1

The Lonely Hunger of Today

I think of you when I think of that Spalding basketball I held at the age of 5 my spherical soldier of loneliness, begging, rolling towards another boys grip. He, picking up the ball, smiling, Game of Horse? The bounce pass back to me, our eyes meeting, a friendship forged. A Spalding, Mr. Williams, just like your glistening red wagon, I know you can relate. The poem is the distance traveled, bounced, between my hands and the hands of a very first friend. I think of you, William Carlos, when I think about my grandfather. Your icebox of plums and your thieving and hoarding, the look of disapproval on your wifes plump face when youve stolen her fruit. I hear the steady silence of old New Jersey; feel the expectation of a woman waiting for a doctor to round the corner. You had 18 years on my Max, William, yet I run the distance between your Rutherford and his Bayonne in a flash of the track meet of my mind. See, my grandfather was a pediatrician like you, but he didnt read stories. Hed dig into a thick steak and eat so slowly and methodically; fall asleep reading the Times on the recliner. I havent thought of the particulars of your life until now William. I am my grandfathers youngest gift, and his life is written on my jellied cells and oral histories, my fibers and ligaments. With you its just been the poems. Yet you took on T.S. Eliot and doctored the children of Rutherford, raised a family too, all in one lifetime! A black bag and an eye, a soft man with a profound drive who never slept behind the wheel. My glad view of the surface. We keep our dreamers wrapped snugly in cellophane. I hold my heroes to my own prejudices; the facts can keep banging on the doors of Wikipedia. But, its my angle, and no one can take it from me. Like the stretching, sloping fields across from Manhattan pristine, then reformed by the hacking shovels, tractors and menacing steamrollers. I make it my landscape and thats enough. The pre-war stateliness of New Jersey, a botanical exhibit before encroachment: the Meadowlands and waste dumps and the Badlands, the inching smog on the Turnpike. You are the poet that resembles my grandfathers comforting voice and the steady, slow articulation, the peace of men who lived full lives, walked with purpose, provided for children and looked the neighbor in the eye. The house calls on streets carpeted with Oak leaves. A womans screams, brow matted with sweat, baby reaching out of her towards your hands. Hands made for stitching a cut, a soothing voice coating a childs pain. I think of you now and your perfect name, a William a Williams and a Carlos; its got to be another invention. We are liars. And yet my heart sails with your singular truth, your empathetic touch. I can see the rewriter behind your lines, toiling in the smoke filled den. A man in Biology class, in Anatomy, writing the human body. And at night, hunching over the form and cries of the human soul. I now understand the beautiful agony behind it all, even though Ill never know you, William. But, Ill feel what you must have felt staring at the white as your kids waddle around you yelping for your time. Its this blazing mad drive to pare it down to just these modest

options. Your coming downstairs in your slippers, emptying the ashtrays by the typewriter and pulling out a lyric that youll spend another two days on, between the house calls, the result being a dash of 27 or 92 or 1,007 words. Poems hidden under stethoscope and tongue depressor. Your lines another setting of the bone. I never had to explain your words, pick through your work or assemble a critique. I can ingest your lines and not have to worry about how to dissect them. The way someone else describes you is static, being told how to read your lyrics the mud caked on my own eye. It takes a long time to realize that you can do with this enterprise what you like. The tolls on these highways running through your garden state will always ask for a writers tokens. The cameras eye will make its greedy demands on human vision. False pamphleteers will shape and distort our lines for massive consumption. Rejection will roar. Blood still slowly drip from pens, fingers; red tears falling on stretched out, white canvass (in both of your regal professions). And yet on quiet nights just like this one, when the cars and cats and kids are all asleep, I can go to your page, William, and I can envision workmanlike hands, feel human breath, and harvest childhoods gaze. These songs can take me wherever I must go. Into grandparents wide, leafy suburb, towards a light in a window, onto tabletop, a glass bowl full of untouched, forbidden hard candies, the shadow of my mother as a little girl, staring up at scratchy mustache, newsprint, clamoring, always, for his hiding affection. You must have been a shroud of silence in the home too to do all that healing. I know this, we all know this. And yet I cant prove it. See me enveloped too though, wrapped around a lost lyric, sulking silently, manly, for what I cant have, what is out of reach. See my own little girls yap and dance away, tugging endlessly at the sleeve of my fathers old work shirt I wear. Forgive us our needling obsessions. Wake the young pediatrician my ever loved Poppy, my grandfather Max from lounge chair slumber, dust peanut shells off his lap and carry him and his worldly burdens up to the bedroom where he can sleep safe from dream, innocent, till body clock rings 5:15. Soothe our grandmothers (Goomahs!) relentless, waking desperation, erase her unwieldy obsession. Surfaces! Their lives, our life, smooth, like paved ice, the insides a slanted, choked honesty well never confront. What words were passed from young pediatrician to dissolving, anguished housewife? Well, words we all know, of course. A Silence all too easily grasped, passed down like another prized piece in the memorial shoebox. Like the gift my basketball soldier brought, a childs game of horse, a friendship found. A doctor\poets lines, specifics of a life unknown, conjectured. A grandfathers real sacrifice, his wifes clenched tears, my lonely hunger of today. Days, Mr. Williams, reading doesnt save. When we are gobbled up by routine, entwined in ghastly chores, our everyday griping, vanilla ice cream down our wrists, the laundry soap bubbles popping, hidden jealousy, red toys abandoned and rusty in the yard, resentment, smoke rings, cheeks left not kissed by the front door, a letter left sealed in its envelope, its secrets never revealed. All of it. The gaps between the black letters, where people live, speak too, on white, common space. Your lines taken away from me, an old friend lost, a tide stalled forever, loneliness and longing never finding its way back out to sea.