- Non-Erotic Poetry
- Finding Love in the Arthur Kill
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Jimmy laughs so goddam hard
club soda drips out his nose
when I tell him kill is Dutch for creek
before he pours me a half-pint beer
Da called a dimey, now a dollar
because, Jimmy says, the treasury's flat
here at the Knights of Columbus bar
where Kearny Ave meets Market St.,
and August bubbles up asphalt.
New Jersey Transit empties a load
of colored or Clorox ladies,
and I guess it's got me thinking, Jimmy,
I hope these worn out women
find meaning in the bleaching of
placenta stains instead of the stuff
of ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
at Perth Amboy General Hospital.
Down the street is the Arthur Kill,
not too far from the catwalks and wharfs
at the refinery where Da, he got
his watchamacallit, mesothelioma
when oil tankers rose like Leviathan
all hours of night and secretly spilled
bilge we swam in that looked like mustard
before the state got goddam serious.
Choo Choo, my girl, used to sing
"My Guy" better than Mary Wells did
on hot summer days in a dinghy
next to petrochemical tanks
that looked like cupcakes, Jimmy,
I swear, vanilla bone white ones
sitting in fields where there weren't any trees
but a dock on which an old man once
fishing flipped the finger at us,
Choo Choo, an ovum in her bikini,
and me, a sperm, wiggling her way,
wet and alive in the Arthur Kill.
- COMMENTS
twelveoonealmost 10 years agoStaten Island Baby!
Idda giveit a six or a seven.
I think I commented on this elsewhere. Sadly only a 5 is allowed.
For those that don't know the history of Arthur Kill, it is worth looking up. It was the a huge dump on Staten Island and then closed, it was reopened for the remains of the world trade center and is now a sort of memorial park. Staten Island was once a grave yard for ships and tugs also, it has somewhat been cleaned up.
GM captures SI as it was, so well
Boy, am I glad I read new poems for a change.
Oldbear63almost 10 years agoWho say it needs multiple readings, and it is very evocative. Wonderful dialect and descriptive phrases. Find a lot of my youth in it, in a different setting but with the same toxins and romance. Tinkering is not necessary, Greenmountaineer.
Cleardaynowabout 10 years agoI have read the different versions several times and am pretty sure that I prefer the original in each case – given your explanatory notes anyway.
“uniformed laundry room ladies” seems to clash with the vernacular style of the rest and very slightly impedes the flow.
“fields without any trees” is so evocative that I would not want to lose it. The revised verse seems slightly empty as a consequence of the alterations.
One thing I have come to respect is the pleasure you get from setting riddles. Perhaps you just need to issue explanatory notes, rather like the solution to yesterday’s crossword, for people like me whose brain starts to hurt long before I have any chance of actually solving the riddle.
greenmountaineerabout 10 years agoAuthor2nd stanza edit:
New Jersey Transit empties a load
of Perth Amboy General Hospital
uniformed laundry room ladies,
and their faces got me thinking, Jimmy,
I hope these worn out women
find meaning in the bleaching of
placenta stains instead of the stuff
of ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
4th stanza edit:
Choo Choo, my girl, used to sing
"My Guy" better than Mary Wells did
on hot summer days in a dinghy
next to petrochemical tanks
with a dock on which an old man once
flipped the finger, pissing at us,
Choo Choo, an ovum in her bikini,
and me, a sperm, wiggling her way,
wet and alive in the Arthur Kill.
Finishing the poem with mention of the two fluids a penis produces, urine(waste) and sperm(life), seemed somehow fitting.
todski28about 10 years agoInto this piece that I am still reading before I throw out more detailed comments but this deserves reading multiple times. At the moment I don't agree with cutting the piece back but I need more time on it.
