Rob S. Friedman
Rob failed at retirement twice; pray the third attempt sticks. The upside of failure is his memoir, The Road Taken, published by Purple Breeze Press and available at Amazon.com as a Kindle download or in paperback.
Thanks to all 45 of you who’ve downloaded a copy or foregone a latte and bought a paperback. If you found anything worth mentioning while reading it, feel free to leave an Amazon review and get me closer to triple digits.
What people are saying
“Robert, one day this will all be yours.” (Never happened.)
— John B., Importer of European foods, 1977.
“In The Road Taken, Robert Friedman writes a new comedy of manners about New York City’s academia in the 1980s and 90s. In a graduate student’s New York, everything happens in public, even those excruciating moments in the Dean’s Office, the classroom, the lecture hall, and in the streets. With wit and warmth, Friedman is our story-teller of that public-news era.”
— Fergal O’D. CUNY GC survivor and Mayor of North Park.
Frequently Asked Questions
In case you’re curious …
Will you ever work in academia again?
Apparently, no.
What is your favorite quote?
“Academics like to eat s**t, and in an pinch, they don’t care whose s**t they eat.” Stanley Fish, “The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos”
Besides hunting errant golfballs, what are you doing with all your free time?
Writing and reading. A few people think enough of it to nominate one of my poems for a Pushcart Prize and another for a Best of the Net.
All but one of the following appeared first at poetsonline.org. Each is in response to a prompt from the editor, found in the archived monthly issues noted below each poem.
SAN DIEGO SUNRISE
III and III and III
Then XI peals
Each a caress, a Carmelite stroke
Smoothly wresting sleepy dreams
From canyon dwellers
Hours earlier
The coyotes called
Their own measured sadness
Filled the canyon
Then two owls
Softly rousing one another
Each from their own eucalyptus branch
Reaching beyond the cliff’s edge
We all share
South of 8
East of 5
West of 15
The whoosh of tires
Constant, nearly indiscriminate
Forcing our attention
From the sonorous morning givers
Each morning they reveal me
An incursion
An alien
(October 2020)
MY SISTER’S LAMP
I haven’t seen one like it since it cracked apart.
The exterior, now ceramic shards and chunks,
Once a field of roses
Wrapped like a thoroughbred’s winning garland,
Into its shapely, curvy form.
Pink and white and red and salmon-hued plaster pieces
Helpless on the floor.
What a mistake, entering her forbidden space,
Destined to be found out, but now so obvious,
The marks of trespass, unalterable.
“You’ll make a lousy burglar,” our mother said
As she coaxed me off a stone ledge
At the top of the block
And back to the house,
Grateful for her refuge from the anger soon to be.
(December 2020)
TAPS
We left him outside of Gilroy,
Where signs for Andersen’s Pea Soup
Pull travelers off of Interstate 5.
Sere hills surround his remembrance field.
White cattle, black cattle laze above the uniform markers.
The hay truck bumps and bounces into their view.
They know fresh bales will tumble off the back.
They make excited noises and run fast down the hill.
The hay truck leaves, their lowing loses urgency.
Some chew, others nudge their young, protective.
He rests beyond the signs that warned us about
Rattlesnakes amid the graves.
(February 2021)
SNOW
Snow sieves onto the stones,
Intent on muffling permanence
Leaving pasts and futures silenced.
Flakes twist and cling to flakes
To swarm and mask our memory,
Challenging our stance and desire.
Sun and days dissolve it.
Yet darkness returns its resolve
To bear its weight on what remains.
(April 2021)
CAMELOT
Listening to him sing, crammed into the middle of our bamboo-framed couch, sisters on both sides of me hopping off it to grab the knob of the B&W Zenith, knowing it would be tuned back to Ed Sullivan as soon as our mother noticed, flints of awe and acceptance confirm that such a voice could never come from me.
If only sharing a birthday has the alchemical power of turning the larynx of an eight-year-old suburban ordinary into the steady baritone of a French Canadian my father’s age, his aura of dark brooding, his sardonic smirk to the camera, projecting Sir Lancelot’s confidence.
Does his older sister also have a birthday just days after his own? Does his special day also disappoint because Thanksgiving gets in the way? Does he also have a pair of battling uncles who ruin even that hated holiday? Would I ever escape to Camelot and stand between Arthur and Guinevere? Would I ever muster the courage to sing “If Ever I Should Leave You” to Alice Rose?
That we also share a first name should bolster the outcomes of magical thinking. I close my eyes and open my chest of amulets and spells.
(June 2021)
A BIRTHDAY NOTE FOR YOU, SON
I watched a gray squirrel outside my office window.
It chose a laurel tree to build a wintering nest.
Perhaps you might find a way to tell me,
though I no longer sense the world as you do,
why the fading laurel and not the still-vibrant sugar maple,
whose full branches stretch westward and would shield it from view,
or even the light-hued oak, as rich with acorns
as the laurel is with gnarled limbs and branches?
It’s the sort of question that no one has asked me
since your why years —
why is she crying; where is he running to?
I dream. Does the cat?
From the back seat, on the highway —
who’s at the head of the line?
I wondered then why it mattered to you,
such mundane happenstances of seeming vital import.
I realize now how each question was a leafed twig gnawed into utility,
a stem that added tensile strength to your own wonder-nest,
and how sweetly it has circled back to mine.
(September 2021)
RIP, DAD
It’s as if, like Goneril,
I’d spent my life waiting him out,
the tense-lipped eldest daughter.
Cold even in the small room down the hall
from where he laid, tubed and monitored,
my siblings silently accepting their grief
having as many sources
as my vengeance has motives.
Years have passed yet
“Ingratitude, that marble-hearted fiend”
defines me still, dismissing
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child.”
I did not intend to
“Dismantle so many folds of favor.”
Better to sew them together,
wear them ostentatiously,
my emblem of how
“Pride is not plainness.”
(November 2021)
PAR 4
In the naive times, with belt-length hair and a copy of Mao’s little red book at his hip, he watched her not watch him. She was lustrous curls and he was fifteen, all id and aching.
In the angry times, consumed by betrayal stunning him flat, he railed through his day, wondering where the ache had gone.
In the knowing times, dismay rested on one side of the fulcrum as he gathered the opposite of grimness.
Rounding the turn at Torrey Pines, as bald as the ball at his toe, he watched a schooner rise and fall, and all was id and aching.
OBLIQUITY
The impish perverse sat astride my nape
As gleeful I strode down 8th Avenue.
He latched on the trim of the barker’s cape
And turned me into the Play Pen Revue.
(March 2022)
THE JARLSBERG’S IN
The thud of the trailer greeting the dock
moved his bovine gaze from the window
to the floor, to his knees, to fingernails
as scuffed and chipped as his steel-toed boots.
I followed him out of the break room
where the crew begins and ends the day
where the oak tag blanks sit next to the stencil press
on a shelf above a can of ink-stained brushes.
The first container of the day
was filled with square boxes of round cheeses
from the Nordic dairy lands of his grandparents
now time-filtered myths and memories.
Onto the rollers he’d painted battleship grey
just weeks ago he placed a layer of boxes
and another atop another until he couldn’t
see around or over his wall of cardboard brown.
I tried to match his metronomic arms
extending swiveling the cold cases moving
onto other rollers chocked with shims
forts of cheese on wheels.
He watched me fail, fail to align the bottom layer
so the corners didn’t snag a wall
fail to rest one box edge precisely atop another
to steady their ride with concentrated weight.
He tapped his pack of Newport to pull one with his lips
reached for his lighter and sighed, silent until he inhaled
his comfort and blew it from the corner of his mouth
readying himself to mete out instruction.
(April 2022)
TO JILL, CLASS OF ’77
I knew I was back in Ripon only
by waking up beneath your hand-sewn quilt.
You didn’t ask me to explain Oshkosh.
I’m still in thrall of the scent of your bed.
Years before, I portaged to Lake Linda.
Embers cooled as stars brightened and I rose
to chirping and twig stems cracking, alone,
sated by sleeping on a pine straw bed.
Younger still, I made my way to Greylock,
my frenetic innocence suspended
at once, then dismissed for eternity.
The mountain doubled as my manly bed.
That Ripon morning was love’s grace defined.
That hand-sewn quilt, my romantic sublime.
(May 2022)
JONES BEACH
Reaching the heat-hazed noise of the Southern State
with baby oil shellac reeking
flinching with each reminder of car rules,
no sand on the blanket, ten steps from the water
all that dissipated with my turn in the marine green blue
surrounding my mother surrounding me
as we bobbed with the rolling Atlantic swells
her tensioned voice lost to a soothing lullaby.
(July/August 2022)
NEAR MONTAUK
August’s just an interruption with potential
a drowsy slack between Independence and Labor Day
an empty clothesline before sun-up.
Each morning takes on a sheen
as light and consequential as the silvering wooden pins
she’ll clip to the line before it bears weight.
With the sunset rest the trawlers off Napeague
dipping their prows as rhythmically
as she squeezes the pin springs and bows toward the basket.
(July/August 2022)
A GUIDE TO AMERICAN LETTERS
After all the time
Torn between them, Hester,
Come sit with me,
Rest with me by the rivulet,
Its cool water coursing lightly
Over our toes.
You don’t know all the time
I imagined what Arthur whispered
To you after yet another day
Of Roger’s churlishness.
I have no sense of what he said,
Or how he said whatever it was that led
To Pearl.
Hold my hand, dear Hester.
Pulse that memory of the moment,
Of the rush you felt,
The flush that negated Roger
And let it flow to me.
For that is my desire, bold Hester,
To know the words, to swallow them,
So that I too can learn to navigate
The prism of your heart.
(October 2022)
STEM RESISTANT
I think my uncle wanted a boy
to share his awe of wondrous science.
Birthdays brought biographies of Galileo and Pasteur,
chemistry sets with the potential to amaze.
His eagerness unanswered, my pilot light, unlit.
Junior high introduced us to Vocational Technology.
Woodshop yielded boxy lamps and bruised fingers.
Boys with talent or a parent’s consent
moved on to Automotive, while the rest
returned to the safety of Spanish 2.
We came back from the Summer of Love
to a world where engineers were cool.
They answered Kennedy’s call and even
taught a mechanical flag to ripple irregularly
in the stolid silence of the moon.
In Mr. Walsh’s summer school math class
he failed to inspire as Euclid would:
‘There is no royal road to geometry.’
His chalk arcing over our dopey heads,
exploding against cinderblock and getting our attention.
(December 2022)
RYE PLAYLAND
Without the clickety-clack of the Wild Mouse
plunging us kids into free fall mayhem,
candy apples awaiting our mother’s opening bite,
or BB guns chained to the counter,
empty of shot, no longer bruising targets
lifeguards gone other places for the evening,
barkers, accepting the emptiness of stalls, silenced,
circle their fingers over Old Fashioned rims,
bumper car wranglers having wiped down seats
leave their charging brutes in a line
I dream of waiting by locked gate,
inhaling, succumbing to the Sound’s salt air
rooting tickets out of my jeans pockets,
grasping these talismans, absorbing their potential and
wishing closer the next sunrise, joyful again.
(February 2023)
PRIMOGENITURE IN THE LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE
(William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Part 2
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the gold watch scene)
This watch
was your great-granddaddy’s war watch,
Then when he had done his duty,
put it in an ol’ coffee can.
your grandfather
was a Marine
facing death.
Winocki,
he paid a visit,
delivering to your infant father, his Dad’s gold watch.
This watch
your birthright.
And now, little man, I give
The
watch
Grandfather’s
Father gave it
said, Quentin,
I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire
the reducto absurdum of all human experience
you may remember time
you might forget it
spend all your breath trying to conquer it.
battle
reveals
victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
(April 2023)
IN THE OLD MINA REES LIBRARY
Meeting in the B aisle after class
knowing that no one reads philosophy anymore
we traced fingertips around wrists, across lifelines
while feigning scrutiny of titles and authors
anticipating the transcendent moment of frisson’s return.
(July 2023)
NOW I UNDERSTAND, IN THREE RONKAS
My fifth grade teacher laughed when correcting
me that ‘decrepit’ isn’t a Yiddish word.
What I learned from that embarrassing experience
is the greater value in dictionaries than
my grandmother spitting out phlegm filled syllables.
What I learned from my little sister
is that being funny can be endearing.
My big sister never learned that lesson.
She did figure out how to disappoint
her chuckling parents by making that obvious.
From my father, right arms figure significantly
in the Newtonian Law of Automobile Deceleration.
From my mother, the definition of love:
lifting her grandchildren with arms draped in
bath towels, hugging them from the tub.
(August 2023)
THE NOISE AND THE SIGNAL
She threaded string through two can bottoms
and handed the Jolly Green Giant to me
Chef Boyardee to my sister.
We paced apart enough for the string to tauten,
enough to mumble nonsense, mishear secrets.
Clearing out her garage lifetimes later we found the cans,
their icons faded yet confident in white toque and green leaf.
But the string had broken long ago,
sending us off into time’s maelstrom
and the constant roar of solitary silence.
(October 2023)
ABOVE AND BELOW
I’m lost in a steady grief that collars me
to an unrelenting remembering of her,
one that wraps its grip on my nape
as a jailer might.
The stinging din of the shovel’s tip
meeting the hard, ancient earth
acts like sonar siting the place where
I’m scoring a hole’s perimeter,
one deep enough to contain the sadness.
But now a Chasteberry tree roots there,
with purple-green leaves and violet berries
molding the morning sun into a jailer’s key,
loosening the collar.
(November 2023)
WHEN THE MOURNING DOVES RETURN
When the mourning doves return
they bring enthusiasm,
a biological glee,
as they chase and nip on wing,
coo sweetly in unison.
When the nest building begins
I rise to watch, like past years,
to witness the gathering,
the framing of a cradle,
the cushioning of the bowl.
Two eggs to blanket gently
will appear at some point soon,
as I wait and watch close by,
unlike the circling hawk,
its sightline obscured by leaves.
The hatchlings will strain agape
to receive the sacrament.
Their first flights sadly signal
the close of my annual
break from the quotidian.
(January 2024)
GRANDMA’S MORDANT POTPOURRI
The hallway smelled abandoned.
At the door a metallic
whiff of industrial paint
and my mother’s saliva’d
handkerchief across my cheek.
We waited forever for
the apartment door’s hinges
to sound the first note of dread
for the kids facing our
Grandma’s mordant potpourri.
A broiler rack of chicken.
Frozen fries in the oven.
A box of thawed out peas sat
on the formica counter,
burner waiting for a match.
Infused into it all was
the sour smoke of Pall Mall,
glass ashtrays strategically
placed, all at a casual
reach to flick an ash, to snub
the last and rest the next and catch
the errant flecks of sot weed
that inevitably made
their way from her lips to her
tongue, to her stained fingertips.
(March 2024)
THE GENERAL STORE
Generations of Hildreths
tended the general store
and post office, long before
Moses split the Bronx and paved
Long Island, and a runway
for Piper Cubs and Cessnas
demanded a tower, and
the artists ceded summers
to young Wall Street wives in Land
Rovers, speeding to lunch dates.
Once the village carpenter,
back from Nam, hung pigeon holes
on a wall, each with a small
keyed door and a brass number,
Mrs. Hildreth grew as wary
as curious about handing
a mailbox key to a new face
even though title had changed.
Familiarity was lost
in a haze of beforetime.
A Topping child holding a
parent’s hand, eyeing glass jars
of taffy and fudge. So with
the Bensons and the Comforts,
who had sold off, over time,
their acres of potatoes,
their tractors and plows, and watched
the sandy land bloom stick-built
bungalows, then grander homes
of impractical design.
Few of the keys, decades old,
are still handed down to son,
to grandchild, all of whom had
grown to know a Hildreth who
sorted bills and letters and
angled them into boxes
as the one-room schoolhouse rang
its opening bell, calling
to a new generation
of Halses, Piersons, Toppings,
whose after-school chore,
was to greet Mrs. Hildreth
before using their mail key
and bring the envelopes home,
unlike the Wall Street wives,
who never see a Hildreth,
or hold a mail key. The house
staff will drop the children at
tennis camp or the stables.
Wives wait for their phones to charge.
(June 2024)
BOY, I SAY BOY!
Chancellor Sanders, Provost Perdue,
eminent faculty and imminent graduates of Chicken Tech,
today is your day. Ol’ Leghorn won’t
castigate you for not paying attention
and I won’t be paddling poor Barnyard Dawg.
Unwind your expectations of hearing
“I say, I say, boy” — it’s not going to happen.
As an alum, I’m here to support
your proud moment with a word to the wise.
I’m proud of strutting down the Champs-Élysées
once we Doughboys whooped those Nazis —
not the decades of playing the overbearing
buffoon, still bumping around your parents’ memories.
That’s another storyboard, the one where your grandmothers
fill their kids with Frosted Flakes and Nesquik,
sugar-charging the absurdly happy violence of Merrie Melodies.
My booming baritone and down-home banter
may have made them come back for more,
but I’m not proud of crooning Foster’s Doo Dahh lines
of racist minstrelsy that those fascists at Loony Tunes
scripted this rooster to hum between gratuitous beatdowns.
Take note, roosters and hens:
take care whose direction you take.
Even these bloviators on the roost
behind me here at Chicken Tech.
Direction from egoists will
trip up your fortunate future,
when fate and chance are
singing in the same key
all the live-long day.
(September 2024)
PONYTAIL
On the way back east after my collegiate fail
I stopped in Lake Forest to seek solace
from my old high school girlfriend who had spent
her freshman year as someone else.
She said, you’re braiding that ponytail now?
It’s not a good look. Let me help you —
which is what I was after, why I was there —
and reached for her scissors.
There, she said, holding it up. Feel better?
(November 2024)
THAT PICTURE
That picture of you two,
two generations reaching for each other.
Two baldies, your hair coming in, his gone.
Two sets of stubby fingers,
our lot, my dear boy.
You weren’t a year in that picture;
he was over sixty. I’m older than
he was then, balding quickly,
with one hand still reaching
for each of you.
(December 2024)
AFTER THE BURIAL (nominated for Best of the Net)
Back at the house,
my aunt had covered
the mirror above the mantle
where his relics were on display.
Mourners strained to see what isn’t.
Lost in memories —
the essential and the out of place —
their fingertips ran across
the arms of threadbare couches.
The women who knew this kitchen best
continued to speak in hushed, graveside voices
and move hesitantly around each other.
The house was unusually cool,
cool like the earth that each of us
had shovelled back into the pit.
We shared a chilly weariness,
standing by the front door,
winter coats on our arms,
pressing against all of what is
and what is not.
(February 2025)
JOHN DONNE AT THE DEPARTMENT MEETING, LEAKING OPTIMISM
We assemble, as we do,
around a glass-topped table
in an unremarkable room.
We organize our spaces
and watch the stragglers
find relief in spotting a seat
left open near their
least objectionable colleague.
We await the arrival of Agenda,
who will feign delight in being
among one’s peers and make noises
of hesitation and resignation
and other tells of discomfort,
to which one of us will respond
with a sigh of beleaguered support.
And as we nestle into the molded seat
of a wooden chair and ponder
the futility of expectations,
we realize yet again that we are here,
each and all, united only by the
begrudging acceptance of time passing,
and our invisibility.
And like a wave or random swell,
an inchoate thought emerges
in our fluttering Agenda medias res,
a near-silent muttering as unintelligible
as our collective indifference is wan,
and a “well, then, let’s begin”
sparks yawns and exhalations.
And we dare to look around into eyes
that recognize the complacency
we’ve imbued in each other and hear
our own mocking inner thought, “let’s not.”
For though we all are credentialed and ranked,
though most of us wonder how,
we each harken silently back
to crisper days of eager anticipations
of respect and published profundities,
all turned into a shared dismay.
We know there could be something good,
should we pretend to be stroking as a team,
with ears attuned toward a coxswain’s call,
yet instead we find our common desire
in longing for this time to pass,
for all time to pass,
and imagine making our way
to the parking deck and flashing
an ironic gallows smile at our fellow travelers.
(March 2025)
ODE TO PROPOFOL
Last night I dreamt of my father
lying in his hospital bed, a tech
separating his wedding ring from his finger
as my siblings debate with his doctors
and fail to defeat time and truth.
Tomorrow, it’s my turn for the ether,
plus a Milk of Amnesia chaser, after
following doctor’s orders, including wearing no jewelry.
My wedding ring’s in a jewelry box
amid some other time-worn totems I’ve gathered.
All the reassurances of tomorrow’s event being
low risk, routine, and not a worry,
are worn brakes against doom and dread
yet still resist any slippage into calm
or confidence there’s a blissful common end.
Except when all tenses lose their power
and logic-defying metaphors of rings extend far
beyond the fog and muck of memory
filling any void between love and joy
existing as quanta, becoming all there is.
(June 2025)
ALASKAN ELEMENTS
Juneau’s Gold Creek ripples, salving river rock.
Bald eagles own a different current above.
I’m jealous of a dog’s indifference
to the water’s force as he ambles.
(August 2025)
SUPERSATURATED SOLUTION
Water rushes through river rocks speckled with
silver and cobalt, fixed against the banks
like resting kits against a relentless wind.
Clouds above counter other forces, their fluid
forms also adaptations to space and time.
The stones on the riverbank remain stones
lodged in silt and sand, unlike us,
more interested in the just noticeable difference,
in experiencing what’s nearly imperceptible as if
the perception of change is change itself.
Would we tweens, on learning of Lot’s
wife, how looking back at Sodom was
enough for an angry God to drop
a pipette of vengeance into her soul,
sealing her salty fate, learn the lesson?
The chemists know how to solidify water,
the precise proportions of solute to liquid
that with one more drop will turn
sloshing beakers of liquid into crystalline form
and stun a roomful of seventh graders.
Would we ever feel a similar profundity,
when looking back at the river, know
but not see how the rapids shape
the shore, or succumb to the beauty
of glinting stones resisting the water’s press?
(October 2025)
Is San Diego as wonderful as everyone says it is?
Yes, it’s the finest city in the state: great weather, senior-friendly, and the golf is cheap.
Who do you recommend everyone read?
Walter Abish, Dino Buzzati, Anne Carson, Michael Chabon, Neil Genzlinger, Benjamin Labatut, Ben Lerner, Emmanuel Levinas, Mark Leyner, Herman Melville, Linda Pastan, George Saunders, and Edith Wharton.
What sums up the zeitgeist of the summer of 2025?
ONE THING’S FOR SURE
We won’t need to heed
Melville’s warning to the gullible:
“the might-have-been is but
Boggy ground to build on.”
Nor dream and hope for
What could-never-be
While the Confidence-Man
Tweets.
Let whimsy reign.
Let the body
Belch ebullience
And seed what-will-be.
Feel the sunshine on your chin.
Today has no governor.
(November 2020)
MORNING WALK
Sidewalks and their four-foot widths are
just enough for the hound dog and me.
For her a leash length to sniff and
For myself
(Now and then stumble stepped)
lost bereft
(Amid cracks in panels and twig-scribed names)
roots in the open.
A rainbow of impressed letters: Geo. H. Oswald, Contractor,
And subordinate, dates decades long gone. Cordoned in the city’s work
Why – concrete freshly poured, an elixir, for George’s name an honor
framed, a shared pride?
Could they have known George, as I have come to?
Will his echoed call rise to a stranger’s voice?
Will my fancy allow his hardened plea?
Over decades we pedestrians
have eyed the corner before us.
Not the precise lettering above a random date
his name his title the day’s remembrance.
He confidently mixed city water and sandy compound,
high-sided shovels full of anticipated pride his gift our passage.
(January 2021)
ETCH A SKETCH
Immediate disappointment.
Twisting two white nobs
Would be less fun than
Watching my box turtle
Trundle along the surface
Of its shoebox home
At the prospect of wilted lettuce.
But after my sisters lost interest in
One knob scribing across the glass,
Its partner, up and down,
They waved Le Télécran like a wand,
Dismissing it to me.
At recess the envied, prodigy pianist
Soon discovered he could transcend its limits
By turning both knobs simultaneously,
Inventing visual improvisations that
Produced as little awe in elementary audiences
As his recitals.
Back home, I made no attempt
At facsimile houses or rocket ships
Or sought comment on my alphabetic derring-do,
Carving secrets onto glass,
Attempting a voice to offset
The flippancy of siblings.
(March 2021)
EXIT
The day was as it will be again
Quotidian, pedestrian, a bit humid.
I could tell, as you are now telling
As I am foretelling how thuddingly ordinary
It was and is and will be.
I was indecisive as I well might be
Tenaciously tentative, not a party
On two feet, my toe sketching
Some inchoate premonition in the sand
An effort to keep ennui at bay.
The broken, pebbled, used-to-be grassy grounds
Continue to spawn weeds despite
The foot traffic becoming
Even more obnoxious as the East End
Turns, like me, intense, perturbed, hasty.
All this amid the constancy of the ocean tide
Breakers of all sizes and valances
Pitching against the bland, hard-pack sand
That catches some water
And tosses some back.
(May 2021)
HAWTHORNE AND MELVILLE
I have tried what seems a lifetime to understand the two of you.
Brooding silently and alone like a barn owl, Nathaniel,
while Herman rages, Lear-like, only to regain his own assuredness
once again, briefly, and once again.
Like brothers bleeding truths differently,
you clasped hands.
How I wished I was in the dells below Mt. Greylock with you
to see the genius break through,
not lost amid the sunlight piercing meadow grass
that so pained your eyes in the morning.
The two of you, elbows joined in sharp admiration and wonder,
matched by your shared agony born of sublime recognition
that you’d dismiss at summer’s end
even though it refused to quit you.
I didn’t know, at sixteen, driving to my own carnal initiation
in a Berkshires cabin atop Mt. Greylock,
that so many years later I’d be in your thrall,
returning to it evermore, and not to hers,
though we’d groped and fumbled our way
to whatever I’d hoped would last,
a different transcendence I’d recognize
as sublime in a different way.
(August 2021)
SYSTEM PREFERENCES
He chose the white cup that had her name
red painted by one of the grandchildren
while waiting out the rain.
Eleven more surrounded it in the cupboard,
each one eponymous, all empty objects now,
variables no longer called.
The array was limited to evocative names,
properties of those who strained to mute
their masked and simmering grievances.
Each cup a pointer to the family tree,
glazed totems of generational sadness and anger
that time congealed into classes of disappointment.
Each one a token without purchase,
standing amassed, atrophied and brittle,
each a martyr’s reliquary of regrets.
If the grandparents’ cups, then two versions of a dream
else ones containing the rivalry of their sons and daughters
or the palpable bewilderment of the next generation.
He chose his wife, as no one else would dare,
to once again review and recollect and reassess
his time and memory of her.
That very cup so often resting on butcher block
as she takes in the ocean with every sense,
and watches a bumblebee alight for the daylily’s nectar.
(October 2021)
(December 2021)
21ST-CENTURY WESTERN DREAM
Leaving Twin Falls
Coming down off the hills of southern Idaho,
two pastures glisten from refracting snow traces.
The absence of cattle,
of tracks and tumbleweed makes the emptiness harsh
unlike the pastures just miles due south, just short of Jackpot, Nevada
where the sun has cleared whatever snow had idled
on the lustrous green field
bounded by a river that feeds the grassland,
which feeds the cattle
which feeds the cattleman’s sons and daughters
and your sons and daughters.
Employee of the Month
Jackpot is cold this morning, like all mornings in some way.
In Barton’s Club 93 parking lot the wind rides up my thigh
and down the strings of my hoodie,
pink and stained and missing the sequined S in STAR.
Boot heels sink into the slush of one parking spot after another
on my way into work, where the croupier is distracted as a glint of daylight pulses once and disappears behind me.
High Times
I back my rig into the lot at Mona’s Ranch,
where my trailer won’t block their wind-worn sign
and its symmetry with the others is somehow sublime.
Inside, the barroom banquettes reek of oily Naugahyde.
I doff my Cattleman’s Crease and look past whoever Mona is that day
and mumble my desire. She choreographs the sisters’ entrance to the foyer.
This troop of runaways, meth-heads, and single moms
can’t conjure a cure for me.
Losing
I tug my uniform on inside the employees lounge at Barton’s
and check my nails.
I want to keep their eyes on my fingers
as they grip their cards and scuff the felt hoping they don’t bust.
They lean in, their weight at the edge of the table,
waiting for the right card to turn,
or sitting tight, ready for this daughter to lose.
Southerly
We stay on 93. Long-haulers split off east and west where Wells meets 80.
Players mark their time in Jackpot,
while truckers sound their horns and tip their hats
to fare thee well their brothers.
Ely awaits us, then Pioche and Caliente, where the Meadow Valley Wash glances off the highway.
We head west, then south, collapsing into 15 near Vegas,
where the Jackpot Star cannot go and Mona’s Ranch has no purchase.
(February 2022)
ANTHROPOMORPHIZE NOW
Be my guest, man. It’s as easy as ordering online.
Your Mocha Latte is my Puppuccino.
Same bliss going down.
You know what I like because you know what you like.
Forget what the trainer says.
You can’t be confident in high-rising terminals.
She’s been trained to train, sure, but where are her dogs right now?
Heads on bed pillows, drifting in and out of dreams
not of what can’t or shouldn’t be.
We know what bacon smells like, just like you.
We know a loving caress that leads to a gaze
that yields even more delivery of joy.
(June 2022)
THE REUNION ABOLITION ACT OF 2022
It is established that we shall no longer rehearse the past.
The chance to meet that moment left the moment that moment left.
Only certainty of plague and uncomfortable doubt surround us.
Inescapable through recurring graduations or anniversaries of death.
That wisp of inbreathe is recognition that memories don’t align.
An inward sigh we dare not share.
Unlike the car wreck curiosity that propels so many
into disappointing hotel rooms with unmerciful mirrors and inadequate light.
Amidst other echoes of previous name-tagged events,
we fail to reduce the distance of time.
Therefore, enacted on this day, no longer shall our phones
vibrate the news that reunion is nigh.
Mickey says it’s time to embrace yourself,
whoever you are these days.
(September 2022)
THE FICTION OF TENSES
Lecturing on poetry from the Lyceum stage,
Thoreau made a distinction between
‘two kinds of writing, both great and rare.
One that of genius, or the inspired,
the other of intellect and taste,
in the intervals of inspiration.’
We dwell in those gaps,
float aimlessly amid wisps of ennui,
fumbling for a crutch, a coma dose of novocaine.
They’re safe spaces, these liminal places.
Like amber containing the whir of change,
a balm for the ache of effort.
We aren’t even diligent metaphysicians anymore,
like sad Fechner, searching the physical for the soul.
He succumbed to the fashion of the new science,
focused on measuring the just noticeable difference,
when somehow the mind and the body shake hands
and we become aware.
Somehow the measuring suffices, assuages, inures.
But for the likes of old Walt, who knew he was ‘never
measured and never will be measured,’
or Anne Carson, who answers by asking,
‘For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it?’
our constant is the interstitial, without a toehold
on the stones of then and too far from to be,
not abiding the fiction of tenses.
(November 2022)
TO DAVID HARRIS, RIPON COLLEGE DEAN OF MEN, 1973
(RIP, Tom Hoehne and AJ Bumby, townies extraordinaire)
An early spring drive from Milwaukee to Ripon
past fallow cornfields and Mercury Motors
to a red-brick campus with North-Central blondes.
I climbed the stone stairs and took a seat in your office.
I said, I’ll take you if you’ll take me.
Our handshake pledged all good things for Fall.
But my roommate smoked Winston and my hash didn’t last.
The Racine girls plied me with Schnapps.
Microdot turned my first C into whatever.
But taunts of Jew from the frosh dorm did not.
After the MDA run to Oshkosh, I climbed your stairs again.
You said, This is for the best, and extended your hand.
No more acid tours of the Ransom Street Church,
where Jesus had already waved goodbye.
(March 2023)
WISCONSIN WINTER, 1974
The darker the colder
the more ominous
the night passed.
The wind spit wreckage
the path confused
by spirits.
Each gust a scalpel
a distant alarm
brought home.
A huddled walk
a stumble back
a wind’s will distracts.
A car door opens
to reveal her
hiked skirt.
He offers her up
I turn him down
she sleeps on.
(May 2023)
ODE TO HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The quiet that leads to inspiration
is found in a wedge of time
when a dream
holds your breathe for you
between a tick and a tock
as long as your yawn
when you pause
to collect sleep-dusty images
that often lose their way
while falling into
the sound of your next in breathe
competing with your hair
scraping the coarse pillowcase
creased and dented
from the nocturnal battle
of whim and will
of sprites and memories and distance
of desperation
as silent
as slow
as the opening of an eye.
(June 2023)
BOB AND HARVEY IN GUS’S DINER, HUDSON AND N. MOORE STS., 1975
“It’s 10 already? What’ll it be?”
“Two regulars, one light and sweet and one black, and three buttered rolls.”
“I didn’t hear a please.”
“I never hear a thank you.”
“You always stir your coffee so slow?”
“You always fill the silence?”
“Has Marty even called you?”
“Look at us, look where we’re at.”
“Not good enough for you?” Gus says.
“You talking’ to me?” Little Bob says.
“Now, that’s a line.”
“Maybe Marty can use it.”
“Tell Frankie that he owes me from last week.”
“Tell him yourself.”
“Whoa, there, young man.”
“Another one for Marty.”
(September 2023)
WHENCE THE SCHADENFREUDE OF TOAST?
A two-slot toaster in front of three kids,
I was happy to watch my sisters
reach deep into the loaf,
knowing the heel would be far more satisfying.
Such joy anticipating the coils’ first glow,
with A pushing the knob to DARK
and B’s fingertip over the CANCEL button,
a daily standoff yielding nothing good.
Then the heel, deep in the heat of the second plunge,
as radiant as an otter cub
as the morning sun warms its small, soft belly
while it bobs in the rippling wake of a canoe.
And as I watch their chosen slices
crack and crumble to touch and teeth,
the lowly heel becomes my tangible predicate
to joy in the fractured frowns of A and B.
(December 2023)
RIGHT TURN
We were little boys failing at
knot-tying and dropping flies.
Few spoken words between us
nerdy and invisible
kids, who later adopted
Hunter S. Thompson as God
before rebellion ended
and we slid off into grey.
Now the gun you carry lurks
like a subtle dormant threat
and makes me doubt memories
of our tacit, enduring
bond, our shared recollections,
and leaves me without a way
back to you, to us, just lost.
There are no marksman badges
in either of our attics.
Maybe an outfielder’s glove.
Were there ever talismans
of half hitches and square knots?
(February 2024)
CRANK
My neighbor has the hood of his old Mustang raised.
Crank it, he shouts to the kid behind the wheel.
We all root for the starter, and fail, as I did
by not cleaning the snake of years’ old muck
soon after it unblocked a drain I neglected,
so now it’s too stiff to crank,
which is what she’s taken to calling me lately
as I stand at the workbench of my shed
sorting screws and nails into old cans and containers,
muttering the names of friends who’ve passed
and remembering the orderliness of their fathers’ garages.
(April 2024)
IN A BETTER PLACE
In a memorial forest not far
from the Pacific cliffs, redwoods tower,
shielding a creek that in winter nearly
mutes the sound of wind moving through the trees.
Our guide walks easily among these trees,
comfortable on the paths she knows well.
She looks back but not to chide or spur us.
“Listen,” she says, “and you’ll hear them speaking:”
“More people,” one sighs, “here to find their tree,
their anchor to the future without them,
their ash to be spread with dirt at our trunk,
their voices transcribed into polished brass.
Soon their own senselessness will press against
a future where they cannot see the buck
standing tall and strong alone on the ridge,
or the ferns that grow from the mossy ground.”
(May 2024)
NYC OPEN SPACE 143
It’s ironic, looking back,
that there were no safety bars
on any of the windows of
Parkchester’s MetLife buildings.
Restrictive covenants, yes.
But somehow my grandparents,
with their blend-in faces and
hardly traceable last name,
got a sixth-floor lease from the
insurance conglomerate.
Their windows looked out over
Metropolitan Oval,
a New York City green space
with ancient graves and benches
that served as an oasis
for the aged on their schlep
to Woolworth’s or the Finast,
gone now like the newsstand
where grandma bought the papers
every morning and her four
packs of Pall Mall coffin nails.
Crossword pencil in her hand,
cigs and coffee was breakfast
because, she said, she couldn’t
eat on an empty stomach.
(July 2024)
THE PAPER FORTUNE TELLER
The last time she touched my hand
she was reaching for something
else. She felt through her backpack
to find the paper fortune teller
she had folded on the train
that connected the home of
her marriage to where she lived
a separate life of work,
a roommate and a lover.
Each origami corner
was inscribed with a winking
innuendo and with each
random number I called out
she made the boxes wriggle
with those same glancing fingers.
Anticipation grew with
each revelation, with each
hint and playful allusion
to what would never happen,
to what could never happen.
(August 2024)
THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER
Yankee stadium rises en masse
as Robert Merrill strides
toward home plate.
It’s Opening Day.
Merrill wanders alone
in the dark outside his home.
The anthem surrounds him like fog.
Outside the room where his son
and friends gather, one muffles
the Stratocaster aping Hendrix’s
Woodstock national anthem.
Bob gazes at four bongs
reeking on a shelf.
The boys are too stoned
to rise to the anthem.
His silence menaces.
Old Yankees fans beam when
they hear the national anthem
and see, behind their eyes,
Robert Merrill in pinstripes.
(October 2024)
SORTING
Boxes filled with might need,
with can’t trash,
with once so important.
They’ve traveled with me —
home to home, job to job —
haunting me like a cold
nearly never gone.
Some are filled with painter’s tape,
unused rollers, tools and screws
with once-singular purpose.
Others with pictures and relics of
commitment and tenderness
remembered and misremembered.
Now that there will be
no more moves, save one,
I’ll clean the tools
and put the words nearer
to the shredder and sigh
when the power button glows.
(January 2025)
THE UNBEARABLE BEAUTY OF BALLET
My 4th grade crush topped the In Memoriam list
that passed from hand to hand around tables
of 50th reunion revelers trapped in
the land of lockers and unrequited love.
I got a pic of the list along with a text:
“we’re still lucking out,” and closed my eyes
to watch nine-year-old Pam and her sister
pirouette across their living room floor.
Cathexis North West Press (March/April 2025, p. 27)
EL CAJON BLVD AND 30TH ST., NORTH PARK, SAN DIEGO
An empty bus rolls past empty storefronts
delivering dust to the curb instead of
old people laden with packages and canes.
The strength of fate overpowered their calm,
wistful memories before those too became ghosts.
(April 2025)
FLOWER POWER, IN FOUR SCENES
The grown-ups leave bodega bouquets near
the teddy bears and other plush animals
propped up against sturdy candle wax tubes,
all soon a tragic debris field of
astonished plastic eyes crying over wilted petals.
Those of sufficient means or wearying distance
scroll through images of arrangements organized by
size, shape, and intended proximity — wreath stands,
a floral coffin drape, a tasteful vase
to be carried home with the grief.
Somewhere even today questions about corsage placement
become urgent in the minds of prom
bound boys, as they circle the mall
parking lot with their mothers, whose own
calendared day of obligatory appreciation proved disappointing.
Yet the pathos of the tribute flower —
most silently present in my sister’s bedroom,
with its rose patterned wallpaper right angled
against a carpet of primrose buds never
trod upon by a varsity lettered hero.
(May 2025)
UNLIKE CICADAS
Unlike the cicadas returning after seventeen years,
ready to swarm and percuss in chorus,
I shunned my acquaintances, sold the house
and headed west to inhale the hope
that sweetens the harshness of new starts.
Unlike those incurious cicadas, programmed by God
to withstand the dampness of the dirt
and emerge to take on the world —
one where cicadas are symbols of certainty —
I rolled a pair of American dice.
The droll croupier announces the roll’s number,
as if there’s no role for surprise,
unlike the cicadas that will crash into
his windshield on his drive home while
I’m halfway to the surf and sunset.
Someone tan built a sand Brian Wilson
near the lifeguard station, carved it from
pailsful of Pacific sand, shell and jetsam.
Surfers bob atop swells, and unlike cicadas,
share with me their resigned surly optimism.
(July 2025)
WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR DINNER?
We both know the revolving go-to menus.
We agree on proteins with generous bonhomie.
Yet every possibility unspoken, stifled by hesitation
and begrudging mumbles that fill the silence —
it’s all an exercise in wasting time.
That looping question wedged again between us,
asked so often it sounds like a
rusty can being kicked down the road.
Its jangling recurrence once again forces your
eyes to squint, my hands into fists.
Instead of considering the many recipes waylaid
in kitchen drawers or Melissa Clark’s brilliance,
we trap ourselves in mutual deference and
our joint failure to inspire or surprise,
and settle again for scrolling on Yelp.
(September 2025)
ODE TO FAULKNER’S ADDIE BUNDREN
Addie, are you William Faulkner’s Hester Prynne
or Anne Carson’s Emily Brontë, who
“spent most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet …
It gave her peace.”
“Sad stunted life,
Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment
And despair.”
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
“Why cast away the world away.
For someone hooked up to Thou,
The world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.”
I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say.
“On herself she had no pity.”
“Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart,
pouring up the vents.”
My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin. I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it.
I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right, even when he could not have known he was right any more than I could have known I was wrong.
*A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me
And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty.*
Quotations Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”
Italics William Faulkner, from ITAL As I Lay Dying
Asterisks Emily Brontë, from “The Prisoner”
Rob S. Friedman 