Ken Wolman
© 1996
ABISHAG'S CEMBALUM
In his old age my grandfather laid down
the wrenches and drain snakes of his occupation:
and, like David of Israel
who borrowed from her youth
the young girl Abishag to entertain
the dying desperate King swept like dust
by grief beyond any songs save those
of a young girl's thighs, so
grandpa, arthritic and chairbound,
poltergeist of the underheated 5th floor,
renounced the clanking song of copper
for Ilona, the Magyar building super's daughter,
age 17, with her Tartar face and
black almond eyes, come up
from the basement to sit
each afternoon into evening,
pluck her grandfather's cembalum,
sing to the old man songs
of whispering scorpions and butterflys
whose colors were assumed into the morning sky,
and then, in late afternoon, with nothing
left to sing, to bare her breasts
to the nodding head and twice-widowed kissing gaze
of the old man who fed her honeycakes
and thimble-glasses of slivovitz,
hold his head against the nipples
hardened by the cold apartment,
look past the curtains toward the street,
see nothing then, feel not joy or loathing
but only the dance of his spirit
in the hair of his head, blown
by the breeze, against her chest,
hear the music of his murmur and
the secret kiss of words,
Vie sheyn, vie scheyn!...
BUGHOUSE
(for Phil Stone)
Sitting wasted each night in front of the tube,
we watched Uncle Walter fill the Home Front in
about the latest disaster at some place called Hue
or Suk Mai Wang, and CBS'd run the newsreels,
and if the mood was right and the dope just strong enough,
I'd see the Medevac choppers swarm from the sky
and think how they looked like giant insects,
dragonflys, or the gentle terrifying praying mantis.
And I knew my friend (or ex-friend) Phil
rode the insides of the bug,
post-induction C.O. schmuck whose gentle heart
recoiled not at war but at the thought
that little men he couldn't see, in black pajamas,
could swing from vines out of his nightmares
to kill specifically him.
So now beneath the rotors and the screams
of engines and of 19-year-old babies
from Paterson and Providence, ABD-bored
grad school dropouts from Case Western or Wayne State,
western PA high school football stars now sans
legs, dicks, and shame--he, Phil, crawled
through a lurching, slimy tube
of running jungle ulcers, shell-burst seminal vesicles,
unconscious voided bowels, and always always blood
(the reassuring constant),
offering morphine and dilaudid hits
like the Rican dealers we hung with
in the West Bronx, bueno caca, man, no charge.
Technicolor imagery floats up from hash-pipes,
an insect, a larva, a cocoon: Wow, maaaaan,
but it looks so coooool when you're stoned!
and years later, a man I worked beside told me
about the flowers he grew in the Cambodian jungle,
the spore of the B-52 seeding the earth
from forty thousand feet, and how the dawn
came up like thunder from China 'cross the bay,
and how the colors refracted through the morning clouds
like a science project: so he was not in his work
and his work was not in him.
And I thought then of Phil, shot in one day
from the bug of the chopper into the womb
of a World-bound transport, born and born
again, not in the colors of flowers or
in the imagery of the insect world,
but into Discharge, ejaculated from the body of his life,
into disappearance, into a sad room,
into a grimy street, into a silence
only metaphor can describe.
THE SALLY KELLERMAN POEM
Sally Kellerman has acquired
another fifteen minutes,
mine: for I,
standing on 7th Avenue
on Tobacco Break,
have seen that tall blonde,
unmistakable, remnant
of my hundred Gentile Girl
fulfillment fantasies,
loping down the street,
walking past me,
leaning forward
like a deflating
Thanksgiving parade float
or like Marcel Marceau
walking against a wind
perhaps generated from within.
You can be my Muse,
Sally-love:
I don't need to see
or talk to you,
never or ever:
you're there, wired
to my consciousness,
unforgettable.
And later, driven
by the winds
that blow through me
and my own tattered sails,
I can say, and weep,
but mean it,
"I saw Sally Kellerman today,
and she looked like shit."
