Letter from Brooklyn Read Online Free Page A

out.
    The one-legged stripper part is true,
    but neither of us slept with her
    or even went to the strip club. But I can explain that.
    My reasons for going to bed alone that night
    have little to do with this feeling I’ve been having lately
    of not being entirely young anymore.
    Rather, it’s only because the Canada Council
    no longer gives grants for poems about that sort of thing.

MY MOTHER DIES IN REVERSE
    After Robert Priest’s
Reading the Bible Backwards
    I dig up the dirt
    & tell the rabbi
    to recant
    his prayer
    I say
    I do not
    glorify
    praise
    or bless
    I do not say
    amen
    I say
    a woman
    & he sews
    the garments
    back together
    & I take her
    to Mt. Sinai
    oncology
    before she begins
    breathing again
    & I open her eyes
    & breath enters
    her mouth
    & mumbles ravel
    into words
    & sentences
    rejoin each other
    & she puts her hand
    into her mouth
    & pulls
    from her throat
    valiums
    like sapphire beads
    & she pees
    morphine
    like a crystal river
    & perspires
    radiation
    till it’s all gone
    & she finds
    her breasts
    on the operating table
    & sews them
    back
    to her chest
    like a garment
    uncut
    & moonwalks
    down the corridors
    & into
    an ambulance
    driver’s seat
    & rides
    home

CAUSALITY
    Some believe cause and effect are simultaneous.
    The window breaks at the exact moment
    the stone kisses the pane. And I want to ask you
    about falling in, then out, if it doesn’t happen
    at the same time. Though Hume said
    a cause might be nothing more than a name
    we give to one thing following another.
    But if he were right, I would think
    the covers rolling from your shoulders
    used to cause the morning. The point is,
    I went to college, and that doesn’t make it any easier
    to walk over the Williamsburg Bridge
    when no one is waiting for me
    on either side and it rains so thinly
    the drops are only visible afterwards,
    cascading from the cables.
    I might think it wasn’t raining at all,
    except I am cold and wet, and fog obscures
    the Chrysler building. But I can still see it, drawn
    from my memory onto the vanished skyline.
    It looks kind of the way it does
    in all the old movies
    I refused to watch with you. This longing
    the effect of having loved
    poorly. And the cause. But I can’t
    change what has come before. Only make
    fog fold in on itself as I walk through it.
    How causing it to disappear
    is one of our powers.
    Like the way we banish the night
    by falling asleep, limbs pressed
    like coin inscriptions,
    or lying a body’s length apart
    or in different rooms in different cities.
    How once in a while we cause the rain, too,
    but by doing what, I have no idea.

ACTUAL PINGPONG
    â€œDon’t be afraid of me because I am just coming back from the mental hospital — I’m your mother —”
    â€” Naomi Ginsberg
    â€œI’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in your straightjacket that you’re losing
the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss”
    â€” Allen Ginsberg
    Through the gauzy air of some wonderful benzo, I recall you
    now chemo-bald, flannel-robed, a Buddha or just some crazy
    lady who is also my mother, pontificating
    plastic spoon metaphysics. “If you dug deep and hard enough,
    wasn’t it possible for anything to be a tool of suicide?”
    Mastectomized cubist breast falling
    statically from the gown slanting across your chest like a sash.
    Miss Psych Ward, USA . Though the crown belonged truly to
    the pretty girls, thin
    and achromatic Modiglianis, queued in a slow, wavy
    kindergarten line outside the Plexiglas planet of the
    nurse’s station. You waved to them
    and said “This is my son. He’s 19 . He writes poems, too.”
    Did you know then, despite the supposed gravity of the
    situation, I couldn’t help looking
    at those faded girls in their loose swaying gowns and yet
    years later taking my own stay on the 17 th floor of St. Mike’s
    (the family pilgrimage to the bughouse)
    the girls ignored me? High