Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos brings together the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of poetry: Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, and Before Our Eyes. Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging poets.
Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos brings together the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of poetry: Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, and Before Our Eyes. Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging poets.
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Overview
Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos brings together the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of poetry: Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, and Before Our Eyes. Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging poets.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374125172 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2005 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d) |
About the Author
He is the Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law and has also taught creative writing at Princeton. He lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos
Poems 1973-1993
By Lawrence Joseph
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2005 Lawrence JosephAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-12517-2
CHAPTER 1
THEN
Joseph Joseph breathed slower
as if that would stop
the pain splitting his heart.
He turned the ignition key
to start the motor and leave
Joseph's Food Market to those
who wanted what was left.
Take the canned peaches,
take the greens, the turnips,
drink the damn whiskey
spilled on the floor,
he might have said.
Though fire was eating half
Detroit, Joseph could only think
of how his father,
with his bad legs, used to hunch
over the cutting board
alone in light particled
with sawdust behind
the meat counter, and he began
to cry. Had you been there
you would have been thinking
of the old Market's wooden walls
turned to ash or how Joseph's whole arm
had been shaking as he stooped
to pick up an onion,
and you would have been afraid.
You wouldn't have known
that soon Joseph Joseph would stumble,
his body paralyzed an instant
from neck to groin.
You would simply have shaken your head
at the tenement named "Barbara" in flames
or the Guardsman with an M-16
looking in the window of Dave's Playboy Barbershop,
then closed your eyes
and murmured, This can't be.
You wouldn't have known
it would take nine years
before you'd realize the voice howling in you
was born then.
DRIVING AGAIN
Driving again,
this time Van Dyke Avenue.
Just beyond my window
October wind raises
a leaf from a sewer,
a gray-haired man standing in a crowd
before the Mount Zion Temple
tips his hat, "Not bad, and you?"
When I was a child
I saw this church through the window
of a '51 Chevrolet
huddled beside my grandmother
in the backseat, her small
soft hands holding mine,
her perfume and the smell from squirrel
fur around her neck
spinning me to sleep.
Now I pass a woman,
her brown-blond face spotted purple,
who lowers her head
to spit, I see
a boy's words, "Dirty Killer Hood,"
in spray paint
on the wall of UAW Local 89.
Where was it? I stumbled
through the darkness to the door
before I realized
I was waking from a dream
of this street, this smoke
from Eldon Axle foundry, these
motor blocks stacked against
this dull sky. Too many times
I stood on a loading dock
and watched morning air change
from red to iron.
"Gimme coffee, gimme a cigarette,"
a face asked me, "ain't no life,"
another warned.
Here is the cemetery.
Beneath stones engraved in Arabic
my grandfather, my grandmother.
Beneath this earth
Grandpa whose sad eyes
could not endure
the pain of legs numbed
forever, Grandma
who smiled although cells
crushed her brain.
Years ago, on a day like this,
I fell to my knees
with my father to pull grass
from their stones.
I did not cry.
When I closed my eyes I did not pray.
Now, in a car, on Van Dyke,
I cry for them and for me.
I HAD NO MORE TO SAY
The last time I saw her
this flat
above the 7-Up Cadillac Bar —
empty now, windows closed
and covered with dust —
was a coffeehouse
to which I came
because I knew she'd
be there.
At the window, away
from the others,
she told me about
her mother, always
alone, her father
somewhere else,
in a hotel, in a bar,
her sister who hated
everything.
I told her about
Dodge Truck.
How I swung differentials,
greased bearings,
lifted hubs to axle casings
in 110° heat.
How the repairman said nothing
as he watched me
almost lose two fingers.
Although she did
not answer, her face
tensed and her eyes
told me, Don't
be afraid, it
won't last forever.
I had no more to say.
I took her hand,
walked to the center
of the room. As voices
on the phonograph sang
we turned, descended
in one beat, rose,
shifted and shifted again.
I sang to her
like the song.
I forgot
what the morning
would bring: the early
bus ride, nervousness,
the factory.
HERE
Pockets puffed with bottles,
hair stiff, rising
in gray wind.
He comes to a dog without hair
sleeping in the weeds
near the old Packard plant,
reads "can't see"
in the dust of a window.
One April morning as
spiders walk on soft, black stones
and the colors of motor oil
spread in rainwater pools
I am where he is,
but I don't look him in the eyes,
I don't want to hold him and tell him yes
if he asks something.
Above us white smoke
drifts with large dark clouds
toward old Poletown,
where the houses are gone.
Now it is September
and I am there, between
the silhouette of broken fences
and weeds with yellow hair
seizing their own piece of buried sun.
Rain streams down my face,
a poplar breathes
over the only house I can see,
burned and gutted.
The only sign of human life
is the crashing sound
of a bottle thrown hard on cement,
east of this wasteland,
where the towers smoke.
BETWEEN US
What was his name?
Drank gin from
a used paper cup, wasn't
even break time yet.
Sitting on a Hi-Lo, his
muscled arms hung
over the wheel.
Between us
white dust covered
with sulfur, the dream
of a farm.
"In a few years ought to have
five head of cattle
and a tractor."
Nine years and 283 miles
to the south side, the voices
in the Whole Truth Mission
singing gospel. "But I
came right here to
Mt. Elliott Street.
Wasn't no future
praisin' Jesus."
I THINK ABOUT THIGPEN AGAIN
I think about Thigpen again.
On the floor in an apartment
on Boston Boulevard, he knows
he's going to die.
I see the record of the criminal court.
Thigpen opens the door,
sees a gun in his face,
pleads, "I don't have
nothing to do with this!"
According to the pathologist
death was caused
by massive tissue destruction,
contusion and swelling of the brain.
In the county morgue
Thigpen's father whispered,
"That's my baby son."
And what must have been said after was,
"You the wrongest person
in the wrongest place,
the wrongest time, Thig."
That was eleven years ago.
Sixteen years ago he stuffed
a basketball into the face
of the Brother Rice forward
who called him a name, and we
went wild. I saw him
in Louis the Hatter's, downtown.
He pointed at my Stetson,
laughed, "You ain't ever
gonna look like a nigger."
Later, he wrote poems of babies
in frozen tenements,
garbage alive with maggots,
the love a woman makes,
the greasy riders with Detroit skin,
the toughest in the world.
He would be the poet of this hell.
That bullet slicing your brain
isn't poetry, Thigpen.
IT WILL RAIN ALL DAY
Breakfast at Buck's Eat Place;
a portrait of Henry Ford,
two eggs, hash browns,
sour coffee. Afterwards
I walk out on Vernor Avenue,
"looks like a river in the rain,"
the signs from small stores hanging
over the wet sidewalks like trees.
But rivers are not passed over
by a woman wearing a windbreaker
with flags sewn on both shoulders,
muttering to herself, head down,
or an unshaven man older
than he is, his body slanting
as if he's about to fall
headlong into a dream.
Neither looks at me waiting
at the light, in my car,
as windshield wipers eliminate
the stars of water.
Along the cemetery, poplars
look upward with thousands
of eyes into the rain
that comes down on hills of lime
and coal, reminding me of Metz,
but the wind
that lifted rhododendrons that April
isn't here with me. What
do I want, driving through streets
past bars where fifty-year-old
truck drivers sip whiskey
and don't feel like talking,
past houses where chimney smoke
reveals fires and rooms I will
never know? On Fort Street
I pass the bar with "Fight Poverty —
Drink & Dance" scrawled in white paint
across its windowless front,
and then a block-long building,
windows knocked in, wires ripped
from the walls, toilet bowls
covered with dirt and spiderwebs.
It will rain all day.
I see a large crane lifting
a railroad car, piles of bald tires,
the two towers of Saint Anne's
where, in a corner, there are crutches,
body braces, and letters written
to acknowledge miracles. I want
all this to come to an end
or a beginning, I want to look
into the black eyes of the lone woman
waiting for a bus and say
something, I want my memory
to hold this air, so I can make
the hills with white hair
and the clouds breaking into blackness
my own, carry them with me
like the letters and icons
immigrants take in suitcases
to strange countries.
BEFORE GOING BACK
Shot five times in the chest
with a .38, only a boy,
member, the Black Killers gang,
on the table in the Emergency Room,
drugged, gasping, tube rammed
through his windpipe for ventilation.
Tube through which you breathed
for him after you cracked
and spread his chest with a knife
and bone cutters, cross-clamped
the descending aorta, held
and massaged his heart,
oversewed holes in the right ventricle
and holes at the hilum
of the lung and tied his chest
with yards of silk, blood
on your face and hands
and hair, blood soaked
through socks and shoes before
it rushed down the drain.
Now you pace the Receiving Dock,
breathe the hot July air,
its trace of sulfur, hear its sirens
coming toward you.
You shake your head to shake
away your headache. You don't
ask why you remember the man
your father said was "down
on his luck," his face fallen,
two overcoats opened
to frozen wind, his arm lifted
to announce words only he hears,
or why you remember the night
you got out of your car,
walked through the small crowd
outside the liquor store
just because, you thought later,
you needed to walk by them all
without looking any of them
in the eye or speaking,
you don't think "must
be past midnight," because
it doesn't matter what
is remembered, it doesn't matter
what time it is. What matters
is the boy will live.
He'll waken, his voice
hushed. You'll be the first one
to tell him he'll never talk again,
that he'll have to walk
with a cane. He'll cry. He'll
never know how you paced
this Dock before going back
to wipe sweat from his forehead
and whisper words he didn't hear.
NOT YET
When my father breathed
unevenly I breathed
unevenly, I prayed
in Saint Maron's Cathedral
for the strength
of a cedar tree
and for the world to change.
When I saw my father's tears
I did not pray;
I hated our grocery store
where the bullet
barely missed his heart,
I hoped the mists exhaled
by the Vale of Esk
in a country of lakes
four thousand miles away
would be mine.
That was before
Lopez whispered through his rotten teeth
behind a maze of welding guns,
"You're colored, like me,"
before I knew
there is so much
anger in my heart,
so much need
to avenge the holy cross
and the holy card
with its prayers for the dead,
so many words
I have no choice to say.
Years without enough to make me
stop talking!
I want it all.
I don't want
the angel inside me, sword in hand,
to be silent.
Not yet.
THE PHOENIX HAS COME TO A MOUNTAIN IN
LEBANON
I
I was a child when the wolves came
from the north and ate our donkey.
My father shouted so much
I was afraid. I hid
in the heavy mountain grass
where he could not see me.
When it was dark I went back to the house.
He was not there.
My mother was on her knees
praying before the bag of silkworm eggs
that hung from the ceiling.
2
I was the kind of boy who prayed
before a statue's face,
sorry for all the tears
that were for me
because I was "always
inside out."
Again and again
I climbed above the village
to think about
what obsessed me:
the tax collectors who melted
the iron points of our plows
into guns, the shrapnel
I saw in my cousin's stomach;
to repeat to myself
what my brother's letter said —
"it is better here,
there is work, there is money
in these factories."
3
I stand over a dead body
and feel nothing
for the bones I've crushed:
my bones have been
crushed for centuries.
I fire my rifle into the sun,
shout God's name,
return to ruins to roast a lamb.
I will eat the head
first and then the bowels.
I will drink wine
until I cannot
see the dream of my own land.
4
The Phoenix has come
to a mountain
in Lebanon, its red flesh
breathing the sun,
breathing myrtle and poppies,
the prayers and wailing,
breathing the singing
Dog River and the Bridge
of Stone.
The Phoenix
is dying
and has come to be
what the land is,
wanting the eyes that no longer
listen, the widow's hair
on fire, wanting the stars
that do not touch
the stones.
The winds are dry
and do not
cool its burning;
the rains will not be
its new blood now.
Filled with the final words
of those left in a ditch
to die, with the black skin
of the bald woman
who's cried almost every day
for eighty years,
filled with the river at whose mouth
a thousand wars began,
river gone now into rock
and crystal after giving
the world its wheat,
the Phoenix
breathes,
goes down the mountain
to the burning cities,
to the sea
where a long boat waits to sail
to another world.
YOU ONLY EXIST INSIDE ME
Where Dix Highway ends
long boats tug ore
across a green canal.
In a café, Yemenites
cheat at dice
and talk about whores.
You drink coffee,
smoke, remember
a room, a table
that held the weight
of your elbows,
the small notebook
in which you wrote
"our labor put the world on wheels";
one day someone
will find it and think
of thick-lipped buckets,
iron pigs growing
into billets.
Alone, I walk this street
of ice, making this up:
you only exist inside me.
A siren blows.
It is 3:30.
I remember how
I punched the clock.
My legs jerked into full stride
toward a room.
I sat at a table
rubbing my eyes.
I did not feel.
I did not think.
LOUIE, SON OF HANNA FRANCIS
Catches the bus
at the corner
of Seminole and Charlevoix,
takes it past
the smell of bread, grinding
dynamos, yellow
streetlight,
Our Lady of Redemption
Melchite Catholic Church,
transfer
north at McDougall,
transfer downtown at
Gratiot, get off
at Russell, not yet
six o'clock,
Louie,
son of Hanna Francis,
descendant of Sem,
of the land Aram Naharaim
where, between two rivers,
soil is soft and black, good
for tomatoes, eggplant, corn,
says to himself, Buy
sausage from Hammond-Standish,
buy produce, but
no cauliflower, from
Caramagno, as he
walks in dark
drops of water dissolving
on his sun-colored face.
ENCOUNTER
Face lowered in his collar,
he leans back
against the darkness
of a boarded doorway.
A flame larger
than the sun
pours from a thin pipe.
Miles of factory
heaped to the half red
and half black sky
glow in his thin eyes.
He steps out
into the frozen wind,
the only strip of light
breaks, scatters
behind him down the alley.
Says he knows
everything: the mysteries
of motors, how to get
easy jobs in the shop,
numbers, the streets,
where you can go
under a bridge at night
in a small boat, unnoticed.
FOG
All day the air was fog;
couldn't see
the barbed wire, rusting
scraps, stacks
and stacks of pallets,
the tar paper roof
of Dreamer's shack,
the underground
caverns of salt hardening
around bones.
The fog says,
Who will save
Detroit now?
A toothless face
in a window shakes No,
sore fingers
that want to be still
say, Not me.
Not far away from where
Youmna lies
freezing in bed,
rolling her eyes, declaring,
This is a place!
the remains of mountains
wait to be moved
through smokestacks
into air.
ALL DAY
At four in the morning
already walking
up Orleans
to Eastern Market, two,
three miles away,
a burlap bag
over his shoulder,
the rows of wooden houses
asleep. Behind
him, low horns
on the river, a full moon
casting moist
blue light; ahead, the sounds
of cars and trucks
on Vernor Highway;
above, oak branches
turning in the high winds.
All day he drops the silver
into a cigar box;
the pennies he puts
in a jar. He gives
too much credit
and the markings on
small, torn pieces
of paper bag will be
forgotten. At dusk
he fills the bag again —
with eggplant, squash,
the last pieces of shank —
and goes
to the houses he knows
don't have enough,
saying nothing
as he gives, shaking his head
if someone starts to speak.
When the bag is empty
he walks
through the black streets
past faces rocking
on the porches. The shouts
of the children in the alley
and he's home, to Mary,
Katherine, Anne, Matry,
Isabelle, Sabe, Josephine,
Helen, Genevieve, Basily,
and Barbara. The screen door
slams behind him.
Unnoticed, he sits down
to unlace his shoes,
to rub his sore feet.
He leans back, his eyes
close, his head
begins to nod at the voices
in the kitchen; he sees,
a world away,
the salamander sliding
down a rock, stars
dropping behind mountains
into the sea.
HE IS KHATCHIG GABOUDABIAN
1
He hears screams in the alley:
a cousin cuts a cousin's throat.
"We are all cousins," they say,
but they are not his cousins,
these black men from Yemen,
curved daggers cinched to their waists,
who kill for women.
He coughs, wakens suddenly.
Is this a dream? What time is it?
Noon? He lifts the shade:
it is past noon; the smoke
from the plant is heavy, red,
the day is gray again.
He walks across his room,
lights a cigarette, sits down on the bed,
gets up, walks, sits down again.
His legs hurt; doctor says
his blood is bad. What time is it?
He's hungry. He scratches his ribs.
He must not forget to take his pills.
2
Before he is born
because there is no work in Sivas
his father crosses the border
into Bulgaria forever.
War brings soldiers with long rifles
who take his mother, brothers,
and sister away forever.
In Arabkir he is an orphan among orphans,
in Detroit an uncle sends him money
to come tap the cupola, pour
liquid metal into the ladle.
When I heard about their bodies
floating in a river of blood
you might say my heart was broke.
I was lost, there was no one
to tell me I was lost.
I used to pray beneath the cross
before I thought of all this,
before I thought.
3
He doesn't know how old he is,
he doesn't know his real name.
He knows pain crosses his shoulders.
His lungs cough blood.
He is dying.
He can't eat because he doesn't have
teeth and his gums bleed.
His room in the Hotel Salina doesn't have
heat and the pipes freeze
like the water in the toilet down the hall.
He complains to whomever listens
or doesn't listen
or to himself
if there is no one to complain to.
He is a well-known
loser at barbouda, a socialist
who speaks with arms and elbows.
He's ashamed to say he's sacrificed
women and family
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos by Lawrence Joseph. Copyright © 2005 Lawrence Joseph. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
SHOUTING AT NO ONE (1983),
I was appointed the poet of heaven,
I,
Then,
Driving Again,
I Had No More to Say,
Here,
Between Us,
I Think About Thigpen Again,
It Will Rain All Day,
Before Going Back,
Not Yet,
II,
The Phoenix Has Come to a Mountain in Lebanon,
You Only Exist Inside Me,
Louie, Son of Hanna Francis,
Encounter,
Fog,
All Day,
He Is Khatchig Gaboudabian,
Nothing and No One and Nowhere to Go,
III,
Stop Talking to Yourself!,
There Is a God Who Hates Us So Much,
In the Tenth Year of War,
Is It You?,
When You've Been Here Long Enough,
Just Like You,
In Each Cell of My Body,
Do What You Can,
Even the Idiot Makes Deals,
It's Not Me Shouting at No One,
CURRICULUM VITAE (1988),
In the Age of Postcapitalism,
My Eyes Are Black as Hers,
Curriculum Vitae,
This Is How It Happens,
Factory Rat,
I've Already Said More Than I Should,
This Much Was Mine,
By the Way,
In This Time,
Stop Me If I've Told You,
Mama Remembers,
Sand Nigger,
Rubaiyat,
In the Beginning Was Lebanon,
That's All,
Who to Deny,
December 3, 1937,
An Awful Lot Was Happening,
I Pay the Price,
Let Us Pray,
The Great Society,
London,
Any and All,
My Grandma Weighed Almost Nothing,
On Nature,
There I Am Again,
BEFORE OUR EYES (1993),
Before Our Eyes,
A Flake of Light Moved,
Material Facts,
Admissions Against Interest,
Under a Spell,
Over Darkening Gold,
Generation,
Time Will Tell If So,
About This,
Whose Performance Am I Watching?,
Sentimental Education,
Out of the Blue,
Brooding,
Variations on Variations on a Theme,
In a Fit of My Own Vividness,
After All,
Some Sort of Chronicler I Am,
Lines Imagined Translated into a Foreign Language,
Just That,
A Particular Examination of Conscience,
Movement in the Distance Is Larger Up Close,
Now Evening Comes Fast from the Sea,
Occident-Orient Express,
Index of Titles,
Also by Lawrence Joseph,
About the Author,
Copyright,