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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847776334 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 360 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
We Look Like This
By Dan Burt
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Dan BurtAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-633-4
CHAPTER 1
Who He Was
(Joe Burt 1915–1995)
1
He catapulted from his armchair,
airborne for an instant, primed to smash
the fledgling power who dared challenge
his rule. That runty five-year-old who would
not stop his catch to fetch a pack of Luckys
crossed some unmarked border, threatened
the kingdom's order and loosed the dogs of war.
No chance to repent, no strap, no bruises
on my face, my mother's screaming just static
behind the pounding taking place; rage spent,
sortie ended, he thumped down the stairs
to his crushed velvet base, pending new
provocations to launch him into space.
Worse followed till my biceps hardened,
but that first strike left most scars: with strangers
six decades on klaxons ahwooga,
the clogged heart hammers, I weigh my chance.
2
A scion of the tents of Abraham
born during World War I, he policed
a patriarch's long list of rights: no one
but he sat in the fat feather armchair
confronting the TV, or at our table's
head, read the paper before he did or
said Let's go somewhere else when we ate out;
if he fell sick the house fell silent, roared
and we all quaked.
I was chattel as well
as son and he sold my youth for luxuries:
an extra day a week to fish, lunch time
shags with his cashier, a kapo's trades.
My anger, like an old Marxist's, leached
away as parenthood, mistakes and time
taught Moloch is a constant. Attic myth,
Old Testament, bulge with sacrificial
tales, the Crucifixion one more offering
to Baal; families recapitulate
phylogeny, it's what fathers do.
3
the golden land in the 'thirties
Morning he threads russet gorges
of two-story brick row houses –
short pants, pals, eighth grade
shut behind him – and evening
draggles home past trolleys full
of profiles who paid the nickel
he can't afford to ride.
No one
waits dinner: his mother leaves cold
soup in the kitchen (on Fridays
chicken) he gobbles by the sink
and chases with a fag puffed
on the way to box, while siblings,
older, younger, scribble lessons
or meet friends; sleeps alone
above the back porch in an unheated
room; wears his brother's hand-me-
downs; his father beats him bloody
for spending part of his first pay-
check on a first pair of new shoes;
for cash he boxes bantam weight
before crowds shrieking kill the kike,
hawks sandwiches from wooden carts
to high school kids who once were friends,
at quitting time shoots crap with men
and at sixteen, meat hook in hand,
stands in a butcher shop's ice-box
breaking beef hindquarters down.
Depression shadowing the Volk
like a Canaanite colossus,
arms bent at elbows, palms turned up,
hefts the male offering, sublimes
skin so it no longer feels pain,
fuses eyelids so rainbows shine
in vain, sears nerves so hands cannot
unclench and a decade on, when
ritual ends, amid ashes
the sacrifice survives, savage
more than man, hard, violent,
unbelieving, in the orbit
of whose fists lie his certainties.
4
Bouts sometimes knocked him head to knees,
His swollen gut spewed crimson
Shit, he wasted until Crohn's disease
Left his great white hope the surgeon.
Tangled in tubes and drips post-op,
Missing most of his ileum,
Ribs prominent through cotton top,
Fed strained juice and pabulum
He went fifteen rounds with death.
The dark heavyweight danced away,
Doctors raised his withered arm
And sent him south where snowbirds play
Hoping he'd recover weight and form.
There he eyed the champion
Crouched outside the ring to spring
Back for the rematch no one wins,
His belly's serpentine stitching,
The black before, the black after.
And when again he spread the ropes
Apart, he could not see beyond
Himself and his ringside shadow.
5
The skeleton in a wheelchair props rented
tackle on the rail, stares down twenty feet
from a pier through salt subtropical air
at shoal water wavelets for blue slashes
flashing toward the bait below his float,
and misses one hit, two, a third, an inept
young butcher far from inner-city streets
recovering from surgery, too proud
to bask with codgers, too weak to walk or swim,
a sutured rag doll whose one permitted
sport is dangling blood worms from a pole.
His father's plumb and adze, mother's thread and pins,
tradesmen, carters, peddlers, kaftaned bearded
kin, village landsmen from Ukraine, friends, nothing
in his life smelled of ocean; but cleaver
held again, he kept on fishing. Once a week
he drove eighty miles east to prowl the sea
with charter-men, ever farther from the coast
till, white coat and meat hook junked, he trolled
ballyhoo for marlin eight hours' run offshore.
Two score and four skiffs on, by his command
we laid him down in fishing clothes, khaki
trousers, khaki shirt, Dan-Rick on the right
breast pocket, on the left Capt. J. Burt.
Death Mask
(L.K.B. 1917–2008)
I would have cast a death mask from her head
Cooling in a bed ringed by surviving kin
If plaster of Paris drying on shrunken
Skin, dull black buttons that had been eyes
And bared grey gums could model havoc
Ninety years had wrought upon a beauty.
But how we ruin others leaves no mark
To be traced: fixing her husband's family
Dinner bequeathed no scars to Procne's face.
I took a twelve-inch square of putty-coloured
Construction paper, drew a pear, inverted,
Eight inches long, four wide for cheeks to flare,
Made marks for spud nose, a Bacon mouth,
Wisps of white hair, spite lines, spots,
Scissored the outline, scraped fascia from frame
Like spittle from sere lips: but I'm no artist
With stroke and scumble to express the natural
History of families in a screaming rictus.
I turned the womb shape over and wrote how
My heels rucked the kitchen rug as she dragged
Me out at five to fight a bully, and watched;
How smart she looked, fresh from the hairdresser,
Made up and gloved to shop, after she dropped
Her eighth-grade butcher boy at his weekend work;
How if lover lift a hand to caress my cheek
I flinch. Dear Spartan mother, why did you send me
To the Apothetae, alone among your children?
I sat staring in my study at the ju-ju I'd made
Then from a top shelf pulled a thick book down
From psychologies I now won't read again,
Opened it in the middle, laid the damned thing
Between the pages as you would to press a flower,
Or billets-doux from a bad affair you can't quite
Forget, and committed her to my high loculus.
Slowly Sounds the Bell
Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris.
Now this bell tolling softly for another,
says to me, Thou must die.
Donne, Meditation XVII
A midnight ring from half a world away
Tolls my only brother's sudden death.
Line dead, handset re-cradled, sleep returns;
I wake to find bedclothes scarcely messed.
We long were distant islands to each other –
I stood Esau to his Jacob as a boy,
My fields the sea, his tents the libraries –
DNA proved inadhesive, no gene
Sutured the rifts between us, and the news
Was less vexing than a tree fall in my garden.
We hope for more: a foetal element
Feeding fondness for our kin, a shared
Enzyme sealing first cousins best of friends,
From propinquity Gileadan balm.
But boyhood hatred, dumb decades apart,
Change blood to water, degauss genealogies;
Abel becomes Cain's pathogen. A shrug
In the cell metastasises through
Isolate null points of the tribe into
Skull paddies and black snow in June.
Religious tapestries woven from old deities
Cannot conceal trenches we dig between us:
Ancestral chemistry stands hooded on
The scaffold, testing trap and rope for all.
It is the face on the school run who mouths
'Hello', a torso hunched on the next bar stool
Twice a week, a high school sweetheart back,
A man selling ceramics I collect
Dying of AIDS, whose curfews heave the clapper
Summoning tears, the shiver in the neck.
Certain Windows
We trail no clouds of glory when we come. We trail blood, a cord that must be cut and post-partum mess that mix with places, people, and stories to frame the house of childhood. We dwell in that house forever.
In time there will be others, bigger, smaller, better, worse; but how we see the world, how much shelter, warmth, food we think we need, whether the outer dark appears benign or deadly depend on what we saw from certain windows in that house. We may burn, rebuild, repaint or raze it, but its memories fade the least; as dementia settles in the first things are the last to go.
Despite the enduring brightness of childhood's colors we may touch them up, sometimes garishly, to infuse the humdrum with romance as we grow old. Testosterone wanes, breasts sag, but in some, perhaps secretly in most, the adolescent hunger to allure and seduce, swagger and swash-buckle remains.
The inherent dishonesty and danger of romantic reconstruction are reasons enough to try to record as accurately as possible what we saw, if we record at all. Vanity's subversions are another; respect for acquaintances, editor and the few readers interested in context or what appears unusual a third. Last, there is the flicker rekindling the past throws on why someone picks up pen, or brush or camera.
Childhood ended when I turned twelve and began working in a butcher shop on Fridays after school and all day Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., or, as we said in winter, "from can't see to can't see." By sixteen I was working thirty hours a week or more during the school year, and fifty to sixty hours in the summers. This is a recollection of my pre-travailous world, of places, people and tales from childhood.
1. Ancestral Houses
Fourth and Daly
Joe Burt, my father, was born in Boston in 1916, almost nine months to the day after his mother landed there from a shtetl near Kiev. She brought with her Eva, her first-born, and Bernie, her second. Presumably my grandfather Louis, Zaida ("ai" as in pay) or Pop, was pleased to see my grandmother, Rose, or Mom, even though she was generally regarded as a chaleria, Yiddish for "shrew." Zaida had been dragooned into the Russian army a little before World War I broke out. Russia levied a quota of Jewish men for the army from each shtetl and these men invariably came from the poorest shtetlachim. Zaida deserted at the earliest opportunity, which was certainly not unusual, made his way to Boston and sent for Mom.
Mom and Pop moved the family in 1917 to a small row (terraced) house at Fourth and Daly streets in South Philadelphia, the city where my father grew up, worked, married and in 1995 died. Pop was a carpenter, Mom a seamstress, both socialists at least, if not Communists. Mom was an organizer for the I.L.G.W.U. (the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union), which seems in character. Yiddish was the household tongue, my father's first, though Pop spoke and read Russian and English fluently. Mom managed Russian well, but English took more effort.
The family's daily newspaper was Forverts The Forward), printed in Yiddish. Forverts published lists of those killed in pogroms when they occurred. Ukrainian Cossacks allied themselves with the Bolsheviks and used the Russian civil war as an excuse to continue the pogroms that had been a fact of Jewish life in the Pale from the 1880s. Pop was hanging from a trolley car strap on his way home from work in 1920 when he read the names of his family among the dead, all eighteen of them: father, mother, sisters, brothers, their children. He had become an orphan. He never went to schul (synagogue) again.
A few years later he learned how they were killed when some of Mom's family, who had hidden during the raid, emigrated to America. I heard the story from him when I was ten, at Christmas 1952. I came home singing "Silent Night," just learned in my local public elementary school. I couldn't stop singing it and went caroling up the back steps from the alley into our kitchen where Pop, putty-colored, in his mid-sixties and dying of cancer, was making what turned out to be his last visit. Zaida had cause to dislike Gentile sacred songs, though I didn't know it. He croaked Danila, shah stil (Danny, shut up) and I answered No, why should I? His face flushed with all the life left in him and he grabbed me by the neck and began to choke me. My father pulled him off, pinioned his arms, and, when his rage passed, led me to the kitchen table where Zaida sat at the head and told me this story:
The Jews had warning of a raid. Pop's father, my great-grandfather, was pious and reputed to be a melamed, a learned though poor Orthodox Jew. As such he was prized and protected by the community. Pop's in-laws urged him to take his family and hide with them in their shelter below the street. Great-grandfather refused. He said, I was told, God will protect us.
The Cossacks rousted them from their house and forced everyone to strip. They raped the women while the men watched. Done, they shot them, then the children and, last, the men. They murdered all eighteen, my every paternal forebear except Pop, who died an atheist, as did my father.
My grandparents' house at Fourth and Daly was a three-up, three-down row home on a very narrow street. People parked their cars on the side of the street opposite their house, leaving just room enough for a small car to pass; big-finned 'fifties Caddys, had anyone owned one, would have had to straddle the pavement to negotiate their street. The front door stood two feet from the sidewalk at the top of three marble steps with dips in their middle from eighty years of footsteps and repeated scrubbings. It opened into a tiny vestibule off a living room, after which came dining room and kitchen, all three no more than twelve by fourteen. There was a four-foot-wide wooden stoop past the back door two steps above a small concrete yard where clothes hung to dry and children could play. A six-foot-high wooden fence enclosed the yard.
Nothing hung on the walls: there were no bookcases, books, or Victrola. But there was a large console three-band radio which could receive short-wave broadcasts from Europe. The house was always spotless, sparsely furnished and lifeless. Two low rectangles projected from either party wall to separate the living from dining rooms; on each end of these little walls stood two decorative white wooden Doric columns pretending to hold the ceiling up and give a touch of class to what was in fact a clean brick shotgun shack.
We did not visit Fourth and Daly frequently. My mother was never keen to go, perhaps because she learned too little Yiddish after she married my father to make conversation easily, perhaps because Mom had refused to speak to her until after I was born. (My maternal grandmother had been Italian and hence my mother was a Gentile according to Jewish law.) But while Zaida lived we always went for Seder dinner on the first night of Pesach or Passover, the Jewish holiday commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. That tale had some heft when I first heard it a few years after the fall of Nazi Germany.
My brother and I, six and eight, were dropped off at their house early on the Passover a year or two before Zaida died to watch him and Mom prepare the Passover meal. Boredom soon set in, and Zaida took us out to the back stoop where he produced two blocks of grainy pine and proceeded to carve two dreidels, the four-sided top Jewish children have played with for generations. He inscribed letters in Hebrew, the traditional aleph, beth, gimel, nun, one on each dreidel side, with a hard lead pencil and explained that each letter had a value, from zero to three: the side facing up when it landed after we spun it represented how many nuts, pennies, etc. the other players had to pay the spinner. Then he counted twenty hazelnuts apiece into our hands and set us gambling on the stoop while he went inside to help Mom.
Three things always happened at the Passover dinner. Someone spilled the wine on Mom's white lace tablecloth, producing a scramble for cold water and lemon juice to wipe it away; there was a fight during which Zaida had to restrain my father; and Zaida lingered over the third son's role in answering the Four Questions (der fier kashes). The Four Questions are the heart and raison d'être for the Seder, a religious service-cum-dinner to celebrate and teach the story of the Jews' deliverance from Egypt. Shortly after the service begins the youngest boy must ask, Why is this night different from all others?, and the leader of the Seder will retell the story of the Exodus, the repeated experience of our wandering tribe's history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We Look Like This by Dan Burt. Copyright © 2012 Dan Burt. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
I,
Who He Was 1–5,
Death Mask,
Slowly Sounds the Bell,
II,
Certain Windows,
III,
Circumcision,
Indices,
Inquisition,
Rosebud,
Ishmael,
IV,
Accounting,
Death Rattle,
Blind Date,
Texaco Saturday Afternoon Opera,
Cabaletta,
All the Dark Years,
For John Crook,
Homage for a Waterman,
Facsimile Folio,
John Winthrop's Ghost,
V,
Pastiche,
Poetry Reading,
After Lunch,
Little Black Dress,
Kept,
Pas de Deux,
Winter Mornings,
Yester-year,
Revenant,
Sie Kommt,
The Faithful,
End of the Affair,
VI,
Decorating the Nursery,
Wine Circle,
Dodge-Ball,
Blue Rinse Matrons,
Momentum,
Three Sonnets on the Coup de Grâce,
Uphill to the Right,
Manqué,
VII,
Compounds,
Modern Painters,
A Brewing Tale,
The Lesson,
Rigoletto,
Summa,
Motes,
Un Coup de Dés,
Identity,
Beside a Cove,
The Institute,
Trade,
Notes,
About the Author,
Also by Dan Burt from Carcanet Press,
Copyright,