II
Her sweet and small
flowers,
Yours, not to abide,
Her health to toast
a scattering of olive,
drab canvas, tucked
behind the books
is where she goes,
Calling it fitting.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Friday, December 3, 2010
Perfect Square
There is nothing but sky,
there is nothing to evaporate,
no underneath to console,
nothing but a rose of Shayan.
there is nothing to evaporate,
no underneath to console,
nothing but a rose of Shayan.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
this might be a finished book some day....
based on the story of my life (see bio)
Our story begins as so many do, in Brooklyn, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, amid the quaintness of a din of horse shoes clopping on the cobblestone, the buggies pulling ice blocks and the boys advertising their newspapers on street corners, a world that is imagined now in tones of sepia, though for our hero, the memories are as vivid as the present before our very eyes.
That setting appeared like child's awakening. We observe as though gradually peeking out from under a table, slowly moving aside the draping tablecloth to reveal a bustling room, alive with things past and coming and the ideas and identities of adults, none of which we can intellectualize. It is all comprehended inwardly, remotely. It is a Robert Altman scene. There is too much to fathom but we are certainly swept up in its motion, and we are just waking. There is an elaborating, deepening horizon. Welcome to America, 1906.
Our hero was birthed onto a kitchen table, wood, in a tenement apartment with floors of wood, and a wood column a few feet aside of the kitchen entryway which seemed not to serve any purpose except to provide an air of eventfulness to the otherwise inadequate apartment. But beyond lay for the most part a city of stone and brick. Even the walls of the tenement were exposed brick. The city was relentless in that way.
They named him Fridlech and upon crawling onto the wooden table, he barely cried. A little whimper, but quickly little Fridela, newborn, was looking around the room with what could only be interpreted as curiosity.
At least that was what his parents, Ira and Esther Mensch told him. Actually, however, this was not the case. Actually– young Fridelech, had been too new to this world then for him to remember now, or before, or when he was a boy, but actually– his parents had been outlaws, a pair in love and business, who had fallen pregnant on a journey up the eastern seaboard, making getaway from a certain kind of southern heat. It was one of the last of a special kind of journey they used to make together, one of the final pangs of their age of epics. They would start on one coast and inevitably end up back there after about a year and a half of travails. They had seen the entire United States and a good deal of Canada and Mexico. The baby boy they called Frank was just that-- a frank presentation of the impossibility of their life, so many epics down the line.
Charlotte Framingham, Frankie's biological mother, was deeply moved by the birth of her child and it was with great sorrow that she parted with the boy that fateful day in a tenement courtyard kiddie-corner from Siegel's grocery in Greenpoint. Frankie's father Emmett was as humbled by the experience. The two of them had decided together to give up the child, sensing he'd be a liability, knowing they could not in their current life of epics, give him a fair shot. For all their deviance, their debaucherousness and their cruelty, the Framinghams, as we will call them, and The Carolina Two as they were more commonly known had a way of transcending the malaised social conventions of their time. They were man and wife regarding each other as equals, they were known as western Robin Hoods in some parts of the country. They decided things together, and so they decided, together, that after giving up their only chid in New York, they would curtail their adventures for a time, and try settling down.
But Fridelech grew up entirely unaware of his brief prior life as newborn child of outlaws. Esther and Asher Mensch made sure to remind him as often as possible of the fabricated story of his birth, as well as many embarassing stories that alleged to have taken place in the following three years including an instance of Fridela's transformation of his own feces into play putty, the tenuous year-and-a-half long campaign to get him to eat the grebenes (the pieces of chicken skin fried in the schmaltz, with the onions and the salt), and the time he ran right up to Rose Pipkin while she was scolding her daughter Rachel and exclaimed in her defense: Ms Pipkin. Ms Pipkin! Rachel couldn't have done it, she's the nicest girl in the whole shul, we played show and tell behind the gymnasium!
But for all embodiment of the many tropes of jewish motherhood, Esther was also that rare turn of the century überfrau, studied in marxist theory and avant-garde theatre, Fridelech often heard her buzzing on about Bertolt Brecht, Seneca Falls, or the Emancipation of Dissonance.
While Esther was ahead of her time, Asher Mensch was deceptively traditional. The marxist theory formed a meeting place for the idealism on which their romance predicated itself, staked what territory it could, but the temple of their marriage was maintained by dogmatic acts of devotion, and Asher was truly humble. Each trip to the grocer, every chore in the apartment, took on the quality of a pious ritual. Even Asher's livelihood- he was a book binder at The Strand publishing house, was a daily penance for which he was awarded the family bread. You could hardly say they believed in God, but an anonymous Protestant Christ presided over them secretly. Such was the lot of immigrants then, who possessed brilliance but would never have the luxury of time to consider the intricacies of their own philosophies.
Was it time? Or was it the relentlessness of need, that grows exponentially in marriage, thriving in the habitat, every success a reason for deeper denial of the self, every failure a cause for smothering one's libidinous anger. What is this phenomenon of marriage? Fridelich felt like an outsider, had an uncanny ability to sense the fallacy of his parents self-defeating union, though he couldn't articulate it even in his most private thoughts. And he was not given to the sentimentality which was truly the only means by which to bestow meaning on the relationship of the Mensch's. Being unable to make acute, direct observations, sensing the air of bullshit beneath the cover of everyday life, and having always felt somehow like a stranger in his own shoes, Fridelich turned his anger to petty crime. There was one thing he could observe at least somewhat acutely, and that was that everyday life was a subterfuge. Beneath the edifices lay indescribable desires, passions too volatile for society, sickening physical truths about human beings, and he came to despise the world for a time, and later to embrace culture avidly, so as to master the negotiations of a civil life with the realities of the soul. But that is later, and for a time, our boy Fridelich was not more than an impulsive petty thief. Those were the beginnings of some glorious days.
Our story begins as so many do, in Brooklyn, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, amid the quaintness of a din of horse shoes clopping on the cobblestone, the buggies pulling ice blocks and the boys advertising their newspapers on street corners, a world that is imagined now in tones of sepia, though for our hero, the memories are as vivid as the present before our very eyes.
That setting appeared like child's awakening. We observe as though gradually peeking out from under a table, slowly moving aside the draping tablecloth to reveal a bustling room, alive with things past and coming and the ideas and identities of adults, none of which we can intellectualize. It is all comprehended inwardly, remotely. It is a Robert Altman scene. There is too much to fathom but we are certainly swept up in its motion, and we are just waking. There is an elaborating, deepening horizon. Welcome to America, 1906.
Our hero was birthed onto a kitchen table, wood, in a tenement apartment with floors of wood, and a wood column a few feet aside of the kitchen entryway which seemed not to serve any purpose except to provide an air of eventfulness to the otherwise inadequate apartment. But beyond lay for the most part a city of stone and brick. Even the walls of the tenement were exposed brick. The city was relentless in that way.
They named him Fridlech and upon crawling onto the wooden table, he barely cried. A little whimper, but quickly little Fridela, newborn, was looking around the room with what could only be interpreted as curiosity.
At least that was what his parents, Ira and Esther Mensch told him. Actually, however, this was not the case. Actually– young Fridelech, had been too new to this world then for him to remember now, or before, or when he was a boy, but actually– his parents had been outlaws, a pair in love and business, who had fallen pregnant on a journey up the eastern seaboard, making getaway from a certain kind of southern heat. It was one of the last of a special kind of journey they used to make together, one of the final pangs of their age of epics. They would start on one coast and inevitably end up back there after about a year and a half of travails. They had seen the entire United States and a good deal of Canada and Mexico. The baby boy they called Frank was just that-- a frank presentation of the impossibility of their life, so many epics down the line.
Charlotte Framingham, Frankie's biological mother, was deeply moved by the birth of her child and it was with great sorrow that she parted with the boy that fateful day in a tenement courtyard kiddie-corner from Siegel's grocery in Greenpoint. Frankie's father Emmett was as humbled by the experience. The two of them had decided together to give up the child, sensing he'd be a liability, knowing they could not in their current life of epics, give him a fair shot. For all their deviance, their debaucherousness and their cruelty, the Framinghams, as we will call them, and The Carolina Two as they were more commonly known had a way of transcending the malaised social conventions of their time. They were man and wife regarding each other as equals, they were known as western Robin Hoods in some parts of the country. They decided things together, and so they decided, together, that after giving up their only chid in New York, they would curtail their adventures for a time, and try settling down.
But Fridelech grew up entirely unaware of his brief prior life as newborn child of outlaws. Esther and Asher Mensch made sure to remind him as often as possible of the fabricated story of his birth, as well as many embarassing stories that alleged to have taken place in the following three years including an instance of Fridela's transformation of his own feces into play putty, the tenuous year-and-a-half long campaign to get him to eat the grebenes (the pieces of chicken skin fried in the schmaltz, with the onions and the salt), and the time he ran right up to Rose Pipkin while she was scolding her daughter Rachel and exclaimed in her defense: Ms Pipkin. Ms Pipkin! Rachel couldn't have done it, she's the nicest girl in the whole shul, we played show and tell behind the gymnasium!
But for all embodiment of the many tropes of jewish motherhood, Esther was also that rare turn of the century überfrau, studied in marxist theory and avant-garde theatre, Fridelech often heard her buzzing on about Bertolt Brecht, Seneca Falls, or the Emancipation of Dissonance.
While Esther was ahead of her time, Asher Mensch was deceptively traditional. The marxist theory formed a meeting place for the idealism on which their romance predicated itself, staked what territory it could, but the temple of their marriage was maintained by dogmatic acts of devotion, and Asher was truly humble. Each trip to the grocer, every chore in the apartment, took on the quality of a pious ritual. Even Asher's livelihood- he was a book binder at The Strand publishing house, was a daily penance for which he was awarded the family bread. You could hardly say they believed in God, but an anonymous Protestant Christ presided over them secretly. Such was the lot of immigrants then, who possessed brilliance but would never have the luxury of time to consider the intricacies of their own philosophies.
Was it time? Or was it the relentlessness of need, that grows exponentially in marriage, thriving in the habitat, every success a reason for deeper denial of the self, every failure a cause for smothering one's libidinous anger. What is this phenomenon of marriage? Fridelich felt like an outsider, had an uncanny ability to sense the fallacy of his parents self-defeating union, though he couldn't articulate it even in his most private thoughts. And he was not given to the sentimentality which was truly the only means by which to bestow meaning on the relationship of the Mensch's. Being unable to make acute, direct observations, sensing the air of bullshit beneath the cover of everyday life, and having always felt somehow like a stranger in his own shoes, Fridelich turned his anger to petty crime. There was one thing he could observe at least somewhat acutely, and that was that everyday life was a subterfuge. Beneath the edifices lay indescribable desires, passions too volatile for society, sickening physical truths about human beings, and he came to despise the world for a time, and later to embrace culture avidly, so as to master the negotiations of a civil life with the realities of the soul. But that is later, and for a time, our boy Fridelich was not more than an impulsive petty thief. Those were the beginnings of some glorious days.
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