The Baseball Cap
We order at the sub shop’s counter,
and instead of asking for my name,
the guy smiles,
“We’ll send it right out, Bob.”
“How…?” I start, but he interrupts:
“Your Grateful Dead baseball cap,
I remember it from the last time
you and your wife were in.”
I want to quip something
a fellow Deadhead would get,
but settle for, “Thanks, Man,”
and hobble back to our table
with a tad more swagger
than my cane usually allows:
I think about the Sphinx’s riddle
about what goes on four legs
in the morning (an infant),
two at noon (a grown man),
and three (an old man with a cane)
at dusk, that only doomed Oedipus
could answer.
So now, Beth and I wait for our subs:
impatient for the delicious crunch
of the first toasted bite,
sort of like our anticipation
of the Dead’s two drummers
hitting the downbeat
of the show’s opening number,
when we’d dance all night.
Where Are Her Horns?
Mom and Dad married
one Brooklyn February Saturday night
of icicle wind; they ran laughing,
holding hands, from the synagogue.
On Monday morning, Dad reported
to Fort Bragg, at the sputtering
butt-end of World War II.
After basic training, Mom followed,
unbearable to be without him. Before
she found lodgings, she stayed in a hotel,
and when she wasn’t at a bookkeeping job—
the boss reasoning a Jew had to be good
with numbers—she sat in the hotel lobby,
reading, working a crossword puzzle,
hoping for Dad to get a weekend pass.
“Mama, where’s her horns?” a small boy pointed.
“Hush, Tommy, that’s not polite!” she scolded,
but drew him closer, wanted to demand where
Mom had hidden her horns and tail,
and how she’d hidden her cloven hooves
inside her fashionable pumps.
But well-bred Christian ladies didn’t ask
such questions, even if everyone in town
whispered Mom seemed nice enough
for one of them, a shame she was going to Hell.
Mom and Cousin Cheryl Teach Me to Dance
To say I had, have, two left feet
would be an insult to left feet.
But Mom was determined
I’d be a hit with the girls
at my first junior high dance,
so she tried to teach me the cha-cha
and the lindy, me galumphing
robotically as Frankenstein’s monster.
She gave up, and called a niece
she knew I had a crush on.
And mirable dictu, the steps came
easily as Keats’s leaves to a tree,
in his famous analogy
for how poetry should be created,
Mom watching, while I floated in a heaven
of holding Cheryl’s hands in the cha-cha,
then one hand and her twirling waist for the lindy.
Mom drew the line at the fox trot,
which always, on American Bandstand,
devolved into bubble-gum-popping girls
with arms draped around hitters’ shoulders,
the two swaying, occupying virtually
the same space, denying the laws of physics,
but obeying the stricter ones
of biology and chemistry.
Mom Confesses and So Does Dad
Years after I married, Mom confessed,
when Beth and I were visiting her,
“You probably never noticed,
but I really hate to cook.
Cleaning I love,” she preened
a fierce sentry against dust motes
or cake crumbs with the temerity
to sully her apartment cleaner
than surgical theatres or those labs
where strange new compounds
are made in sterile conditions.
I decided on discretion,
but remembered every roast
that almost, and sometimes did,
set the oven on fire; the rubbery
taste of perfectly decent meat
she’d pop from the freezer
right into the broiler; the way
she’d mutter—almost as if the poor
bird had given her the finger—
when she koshered chickens,
removing every speck of blood.
Once, maybe ten-years-old,
after Dad muttered over some dish
lying diseased on his plate, I asked,
“If Mom’s such a terrible cook,
how come you married her?”
When he stopped wiping away
tears of hilarity, he wheezed out,
“Someday, Bobby, you’ll understand.”
Dining Out With Mom and Dad
“There is no free lunch,” the saying goes.
Ditto for dinner with my parents at Aaron’s Deli
Sunday nights: a reprieve from Mom’s cooking.
After our scarfed pastramis, fries, and Cokes—
with the perfect sting-on-the tongue aftertaste—
Jeff and I kicked each other under the table
in boredom, as Mom first reapplied her lipstick,
the odour overpowering any pastrami aroma.
Then she and Dad lingered over teas, rehashing,
for the millionth time, their day, their week,
gossiping about family, friends, neighbours,
their glares warning we were supposed to sit,
relax, digest, partake of the conversation,
when all we wanted was to run home:
to play stickball, punchball, handball
in the street, with our friends; or dodge
Terrible Tommy Lockhart’s hand-grenade
snowballs, rocks embedded in their centers,
and play sock basketball in our room.
But no, we had to sit like civilized
Victorian children, not feral Brooklyn
trash can dogs, until finally, finally,
we were unleashed, snarling silently
at the decimation of our last night of freedom
before the school week crushed us again.
Now, now, I’d gladly sit and listen, all night.
Robert Cooperman's latest collection is HELL AT COCK'S CROW (Kelsay Books), a sonnet sequence about the golden age of piracy on the high seas. Forthcoming from Kelsay Books is STEERAGE.
No comments:
Post a Comment