Read Online Letter from Brooklyn by Jacob Scheier - Free Book Online
Authors: Jacob Scheier
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MICHAELâS LOWER EAST SIDE
You have a map,
ballpoint marking the streets
where you lived and my mother lived
and Carl, your best friend who committed suicide,
and Sueâs boyfriend Danny who also killed himself,
because he had cancer. Your stories conflict
with her diary. But isnât that what always happens when Jews talk
about origins? And you donât need to know
what your sister believed in 1968. Itâs enough
that your friends are dead
and nothing on 2nd Avenue is the way you remember it.
If we walk fast enough the three dollar espressos
will turn back into night, the patio legs
fold and table tops resume their previous lives
as garbage pale lids. Right here is where you bought
egg creams at 3 a.m. The Gem Spa on St. Markâs,
soda fountain replaced by the glossy stares of models.
Yonah Shimmel is pretty much the same,
knishes framed in the dumbwaiter.
The dumpy middle-aged man,
not unlike a knish himself, is annoyed
when you ask for cutlery
and this makes you smile. There is no celery soda
so you settle for a Dr. Brown cream. We have never looked
so similar as when resigning ourselves to what is
no longer. Carl or Danny, your parents or my mother.
How thick is absence, too. âItâs not fucking here . . . Itâs gone,â
you say, looking at a vacant lot on 13th, the last place you
and your sister lived before she met my father.
Julie calms you with nothing more profound than,
âMichael, weâre on the wrong street.â You laugh, and I know
this is a story you will tell at family gatherings â
and when the times comes so will I.
The next street over is the tenement where you planned
your lessons for P.S. 110 and Sue tried
to figure out what to do with her life
after being kicked out of Berkeley and the Spartacists
and reading Whitman one evening instead of Marx â
though I made that last part up.
And there was that guy who did too much acid and jumped
out the sixth floor window and survived.
And Fred Hampton killed that same week and
you and her were going to live, okay, not forever,
but for quite some time.
RAISING THE PENTAGON
âYou created the revolution first and learned from it, learned of what your revolution might consist and where it might go out of the intimate truth of the way it presented itself to your experience.â
â Norman Mailer ,
The Armies of the Night
You might have been the thin young pirate
with a large Armenian mustache
on page 149. After all, you were there
when the Pentagon was raised.
Spent the night in Occoquan
and still have that mustache,
43 years later. Ending the draft
killed the movement, you say,
as we drink beneath a stuffed gator head,
confederate flag in its teeth. We are far
from your old New England house,
where snow, as though in a koan,
gathers in the eaves and the shadows
of pines rise and recede across the hardwood.
If we drive all night we can be in Arlington
County, 1967, by morning. On the way
we will find your sister, the woman who will become
my mother, at Berkeley, handing out leaflets â
The March on the Pentagon is liberal
,
bourgeois
. . .
She didnât understand, she wasnât there you say
into the empty pint. For years,
whether it was a Central Park âbe inâ
or trying to make peace
with your father, she would ask
the same smart-ass question,
âRaised that Pentagon yet?â
(I can only imagine what she would say
about your âHopeâ T-shirt.)
Her hair a dandelion
about to disperse its seeds
she says it again from the empty stool beside us.
But remembering sheâs been dead
a decade she loses the smirk and asks
how could you lift a building
but not stop your sister
from falling. And I donât know
who is right. Maybe you didnât,
and maybe you did
raise the Pentagon, clear
into outer space.
I am sure you tried.
You both tried.
RE: GRANDPAâS VILLAGE
About 40 years ago
You have a map,
ballpoint marking the streets
where you lived and my mother lived
and Carl, your best friend who committed suicide,
and Sueâs boyfriend Danny who also killed himself,
because he had cancer. Your stories conflict
with her diary. But isnât that what always happens when Jews talk
about origins? And you donât need to know
what your sister believed in 1968. Itâs enough
that your friends are dead
and nothing on 2nd Avenue is the way you remember it.
If we walk fast enough the three dollar espressos
will turn back into night, the patio legs
fold and table tops resume their previous lives
as garbage pale lids. Right here is where you bought
egg creams at 3 a.m. The Gem Spa on St. Markâs,
soda fountain replaced by the glossy stares of models.
Yonah Shimmel is pretty much the same,
knishes framed in the dumbwaiter.
The dumpy middle-aged man,
not unlike a knish himself, is annoyed
when you ask for cutlery
and this makes you smile. There is no celery soda
so you settle for a Dr. Brown cream. We have never looked
so similar as when resigning ourselves to what is
no longer. Carl or Danny, your parents or my mother.
How thick is absence, too. âItâs not fucking here . . . Itâs gone,â
you say, looking at a vacant lot on 13th, the last place you
and your sister lived before she met my father.
Julie calms you with nothing more profound than,
âMichael, weâre on the wrong street.â You laugh, and I know
this is a story you will tell at family gatherings â
and when the times comes so will I.
The next street over is the tenement where you planned
your lessons for P.S. 110 and Sue tried
to figure out what to do with her life
after being kicked out of Berkeley and the Spartacists
and reading Whitman one evening instead of Marx â
though I made that last part up.
And there was that guy who did too much acid and jumped
out the sixth floor window and survived.
And Fred Hampton killed that same week and
you and her were going to live, okay, not forever,
but for quite some time.
RAISING THE PENTAGON
âYou created the revolution first and learned from it, learned of what your revolution might consist and where it might go out of the intimate truth of the way it presented itself to your experience.â
â Norman Mailer ,
The Armies of the Night
You might have been the thin young pirate
with a large Armenian mustache
on page 149. After all, you were there
when the Pentagon was raised.
Spent the night in Occoquan
and still have that mustache,
43 years later. Ending the draft
killed the movement, you say,
as we drink beneath a stuffed gator head,
confederate flag in its teeth. We are far
from your old New England house,
where snow, as though in a koan,
gathers in the eaves and the shadows
of pines rise and recede across the hardwood.
If we drive all night we can be in Arlington
County, 1967, by morning. On the way
we will find your sister, the woman who will become
my mother, at Berkeley, handing out leaflets â
The March on the Pentagon is liberal
,
bourgeois
. . .
She didnât understand, she wasnât there you say
into the empty pint. For years,
whether it was a Central Park âbe inâ
or trying to make peace
with your father, she would ask
the same smart-ass question,
âRaised that Pentagon yet?â
(I can only imagine what she would say
about your âHopeâ T-shirt.)
Her hair a dandelion
about to disperse its seeds
she says it again from the empty stool beside us.
But remembering sheâs been dead
a decade she loses the smirk and asks
how could you lift a building
but not stop your sister
from falling. And I donât know
who is right. Maybe you didnât,
and maybe you did
raise the Pentagon, clear
into outer space.
I am sure you tried.
You both tried.
RE: GRANDPAâS VILLAGE
About 40 years ago
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