James Penha ~ Five Poems

Pleas

What once was appre­hend­ed in pas­sion sur­vives as opinion.
—“Hammer” by Frank Bidart

Eager for learn­ing, hope­ful for a chance
to make some­thing of him­self again

in school, Richard shook my hand
and sat beside my desk in the office

the prison pro­vid­ed for me to oversee
University cours­es: an inmate might

earn an Associate’s degree in two years.
(Why? was the ques­tion most oth­ers asked.

For the best of rea­sons, I always replied.)
He asked if could study with us even though,

he said, he already had a degree—a B.S.
BS indeed, I said to myself, but wondered

aloud if he had a tran­script. He did, he said,
in his room. (This was a medium-security

cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ty for con­victs queued up
for parole hear­ings. They called their cells

rooms.) In an hour, Richard returned with the
doc­u­ment show­ing he’d earned his degree

in Geology. From Yale. I gulped as I looked
at the top of the page, to his full name and,

of course, remem­bered the front pages
of the Daily News and Daily Mirror:

the Eli schol­ar­ship kid from the barrio
who loved the Westchester débu­tante he’d

met in New Haven so much he smashed her
beau­ti­ful face with a ham­mer in her bedroom

after she told him the romance was over. “I just
killed my girl­friend,” he lat­er told a priest

who called the cops and here, soft-spoken
and polite, he was ask­ing for my help. I

couldn’t—not because he was a killer—
I was there to help criminals—but because

he was way overqual­i­fied for our program.
Richard would soon be paroled because he

hadn’t been con­vict­ed of mur­der after all;
an insan­i­ty plea earned him manslaughter.

Weren’t you afraid, I’m asked when I relate
this sto­ry. Not afraid. I’d grown used to the

clang­ing of steel gates and the dis­taste­ful odor
of the pen and to all the male­fac­tors before me.

But now, I’m scared. That some­one so smart
and polite can run amok and leave his lover

dying with a ham­mer hang­ing from her head
makes me, when I think of leav­ing, afraid of

you.

~

I Met Allen Ginsberg in the Balcony

I met Allen Ginsberg in the balcony
of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
He was unmis­tak­able. Alone. Naked
as were many tak­ing counter-cues from
mantras of The Living Theatre actors
whis­per­ing across aisles and rows: I
can­not trav­el with­out a pass­port. I must
wear these clothes. Allen had made it to
the bal­cony with­out pass­port or clothing
left, I guessed, on some orches­tra seat.
“The Becks,” he said to me of Julian Beck
and Judith Molina who invent­ed Paradise
Now “are real­ly into some­thing. Visionaries.”
Ginsberg was my vision­ary, my Whitman,
a hir­sute vision now gaz­ing down at chaos,
elbows dig­ging into the guardrail, hairy ass
jut­ting above legs ready, it seemed, to spring
over the top if the spir­it moved him. Had I
met him at a café or on the street, I might have
asked about poetry—his or mine—or hoped
for a flir­ta­tion, but here he was naked already
and I…I should have stripped then and there
and held on to him. We could have been really
into something.

~

Roof Dreams

During the day I am Tevye listening
alone to the fid­dler precariously
bal­anced on the roof play­ing my song
some­times melan­choly, some­times like
a man­ic Gypsy vio­lin danc­ing him
toward the eaves and a ter­ri­ble tumble
and so I climb way up to the top
of the stairs to hold tight the player
in a tin-pan par­adise trouble-proof
up on the roof in a dif­fer­ent lit­tle death
only. But by night abed alone my eyes
widen with the chirrup of the cat
on the roof. I know what’s coming:
the cat­er­wauls of hunger and desire.
It needs, like a fid­dler, to be saved
but if I dare to climb the stairs
it will not be embraced; it will snarl
and growl and claw my hands reaching
out for it. We shall be awake all night,
it scream­ing and screech­ing on the roof
for me weep­ing on the edge like a cat
on a hot tin roof wait­ing for the strings.

~

Confidence

I con­fide in the piano the things that I some­times want to say to you.”
—Frédéric Chopin, in a let­ter to his lover Tytus Woyciechowski.

We have shared a bed for more than thir­ty years
I nev­er shy to whis­per love to the back of your neck
as we make that love, to your wel­come steady snores,
lips to lips before we kiss, aloud as you serve culinary
mas­ter­pieces or after you play one on the piano,
but I haven’t writ­ten a line that declares my ardor
since we met and part­ed and ached to meet again
and did till now. I have con­fid­ed in my keyboard
your night­mares, your delu­sions, your paranoia,
depres­sion, and daymares—these ter­rors I can
nev­er say to you because my words exacerbate,
and all these poems in which you fig­ure live abroad
for anony­mous afi­ciona­dos of lit­tle jour­nals while you
stay nescient to them. Will you read this love poem?

~

Our Father’s Garage

Our father’s garage was his Eden,
not Eden to his Adam, but Eden
to his Godhead, orga­nized by his
every word and desire. Unlike our
mother’s clos­ets that avalanched
tow­els or Tupperware when we
opened them, our father’s garage
cab­i­nets revealed labeled drawers
con­fig­ured to their con­tents. More
daz­zling to my young eyes: the
vast peg­board where Father fixed
screw­drivers in ring tool holders,
pli­ers in U‑hooks, paintbrushes
from J‑hooks (my favorite because
it was my ini­tial), and a bracketed
shelf where col­or­ful tapes in balsa
box­es Father fash­ioned with rollers
could be cut at an old hack­saw blade
secured to the edge. Drills, wrenches
and span­ners, saws and axes, snips
and scis­sors, chis­els and files
all had their assigned places and
woe to any child who might filch
a J‑hook or adhere the mask­ing tape
back on itself or bor­row and then
mis­place a ham­mer. No wonder
Father could not bear the chaos
of the out­side world, his wife’s
depres­sions, his elder son’s fondness
for drugs, his poet son’s queerness.
His word dwelled only in the garage.

~

A native New Yorker, James Penha (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fic­tion and poet­ry, his work is wide­ly pub­lished in jour­nals and antholo­gies. His newest chap­book of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is avail­able for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online jour­nal of cur­rent-events poet­ry. Twitter: @JamesPenha