My poem Fire Escape—based on an Alfred Stieglitz photo is up on Ekphrastic Review today. Many thanks to my friend and fellow poet Sarah Russell, who saw the photo and knew she had to share it with me. This poem is best viewed on the site with the photo. So here is the link:
http://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/fire-escape-by-steve-deutsch
Learning to Write Poetry Late in Life
The Drabble
Of course it’s magic,
the way the teacher coaxed
me off my easy chair,
where briared and booked,
I planned
to snooze away my twilight.
I find I’m curious again—
that odd peering into things,
I thought I’d
left behind.
Remember
that first poem?
Like a first solo flight—
ground dropping
like Newton’s apples,
the catch of thin breath,
and the wonder
of words.
One more on Biscuit Root Drive:
Savior
In her last years
mom took to the lottery
like a robed devotee
takes to prayer.
Each morning at eleven
she would darken the boxes
of the day’s lottery picks,
carefully transcribing
from a penciled crib sheet.
She would no more
have the computer choose numbers
than make her coffee
in one of those
automated eyesores
soon to leave our planet
knee-deep in plastic pods.
Every evening
she would station herself
by the console television
and take down the numbers
as the ping pong balls
popped out of pneumatic tubes.
She won fifty dollars once
but never the big score—
the uncountable mega-millions.
We never spoke of it
but deep down
mom believed
she would make things right.
In a family
significant only in disappointment
she would redeem us all.
Today I pause in a supermarket—
a thousand miles from where she is buried
to buy five lottery tickets.
I let the computer pick random numbers,
although I still use her old Bialetti for coffee.
The jackpot is hundreds of millions
and for a heartbeat,
I imagine myself a winner.
It’s only money,
but as mom would say,
“how could it hurt?”
My poem, Bibelot, was just published by Biscuit Root Drive. Here is the poem:
Yours was not
an easy death.
Ampules of morphine
lined the icebox shelves
amid the chaos of beer bottles
and rancid cheese.
How many who wished you
that unremitting pain,
would have paid
to hear you scream?
I did not stay
for your final performance,
inheriting as a consolation
a box of unpaid bills
and odds and ends
of your torturous life.
One was the amulet
you wore around your neck.
You were never without it,
and I searched for an inscription—
some relic of youthful kindness,
some touch of tendered love—
realizing at last it was just a piece
of street junk
you nailed a hole in
and wore to ward off—
what?
I wear it now.
Shabby and worthless?
Yes.
Yet,
it feels just right.
My poem, Memorial Service, was just published by Nixes Mate Review. Here is the poem:
Memorial Service
I hardly knew
the dear departed
and what was there to know
anyway? That the man
who passed unnaturally
soon was much more
saintly than I? Brilliant,
with a fine sense of humor
and parenting skills to rival
those of “Father Knows Best?”
How could I not
imagine my own service?
Suppose the speakers
were not eulogists
but the
damaged
those I
trespassed upon?
They’d limp up
bent nearly in two
with the weight
of their worlds
bursting with need
to expose their festering wounds
a hundred
or, perhaps just one.
Dazzling the mourners
in sequins and rags,
she’d calmly stand
at the lectern
of my final pageant
to the respect of dead silence
and tell
in the same voice
that once startled
Moses.
My tercet just published by Burningword. Lots of fun to write.
No Strings Attached
In Darwin,
Minnesota
the biggest ball
of twine
is unencumbered
by human
frailty.
No discontented lovers
struggling with rope
burn
anxious to be free.
No lasso-
twirling cowpokes
waiting in ambush
for that special
someone.
No timber-hitched
twosomes and threesomes
double knotted
like old sneakers.
No families
held together
by spit
and slip
knots.
Just a ball of
purposeless string
bigger now
than the town
hall.
Two more poems on the Write Launch:
Second Nature
You would have loved
to have me in your class.
I was born with the soul
of a mule—plodding through
with heavenly persistence.
I’d march around my room,
high above a smoldering Brooklyn,
recite irregular verbs in Spanish,
and practice trilling my r’s
to the uncaring mirror above the dresser.
I took to math and history,
could diagram Faulkner’
prose, but never got far
with foreign languages.
I slowly learned
what it means to be born to.
I am an aged city kid
still most comfortable
with the lilt of moonlight
on a wet sidewalk
in East New York.
With the basement
steps to the Blue Note
and the way
my pulse takes
to the time of the subway
shuddering as it clings to the rails.
Forty years gone and I can still
advise you where not to be when
and get around Manhattan,
blindfolded and hobbled.
I love my little town—
dammit I grow things now,
but I will never be at home
in the surrounding woods, bedeviled
by beasts, real and imagined,
that range in size from ticks
to bears. When I first moved
here a friend who came to visit,
sampled the food and nightlife,
looked at me
sorrowfully and wondered
out loud how I dealt
with a place that was
so green.
All you need know
My grandfather, the lumberjack,
was often mistaken for Paul Bunyan.
When he yelled “timber”
it could be heard
from Seattle to Vancouver.
Once he felled an ancient oak
to teach me the lore of tree rings—
wide for a good year,
narrow for a bad.
His calloused hands caressed
the log as he said,
“this is all you need know of life.”
Grandpa, the watchmaker,
was stooped and gray, but elegant
as if he’d stepped out of a portrait
from a forgotten time of formal grace.
What Rodin would have given
to marble the bones of his hands.
I would sit on his workbench
in a shop full of child-sized tools
and watch him work and rework
the movements of a timepiece.
With a thousand pieces splayed before him
he’d say,
“Here I create time,
and time is all you need know of life.”
My grandfather, the farmer,
had the finest two hundred acres
in northeastern Kansas.
A doughty man born without ear or rhythm
he’d sing the standards—
“Ain’t Misbehavin” or “Makin Whoopee!”
as his steam tractor wobbled through
the flat fertile fields.
We’d all smile to imagine him singing
his heart out.
Once, I watched
him put his arm into soil elbow deep
and come away with loam black as pitch
and teeming with worms.
“All of life is here,”
he said to me.
Grandfather, the soldier,
had a grand mustache
that made him look like Pancho Villa.
He fought with Black Jack Pershing
in the Belleau woods
where corpses outnumbered
the bullet scarred oaks.
He would don his uniform
and his tin cap
to shoot targets with his long gun
at a quarter mile range.
I never saw him miss.
Fingering a spent cartridge, he said
with a tired smile,
“this is death—
all who live must meet it.”
My grandfather died when I was five.
I have few memories.
In one I sit on his lap
and stare out the kitchen window
at the unsuspecting walkers
on Riverdale Avenue.
We sit in silence—
his face is so yellow and worn
it seemed carved of candle wax.
At the last, I remember
I waved goodbye to his hospital window
impossibly high in the massive brick
then walked away with my mother.
Swaying and sobbing,
she held my mittened hand too firmly—
as if all life depended on it.
Here is the first of the poems:
Checking in:
There you are Dad
on our cobbled deck
splayed out in my favorite chair,
our nearly feral cat
content to be on your lap.
You hold up the perfect tomato
so round and red-ripe—
I can almost smell it.
It’s the best photo I’ve ever taken.
How is it
no one smiles like that anymore?
That miraculous summer
of just enough rain
and just enough sun,
you and Mom would often visit
our small college town
set down among ridges
rolled up so regularly
they seem like ocean waves.
Mom would pitch in,
while you stationed yourself
on the deck,
and scanned the natural world
like a ship’s lookout
in an iceberged sea.
We all waited on you, Pop—
our pleasure to watch
your many cares
melt away
in the swollen sun of summer.
By now,
the town has grown
to a minor metropolis.
We don’t grow our own
tomatoes anymore—
content to shop
at the farmers markets
that dot the countryside.
Today, at first snow,
the site of our old tomato patch
is white as time-honed bones
but if I close my eyes
I can still see it,
vibrant in that luscious red
that was our
glorious season.
At the Bay
We were sitting
at Liman’s
in Sheepshead Bay—
right on the water—
which was lapping
over some fashionably
placed rocks
with the regularity
of a metronome.
He was gabbing—
he had the gift—
timing the movement
of his ink stained hands
with the patter of his speech.
We had been eating
and drinking for two hours
and I was worried
about the tab.
The gaslights came on
as the sun set
and in the warm light
I could better see how old
and frail he was
He was the Great Uncle—
the family stain
the outlaw-artist-etcher
who passed paper—funny
money, and served time
inside, every decade.
But, he was charming—
and I was smitten.
I could tell
from just his cadence,
he was family.
He left for the Men’s
just as the check arrived.
A back way out,
I thought, staring at a bill
half the size of my mortgage.
But, he was back in a flash,
snatched the check from
my trembling hands,
gave me a wink
and the waiter,
five, crisp Franklins
.
He whistled
“Stormy Weather,”
as we walked away—
the song grandpa
would whistle
when content.
Acnestis
We were all there
that late August day.
Fox and Mike and Mesher,
Potsy and Buddha
and Bernie the Skunk,
even Arnie was there—
the dumbest smart guy
on the planet.
And Bobby
and his younger brother Petey.
We played five on five
which was too damn many
for our narrow court.
The game would end,
as it often did,
in a fight.
Everybody liked Petey.
Tall and rail thin,
he walked on the balls of his feet
as if his ankles were springs.
Bobby was two years older—
a broad hulking menace
who smoldered on a short fuse—
a certain something
behind his eyes said
clear as a name tag:
I’m crazy.
Bobby told us over and over
he didn’t want his younger brother
hanging around.
But no one could make him leave.
He’d suffered Petey all summer
and when his brother bumped him at the foul line
he’d had enough.
He beat on Petey the way
an older brother does.
We figured there’d be
a bloody nose, a black eye or two
and some cracked ribs they would
tape at Beth-el.
But then something changed
and we knew in an instant
that Bobby would kill him.
It took four of us to pull him off.
That school year Bobby did Juvie
and his brother learned to walk with a limp.
They moved in December
from a rat trap in Brooklyn
to a rat trap in the Bronx.
Bobby died in ’69 on Hamburger Hill.
Petey took his game leg
to Fort Hamilton
and was declared 4f.
Pleased to have three poems on Softblow Poetry Journal today. Here is the first poem and the link.
A death in the family
We hustle it all to the dumpster
couches and chairs
lamps, rugs and bedding,
the knickknacks
that fought
for space
on every flat surface.
It’s just stuff now
and we’d like to clear the place
in time for lunch
and an early flight home.
Stories inhabit our belongings
and make them dear.
And you were so good at the telling—
your face softening with delight
as you’d describe a complicated deal
involving your great uncle Saul,
a second-hand store,
and a horse-drawn cart.
It made the rickety dining room table
seem like a gift from the Romanovs.
For a minute,
I think of my home
and wonder
how long it will take the kids
to empty it.
But this is no time for reflection—
the sleep sofa
is heavy and oddly weighted
and the dumpster seems
farther away with every load.
Stevie's Law 