last time he left us.
In the children's ward,
Spot fetched Jane and Jerry's stick
as eternally as ever
while you were dying.
"Go, Spot, go!"
Summer
Awake in the backwards wash
of summer's unending afternoon,
a few, slow children crawl
at the curly-headed monster of the sea
roaring into fizzles at our feet.
Nosing the overgrown, unused
scrap land at the shore end
of the lapping pier.
Nearby, an empty-headed
horseshoe crab goes skidding from the hand
of a boy who goes skidding after it.
At the inlet's ebbing
light lies gratified on the sand
shelving on a shelf of sea;
when the waters race
ankle-high on every shore
shaking the soft dune grasses
intelligence floods the flow....
In the flapping shelter
of a blue windbreaker
a panting man on a bicycle goes by
whirring twin worlds of evil and good.
Tonight,
the huge, lightheaded paper lanterns
of the Kyoto Japanese restaurant toss
their planetary, red light back
and forth across
the wash.
Alone and undecided
I stand at the rail and look on graffitied rocks
painted with the alternating
hegemony of a thousand
tiny lives and huge nights.
Prize Trout
The fish swizzle
from sunspot to sunspot
and wound to wound
in the habit of compassion.
The smaller one takes
the untidy rags
of ephemeral flesh
from the larger one's goitered middle
and vanishes.
Children look down
with their tangle of snags....
Obstruction helps us
by keeping our desire real.
The old fish
Leontes and me
abandoned by love
and inspired by hatred,
the small fish consuming the great.
Obliquely beneath the tangle
is there still
a waver in the water?
The big fish,
trailing his pennants of flesh,
brave, failed, bleeds a somber puff
of tired blood into the pool.
It stumbled in the water,
the old you
still regal and true....
dragging a discolored fin
through the increasing clouds;
Bee and Cup
An azalea climbed up
Into a silver cup,
And blossoming died
While the bee had sup.
After the War
The cardinal his watchful penance keeps [scarlet vigil]
That had no sin but singing;
How much more should we march in grief
That have said and done such things?
The azalea extends its wild branch
Against a wild sky; nearby
Some libertarian pamphlet flaps
Ignored by some more sodden door.
A child is singing in the bright march air
Some tune his father sung---
Abstracted with the politics
Of that disastrous, forgotten war.
"The soldier will soon be waking
That fed on dreams before;
A man kills a man that killed;
All happens as before."
Those Images
Stand again at the old well-lip
As one half-sleeping might
And drop a stone among those images
That lay hid in the night.
When still a boy at the water's edge
Cold with terror at the dark;
The light was like a fish's hide
That floated back to me.
And drop a stone among those images
That lay hid in the night.
What has escaped the breath
In hated words or curses, now rescind
And let an older beneficence begin;
Call that harshness in.
When driven to that edge of speech
The tongue half out of the head
Recall what purpose pleased you best
When time had not yet begun.
And drop a stone among those images
That lay hid in the night.
At gasping dawn a boy again
Swears all breaking light's a game
And climbs before the mounting sky
To catch a dreaming fish
While the water's high.
So sound out the plummet-depth
With some stray rock or cocked ear do it
Or hearth-stone out of pocket;
But drop a stone among those images
That lay hid in the night.
======================================
What's left to salvage from the snow?
Snow that hisses past the frozen prow;
Flowers bursting on the deadened stick
Of winter sizzle as we pass
One manic chipmunk chirring its meal of seed.
Other motions of the wild
Calmed by our despair
Stiffen into portraits of our loves, our lives.
A biplane drops and chills the wheat
Stunned with growth, the miraculous chemistry
God and Merck sustain.
Complete on divinity's humming leash
That puts us in their place.
Something solid/ Moves in the mud.
The outboard motor hisses lost, caught
in the open throat of summer
river of gasoline..
and it is
My friend that's dead.
End