Stradivarius in Press Pause Press

 

Street musician in the plaza in front of the Pompidou Center. 

Damn he was good. Playing Bach, as I remember.

Stradivarius, a prose poem about the Judy Garland-Van Johnson vehicle, In the Good Old Summertime is the headliner in The Family Room on Press Pause Press. Another ekphrastic prose poem about one of my life-long obsessions, Buster Keaton. If you like, paste the address below into your browser. One you get there, I suggest you 'select' the text. Otherwise, pale gray on white on a monitor is kinda hard to read, though it looks cool and all that.

Stradivarius in the Family Room of Press Pause Press. Thank you!

https://www.presspausepress.org/press-play/2022/2/15/karengreenbaummaya

 

 

Blast from the past: Abecedarian of the Budgies

Hawk in the apricot tree, November.

 

When I was coming up on fifty, my dear husband told me, "I know I'm supposed to throw you a surprise party, but I'm no good at those things. If you like, I will try. But I could also take you on a vacation to Paris and Athens. What would you like?" That was an easy decision. In preparation for the trip, I scoured guide books for targets of opportunity. In the event, however, I was in the middle of a health crisis on top of the ongoing midlife phase (it's not a midlife crisis--it lasts too long to be considered a single crisis). The trip itself was much more difficult than either of us had expected, Still, worth having done. This photo is not from that trip, all of whose photos were on FILM, as was still the custom, mostly, and I would have to scan them, manually to post them here. Maybe someday. In any case, the only birds we saw were hungry sparrows. And, you can probably surmise that the initial words of the lines of an abecedarian follow the alphabet. This below is a double abecedarian: the last letters of each line also follow the alphabet, in reverse.

This piece first appeared in Unshod Quills in July 2013.

Abecedarian of the Budgies

 

A week in Athens for my half-century birthday, sure antidote to Weltschmerz.

Believed Frommer’s:  owners parade their budgies in Oneiros Park every Sunday.

 

Could caged canaries be freed? Imagine seeing each avian aviatrix

dance, bound only by cotton strings that would trail daintily below.

 

(Elastic cord would have launched each bird like Barishnikov,

feverish, entangled like the louche courtship dances of Corfu.)

 

Greeks lock bumpers, jump from cars, snarl and brawl in traffic, but

Hellenic birds, even on Sundays, must stay separate as dolmades.

 

Icarus convinced folk you could fly too high. Greeks remember.

Joy-riding birds of Athens, loosed every Sunday from deux à cinq,

 

kites with tiny minds of their own, would soar while locals nap.

Limp, weepy, off-kilter, sleepy, I was not philosophical like Plato.

 

My half-century found me so much less settled than even Helen,

noodling my way through midlife, out-of-step and off the rhythm.

 

Olives of Athena sprouting in every park; now, this mythic marvel:

parakeets uncaged in the polis? What a custom! I was wild to gawk.

 

Question that I never sent to Arthur Frommer, trusted tourist Raj:

Remind me, who told you this tale of tethered birds? The Oracle of Delphi?

 

Simple me, I asked the hotel clerk how to find the park. In fine English,

truthful, not at all unkind:   Never have I ever heard such a ridiculous thing.

 

Unstoppered, fabled birds flew away. I felt my whole flock take off,

vanishing back into the naïve guidebook of this faded layered place,

 

where nods mean no, where one conveys yes by shaking the head.

Xenophile I might be, but that wasn’t enough in Athens. Organic

 

yoghurt was the only soothing part of entire days I spent silent as a tomb.

Zeno said, Once delayed, you can never catch up. You can bet your last drachma.

Newly published: Rembrandt at Fifty, Eve the Inventor, where he did go

 Walter in NYC at the Frick in 2006, contemplating a younger Rembrandt. And thank you, Isabel Niremberg of Offcourse, for publishing these poems.

Poems by Karen Greenbaum-maya

Self-Portrait, Rembrandt at Fifty

He is already looking at you.
No speculation, just appraisal.
The painter plays down the all-seeing eyes
peering from his famous shadows.
The arms of his chair give him a throne,
the right hand easy and magisterial,
deploying a paintbrush, or a baton,
something with a point
suitable for pointing out.

Those rich fabrics we’ve seen before.
Perhaps they distract, dazzle us,
so we don’t read the bulk of his chest
as a swell of maternal bosom,
cinched, but not by the crimson sash
whose crimson brings out the same tone
in his drink-mottled cheeks, his winter-bitten lips,
in the whiskey nose that may be no such thing.
Could just be temperature shifts, spicy foods. Or stress
of bankruptcy, one after another infant
dead before summer,.

You can barely make out his head covering.
A squashed cloche, perhaps velvet.
Deep red-brown. There’s that red again.
Hard to distinguish against
the darkness that surrounds him, yet
it makes a hole, still darker, in the darkness,
shadows those bleak eyes
no amount of dress-up can soften.

Seems what the painter saw
left the sitter with a bitter taste in his mouth.
Just don’t blame the artist.

 

Eve the Inventor

When Eve bites into the apple, she invents Time. She crunches the bite, tastes the juice released from the crushed chambers. She swallows. Now it is Gone. Now there is a Now, becoming Then. Now the apple starts to enter the past, The next bite is a little less  crisp. We are told that Eve has invented Death. Do not forget that she also invented Loss. And Music. Birds sing for the first time when their song begins and ends. Grasses bend in the new little wind, and the sun starts to drift to the horizon. The serpent is astonished to feel the desire to shed his skin. Eve discovers her apple’s green-woody stem that doesn’t even know its useful life is over. She has not yet discovered that no good deed goes unpunished.

 

where he did go…

…when he left Brasil at nineteen
cheapest passage was on a freighter
Took eight weeks. Crew got to know him
They offered him a job as Sparks
because he knew Morse code
He saw himself as Joseph Conrad,
wearing dress whites,
writing in his cabin below the waterline

Where he did go was New Orleans, then
the Greyhound to Austin,
counting on the scholarship they yanked
when they realized
he was no US resident
He said the accents in the hallways
sounded like a joke, a movie
but it was for real
same as those fancy cowboy boots everyone wore

Where he did go
After death is told by the living
We looked
into his face losing its faceness
his jaw drooping from its hinges
the muscles off-line
forgetting what they were there for
retired at last

I took a photo
I will never show,
the last thing I have of him
except the last glimpse of his face
the coroners looking over at me
for a signal, for permission
before they closed the bag

The New Normal 2.3 (Jitterbug, and Father's Day)

 My father, David Greenbaum, probably 8 or so, already deaf. (1927-1979)

Jitterbug

 

You have to understand:

at six months he should have died

when fever torched his otic nerve,

scalded his inner ear.

Grandma bargained, connived, even

changed his name to change God’s mind:

David, always outmatched,

yet understanding the swing of sling.

The odds shorted him, every time.

 

Somehow he knew music,

sold vinyl in Hollywood after school.

His heart beat 4/4 like the blues,

just right for a jitterbug slow enough for flair,

to place, to plant the back foot

so the wave snaps right up your spine

to your thrown-back head.

Loved the cool grunt of the bass

sounding diminished thirds,

augmented sevenths. Vibes poured

through the pencil

he held like a straw between his teeth,

eraser braced on the turntable base.

 

The man could dance.

Taught me the off-kilter tilt of hips

kept balanced by the partner’s hand,

shoulders spiraled around the core,

each of us styling, saved from falling

by the back-beat back-step.

 

He’d raise his arm and I’d strut under,

turning as natural as walking.

We’d move into the snazzy draw,

hands sliding along the other’s arms,

no words needed for the trick

of snagging fingertips,

catching and pulling back to the center,

leaning and returning,

solid on the beat he could not hear.

:::

The New Normal 2.2 (featuring The Clairvoyant Widow)

 

Karen Greenbaum-Maya Archives | U n l o s t (unlostjournal.com)

The cento is a fun form and something of a Rorschach test for the poet. You pull out some other writers' work and take lines that strike you, in no particular way. Then you arrange them so that the order makes sense to you. I love found objects and found poems anyhow, and when I saw that line of Roethke, I knew what to do. I have included this one in my tribute to my husband, The Beautiful Leaves, which Bamboo Dart Press will publish in August 2023.

The Ballad of the Clairvoyant Widow

--a cento of lines of Christine Gosnay, Michelle Brittan Rosado, Russell Salomon, and Theodore Roethke

   Slow, slow as a fish she came,

A green angel swaying branches.

The wide streams go their way.

She went in slowly, and found him.

She watched the river wind itself away.

 

   Everything undoes itself.

He woke with mountains in his knees.

She saw her father shrinking in his skin.

She thought a bird and it began to fly.

The light cried out, and she was there to hear.

 

   The wings have fallen off. The arms too.

It was as if she tried to walk in hay.

Once she knew how to run.

She came to the western river,

breathed as if moving a hand toward a candle.

 

   The sleep was not deep but waking was slow.

The outline of one is inseparable.

The New Normal 2.1 (featuring Busy)

 

https://bodyliterature.com/2020/01/27/karen-greenbaum-maya-5/

B O D Y  is an estimable journal published out of Prague. Yes, that Prague. I am honored to have placed several pieces there over the years.

Busy

French bees are dying, she tells me. Not because of big Agro pushing its products, threatening finance interruptus, the short-term win killing the long-term love. The bees are dying because the Chinese have planted killer bees that lay their eggs in the French bees. Like mantises they behead, like termites they eat wood, like wasps they colonize from within the good-hearted worker bee herself.   

Oh, these Chinese bees. They’re aggressive as South American bees and twice times the size. Easily they kill the French bees. A single smear of their honey leaves you braindead but unable to stop consuming Chinese imports. There you go, buying twice what you need. There are bees flying all over the blossoming trees, cherry and quince, even willows and camellias, but she knows the bees are dying, just going through the motions.

 She can tell the Chinese ladybugs from the French. The vulgar Chinese are gaudy with too many dots. The French ladybugs are subtly accented with two, at most four, asymmetrical for interest. Chinese ladybugs adapt quickly. They do not care about tradition. They undersell the French ladybugs and take over their turf. You’d think there would be enough for all, aphids being what they are, but no. Oh no.

The New Normal 2.0 (featuring To Die in Cochabamba)

You realize, of course, that I'd rather be able to go back to the way I was managing this blog before, namely, putting forth my comments and observations and posting links to any on-line publication. But Google improved the format over a year ago, and as a result I can't figure out how to set up the links. So, I'm going to make it possible for me, and I hope simple for you, Gentle Reader. When I get something published, and when it achieves publication, I will post the link and the text of the poem right here, in the post. Where you are reading this. If I actually achieve a thought worth sharing, I'll put that up here too.

Today's post, not a new one, but from an expired link to The Centrifugal Eye, a project of Eve Hanninen, who set it down so she could spend some time with her own work. What an excellent editor she is, reading closely and considering what might improve the poem.

To Die in Cochabamba (I Will Not Die in Paris) 

Cochabamba, green valley at the mountaintop,

umbilical scar high on the equator.

No one dies in Cochabamba.

I will die in Cochabamba.

Cochabamba of eternal spring,

no longest night, no shortest day.

Streams freeze hard after sundown,

winter comes every night in Cochabamba.

 

Cochabamba of bum leg, the fùtbol ploy.

The center herds the ball around rival feet,

threads it down the field on bamboo legs

while fans shout eternal spring in Cochabamba.

 

Cochabamba, hit samba of Carneval.

Close the window, that cochabamba

is getting on my last nerve, I tell the nurse,

but she is busy slipping morphine under my tongue.

She cups my face in her dry hand,

and my eyes, lips, bum leg relax, Ay, mi cochabamba.

 

It seems in Cochabamba everyone knows,

but I don’t understand, I never have.

I am a plane crash in Cochabamba,

aisle lights down the center in the darkness.