Poems that you love

[Lizzie]

Ode to Elizabeth

"Grimy Elizabeth," Time magazine intones.
This city escaped the race riots
Never quite sank
And, consequently, never rose.

It's not a town for poets.
You live here, you work the factory or a trade.
Down the burg, in Peterstown,
Italian bricklayers sit
on stoops, boxes, chairs,
playing poker
into one a.m.

Drive up Elizabeth Avenue
and you'll hear the salsa music blast from every window.
Even the potted geraniums dance.
In La Palmita, old Cuban guys sip coffee
from little plastic cups.
They talk politics, prizefights, Castro,
soccer, soccer, soccer.

Our Mayor looks like a lesser Mayor Daley:
smokes cigars, wears loud plaid suits,
the penultimate used car salesman.
He's been in since '64, a Mick with a machine.
He's been re-elected because he's a consistent evil
and, here in Elizabeth, we appreciate consistency.

Half the law of life is hanging out, hanging on
to frame houses, pensions.
Every Sunday, ethnic radio: Irish hour, Polish hour,
Lithuanian hour. My father sits in the kitchen
listening to Kevin Barry.
He wishes he could still sing.
Two years ago, they cut his voice box out:
cigarettes, factory, thirty years' worth of
double shifts. My father's as grimy as Elizabeth,
as sentimental, crude.
He boxed in the Navy, bantamweight.
As a kid I'd beg him to pop a muscle
and show off his tattoo.

We are not the salt of the earth.
I've got no John Steinbeck illusions.
I know the people I love have bad taste
in furniture. They are likely to buy
crushed-velvet portraits of Elvis Presley
and hang them next to the Pope.
They fill their lives with consumer goods,
leave the plastic covering on sofas
and watch Let's Make a Deal.

They are always dreaming the lottery number
that almost wins.
They are staunch Democrats who voted for Reagan.
They are working class, laid off when
Singer's closed, stuck between chemical dumps and oil
refineries in a city where Alexander Hamilton
once went to school.

In the graveyard by the courthouse,
lie Caldwells, Ogdens, Boudinots.
Milton is quoted on their graves.
Winos sleep there on summer afternoons
under hundred-year-old elms.
They sleep on the slabs of our Founding Fathers
and snore for History.

The Irish of Kerry Head have vanished,
but up in Elmora, you still can see
the Jewish families walking home from synagogue.
They are devout, they are well dressed,
They read the Talmud.

Twelve years ago, I used to go to the Elmora Theater
with twenty other kids.
It was a run-down movie house that never
got the features till they'd been out a year.
Because the Elmora was poor, it showed
foreign films; art films we didn't know were art:
Fellini, Wertmuller, Bergman.
It cost a dollar to get in.

We'd sit there, factory workers' kids, half hoods,
watching Amarcord.
When the uncle climbed the tree
in Amarcord and screamed, "I want a woman!"
we all agreed.
For weeks, Anthony Bravo went around school
screaming, "I want a woman!" every chance he got.
I copped my first feel there,
saw Hester Street, The Seduction of Mimi.
Once they had a double feature:
Bruce Lee's Fists of Fury with Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal.

I remember, two hundred kids exploding
when Jack Nicholson choked the nurse
in Cuckoo's Nest.
Sal Rotolo stood up, tears streaming down his face,
and when they took Jack's soul away,
we all sat there silent.
It lingered with us all the way home,
empty-eyed and sad.

Here in Elizabeth, the tasteless city,
where Amarcord was allowed to be just another flick,
where no one looked for symbols,
or sat politely through the credits.
If Art moved us at all, it was with real amazement;
We had no frame of reference.

And so I still live here,
because I need a place where poets are not expected.
I would go nuts in a town where everyone read Pound,
where old ladies never swept their stoops
or poured hot water on the ants.

I am happiest in a motley scene,
stuck between Exxon and the Arthur Kill...
I don't think Manhattan needs another poet.
I don't think Maine could use me.
I'm short, I'm ugly, I prefer Mrs. Paul's Fish Sticks
to blackened redfish.
I don't like to travel because I've noticed
no matter where you go, you take yourself with you,
and that's the only thing I care to leave behind.

So I stay here.
At night, I can still hear mothers yelling,
"Michael, supper! Get your ass in gear!"
Where nothing is sacred, everything is sacred;
Where no one writes, the air seems strangely
charged with metaphor.

In short, I like a grimy city.
I suspect Culture because it has been given over
to grants, credentials, and people with cute haircuts.
I suspect Poetry because it talks to itself
too much, tells an inside joke.
It has forgotten how to pray.
It has forgotten how to praise.

Tonight, I write no poem, I write to praise.
I praise the motley city of my birth.
I write to be a citizen of Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Like a goddamned ancient Greek, I stand for this smallest
bit of ground, my turf, this squalid city.
Here in the armpit of the beast.

Tonight, the ghosts of Ogdens, Caldwells, Boudinots
walk among the winos.
They exist in the salsa music blaring on Elizabeth Avenue.
They rise up and kiss the gargoyles of Cherry Street.
They are like King David dancing naked
unashamed before the covenant.

Tonight, even the stones can praise.
The Irish dead of Kerry Head are singing in their sleep.
And I swear, the next time someone makes a face,
gives me that bite the lemon look, as if to say,
"My Gawd...how can you be a poet and live
in that stinking town?"
My answer will be swift:
I'll kick him in the balls.

~Joe E. Weil