The Poetry Of.
Richard Fein..................................................................
TENTH-GRADE HISTORY LESSON
The life of Gandhi or Lincoln, and if neither one then Washington, George or Booker T.,
were all standard choices.
But I needed a book no one had read,
so my phony quotes and false synopsis
in the Social Studies book report
I'd slap together in five minutes couldn't be exposed.
For such a fraud there was nothing better than Hitler's Mein Kampf.
I had been told it was the coffee table book of the Third Reich,
displayed by all good Nazis but read by none,
except it had no pictures, and beer was served instead of coffee.
I was sure Mr. Goldstein had never read it.
In fact, no one sane could plow through it.
But I thought Mr. G might give me a 90 just for originality of choice.
The day before the deadline I actually read a few pages
to get at least one legitimate quote from that illegitimate book.
In the rush-hour subway I read about a beer-hall brawl,
a crucial event for modern Western civilization,
because he survived.
The two seats in front of me became vacant.
An elderly man wearing a yarmulka and a middle-aged woman fled
before the large printed name of Adolph Hitler.
The man had a look of fear and the woman of loathing,
for I had been grinning while I was reading,
but only out of self-satisfaction with my sophomoric scheme.
Then suddenly I understood the entire book,
by reading living faces instead of dead words.
My feet ached,
but I didn't take one of the abandoned seats.
In that very crowded subway,
I swayed back and forth holding on to the hand straps,
thinking of Hitler, thinking of suffocating freight cars,
all the way to the Sheepshead Bay Station.
KOAN
"That clapping is the sound of acolyte and master
.slapping each other's palm to a common beat."
In the beginning the shaman chanted the word,
sounds in the air as magickal as the crackling night fire---
singing, dancing,
invoking the spirits looming outside the campfire
and like Adam
contriving names to confine them in.
Later came the Shaman's children,
and they were named poets.
They also danced around the fire,
but with rehearsed steps.
They found magic in the music of words alone,
worhipping properly honed syntax.
Holiness was sought not in the song itself,
but in the execution of song.
Now come the grammarians, children of poets, grandchildren of priests.
Unafraid of night they douse the fire and analyze the ashes.
These coroners of the sacred chants
scoop out the divinity from the old hymns,
dissecting sounds by reciting the syllables
as they peruse their pursed lips before mirrors.
They weigh the parts of speech against the speech
and always come up short.
They sterilize their lab tables,
putting the leftover goo in labeled jars,
and then scrounge around
for vaguely remembered names.
FISH
Fish in the air,
seemingly
over, under,
at times eclipsing, at times passing through--
human heads.
A roomful of busy jaws
at Ling's South China Sea restaurant,
one humongous tank lit by a long neon,
and behind it is one huge room lit by many neons.
Fish food floats pell-mell and is gobbled,
while beyond diners hunch over their plates.
A vista filled with unsated appetites.
Some fish engulf human faces,
an illusion created by
two worlds aligned before the eye,
a question of proper perspective.
Four hundred million years of competing hungers
evolved into this clear vision
here at Ling's, which is so distant
from the South China Sea.
But I didn't come here for a proper perspective,
or to see the unrefracted light pass through two worlds,
one now, one long ago, and the distance of time between.
No, I came here for the specialty of the house
which is, of course, . . .
