Letter from Brooklyn Read Online Free

this are a kind of punch line
    to a joke that isn’t supposed to be funny.
    Jokes are like prayers.

ODE TO THE DOUBLE RAINBOW GUY
    â€œIt’s starting to look like a triple rainbow! Oh god! What does this mean?”
    â€” Paul Vasquez
    You lost your shit over shades of light
    or as you proclaimed,
oh my god
    a double rainbow all the way
—
    and were received like all our prophets,
    with scorn. Too filled with emotion to reflect
    tranquility, you burst into tears
    that from some odd angle
    made a small rainbow, somewhere.
    Oh god, oh my god, you spoke like Job
    in reverse, suddenly seeing that we’d
    been given everything, and asked
    god
,
what does this mean?
    We answered you with laughter
    because we no longer know
    what it means to be astonished.
    For this, for everything, we are auto-tuned.
    Oh my god, what does it mean
    to care about something or someone
    that much. Woo! You knew
    triple rainbows were impossible.

NATURE
    Easily startled
    by how her voice carries
    over water. His ears perk
    and his head rises.
    She is close now,
    having paddled deep
    into the bulrushes
    to find him. He stares,
    then lowers his head
    to let her know
    if she gets any closer
    he will charge.

TO MY BEARD
    Whose absence haunted adolescence
    Whose barren field I examined nightly for signs of life
    Who grew on all the other boys first
    Whose no-show suggested the absence of hair in other places, too
    Whose absence I shaved with a Mach 3 razor one night till I bled
    Who I glued on with shavings left in my father’s drain
    Whose first, stubbly signs appeared one day miraculous as
Isaac’s birth
    Who, if left alone, now grows blond and burly as the face of Western Christ
    Who a century ago had to be long and full
    Who the Cossacks forced Yacob Scheier to eat till he stopped breathing
    Who no longer grows like assimilation
    Whose absence is tolerance
    Who stays stuck to faces of men in North York Jerusalem East Williamsburg
    Who does not recognize me as I pass

THE REDHEADS OF SUDBURY
    I want to write a poem called “The Redheads of Sudbury for
Rocco de Giacomo.”
    I want this poem to account for how so many of the girls there
    have a hair colour reminding me of candies
    I ate as a boy: big foots, hot lips, and sour balls —
    the tangy, cherry-flavoured ones.
    Those girls all looked like something bad for you
    and awfully nostalgic.
    Near the end of this poem I want
    one of us to sleep with the city’s one-legged stripper,
    who also has red hair.
    This is the kind of thing the male poets of our national anthologies
    used to write about it. In my poem
    I make it sound like something that just kind of happened,
    you know, and isn’t all that big a deal.
    I would like the poem to account for how I felt
    and perhaps how others feel upon leaving somewhere
    where it’s still winter in April.
    To leave somewhere north and come home to Toronto
    during that brief season
    that is neither winter nor spring. Where rain is pervasive
    whether falling or not.
    I want a certain kind of reader to feel a little sentimental
    when I mention the Honda dealership on the outskirts of the city
    and the rain gathering on the windshields.
    When we pass the suburbs and see a billboard — for what, I forget —
    with our area code on it, I feel close
    to the way I imagine others do when they speak of feeling patriotic.
    The feeling of being from somewhere.
    Rocco de Giacomo told me he hadn’t noticed
    that so many of the girls had red hair, and asked me if I wanted to fuck any of them.
    I said of course of course I wanted to fuck them all.
    He talked about being married, said he was lucky.
    It was a longer conversation, but that’s the part that matters.
    I don’t want to be married for a long time or ever, I think.
    But I was jealous of his obliviousness. Nothing at the end of
the poem
    â€œThe Redheads of Sudbury for Rocco de Giacoma”
    happened in real life. The truth is we drank a lot and passed