Don Wellman
Au
Dazzled by sunlight because she had been born blind.
She learned to read and memorize Latin nouns
as once I did.
Juggling translucent crystals,
“radioactive, radioactive!”
I don’t like that song.
Videos of mangled teddy bears and stuffed rabbits.
Her love for her sister Harriet obtrudes
on funereal winter afternoons.
“What name shall we call ourselves now
our mother is gone?”
She sought an island
not unlike the Carriacou that her mother
told over and over
counting rivulets and jacaranda.
Beads on a rosary,
whacks on her bottom and bruising pinches.
On Saint Croix I learned to drive on the left side
as did Audre. I met men that I loved.
I lived in a house open to the east wind,
perched above a cistern, once slave quarters.
The seeds of flame trees
were blown in form Africa on the sandstorms,
long scabbards. Bittersweet tamarinds.
Mawu, “your blood running through my dream”
Red angry water.
BB
He stood by a stone on which the dogs pissed.
Charles it might have been you or me
BB came from the Black Forest in his mother’s belly.
He learned sardony and obscenity. Rhyming in name
with Orge, his monster rock and roll, heavy metal self,
Baal in Munich bars. His songs took
Broadway by storm in their Three Penny form
In life and in love ever the scoundrel
I taught his Galileo to aviators. who sang
Galileo, Galilei, Scaramouch, Scaramouche
Fandango. Nobody loves me.
When I was young. I learned his songs
from Dagmar Krause, “Supply and Demand,”
her voice unlike any other
and Lotte Lenya who was wife to Kurt Weil,
„Und ein Schiff mit acht Seglen und funfzig Kannonen“
sailed into the port. I rode
the Bundesbahn and climbed the highest tower in Ulm.
I crawled on my belly beneath tracers
and machine gunfire. My soul leapt,
reluctant paratrooper. BB my alter ego,
we chewed cigars and spat
at the green police. My father
taught me to drink bootleg cognac.
I became a punk, my face purple yellow
like Oscar Kokoschka’s. At the Opera in Madrid
Molina-Foix and I attended the revival
of Street Scene, lyrics by Langston Hughes.
BB’s poet and mine, François Villon,
„Ihr Menschenbrüder, die nach uns lebt
Lasst euer Herz nicht gegen uns verhärten“
Frères humains, qui après nous vives,
So said the poets, so say all.
N’ayez les cueurs contre nous endurcis.
C
Big man, ravenous
bottled up for days, in a great sweat,
petere, a begging diction,
decried postcards of things to eat.
On edge taught me to write sitting down,
immobile himself a motherly man
feasting on the bones of his children.
Sought a republic, loved tansy as I do, immortality,
alchilea millefolium on my stone wall.
With the corner post of the Annisquam bridge, as tablet,
he took notes, night watchman
wakeful for my welfare and his daughter’s
so amiss her mother warned her not to mother him her father.
She died in my brother’s arms years later
of her fatal addiction like his, her dad’s,
alcohol that fuels melancholy.
Da
We met on a side street near the Sorbonne and spoke of
our debts to one another, brothers
who had never before held hands or touched
fingertips. David expounded upon
the qualities of serrano ham. In print
he had taken me shopping with his mother,
who was looking for underwear in a California department store.
I sought to emulate Ezra Pound as he easily detected.
He spoke highly of Guattari. Sadly, we never met again.
I spent the night in the house where Jean de Meun
had written Le Roman de la Rose. The prickles
of medieval bed bugs interrupted my sleep.
I sought to decode Tang Dynasty playing cards
derived from incisions on oracle bones,
an ideographic quest around the high walls of a stone prison,
the stones excreting sweat and sewerage, one of those endlessly repetitive dreams
derived from unrelenting interrogation.
How is it that our lives had passed, unknown
to one another? My nails were chipped. Who are you?
Maybe it was the absinthe? It never
sits well with me. Now since you passed,
hypertension causes my bones to rattle.
I miss your deep attention.
E
Aliens contaminated God’s people.
Women wash their underwear on Thursday.
Ezra limped like Oedipus. My Uncle Harold
would drag one foot in the gutter, looking
for coins. The mikveh instantiates
both feminist and orthodox bonding. Ezra
sat under the linden and found in red wine
what women wanted. Ablution required.
Donna me prega, - per ch'eo voglio diret
d'un accidente - che sovente - è fero
ed è sì altero - ch'è chiamato amore.
Very much the man, Ezra played tennis
with Hemingway. “Yes Love,” he thought.
Now he sits in his rocker, a rug on his lap,
on the porch of the rehabilitation hospital
in my hometown. Billowing white hair,
he rode horses through the surf at Nauset.
F
All my days his shadow followed me,
we met once in Havana, earlier in Harlem
where black men danced to the new jive.
Duende like flamenco has African roots.
In Tamri I read with the first published, female Amazgha
poet. She invited me to the banana grove
under white nylon netting. The leaves
crunched like seashells.
With her brother I sought a nakedness
como un río, joining the wheel of the sun con el alga
that swam in his eyes. A wedding of soul and soul,
the poet found this image in the eyes
of his beloved. They swam in the flooded forests
of the Matto Grosso. Federico trudged the mire
of East River shores, droplets of death flowed
from his eyes, la muerte mana de vuestros ojos,
his shyness apparent. In Cuba amid clapping palms, the babalawo
chanted the liturgy of liberation, a Yoruba language
native to the Andalusian soul. Iré a Santiago
the nana wants to be a jelly fish, ser medusa.
El platano, phallic fruit.
G
Our thighs brushing, smiles
more intense than kisses,
we held hands.
You for each young poet,
a treasure unlike others,
your knowledge reaching back
through Chinese alchemy,
informing Maximus.
Male and female. Embrace all
who visited your kitchen.
Henry, a nephew of Vincent dedicated
the space of his uncle’s frame shop
to the writers of the community.
His enterprise is the quick life force
of cinematic Gloucester as it exists today.
That force embodied, as it ever was,
in the poet we mourn, author
of the “Heavenly Tree Grows Downward”
into the root flesh of my heart.
He and I first met after the bombing of Glad Day Books,
Bromfield Street, July 7, 1982, my birthday incidentally,
a boy then, lost now, as I think on you. Memento mori.
Au
Dazzled by sunlight because she had been born blind.
She learned to read and memorize Latin nouns
as once I did.
Juggling translucent crystals,
“radioactive, radioactive!”
I don’t like that song.
Videos of mangled teddy bears and stuffed rabbits.
Her love for her sister Harriet obtrudes
on funereal winter afternoons.
“What name shall we call ourselves now
our mother is gone?”
She sought an island
not unlike the Carriacou that her mother
told over and over
counting rivulets and jacaranda.
Beads on a rosary,
whacks on her bottom and bruising pinches.
On Saint Croix I learned to drive on the left side
as did Audre. I met men that I loved.
I lived in a house open to the east wind,
perched above a cistern, once slave quarters.
The seeds of flame trees
were blown in form Africa on the sandstorms,
long scabbards. Bittersweet tamarinds.
Mawu, “your blood running through my dream”
Red angry water.
BB
He stood by a stone on which the dogs pissed.
Charles it might have been you or me
BB came from the Black Forest in his mother’s belly.
He learned sardony and obscenity. Rhyming in name
with Orge, his monster rock and roll, heavy metal self,
Baal in Munich bars. His songs took
Broadway by storm in their Three Penny form
In life and in love ever the scoundrel
I taught his Galileo to aviators. who sang
Galileo, Galilei, Scaramouch, Scaramouche
Fandango. Nobody loves me.
When I was young. I learned his songs
from Dagmar Krause, “Supply and Demand,”
her voice unlike any other
and Lotte Lenya who was wife to Kurt Weil,
„Und ein Schiff mit acht Seglen und funfzig Kannonen“
sailed into the port. I rode
the Bundesbahn and climbed the highest tower in Ulm.
I crawled on my belly beneath tracers
and machine gunfire. My soul leapt,
reluctant paratrooper. BB my alter ego,
we chewed cigars and spat
at the green police. My father
taught me to drink bootleg cognac.
I became a punk, my face purple yellow
like Oscar Kokoschka’s. At the Opera in Madrid
Molina-Foix and I attended the revival
of Street Scene, lyrics by Langston Hughes.
BB’s poet and mine, François Villon,
„Ihr Menschenbrüder, die nach uns lebt
Lasst euer Herz nicht gegen uns verhärten“
Frères humains, qui après nous vives,
So said the poets, so say all.
N’ayez les cueurs contre nous endurcis.
C
Big man, ravenous
bottled up for days, in a great sweat,
petere, a begging diction,
decried postcards of things to eat.
On edge taught me to write sitting down,
immobile himself a motherly man
feasting on the bones of his children.
Sought a republic, loved tansy as I do, immortality,
alchilea millefolium on my stone wall.
With the corner post of the Annisquam bridge, as tablet,
he took notes, night watchman
wakeful for my welfare and his daughter’s
so amiss her mother warned her not to mother him her father.
She died in my brother’s arms years later
of her fatal addiction like his, her dad’s,
alcohol that fuels melancholy.
Da
We met on a side street near the Sorbonne and spoke of
our debts to one another, brothers
who had never before held hands or touched
fingertips. David expounded upon
the qualities of serrano ham. In print
he had taken me shopping with his mother,
who was looking for underwear in a California department store.
I sought to emulate Ezra Pound as he easily detected.
He spoke highly of Guattari. Sadly, we never met again.
I spent the night in the house where Jean de Meun
had written Le Roman de la Rose. The prickles
of medieval bed bugs interrupted my sleep.
I sought to decode Tang Dynasty playing cards
derived from incisions on oracle bones,
an ideographic quest around the high walls of a stone prison,
the stones excreting sweat and sewerage, one of those endlessly repetitive dreams
derived from unrelenting interrogation.
How is it that our lives had passed, unknown
to one another? My nails were chipped. Who are you?
Maybe it was the absinthe? It never
sits well with me. Now since you passed,
hypertension causes my bones to rattle.
I miss your deep attention.
E
Aliens contaminated God’s people.
Women wash their underwear on Thursday.
Ezra limped like Oedipus. My Uncle Harold
would drag one foot in the gutter, looking
for coins. The mikveh instantiates
both feminist and orthodox bonding. Ezra
sat under the linden and found in red wine
what women wanted. Ablution required.
Donna me prega, - per ch'eo voglio diret
d'un accidente - che sovente - è fero
ed è sì altero - ch'è chiamato amore.
Very much the man, Ezra played tennis
with Hemingway. “Yes Love,” he thought.
Now he sits in his rocker, a rug on his lap,
on the porch of the rehabilitation hospital
in my hometown. Billowing white hair,
he rode horses through the surf at Nauset.
F
All my days his shadow followed me,
we met once in Havana, earlier in Harlem
where black men danced to the new jive.
Duende like flamenco has African roots.
In Tamri I read with the first published, female Amazgha
poet. She invited me to the banana grove
under white nylon netting. The leaves
crunched like seashells.
With her brother I sought a nakedness
como un río, joining the wheel of the sun con el alga
that swam in his eyes. A wedding of soul and soul,
the poet found this image in the eyes
of his beloved. They swam in the flooded forests
of the Matto Grosso. Federico trudged the mire
of East River shores, droplets of death flowed
from his eyes, la muerte mana de vuestros ojos,
his shyness apparent. In Cuba amid clapping palms, the babalawo
chanted the liturgy of liberation, a Yoruba language
native to the Andalusian soul. Iré a Santiago
the nana wants to be a jelly fish, ser medusa.
El platano, phallic fruit.
G
Our thighs brushing, smiles
more intense than kisses,
we held hands.
You for each young poet,
a treasure unlike others,
your knowledge reaching back
through Chinese alchemy,
informing Maximus.
Male and female. Embrace all
who visited your kitchen.
Henry, a nephew of Vincent dedicated
the space of his uncle’s frame shop
to the writers of the community.
His enterprise is the quick life force
of cinematic Gloucester as it exists today.
That force embodied, as it ever was,
in the poet we mourn, author
of the “Heavenly Tree Grows Downward”
into the root flesh of my heart.
He and I first met after the bombing of Glad Day Books,
Bromfield Street, July 7, 1982, my birthday incidentally,
a boy then, lost now, as I think on you. Memento mori.