Autobiographies 3
by Gerard Malanga
Is this #2 or #3? I’ve lost count. Oi, vai!
I never know what I’m gonna do or write about.
Curiosity emotes life’s surprises.
I’ve had a lucky life,
though rarely contemplate its implications. Just as well.
Turning pages made up for those infernal blanks.
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Robert Moses was the first & last as I recall who tabled this remark.
A name that namely goes unrecognized.
Time’s funny like that.
Here one day, gone the next.
The moving pen writes and having writ moves on
at the road’s next bend.
I was always being asked, “Are you still writing,”
as if I were some long-forgotten dinosaur
trouncing its way into now . . . and where is now ?
Where is the past, where was the future?
Where’s my toy dinosaur?
Where, O, where?
The tenses suddenly scrambled, make-believe.
See? That’s a summer dream embedded in the secret language.
Seclusion’s what you make of it.}
Could be walking round the Upper East Side,
or sitting at a desk in the shadow of the Kaaterskills
with a cat leaping in your lap. I remember
as a child the small gentle hands of my dad sewing
long into the night way past my bedtime.
My dreams waiting patiently in the folding darknesses.
Autobiography 1
by Gerard Malanga
I was born at 11 going on 12 with glimmers of a 4-year-old
hanging out with Mr. Rabbit & the hens,
with Romeo my white donkey friend.
He’d nibble at my ears as if whispering something comforting,
encouraging, funny.
I remember having dreams,
and it was like a rumbling ride on the 3rd Avenue El
right up until the end.
And I’d walk up the Fordham Road to the Valentine
and see a double-bill of O’Henry’s Best and The Man Between
with James Mason at his best.
I was a kid who went around talking to myself.
As I grew older not much has changed,
’cept now talking to my cats and in my head they’re talking back.
Is this how I remember things?
A typical mundane dream-like conversation
that would then break into a lilting song-and-dance.
That way of cinematic dreaming was disappearing even then.
My mentors have mostly died. So, too, some friends.
I’m now the only link with my passing past.
Not much else to relate to or confuse.
Not much else but those hidden midnite matinees,
those neons blinking on and off and on.
Where is my muse?
Two Old Sisters
by Francine Witte
The older was the pretty one,
still keeping the secret about long
achy nights with her sister’s husband,
his hand hushed over her breast.
Mornings after, she would want
to confess, but his touch kept her
stupid and too much in love.
The plainer sister knew it
all along. Had lived with it since
twelve years old when the neighbor
boy agreed to kiss her if she’d promise
to put in a good word. She had to accept
that this is how it would always be
and that half was better than none,
better than the lonely life her mother
predicted, leaving her more in the will
to make up for the beauty she didn’t
divide. The older sister had her own
stuff. The abortion, the stack of excuses
she cherished like love letters. She used
to wish her beauty away, thinking
it helped in life to be plain. No one
trusted beauty, not even her, knew
it would up and leave someday
just like her lover, just like her
mother, who favored the plainer sister,
leaving her more, after all, in the will.
And what did it matter anyway?
The two old sisters sitting now
by a window. Evened out by age.
The secrets they are still holding
on to, covering them like a shawl.
Strangers at a party
by Francine Witte
see each other, polar
pull cross a crowded room.
Rhumba beat clicking the air,
crumbled chips on the carpet.
When they reach each other,
someone clucks they’re perfect!
They hear it circling above them
like doves and they start to believe.
Later, they will marry, and later,
still, divorce. No one’s fault,
but at some point, it all went
waterfall. Fertility troubles
or mid-life doubt. No matter.
One night, years later, they see
each other at a party. Cha-cha
on the stereo. Elbows of cigarette
butts on a dish. She in her only good
outfit, the one she wears for blind dates.
He has done better, younger wife, who is
away on business, second baby on the way.
But still, there is something. Memory, maybe
or just the heart’s ticking desire to heal itself.
Whatever it is, his hands go damp. Perhaps
from a sudden rush of nerves, or maybe
from the sweat of his martini glass,
which is also only half done.