The Brooklyn Rail

Poem for My Foo

You sound okay, this thin-lipped redheaded
knockout says to a musician, but she would not
go out with your
tin-whistle and paddy-cake drums
even if you were in
The Chieftains.

There go my father and sister, the economists. Styles of mind.
Family
of
origin:

There is a version in some papers.
They think Irish intellectuals have been out there
knocking down superstitions, pure pagan nonsense, for a long time.
They are looking up
and adjusting reasonable scales
for as long as people have been lighting up their wicker men. This brood has

terrible hilarious
orderliness and orderly
ways of interrupting
and think that is fine.

For My Friend in the X-Ray Room

The kid tripped. It must be hard
to fit some names on a marquee
to go with that x-ray—
see how many colors that toe has turned
and know
that toe is broken
into some January sunrise.

The X-Ray room
has the metallic cold smell
of empty file cabinets
that roll shut.
This person has a high-powered telescope camera
to peer into the universe of the body.

Lead aprons
feel the way George Jones
said the bartender's girlfriend
feels, keeping him
safe from floating away.
Energy gets to be visions of bones,
one of the peaks of science
anybody who browsed
back pages ads
would have to admit.

This is the ad you would submit. Single ass
cold against that metal chair at my work
in this shady place in my pajama bottoms.

It's Not a Great Museum
—for Sebastian Smee

When you drive by, you are glad they are all in there.

Some of these wigged-out paintings the surviving heirs could
not wait
to GIVE AWAY to the museum for awful and ugly.

Saint Renaissance Nonplussed wears a meat-cleaver like the
matador's cap,
sure, it's old, and balanced, yes, yet
thanks, you can hang this one at your museum place like Leon
Trotsky
around some corner to go "Boo."

Then
1,001 creepy
English
choirboys
sing their apple-cheek heads off
in their white freak nightshirts. The mementos of the loons.

For Clocking Some Summertime Shopping

I know where all these capes
and big scarves
come from. I got
one, too. Cambridge,
but some scarf comes from Newton.
I like to get into
a middle-aged business.
The old-fashioned
clothing store
on Mass Avenue with a skylight
and the older women working there,
owner and clerk
snapping phone photos
and talking how the local designer
of this boutique active wear
would want to see Sabrina
but not beyond the old Iron Curtain.
Normally they are listening
to a lot of Lenya in here,
but have a Tab. Put Joni on
and I slide in my fine clogs,
too. The skylight up above
the color of a cloud
or shower cap or old person
while outside the blue sky heat
and the sound
of air-conditioning
making them raise their voices
a bit louder
than they usually get, excited.
I am in the privacy
of retail out of time.
I am in my zone: breath on a glass.
I knew a priest
who said he was off
to see his blue-haired congregation
in Westchester.
He did not mean
they really had blue hair.
I told Sabrina,
and she said, "What a dick."
The sixteen-y.o. kiddo, how does
she feel about this feeling
of time being inside time
while the old tape measures
and reading glasses crew
go on and on and on
the way we are inside
a shop and Sabrina
now moves around in dress
that she will move around
in some day, through days.
How long has the shop been
at this, dresses, and active
wear, and jewelry
appropriate to dress down
occasions, and survival
skills? Sabrina is really asking
the question of the first
pita pocket, the original
celery juice, the first beansprouts
and the bland tin olives
and the museum of tennis,
the way people cooked fish
and ate beef Stroganoff.
I think we should go home
and watch that movie Shampoo.
She and I know the old menus,
who was eating, what, their zesting,
their celebrations, and those options.