Letter from Brooklyn by Jacob Scheier Read Free Book Online

MICHAEL’S LOWER EAST SIDE
    You have a map,
    ballpoint marking the streets
    where you lived and my mother lived
    and Carl, your best friend who committed suicide,
    and Sue’s boyfriend Danny who also killed himself,
    because he had cancer. Your stories conflict
    with her diary. But isn’t that what always happens when Jews talk
    about origins? And you don’t need to know
    what your sister believed in 1968. It’s enough
    that your friends are dead
    and nothing on 2nd Avenue is the way you remember it.
    If we walk fast enough the three dollar espressos
    will turn back into night, the patio legs
    fold and table tops resume their previous lives
    as garbage pale lids. Right here is where you bought
    egg creams at 3 a.m. The Gem Spa on St. Mark’s,
    soda fountain replaced by the glossy stares of models.
    Yonah Shimmel is pretty much the same,
    knishes framed in the dumbwaiter.
    The dumpy middle-aged man,
    not unlike a knish himself, is annoyed
    when you ask for cutlery
    and this makes you smile. There is no celery soda
    so you settle for a Dr. Brown cream. We have never looked
    so similar as when resigning ourselves to what is
    no longer. Carl or Danny, your parents or my mother.
    How thick is absence, too. “It’s not fucking here . . . It’s gone,”
    you say, looking at a vacant lot on 13th, the last place you
    and your sister lived before she met my father.
    Julie calms you with nothing more profound than,
    â€œMichael, we’re on the wrong street.” You laugh, and I know
    this is a story you will tell at family gatherings —
    and when the times comes so will I.
    The next street over is the tenement where you planned
    your lessons for P.S. 110 and Sue tried
    to figure out what to do with her life
    after being kicked out of Berkeley and the Spartacists
    and reading Whitman one evening instead of Marx —
    though I made that last part up.
    And there was that guy who did too much acid and jumped
    out the sixth floor window and survived.
    And Fred Hampton killed that same week and
    you and her were going to live, okay, not forever,
    but for quite some time.

RAISING THE PENTAGON
    â€œYou created the revolution first and learned from it, learned of what your revolution might consist and where it might go out of the intimate truth of the way it presented itself to your experience.”
    â€” Norman Mailer ,
The Armies of the Night
    You might have been the thin young pirate
    with a large Armenian mustache
    on page 149. After all, you were there
    when the Pentagon was raised.
    Spent the night in Occoquan
    and still have that mustache,
    43 years later. Ending the draft
    killed the movement, you say,
    as we drink beneath a stuffed gator head,
    confederate flag in its teeth. We are far
    from your old New England house,
    where snow, as though in a koan,
    gathers in the eaves and the shadows
    of pines rise and recede across the hardwood.
    If we drive all night we can be in Arlington
    County, 1967, by morning. On the way
    we will find your sister, the woman who will become
    my mother, at Berkeley, handing out leaflets —
    The March on the Pentagon is liberal
,
bourgeois
. . .
    She didn’t understand, she wasn’t there you say
    into the empty pint. For years,
    whether it was a Central Park “be in”
    or trying to make peace
    with your father, she would ask
    the same smart-ass question,
    â€œRaised that Pentagon yet?”
    (I can only imagine what she would say
    about your “Hope” T-shirt.)
    Her hair a dandelion
    about to disperse its seeds
    she says it again from the empty stool beside us.
    But remembering she’s been dead
    a decade she loses the smirk and asks
    how could you lift a building
    but not stop your sister
    from falling. And I don’t know
    who is right. Maybe you didn’t,
    and maybe you did
    raise the Pentagon, clear
    into outer space.
    I am sure you tried.
    You both tried.

RE: GRANDPA’S VILLAGE
    About 40 years ago