23
DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL, HIGH-SCHOOL EDITION
I started crying at unexpected times. I burst into tears on the way
to school. I started to write things down to see if I felt better. What
I wrote came out in lines. I called it poetry.
EYEWASH
My eyes were red from crying. We had a little blue eyewash cup
shaped like an eye. It was vintage. I tilted it back and soothed my
sadness with saline.
MY FEELINGS
My feelings were so strong I couldn’t control them. They did
what they wanted. Sometimes we traveled in different directions.
Whenever they got too far away from me, I ran after them.
BOYHOOD NEIGHBORHOOD
Abraham Lincoln said his boyhood neighborhood in Indiana was
“as unpoetical as any spot of the earth.” He’d never been to Skokie.
In honor of Lincoln, it’s best to be honest. My suburb is one
place I never planned to write about.
MY NEW VOCATION
Reading poetry, I felt poetry reading me.
I knew what Wordsworth was talking about when he crossed
the Alps. That’s because Lenie and I used to race up and down
an enormous hill in Montrose Park. It was as steep as the Alps.
Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud. But did he go sledding
like us? You skidded fast. You didn’t have time to reflect on it.
I didn’t like Carl Sandburg because everyone else in Chicago
did. His town was long gone. “Hog Butcher for the World”? I don’t
eat pork. “City of the Big Shoulders”? I’d rather slouch. “The fog
comes in on little cat feet”? I’m allergic to cats.
When I was lonely late at night, I climbed out the basement
window and circled Laramie Park. I walked past the farthest
city light. I recited poems I was trying to memorize. That’s how I
became acquainted with the night.
I had never looked at the sky, I mean really looked, until I
walked around the park at night. No wonder Gerard Manley
Hopkins’s sonnet “The Starlight Night” has fourteen exclamation
points. Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
I found my grandfather’s leather-bound copy of Longfellow’s
Collected Poems on a bookshelf in the basement. The upper-right-
hand corner of a page was turned down at “The Jewish Cemetery
at Newport.” He was sending me a message: “We’re still here.”
TWENTY LOVE POEMS AND A SONG OF DESPAIR
I worked over Christmas vacation at the box company. I bought my
lunch from a truck outside. Then I ate by myself in the lunchroom.
One day Maria saw me reading a translation of Veinte poemas
de amor y una canción desesperada. She loved Pablo Neruda.
I asked her if she could read it aloud in Spanish. We stood by our-
selves on the loading dock. It was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard.
Every day Maria held my hand when she recited the love poems.
We went outdoors but we didn’t have an outside relation-
ship. After twenty days, we hit the song of despair.
PROVERBIAL POETRY
1.
I asked my grandmother if the street where I was born was named
after Lord Byron. She said, “I doubt it. I never saw any lords or
ladies in that neighborhood.”
2.
I left A Coney Island of the Mind on the kitchen table. “I took the
girls to Coney Island,” Grandma said. “They drove me crazy.”
3.
My grandmother worried I was becoming like my grandfather.
“You have the same tendencies. You think every lens grinder is
Spinoza.”
4.
She was afraid that I would never earn a living. “You’re a dreamer.
Just remember that dumplings in a dream are not dumplings but
a dream.”
HOBBYHORSE
“Stop horsing around,” my mom said. “Poetry is fine so long as it
sells products. Otherwise, it’s just a hobby, and no one gets paid
for a hobby.”
