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