Evening, November 8, 2016

Fair Trade
Gary Soto

I did my best when I was young
just married, walking my love
From one room to the next.
I was living in my madness--
The traffic inside
My head while outside
Our downtown apartment, vatos
Cruised with blue tatoos...
I walked my wife from
One sun-lit room to the next,
And on a dead Sunday
I walked her to the Azteca Cafe,
Slum eating, rags
of chicken wings, lumpy gravy,
The anemic coins
Of carrots. My money,
Then, was dollar bills
That tumbled through the wash
And coins warmed by sunlight
On the chest of drawers.
Money is what gave me
A plate of chicken,
Steam like a glove,
And when I wiped
My glasses, a Mexican man
was asking for toast.
The waitress turned
And started the order,
Two slices browning
in their stand-up bed
Of red, angry filaments.
When she said, Dollar thirty,"
I thought, two slices
No meat or butter. The man
Hesitated, then fumbled for
Coins from his pocket.
This, I saw, was pride.
I stabbed my carrots,
Hurting for this man.
He took his toast
In a napkin,
Toast that was already cool.
He left no trail of crumbs
But the line of memory
From my eye to the bell jingling
On the closing door.

_____

From Gary Soto, New and Selected Poems, 1995.

Monica, Monica dance the waltz

Up in the sky, someone is playing a trombone and a guitar.
Red is your tie, and in your velveteen coat, you hide a star.
Monica, Monica, dance the waltz
Monica, Monica, dance the waltz
Follow me, moon and sun
Keep time with me, one two three one.

from The Medium, by Gian Carlo Menotti. 

Sergey Zadvorny

Sergey and Tatiana, April 2010...

Cliff's Bar

From before its rebirth as the Sky Lounge--although in one sense Cliff's was always the Sky Lounge.

Anna

Student life, reappearing like something out of 16th century Flanders...the dull homespun and worn heel, cloth the color of earth--brought together on a gray concrete floor, with only the tubular leg of a modern factory chair--a whisp of metal--to break the spell...

Weeks later, just before Thanksgiving, at an intersection near San Pablo--a figure on a bicycle, a woman with heavy load...heading uphill towards school. Also Anna...

Shtot meshugener, Mozyr

The shtot meshugener (town fool) of Mozyr, Belorussia, 1912-13. First encountered this as a photograph on the wall of the Jewish Museum in New York. What struck me was the man's face, and the gesture of his pose--something essential, as if known--and then (from the caption) that he was from Mozyr (my father's birthplace) and that the period in which it was taken would have also been while my father was still living there, eight or nine years old--all of which which meant that he probably knew this man, too...

The Sky Lounge

Up in the sky, someone is playing a trombone and a guitar.
Red is your tie, and in your velveteen coat, you hide a star.
Monica, Monica, dance the waltz
Monica, Monica, dance the waltz
Follow me, moon and sun
Keep time with me, one two three one...

Aleksandr Galich, "Nomera"

Russian video yesterday, late afternoon--Aleksandr Galich, Nomera, with old film clips of Galich--standing and singing, with guitar, in jacket and tie, later talking with young people, or alone, at a table, smoking thoughtfully, all beginning with a scene at his Russian Orthodox gravesite... And most mysteriously, the ice skaters in Moscow, grainy black-and-white footage, looped in place, in the same way the refrain from the song returns to a telephone number from long in the past--and a whispered invitation to go skating--"tonight, at eight...

- Пять-тринадцать-сорок три, это ты?
Ровно в восемь приходи на каток!

(Five--thirteen--forty-three, is that you?
Right at eight, come to the rink...)

* * *

For the full video: Александр Галич. Номера

(Note: for the image we're indebted to Mandelstam ("Leningrad")--but Galich's song is very much his own--and these things seem to be the property of all Russians...)

November 2010

Corinna, Corinna, way across the sea
Corinna, Corinna, way across the sea
Ain't done no good babe, since you left me...

Oscar's Famous Cole Slaw

Oscar’s Famous Cole Slaw (by Peter Dubow)

My father’s Cole slaw was known up and down the West Coast, thus—Oscar’s Famous Cole slaw. People who hate slaw would love his because it was garlicky and tangy, altogether different from the creamy variety.

Dad would hand grate cabbage but I use a Cuisinart (1mm disk—very fine). Lawry’s seasoned salt is all our family ever used so I wouldn’t know what other seasoning to recommend.

Ingredients:

Cabbage 1 head (serves 4-6)
Garlic! 1 clove or more
Green onions 1-3
Parsley 1 oz. more or less
Olive oil 1/3 cup approx.
Cider vinegar 1/8-1/4 cup approx.
Tarragon vinegar a splash or two
Lemon juice 1
Lawry’s seasoned salt to taste (about 1 tsp.)
Dry mustard 1/3 tsp. Approx.
Sugar tbsp. approx
Oregano careful—just a little
Salt to taste
Ground pepper ditto

Preparation:

Crush garlic with the back of a tablespoon and mix into dry ingredients in a wood salad bowl. Add finely grated cabbage and finely chopped green onions and parsley. Toss thoroughly. Add oil, vinegar and lemon juice. Toss a whole bunch more.

A secret to the slaw’s success is achieving the proper balance of vinegar, lemon juice and sugar to get just the right sweet and sour effect. Of
course, it’s always easier to add salt (and anything else) than to subtract
it.

You may have to try this recipe a few times before you even begin to
approach the magic quality my dad put into his Cole slaw.

With Eleanor (May 2009)

Umberto Saba, The Goat

Umberto Saba, The Goat


I talked to a goat.
She was alone in a pasture, and tethered.
Stuffed with grass, soaked
by the rain, she bleated.

That monotonous bleating was brother
to my sorrow. And I answered, first
in jest, then because sorrow is eternal,
has one voice and never changes.
I heard this voice in the wails
of a solitary goat.

In a goat with a Semitic face,
I heard all other pain lamenting,
all other lives.


(translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan)

Spotkanie Galerii Foksal 1968

Warszawa, 1968, appearing miraculously under the name Hanna Ptaszkowska. The Galeria Foksal, with Henryk Stazewski propped on the floor, holding forth to a gathering of young people. That's Hanna herself, just behind, and Prorok (Prophet), the leader of a group (the only group?) of Polish hippies, his rabbit pelt vest--an investment in the era. Unknown girl to his right, too tall for Gabryela. Likewise the gaunt type leaning on edge of door. Myself, with pipe, tip of rapidograph pen, drawing...

Spotkanie...

____

Note added September 2014: The setting here is a "hippie commune" in Ozarów, just outside Warszawa, not the Foksal Gallery.  Photo by Eustachy Kossakowski.. For other photos see Eustachy Kossakowski Archive at the Museum of Modern Art in Warszawa (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie). The following year was my exhibition at Galerie Foksal (September 1969).

Tadeusz Kantor

(photo by Eustachy Kossakowski)

Edward Krasinski

(photo by Eustachy Kossakowski)

Marina Tzvetaeva

Don't misunderstand me: I live not to write poems, I write poems in order to live. (Who would make writing poems an end in itself?) I write not because I know, but but in order to know. Until I've written about a thing (have looked at it), it doesn't exist. My way of knowing is through expression--there's the knowledge, right from under the pen. Until I've written a thing, I don't think about it. (You're the same, you know.) The pen channels experiences of what is extant, but dormant. Just as the Sybil doesn't know until the words come. The Sybil knows immediately. The word is the background of the thing in us. The word is the path to the thing, and not the other way around. (If it were the other way around, we would need words, not things, and the ultimate goal--is the thing.)

Marina Tzvetaeva, in a letter to Boris Pasternak, 1926

Campos de Soria

VII

Colinas plateadas,
grises alcores, cárdenas roquedas
por donde traza el Duero
su curva de ballesta
en torno a Soria, oscuros encinares,
ariscos pedregales, calvas sierras,
caminos blancos y álamos del río,
tardes de Soria, mística y guerrera,
hoy siento por vosotros, en el fondo
del corazón, tristeza,
tristeza que es amor! ¡Campos de Soria
donde parece que las rocas sueñan,
conmigo vais! ¡Colinas plateadas,
grises alcores, cárdenas roquedas!...

Antonio Machado

Noche Porteña

March or April of 1961? Arriving in the airport at Ezeiza, after 24 hour milk-run down the west coast of South America, over the Andes and into Argentina. Late afternoon, drive to La Plata with the Kraiselburd family: Elias, Lea, Gustavo, Gaston. Abuela? Flatness of the land, nothing visible over a horizon. Arriving in La Plata in the evening, trying to make out what the place was like from back seat of their family car. Cobblestone paving, yellowish street lamps, far between. Pools of light at leafy intersections, then bumpy blocks of darkness. No sense of destination until we'd almost arrived. Calle 52, Numero 362? Me trato de acordar...

George Oppen

. .

Of the dawn
Over Frisco
Lighting the large hills
And the very small coves
At their feet, and we
Perched in the dawn wind
Of that coast like leaves
Of the most recent weed----And yet the things

That happen! Signs,
Promises----we took it
As sign, as promise

Still for nothing wavered,
Nothing begged or was unreal, the thing
Happening, filling our eyesight
Out to the horizon----I remember the sky
And the moving sea.

(from "Guest Room," This In Which, New Directions, 1965)

Hojin, 2007