Collected Poems Richard Greene

By Richard Greene

Richard Greene has been writing poetry intensively since he retired from a 38-year career in international development in the mid-1990s. A lawyer by training, he fell into his development career by accident when, after law school, though planning not to practice law but interested in international affairs, he accepted an unsolicited job offer from the U.S. Agency for International Development. After a few years in Washington (or Foggy Bottom, as the location of the U.S. foreign policy establishment is known), he was assigned as legal advisor to the USAID mission in Laos and there discovered that the development business suited his interests and inclinations very well. Greene wrote poetry beginning in the 8th grade and continued through college where he studied with a Professor, Henry Rago, who later became editor of Poetry magazine, the leading U.S. poetry journal. However, he wrote few poems after law school as he became absorbed in international development, but turned back to poetry as he neared retirement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jumble Books and Publishers
• Release date: Dec 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645376203

Richard Greene

RICHARD GREENE is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Richards Richards Institute for Ethics at Weber State University. He is the past Director of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl. He is the author of Spoiler Alert: It’s a Book About the Philosophy of Spoilers, and has produced twenty or so edited books on pop culture and philosophy. He also co-hosts the popular podcast I Think, Therefore I Fan.

Book preview

MEMORIES

Old files

sifting through old files

like layers of earth

yielding up bones

and pollen,

the shards of life

breath clotted

by the dust

of triumph and failure

desire and loss

(August 1996)

The Mother Lode

One’s past is a lode

of images

where we work the veins of childhood,

lost innocence,

love in all its variations,

the old and their reminiscences,

those to whom we are linked

by the chance of birth

or life’s tectonics,

those who are no longer with us,

all there in the mineshafts of memory

waiting to be brought to light.

(September 13, 1999)

Boxes

Our basement is full of boxes

and often when looking for something

I’ll be surprised

by the debris of another time,

my children’s toys or baby clothes,

my son’s baseball cards

that haven’t been touched in years,

the paraphernalia of forsaken interests,

long unused pots and pans,

and as I sit there sorting,

memories flicker

through my mind.

(October 21, 1999)

Steam Engines

When I was young

trains were still powered by steam,

and I remember gazing at locomotives

latent in stations

or churning by at crossings,

or, as a passenger,

catching a glimpse of one

spewing smoke from its fierce furnace

as the train rounded a curve.

They gobbled coal by the shovelful

quaffed the contents of water towers

as easily as you might down a soda pop,

displayed their naked wheels and driving rods

like the muscle

of sweat sheathed, carbon smeared, shirtless coal shovelers,

those old steam engines

showing off their brawn.

(October 30, 1999)

To the Basement and Back

Looking for something in the basement this morning

I noticed once state-of-the-art equipment I’ll never use again,

which reminded me

of other phantoms that haunt my nether world,

paint that no longer adorns our walls,

gadgets whose use I no longer know,

the too-warm sheepskin coat I never wear,

still-good suitcases

supplanted by newer ones that won my favor,

books I’ll almost certainly never read again, nor lend,

a book I was going to return but never did

which reminded me in turn

of friends I meant to call,

but weeks turned into months

and months into years,

and I came back upstairs

bearing the baggage of those years.

(April 13, 2002)

Becoming Dickie Again

I saw my cousin Bob last week

for the first time in decades

His hair is white now

and he looks older than his father did

the last time I saw him,

but he called me Dickie

and it made me feel like the Dickie I was

those many years ago.

(August 4, 2000)

Autumn Returns

Opening the window

I see leaves on the street

and autumn slips in,

a crowd of autumns

mingled in memory,

a distillation of autumns,

sounds, scents, scenes,

a feeling that runs over the skin.

(September 16, 2002)

Sensing Memory

If one can talk of the mind’s eye

why not the mind’s ear, nose, taste, touch?

I can hear a pianist playing Schumann

in a concert hall in Copenhagen

fifty years ago,

smell the camellias

outside my bedroom window

when I was eight,

taste the salmon

I savored long ago

fresh from a Canadian lake,

feel the smooth skin of a woman

I haven’t seen in decades,

all in this very moment

as if now were then.

(January 7, 2006)

In the Attic

among the cobwebs and mementos

in the dim light

diffused through clouded windowpanes

I hear voices in the street

footsteps in the house below,

but there’s no going back to that house

where I was young

so many years ago.

(December 7, 2002)

Memories

I don’t need more memories

yet they keep coming.

Nearly seventy years accumulation stored away

in the attics, closets, cupboards of my mind,

but more arrive each day,

and the bedchambers too are full

of animated guests.

Granted, some don’t stay,

and some stay only awhile

taking their leave considerately

Others, however, remain,

stalking the halls year after year,

some unremarkable,

some congenial,

some unwelcome lodgers who resist eviction.

And so, though the house is full

it keeps on filling

for it seems there’s no end

to the memories it can hold.

(May 13, 2000)

One Memory

If I could have

only one memory

it would be

of my firstborn

resting on her mother’s shoulder,

life and memories ahead.

(May 23, 1999)

First Memory

My first memory is of a name,

Rachel.

I remember no more of her

but know we played

and I recall

or dreamed

the courtyard

of an apartment building

where I see two toddlers

in early memory’s glow,

like the aftermath

of creation.

(December 18, 1999)

A Birthday

There’s a difference of opinion in the family

as to whether I was three or four.

I remember a coconut cake in the shape of a lamb

surrounded by yellow cotton chicks.

I see it as through a scratched lens.

(November 1, 1999)

Frozen Fields

My grandmother drove me to the train

that winter I was four,

through the threadbare fields of Indiana

with their ragged patches of snow.

I was on my way

to my mother in New York,

excited about the journey

and the prospect of being with her again,

but I remember

not so much the excitement

as passing through those wintry fields,

as if time were deep-frozen

in memory.

(November 19, 1999)

West Side Memories

We lived across from the planetarium,

mere yards from the sky,

while just down the street

was the el,

and still vivid

under the long-gone girders,

a barbershop

with its candy stripe pole

and carousel pony

astride which young clients sat,

at the center of the universe.

(July 1998)

First Grade

I was in first grade when I was five

and my memories of it are so nebulous

I can’t be sure

whether they’re memories

or dreams.

I picture low, rambling buildings

of vague design,

the excitement of a track meet

in which older boys enviably competed,

and making parachutes

of handkerchief, rock and string,

hurling them as high as we could

and watching them drift down slowly

drift slowly down

through a dim haze

of memory

or dream.

(February 23, 2000)

Truckin’ on Down

In the thirties,

when I was six,

we lived on Riverside Drive

and across from our apartment,

in the park,

was a small stadium,

with a big red apple

over its entrance arch.

Dance contests were held there,

bringing a bit of Harlem to midtown.

I watched from the window of our apartment

and though I remember little

of that place in which we lived,

the dancers are still visible in my mind

performing that rhythmic,

finger-shakin’,

high-steppin’,

bouncy walk,

truckin’ on down,

in memory.

(June 10, 2005)

Pullman Memories

Riding a train

takes me back

to those boyhood summers

when I traveled alone

from New York to Chicago

starting from Grand Central Station

with a gentle jolt,

gathering momentum

past the vacant eyed apartments

of upper Manhattan,

wondering about the people

who lived inside,

then over to the river

where we hit full stride,

our wheels clicking

at a Dixieland pace,

the Hudson Valley scrolling by,

lake-wide river, stubs of old mountain,

the play of light in a cloud-crowded sky,

until we turned off at Albany

into mile on mile of farms and woods,

imagining myself into the houses

along the right of way,

those who might live within

seeming not quite real,

as we no doubt to them,

two worlds

sliding by one another

each in its own continuum

of time and space.

Then in the dining car,

self-conscious but proud,

the center of attention

in that adult place,

and not long after

in my berth,

snug as a tent,

shaken down to sleep

by the jiggling of the train,

waking during the night

when we stopped

at some anonymous station,

pulling the window shade up a crack

to see if I could make out a sign

of where we were,

watching the moving figures

swathed in steam,

silhouetted against the platform lights.

Then it was morning

and the flat fields of Indiana

were wheeling by,

telephone poles

riffling by

at a dizzy pace.

Like a horse

galloping back to its stable,

we seemed to accelerate

as we drew near our destination.

I felt I had to hurry getting dressed

lest I would still be in my pajamas

when we reached Dearborn Station

where the train might be shunted off

before I emerged,

my father on the platform muttering,

Where is that boy?

But we slowed down

as we swam into the denser urban landscape

and instead of being caught unprepared

I waited impatiently

for that endless city

to end.

(February 1999)

Summertime

As a child I spent my summers

with a crew of cousins

at my grandfather’s house

on a lake in Michigan

where we passed much of our time swimming

and trooping into town for ice cream, or movies.

Horror films were a favorite,

Igor pouring molten metal on us,

in three dimensions,

from the tower of Dr. Frankenstein’s house

(which for many years made Victorian houses

synonymous in my mind with horror),

The Incredible Shrinking Man

fleeing a house cat bigger than a rhinoceros,

rubber dinosaurs

rampaging through The Lost World.

The youngest of the gang

I took all this seriously

peering out from between my fingers

through much of the show,

clamping them shut when the going got too scary.

Then there was the amusement park

only 12 miles away

(which at the time seemed far to me

as if distance stretched

in inverse proportion to one’s size),

the fun house

with its whimsical mirrors

and the forced laughter

reverberating from its loudspeakers,

the papier-mâché monsters in the house of horrors

exciting more hilarity than terror,

and a large flat cylinder of a ride

that rotated so fast

you could hang on its inner side

defying gravity,

a sensation that visited me in my dreams.

The cousins with whom I spent those summers

over half a century ago

are still young in my mind

splashing into the lake,

filing into the little theaters

in Coloma and Watervliet

or heading out rowdily for that amusement park.

(September 12, 1999)

This Dove Is Not for Mourning

The mourning dove doesn’t sound mournful to me,

wistful maybe,

but not melancholy,

as if happy with the day

whether a chill March one like this

or a sultry one in August.

For me it sings of childhood summers,

spent at the lake

where my grandfather had a house,

of warm mornings

when fresh from bed

I could comfortably step outside shirtless,

of times when I could hear

the trees’ full rustle

and waves lapping the shore,

and see fish dimple the mirror of evening

and swallows swoop

over the languid water

streaked with gold.

(March 28,2002)

Scent from the Past

Opening the back door this evening

I’m caught up in a scent of earth and vegetation

from over 50 years ago,

the dark aroma of the dirt road

I sometimes walked at night

along the lake where I spent my childhood summers,

the oil-calm water on one side,

a small tremor disturbing its reflections,

on the other side, interiors

stage-lit behind their window panes.

For a moment I think I’m seeing the lights

from houses next to that long-unvisited road,

but then I’m back in the present,

though the scent of that old ground

still tugs at my memory.

(August 15, 1999)

The Road by the Lake

The road by the lake

where I spent my childhood summers

was here again

when I stepped outside tonight,

a faint odor perhaps,

something in the feel of the air,

the lights beyond the trees…

It visits me from time to time,

a ghost of summers past.

(June 22, 2000)

Watermelon Days

Here I am, a graybeard, eating watermelon

and remembering those summers

when I could count my age in single digits,

summers at the lake where my grandfather had a house

and all the cousins would assemble for dinner

around my grandmother’s large table.

Though there’s plenty of melon in the fridge

I find myself cutting close to the rind,

as I did in those days,

and there I am,

still that boy at seventy-three,

at the table with the tiffany lamp overhead

or descending the hill to the lake,

its remembered water, smooth and green,

lapping softly on the shore,

and the sound of mourning doves in counterpoint.

(August 23, 2004)

At the Window

Standing at the window I see

light glinting off leaves,

pale light on the pavement—

streetlamp or moon?

Darkness too

flows in at the window,

night air,

cool to the skin,

and summer nights

still warm in memory.

(August 28, 2002)

Scrapbook

I still have snapshots I took when I was eight,

Sixty-five years ago,

the house, the pond, the patio.

I remember the camera

a Kodak Bullet

so named in the fashion of the day

when streamlined was the thing,

a candid camera,

plastic as befits so casual a machine,

Bakelite I believe,

like those 78 rpms it joined long ago

in a landfill somewhere.

It was a gift of a woman who took care of me

and might have been a significant expense for her,

but though she may have doted on me,

I remember nothing more of her.

Then there’s the snapshot of me with my mother

at the side of the house

taken with that same camera,

by whom I have no recollection,

the photographer now only a ghostly presence

on the other side of the machine,

gone with the camera

and the caretaker

whose name I no longer know,

all in the ground somewhere.

(March 30, 2004)

Under the Apple Boughs

There was a wall along the road

where we played soldier

behind the loosely stacked stones.

Next to it a row of mountain birch

tops tinted in memory with evening sun.

Then the house

in dappled coat of whitewashed brick,

and the orchard with gnarled trees

where we pressed apples on chill fall days

and savored the cold, sweet cider.

Outside my bedroom window

a camellia tree glistened,

and, beyond, a broad lawn

sloped down to the pond

where frogs held nightly congress

and I learned of mallards

and snapping turtles

and green-winged teals.

There we skated in winter

until darkness hid the agate surface,

and swam impatiently in spring,

the ice barely melted,

as if our innocence protected us from cold.

Between pond and house

stood a lone apple tree

where, as I watched at first light,

pheasants gathered

in their courtly plumage

to feast on windfalls.

Then bombs fell on Pearl Harbor

and soldier games gave way to war.

(September 1998)

Radio Times

There was the opera

my parents tuned in to every Sunday,

in the background like a movie score,

but of little interest to me,

but then The Inner Sanctum

with its creaking door

and shivery stories

that sent me fleeing

down the long hall

to my parents’ bedroom,

and The Shadow,

who knew what evil

lurked in the hearts of men,

and that other crime fighter

of mythical proportions

The Green Hornet,

whose theme song was

The Flight of the Bumble Bee,

which strikes me now

as biologically incorrect,

and The Lone Ranger

whose theme was

an Italian overture

commemorating

a legendary 14th century

Swiss patriot,

and Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy,

which posed the existential question,

"Have you tried Wheaties,

the best breakfast food in the land?"

(January 1999)

Passover

I was eight

when I learned the four questions

(Why is this night different from all other nights?),

a duty reserved for the youngest child,

memorizing them in Hebrew

in the car

on our way from the suburbs

to my aunt’s apartment in the city.

For me that night was a time

of waiting hungrily for dinner

through a drone of words

in a language I didn’t understand,

a blur of readings, songs and prayers,

and of falling asleep after dinner,

drowsy from the ritual wine,

on a big bed covered with fur coats

that smelled of perfume.

I didn’t get any thrill out of stealing the afikomen

while the adults pretended not to see,

and the questions I mouthed

weren’t the ones I would have asked for it seemed unfair to me

that the Lord had hardened Pharaoh’s heart

then punished the Egyptians for it.

It only occurred to me years later

that this holiday celebrated freedom.

(October 30, 1999)

World’s Fair

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.—Leon Trotsky

I went to my first world’s fair

when I was eight.

As is the way with such events

it was more about us

than the world,

and refracted the future

through optimist eyes.

You wouldn't have known

from anything on display

that a cancer festered

in Europe’s bosom

or that the most brutal of wars

was mere months away.

Nor was there any inkling

of the baleful new words

soon to be unleashed

on our vocabulary,

blitzkrieg, storm trooper, quisling,

kamikaze, Hiroshima,

Holocaust,

while the Futurama

with its ebullient guides

depicted a morrow

of shining towers

where poverty was ostracized.

Oh, the world looked good

in our neighborhood

in the spring of ’39.

(March 10, 2000)

Book Worlds

I’m nine or ten

seated at my rolltop desk

next to a dormer window.

It’s a rainy day

and a pearl-gray glare

of cloud-scattered light

streams through the window

where the only landscape I see

is that of the book before me:

the ubiquitous forests

where Arthur and his knights

pursue their solemn quests;

or Sherwood

where Robin Hood and his men

display their courage and cunning;

the plane before Troy

where long-ago armies clash

and Hector and Achilles pass

on their way to immortality;

or scenes from Odysseus’ adventures

where Cyclops and Circe and Sirens

lie in wait.

Such are the pictures that scroll by

on the gray screen of those days.

(January 3, 2000)

Milkmen

This morning I dreamt of the milkmen

who used to deploy through the half-lit city,

when I was a child,

with their cargo of clean, white liquid

and rows of glistening bottles,

depositing their burden

on doorsteps and porches

with a soft clinking

that made sleep

all the more voluptuous.

This morning I dreamt of milkmen,

but, when I awoke,

they were only a dream.

(September 10, 1999)

Jane Austen at Fort Dix

Yesterday I heard a broadcast

commemorating Fats Waller

whose centenary is this month.

They played Ain’t Misbehavin’

and it took me back fifty years

to when I was a draftee at Fort Dix

and spent my Sundays at the enlisted men’s club.

Though I’m not a clubbable type,

it was the best place to escape from the barracks

where there was the risk of being called upon for extra duty.

I was working my way at the time

through the complete works of Jane Austen

(which I kept well concealed the rest of the week)

and secluded myself in a balcony

reading those works so far from the military mind

while a fellow refugee played piano downstairs

and sang in a clear Irish tenor.

Ain’t Misbehavin’ was one of the songs he sang.

Fats Waller, Jane Austen and an army base.

Now those Sabbaths in that club,

deep in that place I’d have shunned if I’d had a choice,

sing amongst my memories.

(May 19, 2004)

Pictures of Yesteryear

Looking for an old photo

I came across another

from almost fifty years ago.

It was rolled up in a mailing tube

addressed to my mother

in the handwriting of my youth

and labeled prominently

Reception Station

Company C 14.7

Fort Dix, N.J.

September 15, 1954.

I’m at the far left of the back row

cap raked low over eyes

looking about fifteen,

though I’d already finished graduate school,

and I think to myself

if my children looked at this photo

it would seem to them

like ones from early in the century did to me,

alluding to wars they’d know only from books,

while in my mind

the years elapsed seem not that many

and those days like recent history.

(July 22, 2000)

Where Have the Hurdy-gurdy Men Gone?

Reader, do you even know what they were,

the knife sharpeners, the milkmen, the icemen,

who peopled the world of my youth?

Have they all quite faded away,

or is there an alternative universe

where crowds of them circle in the streets

performing the slow waltz of time?

(July 8, 2005)

Old Music

Today I came across records

I haven’t listened to in years,

wide black disks

in musty cardboard jackets.

The sight, the smell, the sound

transported me back to those years

when I first heard much of this music,

years filled with learning and longing

dreams and doubts,

and the times that followed

when I tried to fill the void of loneliness

with melodies

so that even now

these tunes are burdened

with the weight of those years.

(July 25, 2000)

Back to School

The weather turned cool last night,

the end of August near,

and my mind returns to school,

schedules

homework

confinement in a classroom

gazing out a window at a still bright sky

enduring through still open windows

the lure of fresh autumn air.

All this weighs heavily on my mind

though I haven’t been to school in fifty years.

(August 24, 2003)

From the Archives

A photo of Times Square 65 years ago,

on the RKO marquee, J. CAGNEY,

on the Translux,

"LONDON CAN TAKE IT

FDR-WILKIE-LEW LEHR",

women wearing hats,

cars with fenders.

The photo’s in black and white

but what stirs in my senses

is the feel of night air

and the smell of fedoras.

(July 6, 2006)

Endangered Species

All my life it’s been Ace combs.

I never much liked the name.

Made me think of youths with greasy pompadours.

But the combs were good,

more durable than most,

and whenever I went to the drugstore to buy a comb

I looked for Ace.

But now they’ve disappeared from the shelves

displaced by a rabble of brands I don’t recognize.

I still have an Ace in my bathroom cabinet,

reminding me of simpler times

and my long-gone youth.

(November 6, 2006)

Remembering Trolleys

Reading recently about trolleys,

now almost extinct,

I heard in my mind

one clanging down a Chicago street

Seventy some years ago.

I was four and staying with my great aunt Florence.

I can’t remember the place where she lived

or even what she looked like

but I remember

trolley tracks ran shining

down the street outside,

and during the night,

hearing a trolley’s ghostly clang and rattle.

(February 15, 2007)

The Demons of Madison Avenue

I read a review of a book today

about how Pepsi gained on Coke

over half a century ago

and the Pepsi jingle from that time

jangled in my mind:

Pepsi Cola hits the spot.

Twelve full ounces.

That’s a lot.

Twice as much for a nickel too.

Pepsi Cola is the drink for you.

It’s probably close to sixty years

since I’ve heard that ad

but it still has the power

to commandeer my brain.

(February 21, 2007)

Sue and Me

My sister recently sent me a photo

she found among my late stepmother’s things.

It’s from 72 years ago.

I’m standing with my cousin Sue

in front of an apartment building,

that could only be Chicago,

when I was four and she eleven,

and it’s almost as if she were in this room.

I don’t remember her from then

but can see her in my mind’s eye

as she was a few years later,

soon to become her high school homecoming queen,

can almost smell the air

on the shore of the lake

where she was babysitting me

the day I fell off the breakwater

trying to study the pattern

on a snail shell on the bottom

while Sue flirted with the neighbor’s son.

Her life flashes through my mind

her marriage,

at which I was present,

her children when they were young

and grandchildren now,

some already adults,

tactile images

opening in my memory

like a time capsule

buried on some commemorative occasion.

(February 6, 2008)

Sue, Sue, Kalamazoo

I was talking to my cousin Sue last night

about the old days

when she was in her teens and I in my pre-.

We were among the summer cousins

who used to assemble

at my grandfather’s house at the lake,

stocking shelves in the storehouse of memory.

Cousin Sue’s in her 80s now

and I in my 70s

and when we talk

we rummage merrily through those memories.

Last night Sue was talking about

how they used to pick me up in Kalamazoo

when I came from the East on the New York Central.

I don’t recall the town at all

though I’m sure I was there more than once.

I conflate it in memory with another K

the Kellogg company

which is in Battle Creek,

not far away,

where they made some cereal,

the advertising slogan said,

by shooting it out of guns.

(Somehow that made sense to me at the time

though why that would sell a cereal

is beyond me now.)

I’ve another magic memory

of a town nearby,

Holland Michigan,

where they grew apples the size of grapefruit

too large to get my young hands around.

And then there’s Glenn Miller’s I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo

which we used to listen to

on 78 rpm

in the sunroom

along with Harry James’ Sweet Sue

and, in my mind, cousin Sue

is that gal from Kalamazoo.

(January 11, 2008)

Fishing

There’s a time at the end of the day

when the air grows perfectly still

and lake water smooth as syrup.

When I was a boy, I used to fish at that hour

hurrying through dinner

to row out on the silky water

ruffled only by the wake of my boat

and the rings within rings made by its oars.

Most evenings I’d cast my lure

dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of times,

the calm broken only by the whir of my reel,

the gurgling of the lure,

the occasional splash of a fish

leaping out of the water,

or a dog barking

somewhere on the shore,

but every once in a while

a bass would strike.

(March 28, 2008)

Life and Times

Reading May Swenson’s "Riding the A"

I’m beamed back in memory

to that time in my early twenties

when I daily rode the subway

between 23rd and 116th and Broadway,

reading my texts or The Times,

tranquilized by the rocking of the train

and the click clack of wheels on track,

rolling timelessly

through station numbers mounting

as the years

or counted down in memory,

and now I find those years alive

like images on celluloid.

(July 28, 2008)

Mashed Potatoes

When I was ten

I graduated from my one room school

with less than a dozen students

to a larger one

a couple of miles from home

on a busy avenue

instead of a few hundred yards

down our quiet road,

with hundreds of kids,

most unknown to me,

and bigger,

many by as much as a foot.

But they had a cafeteria there

where they served mashed potatoes every day

for five cents a scoop

(this was 1941)

a creamy volcanic islet on your plate

with thick brown gravy

in its crater.

I’ve never tasted anything better.

(November 27, 2008)

Dwellings

Every place I’ve lived

still dwells in my mind

like ghosts in an attic.

I think Chicago and see

the apartment by the lake,

ice piled on the shore

one cold winter,

or the place near the railroad tracks

where I slept in harder times

on a cot rolled out at night.

The house in White Plains

when it was still country:

the meadow, the orchard, the pond.

New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Beverly Hills

Washington, Quito, Bangkok,

to name just a few,

so many cities

so many dwellings,

more rooms than Versailles,

but it’s the houses that haunt,

not are haunted.

(April 4, 2009)

First Books

My mother and father gave me

a gold-embossed set of children’s books

for my eighth birthday,

Treasure Island,

Gulliver’s Travels,

Greek myths I read over and over,

Norse myths,

a book of poetry,

from which I remember best

Burns’ To a Field Mouse

its Scots dialect engraved in my memory

like a language learned in childhood.

Then there was a book I’d asked my father for,

one I’d seen advertised,

The Book of Marvels,

sci-fi about Mars,

but my father mistakenly got instead

Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels,

with its pictures of

the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

the Colossus of Rhodes,

the Great Wall of China

Mount Everest,

the Taj Mahal

and more.

I leafed through that book again and again

until its pages were worn,

its places on Earth

so much more interesting than Mars.

There’s a faded photo of me

from that time

holding, with both hands, a book

propped up on a child-sized, roll-top desk,

soft light streaming through a window.

Books were my friends in those days—

unathletic, a new boy in town, I had few others—

and so they have remained.

(April 13, 2009)

You Can’t Go Home Again

You can go back to the place where you lived

but you can’t go home again

as the man said.

At least not for long

The house that’s been sold

is no longer home,

and it isn’t just the house, it’s the neighborhood,

those friends and neighbors

who’ve moved away,

or died,

houses painted new colors,

extended or modified,

new gardens, trees, shrubs,

maybe a new house or two,

the empty field at the end of the street

now a development.

And maybe even those neighbors who’ve remained

no longer the people you knew.

(May 15, 2009)

Pictures Then and Now

Time was, unknown to most of today’s youth,

before the spread of suburbia and the multiplex,

when we went to the movies in palaces,

not like Versailles or Buckingham, to be sure,

but rather vast dark chambers

where shifting light beams played on mote-filled air,

like sunlight falling through clouds,

where we passed our Saturday afternoons and evenings,

immersed in adolescent murmurings,

entranced by motley patterns on a screen

or necking in a place called the balcony

like courtiers in some ornate nook

surprised there by Watteau.

(June 18, 2009)

Time Machine

Our neighbors have a granddaughter

who’s about two

and I’m reminded when she visits

and I hear her cry

of those many visits with my children

to their grandparents

in Glencoe, Lake Worth, Van Nuys

from the time when the children

were small enough to bawl at least once a day

till they were old enough to do the rides alone

at Disneyland or Disney World,

and almost old enough

to have stopped bickering in the back of the car.

(July 26, 2009)

Oldies but Goldies

We moved not long ago

and today as I unpacked our CDs

(compact disks, not certificates of deposit,

though I’m of an age to have those too)

my eye lit on The Best of The Doors

and faster than I could snap my fingers

a door opened on the time

when I first heard that group.

It was in the late Liberty Music Shop

in midtown

around the corner from Saks and Saint Pat’s

between the secular and the sacred as it were

where you could audition records,

meaning listen to,

33 rpm in those days.

A woman in the booth next to mine

was listening to the The Doors’ new album.

I could hear it through the partition.

Hello, I love you. Won’t you tell me your name.

Baby won’t you light my fire.

People are strange when you’re a stranger they sang

to a faintly raga-like beat.

I asked her what the album was,

having been out of the country for two years,

bought it forthwith

and hurried home to play it for my wife,

my then wife, that is.

I liked rock from the beginning,

though already a career man by that time,

liked everything Middle America found offensive,

wore my hair long, as long as I could in the State Department,

had sideburns and granny glasses,

was against the war.

The Doors,

then cutting edge

are gray haired now,

if still alive,

and their era is another country for the young

as the Roarin’ 20s were for my generation.

CDs are disappearing too.

But 33s are coming back.

Maybe the Hindus were right

about cycles of history.

(August 11, 2009)

Skipping Stones

I remember skipping stones

as a boy,

looking for those round flat ones

you don’t find everywhere

and throwing them just so

index finger round the stone’s circumference

arm out to the side

tilting the body a bit

so the flat side of the stone hit the water

and bounced

not just once but as many as four or five times,

seeing how many bounces you could get

each smaller than the last

before the stone sank into the water

as a diminuendo

diminishes into silence,

or a memory dwindles

into the distance

of time.

(February 24, 2010)

Bivouac Weather

It was cold this morning

with wind driven rain

and when I went out for the paper

my mind was swept back 56 years

to when I was a young draftee

in basic training.

We bivouacked for a week

in weather like this

sweating under ponchos all day

while the rain drummed its fingers

on our helmets,

sleeping two to a pup tent

in flimsy government issue sleeping bags,

awakened after a few hours by the cold.

Some nights it was cold enough to snow

but it was worse when it rained

for if you brushed the tent in your sleep

rain seeped through where you’d touched it

smearing your sleeping bag with water

dripping on your face and neck.

But this morning

as I padded back to the house with the paper

I felt like I was 23.

(March 30, 2010)

Woods

When in early spring

I pass a woods where the trees are budding

I feel like I’m back in those woods near military school

to which I escaped on weekends

with a fellow cadet, Duncan Tremaine,

wholesome as the sound of his name,

one of my few friends in that place

to which boys were sent

for discipline,

a place of the violent, uncouth and authoritarian—

those who liked to impose their will on others,

or who liked to live under the arbitrary order

of military life,

and those who fought it,

not out of principal

but because they liked to fight

or resisted all authority—

a place of southern chauvinism,

the civil war refought verbally

in the dorms at night

with the few boys from the north.

The woods were dimpled

with shallow hollows—

like cupped hands—

fringed with feathery budding leaves,

a different planet from the campus,

and I feel when I pass such places now

the freedom of those budding woods

and of being 15.

(April 17, 2016)

The Taste of Raspberries

I taste a raspberry and suddenly

I’m in a body much smaller than this

picking berries

from a thorny bush

in a summer field

amidst meadows and woods

under a bright canopy of sky.

(July 15, 2010)

Hidden Treasure

I dropped something in my lap

and it disappeared

into one of those invisible cracks in the universe

so I searched for it

in the subterranean crease in my chair

below the seat cushion

where the seat joins the arm

and there I found a cache of coins,

ranging from pennies to quarters

and experienced a familiar thrill.

But it wasn’t the money.

It was the memory

of finding coins in couches as a child.

(August 29, 2010)

Marrakesh Express

We had Moroccan food tonight—

restaurant leftovers brought home in a doggy bag—

and I thought of the song Marrakesh Express.

As we were doing the dishes

one thing leading to another

I put Dylan’s Country Pie on the CD player

and my wife and I were dancing

around the kitchen

like it was forty years ago.

Those were the days.

Crosby, Stills & Nash

Dylan

The Lovin’ Spoonful

Blood, Sweat and Tears.

I was in my late thirties

a little old for new pop

but that music was different,

and so was I.

(January 20, 2011)

The Taste of Summer

I remember picking blueberries

with my mother and sister and brother

on a sunny, breezy hill

overlooking our house,

the sky bright blue,

few clouds.

My mother gone over five decades now,

I can still taste those berries,

even this winter day

as I breakfast on blueberries,

brought from another continent,

and I remember my mother,

her auburn hair, her grey eyes, her voice,

on that berry-laden hill.

(February 7, 2011)

The Persistence of Memory

A school friend of mine just died.

He was 83

but it isn’t real to me that he’s gone.

I’d seen him over the decades

only from time to time

and barely remember now

what he looked like then

but my memory of him

as an 18-year-old

is vivid and alive.

(March 26, 2012)

Time and Again

Catching a glimpse through an open window

this mid-June night

of a circle of lamplight on the street

and the soft silhouette of the maple tree

in our front yard

I’m suddenly a GI in Verdun

almost sixty years ago.

It’s May.

Winter finally vanquished by spring,

the streetlight in front of the barracks

shines through full new leaves

fragrant in the fresh night air,

and I’m just twenty-two.

(June 15, 2012)

Ode to Forgetfulness

People are always going on about memory—

all those allusions to Proust and his madeleine—

but forgetting is shamefully neglected

though it probably occupies a larger space in our minds.

Much can usefully be forgetorized,

we could helpfully send each other forgetoranda,

and the world might be a better place

if aspiring authors wrote forgetoirs.

Then too, many of us could most appropriately

be seen off with forgetials

or have them erected in our names.

Someone needs to write a how-to manual

called Don’t Waste Your Time Searching for Lost Time

or, perhaps, Forgetance of Things Past

(March 7, 2013)

Summer Memory

Seeing the lights of a slow-moving aircraft

over the floe-clogged river outside our window

I suddenly remember an autogyro

I saw in a summer sky

when I was a boy

three quarters of a century ago.

Now few know what an autogyro is

and that memory seems like it belongs to another life.

(February 17, 2015)

Michael White

Sixty some years ago

my sister had a boyfriend named Michael White

a well-educated but callow young man

who was writing a novel entitled

The Cadmium Terrace.

(Don’t ask.)

Today there was an obit in The Times

for Michael White, 80,

characterized by the actress Greta Scacchi

as the most famous person you’ve never heard of.

He was the producer of Oh! Calcutta!,

The Rocky Horror Picture Show,

and Monty Python and the Holy Grail

among other popular entertainments.

In my mind, Michael was still that callow youth

trying to write a novel with a pretentious title.

(March 13, 2016)

So Many Memories

I forget so easily nowadays.

Is that because I’ve so much to remember,

the places I’ve been,

obscure corners of this planet

I’ve inhabited for mere days, or hours,

the regimental rolls of people I’ve known,

many so briefly,

the books I’ve read and news I’ve ingested,

the stories I’ve lived?

Is my memory too full

with living?

(October 17, 1999)

Loss

Her cat got out of