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 Sample
poems from
Who Lives Better Than We Do?
by
Reggie Marra |
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From
Part One,
Who
Lives Better Than We Do? And
Now, old
photographs of you ten years before
I was born reveal a young woman I never
knew, searching for herself—Canada,
Italy, Hunter College, the Paterno
estate where your father took care—a
young woman with fifty-five years
to go,
unaware
that the man she would meet
and marry stood in harm's way, Pacific theater,
oblivious
to the children they would
have, the house on Etville Avenue, unborn
nurses
who would love her so in later
years—a young woman unconcerned
with
not-yet-available bypass and
dialysis she would one day credit
with adding
years to her life. . . once
again, the home regresses to a house
with too much space and silence, remembers
clattering Yahtzee dice on kitchen table, recliner's
bang—returning upright,
theme from NYPD Blue,
shuffling slippers across hardwood floors, faint,
even
stair-lift hum, and back-door view of birds
battling for breakfast
around the
feeder that hangs still from
the clothesline. . . I
hear the Minnie-Moused voice with which you'd
reply, Thank YOU, to
someone else's thanks—
the YOU, more like Minnie than the Thank,
see the epitaph, newly cut into the
stone this month, inches from his
He
could spin a yarn,
your chosen response—
She
rarely let him finish
and I smile at your joy in acknowledging this truth,
which nonetheless pales in light of other truths. . .
other truths. . . when they engrave December 15,
1999 I understand how something etched in stone
can feel more permanent
than the reality it represents,
I return to everything I didn't choose when
Dr. Kumar
asked me what to do—to
what was forced below,
more time, meals, laughter, visits, a wedding-day
dance—and what remains beyond this or that truth
or feeling, always already
Is—that screaming, spacious
Silence, first and final Truth, ever present
ruddy
complexion against white hair, dialysis filters
tinted pink by tired
blood, green zeroes fading to
black, trying to remember Who We Are
in
order to say
Who
lives better than we do?
and mean it. Copyright
© 2000 by Reggie Marra
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From
Part Two,
Waiting
for the Light to Fade In
September Jeffrey
listens to,
then dreams, of sixth-
grade classmates' summer
essays—museum
trips,
Coney Island, Yankee
Stadium, the Bronx Zoo;
real vacations,
not just time
away from school, but weeks on
the Jersey shore, in the
Catskill
and Adirondack mountains, at
Niagara Falls and Lake George;
he imagines barbecues and
body surfing, tastes roasted
marshmallows and
cotton
candy, smells evergreens
and sun tan oil, sees a night
sky
so filled with stars
that everything seems possible,
even family dinners,
especially
Sunday afternoon with grandparents
who tell stories that begin
"When
I was your age," who hug you all
the time and give you quarters
on your birthday. His vacation
dreams last a while, but fade
before
Thanksgiving, when he'll
listen to the dinner stories, invent
cousin,
turkey, stuffing and pumpkin-
pie lies for an essay of his own. Copyright
© 1998 by Reggie Marra
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Part Three,
And
Don't You Know Who I Am? Almost
Perfectly Clean John
fiddles with the rabbit
ears until only two or three
extra boundaries
blur each
image—ghosts, he remembers
calling them as a child when
the first black-and-white
t.v. appeared in Joseph Iron
Hand's trailer,
and all
Oglala clamored to see
and hear the magic lie. Now
he struggles to sort
out killers and victims
on the evening news as
once again
humans become refugees,
innocents die,
another line is
drawn,
another boundary set,
against the ticking of
an imaginary clock.
Serbs
and Albanians, Christians
and Muslims fight for
their destinies,
their homes,
their lives, for who they
believe they are: remind
him
he is all of them. He
watches NATO bombs explode
over Belgrade like U.S. treaties
over Native
Americans. He hears
them denounce Hitler's
incineration of 6 million
Jews, Milosevic's removal
of non-Serbs from Kosovo—
any attempt to
eliminate,
as ethnic cleansing; except,
of course,
the wash, rinse, and
spin cycles of Manifest
Destiny that
leave him almost
perfectly clean. Copyright
© 1999 by Reggie Marra |
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From
Part Four,
Fits
and Starts Poets
Don't Drive Porsches
(What
a Word's Worth) A
regular, though not a
poet, at Eleanor's cafe,
asked if any of us owned
the
Porsche with the lights on.
We laughed, then
darkened, harmonizing,
Poets don't drive Porsches.
We threw a couplet
to his chin and
raised our ironies to his tender groin.
We
reduced him to a rough draft
loudly alliterated and lambasted him
kicked
his assonance
rhyme and rhyme again.
Not
knowing where to draw
the line, we broke it,
dumped a hyperbole of hot
soup in his lap, enjambed
his fingers, dropped
concrete nouns on his iambic
feet,
piled image upon image upon
his fractured Muse.
We
ripped off his shirt and
his
pantoum, pushed him in front
of
a runaway quatrain
that
cracked his spine,
then rapped him till he sang the blues. Our
truculence left satire
marks across his body.
When he pleaded for a doctor,
we called two:
a paradox
who just confused him. We
pierced him with a spear
then shook it, and he gasped,
Please don't
shake speare—
this is no pun at all.
As you pound the life from me,
I feel great paine,
and
though I may not be swift,
I fear that I am donne.
Too late have
I learned what
a word's worth—poetic license
notwithstanding,
poets
don't
drive Porsches.
Almost gone, he turned toward
the proprietress as if to prove
some point,
and whimpered with
his final breath, I'm not
a villain, El. Copyright
© 1997 by Reggie Marra |
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