Poetry

In further preparation for my grand exit
I dispose of material things
That once had value to me
And still do
A seventy-year-old
4 x 7 weathered fake-leather
Zippered autograph book
From public school 95
In the Bronx
An archeological time capsule
From the first half
Of the last century
Having survived wars, moves, and fires
Filled with empty limerick poems
from prepubescent classmates
comprised of red rose and blue violet couplets
And the hearty toast from my eighth grade English teacher,
Who like my mother thought
I had the potential to better conjugate verbs if only I paid attention.

I dispose now of high school trivia:
A senior pin.
The 1958 yearbook.
It is inconceivable anyone might care about this detritus
Rather it is in the mind
Where anything of substance remains
and there is no need to throw any of that away
As if one could.
I wrote my first poem
On assignment in freshman English
And I know the words to that poem verbatim
Sixty-eight years later
Worth exactly nothing o’er these decades
Except to me.
That I now throw into the fire. 

I cast away a trove of my uncle’s World War II bounty

Military orders handwritten on parchment

Photographs of shamed collaborator women

  being paraded naked down the screaming streets

Next to letters of commendation

Nazi medals

Sewing kits. Bootie.

Jingoism and heroism on display.

With old correspondence

And letters from abroad.

He was in the psychological warfare unit,

Aide and driver to the Unit Commander.

I so admired the smell of his shaving cream

And cigarette smoke

mixed with the aroma of his morning

ablutions and eliminations

There

Next to the jeep

With the beautiful French women

Never married

Nor producer of offspring.

Who care that he served with valor

This unknown soldier

Absolutely anonymous

To all but me and a few cousins

One who turned a starter postage stamp collection

Into books upon books filled with cancelled postage stamps

Worth exactly nothing these decades later

Except to me

That I now throw into the fire.

Whispering among the gods
Sounds like the buzzing of a beehive,
like tides,
like Bach.
There is an urgency to godly whispering
To the call to the colors
To the nectar.

Whispering with the gods
I noticed the god within me
And jarred by this recognition
I sought my own meaning
among the gods.

After news of the tragedy arrived
The Tibetan prayer flags waved in the breeze
As they always do
And a hummingbird came to hover
Inches from my face
Reminding me – as if I needed further evidence –
of the need to prepare
for the long journey
by feeding on the sweetness of life
whenever and wherever we can,
always aware,
like the hummingbird,
that we are mere hours from starvation or death,
grateful we can store enough energy  
to respond when our houses need cleaning
and when it is time to move on.
The fact is that doors have closed,
and will close.
The question is,
where will we find the strength
to explore the doors now opened.

Long ago, perhaps yesterday
Her visit exposes the soft underbelly
of the large, terrified animal
who rolls over on his back
like an infant in a crib
to let her rub him.
Long ago,
perhaps yesterday.
A man still at war
with himself,
his feelings,
neediness,
his country.
This close to losing
and this close to winning.
Maybe even having won.
Either way it’s a gift to be playing
and a privilege to be sharing

She loved the sea

to sail on skin of ocean

to skid the surface

in quiet ripples

moving with aid of wind

no fish or bird

more buoyant.

He loved the dark of woods
trees young and old
to bend or lean upon
rustle of leaves
hint of other creatures
of mystery
without horizon.

She liked the silence

solitude

the play of elements

the heart of sun

colors brightened

fall of day

a peaceful harbor

to lie upon.

He liked the beach

stone and shell

the warmth of sand

beneath his feet

connected from solid to solid

to float and not to sink

to drift but not to drown.

As tide and shore

they lost their sense

of edges and beginnings

as each the other touched.

Not ship nor gull

they glide and wait

willow to starboard, mate.

B R Taub – June 1980

I go to baggage claim a few days early

To wait for you

I check the message board

But your day of arrival

Is not yet listed

Although your flight number appears

So I practice

My song of meeting and greeting.

A vast array of old

And sculpted

Infantile and exhausted

Gather at the carousel

To listen to the music

And watch the spinning containers

In all their many mesmerizing shapes and colors.

People reunite with their belongings

Loved ones come to greet them

Anxiety is resolved

Hope and trust renewed

I witness this

Strangers lifting stranger’s luggage

Faces scanned

In the hopes of recognition

And look for you

But no one is as beautiful

And no one runs to greet me

So I study well how it is done

What happens to the eyes

When luggage or a loved one is recognized

The use of the hands

In waving and greeting

In pointing and grasping

How lips part and join

The sight of folks leaving together

A sense of mission accomplished

And lives to be lived

Good things happen at baggage claim

I have witnessed this

And in that joy

I await you.

When I love myself
I am small and thoughtful
And don’t use much space
Or oxygen.

I am a man who listens well
When I love myself
And then am critical of my narcissism,
My need for attention and affirmation,
The immense amount of work it takes me
Just to keep this tall, fumbling man with bad manners
And nose hair
Alive and safe.

The impact of truths exposed
Will not always be pleasant or good.
Appraising one’s self-criticality
Is not always pretty
All of which makes self-love a challenge
But commends the object of the man’s affections
To high self-regard for his honesty.

when spring arrives

the ice flows out of the bay

but the dead dolphin does not.

something is eating him,

portions of his tail gone,

a fin.

a creature with sharp claws

has opened a gash in dolphin’s soft underbelly

from which still red entrails fall

onto flattened marsh grass

and what was once beautifully poetic

turns macabre,

frightening,

disintegrating,

the promise of resurrection eradicated

in the reality

of what remains,

and what remains

is what is never more,

in spring,

when the ice flows out.

1.
Reunion – a coming together after separation
Of those who have a shared experience.
That would be us.

2.
There are many reunions, of course,
An island in the Indian Ocean,
An arena in Dallas,
There’s Reunion the software program
Reunion the screenplay by Harold Pinter
Reunion, a book of poems by poet laureate Fleda Brown,  
Reunion, the steamy novel of bondage and sexual erotica by Laura Antoniou
Reunion the TV show
That follows close friends after high school
Each episode a year in their lives
A mystery of love and loss, marriage and death, triumph and scandal,
The hopes and dreams of 18-year-olds
and the realities that mark their lives decades later.
And perhaps winner of best “Reunion” overall,
the song by Jimmy Webb,
With the lyrics:
“In the mathematics of the soul,
When we’re together
We each feel whole.”

3.
Our union begins at the rectangular city block
Carved into what was once a hilltop meadow in the Bronx
Bounded by Creston Avenue and Morris Avenue
184th Street and Field Place
And the building placed on the meadow
Created nearly a century ago
By craftsmen from a different millennium
Morphed into the Bronx HS of Science
Now the Elizabeth Barrett Browning Junior High School
Near the Grand Concourse
Modeled after the Champs-Elysees
Near a deli named Boxers
A little luncheonette
And a billiard parlor
Where I learned the first proposition of Einstein’s theory of relativity
“Time equals money.”

4.
Each one of us here today
More or less as we were there then,
A composition of fifty trillion cells
A mass of genetic nuclei
The energy producing mitochondria
The cytoplasm
(Who says I didn’t learn anything at BHS,
even if I graduated 703rd out of 746 graduates?)
To be intelligent may be a boon,
Said Henry Miller,
But to surrender without reservation,
Is also one of life’s supreme joys.

5.
So what did we intelligent Science graduates surrender to?
To love, of course
To children
And grandchildren
To pets
To careers
To the folly of our egos
To the search for peace
Interior peace
Familial peace
Peace in the wars with our neighbors
Peace in the wars with our parents
Peace in the wars raging inside ourselves.
Attaining peace,
Now there would be a reunion.

6.
In 1958 our class president, Phil Lilienthal,
Won election on a platform asking,
“How will you know what you want
Until you get it?”
Have we gotten what we want yet?
Phil runs a camp in Africa for teens confronting AIDS.
Ask him.

7.
Did you know that Stokely Carmichael,
“Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party
Who personally helped raise the number of registered Black voters in Loundes County Alabama from seventy to 2,670 in the summer of 1965,
Who I personally threw down the stairway from the fifth floor lunchroom in 1957 and later became allied with
was a Science graduate?
What a different path than our own Bill Taubman: Russian history scholar, biographer, winner of a Pulitzer Prize Award,  
And Susan Gilbert Levine – Science HS class of 58 historian, scholar, eternal cheer leader, winner of the Elmer’s Glue Award
Or Angel Martinez, social activist and environmental visionary – who personally asked that I send his love today.
Robert Reeback, fine artist and painter.
John Burke, philosopher, pianist, railroad engineer, union man.
Captain Steve Sperman, once Brigade Adjutant of the 4th Army Division, a Jewish kid from the Bronx being saluted by German officers, a man who did what he believed was right: duty, honor, country.
You know we had three sets of twins in our class:
Jack and Fred Mazelis, Judy and Paulette Lambert,
And Constance and Cleonis Golding, now Elaine and Ellen Golding
Their home in Harlem a hub for friends and neighbors
Their family always generous with their time and compassion
As Ellen and Elaine are, to this very day.

8.  
Listen to Ralph Berest Bennett, physician, healer, our valedictorian, who said at our graduation, “Let go of insistence on perfection.  Be open to what life brings you – it is full of wonderful surprises.”
Or Marcia Klaster, our class salutatorian, who went on to teach biology at Bronx Science who said, “Work and love are what really matters.”  

Work and love are what really matters …

9.
That’s what Liz Scoletis, co-captain of our cheerleading squad, Dean at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, whose sons attended our alma mater, also said, “Interesting work is the most seductive of all obsessions.”  The most seductive of all obsessions?  Maybe only at the Bronx H.S. of Science do cheerleaders say that.  But then again, what more is there really to say?    

10.  
More than that, my classmates, whatever marks we leave are no more than footprints awaiting the next tide,
That we were traders of oxygen for carbon dioxide, which made some plants happy,
The throwers of balls which someone caught,
The kisses we blew which someone bought
The things we learned, the things we taught
We’ve spun our tales
We’ve called the bet
Our lives were precious
They are still yet
There was a school
Built in the Bronx
Where we learned Science
From hacks and wonks
Where we made friends
Where we found love
The plus the minus
The hawk the dove
A full half century
These fifty years
Of joy and sorrow
Of smiles and tears
You see my friends
The planet’s spinning
And all of time has no beginning
And since that’s true (how else can it be?)
There is no you, there is no me
There are our lives
The biosphere
The large, the small
That we hold dear
There was a time
Within our line
When you’d your life
And I had mine
We’ve known the small
We’ve known the great
There was a class
Science ‘58

Come my friends let us continue the conversations we have yet to begin.

© Bruce R. Taub