Selected Poems of Robert Friend
Copyright © Jean Shapiro Cantu/[email protected]
The Hunchback
Within the house of mirrors
amazedly he sits
and studies in the mirrors
how well his hunchback fits.
He picks up his book of riddles
and tumbles his game of blocks.
How many tears in an onion?
How many springs in clocks?
Flies turn to bones of amber
when the spider spins itself,
and he sighs into the cobwebs
and the clock sighs on the shelf.
He treads his growing shadow,
and walks the endless round
along the edge of the mirror sea
where a hunchless ghost lies drowned.
Classroom in Puerto Rico
Sometimes they could not master their courtesy of spirit
under my Spanish rule, whose odd inflection
provoked the earthquake that it would subdue;
sometimes malarial languor overtook them
(if they were lucky, my desk drawer held a pill);
but other times they would sit quietly
and scratch their broken English into notebooks.
And I could stand for a moment at the window
and hear in the island hush the cane stalks swaying, as
if the earth were breathing. And what it breathed
was silence. And see the palm fronds slowly fanning
dreams that rose beyond green hills and glittering
sea to drift with drifting cloud.
The murmur
of "I go, you go, he go" often lulled me,
sometimes would recall me. And once I was recalled
when trousers, caught on an ironic nail,
opened me to a summer storm of laughter,
but to the children's courtesy as well.
Five urchins then, five valiant volunteers
to prove initiative un-American,
or at least as Puerto Rican as American,
delivered a report and made a quick decision:
"Your pants is broke. We take you to the house."
And so they did. Hiding my shameful tatters,
they marched in strict formation right behind me;
kept me respectable to my very door.
Ars Poetica
The perfect paradigm of
the young poet--
quivering, sensitive,
painfully sincere,
and "thin enough for any wind
to blow him back
as far as Tennyson"---"*
came passionately prepared
to argue the cause of the sonnet.
Dr. Williams was waiting
at the San Juan hotel lobby,
and having listened
somewhat impatiently
soon diagnosed the case.
Taking the young man by the elbow
affectionately, but firmly,
he led him to the terrace
that overlooked the sea,
and said:
Look,
pointing to the bathers
running along the beach
and sporting in the waves.
*What Irwin Shaw said about a certain young poet in the Brooklyn College Yearbook of 1934.
Dancing with a Tiger
For Arthur, who contributed a line
A crowded floor of couples at a dance
and only I,
his tail wrapped round us both,
dancing with a tiger.
Soft lights, music,
social happiness,
but suddenly
--what had I said to him?--
the strong grip loosened,
the tongue at my ear
stopped licking,
and he growled.
"Don't go,"
I pleaded,
yet even as he went
strangely relieved
to find myself alone
upon that dancing floor.
A Crucifixion
Love was a record on the gramophone.
The panting and the moans were almost real.
He said, I'm getting nearer to the bone.
This time I felt that I began to feel.
He looked into the mirror for a sign,
but not a single wrinkle put to rout
the blank expanse without a single line.
He suffered, and his lips began to pout.
When I'm Sebastian, it's a game of darts.
My Antony grows fat upon the Nile,
whose sleeve can always trump the Queen of hearts,
and when I weep, the glass gives back a smile.
Where are my battles? Where are all my wounds?
Against the backdrop of his grandest scene
he stretched a mimicry of red-holed hands,
and hung there with the languors of a queen.
No itch of agony. No dram of loss.
But faithful to the logic of his fiction
sank with a final cry upon the cross
as if it truly were a crucifixion.
The Truth
Where is he now, now I have learned to love?
I thought it was love then,
when hungry with our youth,
we fell out of truth
(but it was I who fell)
into each other's keeping.
Where is he now who fed my nights and days
(I thought it was love then)
with flesh whose taste was still
the hunger of my will?
Yet, kneeling at the bitter well
I knew whose life lay weeping.
Jealous as the stars I peered at all his ways
(I thought it was love then),
murmuring, a sea, endlessly,
his sins against me;
following footsteps to
blank doors and howling trains.
Now if we met, how would he praise my love?
"My dear, now is still then,
when true to your marrow bone
you wed yourself alone.
I was the glass
that gave you back to you.
That image still remains."
The Irrational Source
A little more of irresponsible love
and a little less of responsible affection
could have saved. Your code
of honor breeds pestilence of stone,
a clean, dead world where nothing grows.
justice, too, out of a pure sky
can murder. A little water,
the irrational source, will defeat error
till roses and wheat spring from arid eyes.
Order is a perfect ring-a noose.
Who dangles there is I.
The Grip
A legend goes
that God made penises
to lift boys to Mohammed's paradise.
They do provide a grip
that sometimes wearily
the panting angels
and the ravished houris
with black-circled eyes
wish
that each slippery, arching boy
would through their greedy fingers
slip--
a fall
assuring them at last
a heavenly repose
though adding to the fire
of the sad fiends below.
Two Moons over Taxco
One full moon in the sky
should have been enough,
but there were two,
the moon each saw:
she, the radiant moon
of her love for him,
he, the pinchbeck moon
of her unwanted love.
If only he could have pretended--
to allow her the surrender
that she longed for.
But the fixed moon of his desire
would not allow him to.
Good friends, they were
for the sake of the decorum
she insisted on
(and what a relief to him!)
lodged in separate hotels--
each with a room for love,
each with a bed
where, that moon-lit night,
she overflowed with tears, and he
emptied his emptiness
onto the cold, white sheets.
The Embrace
We would like to jump out of our clothes
and skin to skin
jump out of our skin if we could
and flesh to flesh
jump out of our flesh if we could
and bone to bone
jump out of our bones if we could
and soul to soul
jump out of our souls if we could
and void to void
embrace.
Sleeping Alone
Sleeping alone
for many years
I dreamed of two
in a big wide bed,
but now that you
lie warm by my side
I dream of a single
narrow bed
cool and white
where I can lie alone
all night.
Shirts
Rereading Cavafy I suddenly remembered
my own Ionian Sea, and a steamer
plying between the islands.
And I remembered, amidst the passengers
crowding the deck of the steamer,
a handsome young Greek
wearing a shirt I very much admired,
and he in turn admiring mine.
We took off our shirts then and there
and exchanged them.
I wore his shirt next to my skin
for many years.
But it was never the same on my body
as on his, and he was not there
to take it off.
Arabic Lesson
for joyce
"Ahel," Arabic for "family,"
cognate of "ohel," the Hebrew word for "tent" --
for desert dwellers a home:
grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, kids
a family,
all under one roof--
their floor sand
covered by mats,
their roof and walls skin
flapping in the wind.
A Bedouin living in our kind of house
solid against the weather
complains,
"I can't sleep. The walls don't move."
For Gabriel
You show me yours and I'll show you mine.
Don't get me wrong. I mean our poems.
They, too, are a nakedness we must explore.
At the Tomb of Oscar Wilde
Hounded to death by a prurient age
that coyly itched beneath white sheets
you sleep, while the same ignorant rage
beyond these gates foams through the streets.
Those who spit are those who leer
where can-cans lure their frenzy on
in burlesques of their one idea--
Leda and the dirty swan.
In your lost name the lost confess,
green faces ogle over bars,
and hairiness parades in lace
or drools in drizzling urinoirs.
If they neither ape nor mock,
they too blaspheme your angels, who
forgiving with a civic plaque
obliterate your ruined brow.
Alfred Chester
Exiled from the arms of his fisherman lover
who had angled a rich wife
and from Morocco, that country
where he had felt least stranger;
defeated, despite ridiculous disguises,
at every port of desperate re-entry,
he found himself enclosed
in the bottle of his madness.
Here the prisoner in his glass world kept saying,
even as he shared
his brandy with a friend,
"There are no friends!";
kept saying,
even as he scribbled, scribbled
into a notebook,
"Literature is shit!"
His world reduced to his two huge dogs
he cooked for every day,
his daily dose of brandy,
his barbiturates,
Bach endlessly spinning on the phonograph;
and desiring but incapable of boys,
he proposed as last resort
A white marriage.
Deprived even of this,
he broke through the glass
of his gigantic bottle
into another sort of whiteness;
casting off his body with relief
as once the wig
that had concealed for too many years
a child's bald head.
Descending the Stairs
As I slowly descend the stairs
to join the ladies with whom
I share my wit and my old age,
I furtively look back
at the two young men
on the restaurant balcony.
Gazing at each other longingly,
they are not so lost in love
they cannot spare
a kind good night for me.
Why am I grateful?
Why don't I rage?
But I only smile and wave
as if, as if
I were too old to care.
The Lecture
Being young was natural.
I could not imagine that
what I felt in those heady years
like love and beer would go flat.
Though I read in all the books
and was often sagely told
that the young at last grow middle-aged,
and the middle-aged grow old;
though it stared me in the eyes,
though I smelt mortality,
what applied to others
could hardly apply to me.
Would I sink like them into my bones,
grow querulous and mean,
and buried all day in a fat armchair
stare blankly at a screen?
Would my stride slow down to a walk,
to a shuffle, then a crawl;
would I complain that down below
I felt nothing at all?
Lonely at a window sill,
would I sit watching the rain,
or gulping down a desperate pill,
clutch a side with pain?
Would I have rheumy eyes, a dribbling mouth,
and cough up blood and phlegm? ...
I swore, I swore in my young bones,
I would never be old like them.
I would never be old like them!
The years would not snow on my head
and bring a sleepy reason alone
for wanting to go to bed.
But seeing in the mirror one day
a first white hair start,
I slowly began to learn, young man,
what at last I learned by hc:art.
The Odd Couple
The young man clutches the old man's beard.
The old man, the young man's cock.
Steel in that cock, wisdom in that beard.
A grip,
a sliding grip on salvation
Sunburnt by Moonlight
Black to my white,
straight to may gay,
and yet when I invited him,
he came.
But I held back--
beautiful as he was,
his dark eyes gleaming
as I knew his skin would
in the naked moonlight
But I held back,
postponing and postponing
until at last
I dared put out the lights,
the better, I said,
to watch the moon in its fullness.
The moon was generous.
spilling its radiance
over lover and would-be lover.
But I held back.
What did I fear--
that he wouldn't be
as generous as the moon?
Whatever the fear,
I held on to words to save me
from what I so much wanted,
grasping at themes. at anything
but him,
until at last asking desperately
ridiculously:
Could a black man get sunburnt?
I wrecked the moonlight.
One thing was certain: the moonlight
did not burn him
or me. Not that night,
or ever.
Incontinent Continent
Young, my hot and hungry,
forever rising flesh
flooded my mind with an orgasmic dream: America
huge between its seas, a continent of bed,
and on that bed an army of lovers,
young, tireless,
all joined in battle.
And what a battle!
tender explosions,
ecstatic dyings,
endless resurrections.
Today America
stretches enormous still
between its seas,
but even my metaphors have grown tired.
The bed is now a groaning battlefield
where the middle-aged in battalions
keep pumping pumping away,
desperately, and the old
stlll in the ranks keep trying
to hold their end up--
their manoeuvres stale,
their victories dry,
all the initial sweetness
that had first turned bitter-sweet
turned to bitter sweat.
My Cup
They tell me I am going to die.
Why don't I seem to care?
My cup is full. Let it spill.
Copyright © Jean Shapiro Cantu/[email protected]
The Hunchback
Within the house of mirrors
amazedly he sits
and studies in the mirrors
how well his hunchback fits.
He picks up his book of riddles
and tumbles his game of blocks.
How many tears in an onion?
How many springs in clocks?
Flies turn to bones of amber
when the spider spins itself,
and he sighs into the cobwebs
and the clock sighs on the shelf.
He treads his growing shadow,
and walks the endless round
along the edge of the mirror sea
where a hunchless ghost lies drowned.
Classroom in Puerto Rico
Sometimes they could not master their courtesy of spirit
under my Spanish rule, whose odd inflection
provoked the earthquake that it would subdue;
sometimes malarial languor overtook them
(if they were lucky, my desk drawer held a pill);
but other times they would sit quietly
and scratch their broken English into notebooks.
And I could stand for a moment at the window
and hear in the island hush the cane stalks swaying, as
if the earth were breathing. And what it breathed
was silence. And see the palm fronds slowly fanning
dreams that rose beyond green hills and glittering
sea to drift with drifting cloud.
The murmur
of "I go, you go, he go" often lulled me,
sometimes would recall me. And once I was recalled
when trousers, caught on an ironic nail,
opened me to a summer storm of laughter,
but to the children's courtesy as well.
Five urchins then, five valiant volunteers
to prove initiative un-American,
or at least as Puerto Rican as American,
delivered a report and made a quick decision:
"Your pants is broke. We take you to the house."
And so they did. Hiding my shameful tatters,
they marched in strict formation right behind me;
kept me respectable to my very door.
Ars Poetica
The perfect paradigm of
the young poet--
quivering, sensitive,
painfully sincere,
and "thin enough for any wind
to blow him back
as far as Tennyson"---"*
came passionately prepared
to argue the cause of the sonnet.
Dr. Williams was waiting
at the San Juan hotel lobby,
and having listened
somewhat impatiently
soon diagnosed the case.
Taking the young man by the elbow
affectionately, but firmly,
he led him to the terrace
that overlooked the sea,
and said:
Look,
pointing to the bathers
running along the beach
and sporting in the waves.
*What Irwin Shaw said about a certain young poet in the Brooklyn College Yearbook of 1934.
Dancing with a Tiger
For Arthur, who contributed a line
A crowded floor of couples at a dance
and only I,
his tail wrapped round us both,
dancing with a tiger.
Soft lights, music,
social happiness,
but suddenly
--what had I said to him?--
the strong grip loosened,
the tongue at my ear
stopped licking,
and he growled.
"Don't go,"
I pleaded,
yet even as he went
strangely relieved
to find myself alone
upon that dancing floor.
A Crucifixion
Love was a record on the gramophone.
The panting and the moans were almost real.
He said, I'm getting nearer to the bone.
This time I felt that I began to feel.
He looked into the mirror for a sign,
but not a single wrinkle put to rout
the blank expanse without a single line.
He suffered, and his lips began to pout.
When I'm Sebastian, it's a game of darts.
My Antony grows fat upon the Nile,
whose sleeve can always trump the Queen of hearts,
and when I weep, the glass gives back a smile.
Where are my battles? Where are all my wounds?
Against the backdrop of his grandest scene
he stretched a mimicry of red-holed hands,
and hung there with the languors of a queen.
No itch of agony. No dram of loss.
But faithful to the logic of his fiction
sank with a final cry upon the cross
as if it truly were a crucifixion.
The Truth
Where is he now, now I have learned to love?
I thought it was love then,
when hungry with our youth,
we fell out of truth
(but it was I who fell)
into each other's keeping.
Where is he now who fed my nights and days
(I thought it was love then)
with flesh whose taste was still
the hunger of my will?
Yet, kneeling at the bitter well
I knew whose life lay weeping.
Jealous as the stars I peered at all his ways
(I thought it was love then),
murmuring, a sea, endlessly,
his sins against me;
following footsteps to
blank doors and howling trains.
Now if we met, how would he praise my love?
"My dear, now is still then,
when true to your marrow bone
you wed yourself alone.
I was the glass
that gave you back to you.
That image still remains."
The Irrational Source
A little more of irresponsible love
and a little less of responsible affection
could have saved. Your code
of honor breeds pestilence of stone,
a clean, dead world where nothing grows.
justice, too, out of a pure sky
can murder. A little water,
the irrational source, will defeat error
till roses and wheat spring from arid eyes.
Order is a perfect ring-a noose.
Who dangles there is I.
The Grip
A legend goes
that God made penises
to lift boys to Mohammed's paradise.
They do provide a grip
that sometimes wearily
the panting angels
and the ravished houris
with black-circled eyes
wish
that each slippery, arching boy
would through their greedy fingers
slip--
a fall
assuring them at last
a heavenly repose
though adding to the fire
of the sad fiends below.
Two Moons over Taxco
One full moon in the sky
should have been enough,
but there were two,
the moon each saw:
she, the radiant moon
of her love for him,
he, the pinchbeck moon
of her unwanted love.
If only he could have pretended--
to allow her the surrender
that she longed for.
But the fixed moon of his desire
would not allow him to.
Good friends, they were
for the sake of the decorum
she insisted on
(and what a relief to him!)
lodged in separate hotels--
each with a room for love,
each with a bed
where, that moon-lit night,
she overflowed with tears, and he
emptied his emptiness
onto the cold, white sheets.
The Embrace
We would like to jump out of our clothes
and skin to skin
jump out of our skin if we could
and flesh to flesh
jump out of our flesh if we could
and bone to bone
jump out of our bones if we could
and soul to soul
jump out of our souls if we could
and void to void
embrace.
Sleeping Alone
Sleeping alone
for many years
I dreamed of two
in a big wide bed,
but now that you
lie warm by my side
I dream of a single
narrow bed
cool and white
where I can lie alone
all night.
Shirts
Rereading Cavafy I suddenly remembered
my own Ionian Sea, and a steamer
plying between the islands.
And I remembered, amidst the passengers
crowding the deck of the steamer,
a handsome young Greek
wearing a shirt I very much admired,
and he in turn admiring mine.
We took off our shirts then and there
and exchanged them.
I wore his shirt next to my skin
for many years.
But it was never the same on my body
as on his, and he was not there
to take it off.
Arabic Lesson
for joyce
"Ahel," Arabic for "family,"
cognate of "ohel," the Hebrew word for "tent" --
for desert dwellers a home:
grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, kids
a family,
all under one roof--
their floor sand
covered by mats,
their roof and walls skin
flapping in the wind.
A Bedouin living in our kind of house
solid against the weather
complains,
"I can't sleep. The walls don't move."
For Gabriel
You show me yours and I'll show you mine.
Don't get me wrong. I mean our poems.
They, too, are a nakedness we must explore.
At the Tomb of Oscar Wilde
Hounded to death by a prurient age
that coyly itched beneath white sheets
you sleep, while the same ignorant rage
beyond these gates foams through the streets.
Those who spit are those who leer
where can-cans lure their frenzy on
in burlesques of their one idea--
Leda and the dirty swan.
In your lost name the lost confess,
green faces ogle over bars,
and hairiness parades in lace
or drools in drizzling urinoirs.
If they neither ape nor mock,
they too blaspheme your angels, who
forgiving with a civic plaque
obliterate your ruined brow.
Alfred Chester
Exiled from the arms of his fisherman lover
who had angled a rich wife
and from Morocco, that country
where he had felt least stranger;
defeated, despite ridiculous disguises,
at every port of desperate re-entry,
he found himself enclosed
in the bottle of his madness.
Here the prisoner in his glass world kept saying,
even as he shared
his brandy with a friend,
"There are no friends!";
kept saying,
even as he scribbled, scribbled
into a notebook,
"Literature is shit!"
His world reduced to his two huge dogs
he cooked for every day,
his daily dose of brandy,
his barbiturates,
Bach endlessly spinning on the phonograph;
and desiring but incapable of boys,
he proposed as last resort
A white marriage.
Deprived even of this,
he broke through the glass
of his gigantic bottle
into another sort of whiteness;
casting off his body with relief
as once the wig
that had concealed for too many years
a child's bald head.
Descending the Stairs
As I slowly descend the stairs
to join the ladies with whom
I share my wit and my old age,
I furtively look back
at the two young men
on the restaurant balcony.
Gazing at each other longingly,
they are not so lost in love
they cannot spare
a kind good night for me.
Why am I grateful?
Why don't I rage?
But I only smile and wave
as if, as if
I were too old to care.
The Lecture
Being young was natural.
I could not imagine that
what I felt in those heady years
like love and beer would go flat.
Though I read in all the books
and was often sagely told
that the young at last grow middle-aged,
and the middle-aged grow old;
though it stared me in the eyes,
though I smelt mortality,
what applied to others
could hardly apply to me.
Would I sink like them into my bones,
grow querulous and mean,
and buried all day in a fat armchair
stare blankly at a screen?
Would my stride slow down to a walk,
to a shuffle, then a crawl;
would I complain that down below
I felt nothing at all?
Lonely at a window sill,
would I sit watching the rain,
or gulping down a desperate pill,
clutch a side with pain?
Would I have rheumy eyes, a dribbling mouth,
and cough up blood and phlegm? ...
I swore, I swore in my young bones,
I would never be old like them.
I would never be old like them!
The years would not snow on my head
and bring a sleepy reason alone
for wanting to go to bed.
But seeing in the mirror one day
a first white hair start,
I slowly began to learn, young man,
what at last I learned by hc:art.
The Odd Couple
The young man clutches the old man's beard.
The old man, the young man's cock.
Steel in that cock, wisdom in that beard.
A grip,
a sliding grip on salvation
Sunburnt by Moonlight
Black to my white,
straight to may gay,
and yet when I invited him,
he came.
But I held back--
beautiful as he was,
his dark eyes gleaming
as I knew his skin would
in the naked moonlight
But I held back,
postponing and postponing
until at last
I dared put out the lights,
the better, I said,
to watch the moon in its fullness.
The moon was generous.
spilling its radiance
over lover and would-be lover.
But I held back.
What did I fear--
that he wouldn't be
as generous as the moon?
Whatever the fear,
I held on to words to save me
from what I so much wanted,
grasping at themes. at anything
but him,
until at last asking desperately
ridiculously:
Could a black man get sunburnt?
I wrecked the moonlight.
One thing was certain: the moonlight
did not burn him
or me. Not that night,
or ever.
Incontinent Continent
Young, my hot and hungry,
forever rising flesh
flooded my mind with an orgasmic dream: America
huge between its seas, a continent of bed,
and on that bed an army of lovers,
young, tireless,
all joined in battle.
And what a battle!
tender explosions,
ecstatic dyings,
endless resurrections.
Today America
stretches enormous still
between its seas,
but even my metaphors have grown tired.
The bed is now a groaning battlefield
where the middle-aged in battalions
keep pumping pumping away,
desperately, and the old
stlll in the ranks keep trying
to hold their end up--
their manoeuvres stale,
their victories dry,
all the initial sweetness
that had first turned bitter-sweet
turned to bitter sweat.
My Cup
They tell me I am going to die.
Why don't I seem to care?
My cup is full. Let it spill.