Letter from Brooklyn Read Online Free Page B

school all over again in the psych
    ward, as I waited for the sad hour selected from all years
    (till the next hour) for a smoke —
    a memory interrupted by you, a memory of you in the ward,
    telling the half-catatonic lady with honey-coloured hair shot out
    in all directions like a child’s drawing
    of the sun, “This is my son. He’s taking time off to decide what
    he wants to do with his life.” I pull your gown back over your
    absence of breasts and gas
    seems pumped up from the floorboards — the perceivable air
    of things recollected in a dream, in a dream I just woke from
    and told you about, this dream
    in which you were dying and losing your mind and saying, “This
    is my son, he’s going to be a doctor and invent the cure for being
    on earth.” Everything you said, coded
    or nonsense. I wanted to remind you about my 18 th birthday, the
    Selected Poems 1947–1995 , your inscription,
The key is in the window
,
    the key is in the sunlight at the window
.
Love
,
    your mother
. Here this becomes ironic or here you are beyond irony.
    Was it prophetic? Insanity, the last respite from the Ironic Age, I told
    myself on the 17 thfloor staring
    at the key hidden in the shadows of the bars of the window. How your
    delusions started to bore me — I wanted to hear Nixon was stealing
    your Jell-O and Reagan, your breasts. Or McCarthy
    forced you to blow him in the basement of 1504 Ocean Ave., 1953 .
    Instead, uncreative paranoia — friends and colleagues out to “destroy”
    you and every attempt to dissuade,
    a confirmation. You thought you were clever for unveiling the basic
    structure, just stating what we are all trying to ignore. Did you think
    you were the first lunatic
    to figure out civilization? Neither insight nor madness, but unadorned
    honesty destroying your mind. Of course, I was a pawn in “the
    conspiracy” that is life. “Do you want to play table tennis?”
    you asked, suddenly back in the game of ordinariness. We approached
    the green slab at the end of the corridor. The girls gathered round and
    watched as you lost (badly) a game of actual pingpong.

ELEGY
    This is about the first time
    my mother died.
    The second time was the normal way,
    decaying in stasis.
    Now, webs of storm-splintered wood line the shore
    like shanty-church stained glass.
    The ocean a loud whisper, and
    too beautiful for god.
    Her body, a chronology of scars,
    becomes salt-stung air.
    She is not anything that has happened to her,
    only the pure and fine pain, alone.

IN MEMORY OF HOWARD ZINN
    After W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”
    Not a saint, but an angel of history,
    who in peering back into the wreckage, found
    us, the people. For looking forward
    was his true gift. He always saw what we
    might be capable of. And so we are left
    now to struggle without his recognition,
    which while sometimes inaccurate, was
    often faithful. He taught us what we knew
    and wished to forget: our independence
    was for those who could afford it, and the slaves
    were freed to be serfs, and the good war
    was like every war, a war on children.
    One could say he was unkind to the nation,
    or it was the kind of tough love given to
    a friend, who suffers from one of Jung’s
    shady types. Where there’s hope for this patient,
    he found it by integrating the country’s
    repressed selves, who are bare and as incomplete
    as his research. If status, at times,
    had made him blind, to us he is no more
    a person now than an entire movement
    of people. The patriotic remain proud
    but a little less, while the scholars
    accuse him of bias, and, of course, they
    are right. He was not a historian, but
    the narrator of a collective memoir,
    where proving what happened exactly
    was less important than why it mattered.

THE ILLUSION THEORIST OF COLOUR DESCRIBES A LANDSCAPE
    â€œNature never did betray the heart that loved her.”
    â€” Wordsworth
    The top soft of the