PETER BAROTH
_____________________
Continental Drift
I'm sitting in the halfway house
for lost European souls
encountering my unconscious.
Each candle flicker in the darkened room
reveals a ghost
a precursor
a lost farmer on the steppes
a lover of books
and horses
and plum wine
and the Gypsy singing
once echoed over the phone
by a centenarian aunt.
It may be time to embrace the ghosts
when the places are gone
and the people are scattered beyond the pale.
[663]
Budapest Moment
The ancient exotic
sex-glutted city
lies curled up
next to the Danube
like a worn-out prostitute.
Here she lies
fetally
among wet ropes of blanket
blinking in the noon light
after a night's arduous tasks.
And here men and women
seek to preserve something sparkling
like a diamond among the fetid coal dust of history.
Scenes of now ancient and obsolete Communist statues
loom like nuclear shadows.
Dreams and nightmares of
dictatorship and emergence,
freedom and escape
appear like the walls and walls of graffitti.
And Arpad looks down upon it all.
Meet a fascist cabbie.
Another one hustling to get ahead
amongst the obscenity
of billboard capitalism
and the Bandstand beat
of a victorious America.
Meanwhile Marylin Monroe
or perhaps Anna Nicole Smith
in Levis caresses herself
with vulgar leer
on parliament steps.
The city alive,
growing, groaning, flailing,
inert, corrupt, beautiful, painted.
Flotsam and jetsam
at the end of Occident
and the beginning of Orient.
Story-spackled neighborhoods.
Places where people were schooled,
worked, hid out, were massacred, survived.
Dined in imperial decadence,
[664]
swam among the dizzying waves
in sensual delight.
Took part in military exercises.
Sat in dessert-laden cafes eating cakes
and drinking absinthe.
Stories countless and filed away
in infinite folders,
yet remembered with Proustian exactness.
A fool's golden paradise
with parchment maps
pointing out exactly where to go.
Looking for the real Hungary,
from Cleveland to New Brunswick, New Jersey
to Budapest to provincial town.
Scuffling gypsy,
sun-aged and brown like the earth,
scrapping to get by.
Body tilted,
hat cocked,
digging ditches
or listening to winds east and west
while selling watches with Lenin hands.
The poets,
exiled, dead,
haunted by spirits of frustration.
And mascaraed women in gauze skirts
disappearing off the next streetcar
and around the next block.
The message is clear:
It's not about how long you live,
it's about how you live.
[665]
Encounter
There was a whole ream of things
I wanted to say to you the night we went out,
but didn't.
Maybe it was your psychedelic pantsuit
that shut me up.
Rescued from God knows where,
a thrift shop maybe.
Or maybe the latest designer.
What a perfect spectacle it made,
riding on your hips.
You, of course, not giving a damn.
Hair casually mussed.
Nose jewelry.
Strung out or between drunks.
I sensed the space between you and me
would never be bridged,
that you were just going through the motions,
that you wouldn't even remember what happened,
even if it was something momentous like the end of the world,
or an undercooked main course.
Me, parting with my money.
You, parting with your ever-loving soul.
So much reality to carve out over dessert.
So little time.
The next day I recalled you as I ate my enchilada
at Marita's on the Main Line
and looked out the window,
vaguely, I'm sure.
So far away from the night before.
Far enough, anyhow.
I wondered about your parents,
your brothers or sisters.
The schools and sentences you never finished.
Your breasts like delicious small candies.
Your pale curves, generous.
Your long legs, thin and sculpted.
Your mind, vaguely bombed out,
yet strangely acute.
Certain things hardly came up at all,
but kept me wondering,
like about the lifeblood of cities,
[666]
about intimacy and alienation,
about the ragged edge of reality I'd fallen onto,
meeting you,
and the relief the first fallen leaf of autumn caused me.
[667]
Recovery
From rain-rotted seeds
the flowers sprouted magenta petals,
and I think the song I heard
on a dowager street years ago
will be the top ten hit of tomorrow.
There I saw the twisting green stems
grow through the cracks
when fungus was all that seemed to survive the drenching rain.
And I smelled the spiced Ethiopian sauces
and the mingled breath of South and East,
heard stories of the future and faraway nebulae,
which somehow carried an ineffable truth.
Saw students come and go,
taking their gestures and knapsacks with them
and heard stories of fleet-fingered artistes of
drums or dance--then saw them in action
alongside the deft mechanics of the night,
and I joked in hybrid cadences
with still Celtic bartenders
and tasted spirits of the South,
guiding me down to the rich humus of the delta.
And that whirling world still whirls,
from fifties Pontiac migrations,
to sixties disc jockeys
and more recent rages against prevailing winds,
sights and sounds produce
a lotus fashioned out of a Peckinpah showdown.
"In America it's either a bullet that stops you
or you're sucked up in a cyclone," someone told me.
To die of old age is to betray a code--
to have failed in the good life.
And it still whirls.
Run to the fringes of the city.
Fashion a house in a bucolic county.
Consider all else a forbidden world;
but it still goes.
Like an old Porsche
sitting on blocks,
kissed by November leaves,
replace one hose and you'd be back out
[668]
on the streets,
showing up cops with the speed.
"It has to go," you think.
It has to go.
It must go.
Though one thing is unmistakable:
you can't just pretend it never existed.
[669]
Shades of Night
That fearsome pipeline
on the way downtown,
everything melts there.
The line between good and evil,
between now and then,
between love and the precipice
we all eventually tumble down.
Damn it all
and let it flow
like bad whiskey down a river.
Walking, walking now,
the vertigo growing
with every movement.
Philadelphia secret
told to no one,
only slurred in dreams,
good and bad.
Dreams like roller coasters
heading down and in
and down again.
Bottomless pits of ecstatic landscape
whisper into my ear
that these streets will one day disappear;
that the contradictions will only come
from a distance--
a movie screen away,
when they get too close,
I'm nauseated by the flagrant beauty of it.
I hear the Indian married
a girl from coal country
and they lived happily ever after.
I hear the jock from out West
married an actress from the suburbs.
I hear of a house
without risk or responsibility,
of choreographed license
and creeping pleasures.
Surrender now
to the rushing flow.
It's the only thing
between you and destruction.
[670]
The Gnarled City
The St. Louis humidity,
lingering from April to September,
now wafts over me
as I walk down the sidewalk
in a dream.
As I drive down the corridors
of its too narrow blocks
and earthy overripe red brick buildings
faintly Gallic
and reminiscent of the strains
of a lonely Middle-American Blues
wafting out of the windows
and through the alleys,
a cry of injustice rolling
down the incline and into the river,
down, down to the distended Delta,
across incomprehensible expanse.
Or down I-40
through Oklahoma plains
and Bonnie and Clyde dirt roads,
around lost Indians in downtown bars and bus stations.
St. Louis, I know damn little of your riverside civilities,
your Catholicism
and faith in culture,
science and industry,
your daily pulse.
No, all I know is a profile of a rowhouse
on an incline,
a shady backyard,
a soccer game in the park,
a century-old Italianate church
and the humidity of a late afternoon.
[671]
The Yearning
I wish I knew what to do
with a degree,
or two.
I wish I could make something
like an airplane or a box,
come home,
wash my hands
and father a dynasty;
read the Bible
and know that the jealous God was with me,
like a tough but kind football coach,
slapping my back even if I missed a kick,
or so.
I wish that I could open my door and
Ann-Margret would blow in with the breeze,
introducing me to soft angles and sheer fabrics
I never before knew--and perhaps a little Swedish,
engaged as we would be on the wool rug,
before the fading fire.
I wish I knew what to do,
having seen what I did
those years
on the giddy corner,
besides convey some wee hour ecstasy
until someone says:
"Yeah, I was tuned to that station once--
a different place and time maybe,"
though then everything might be o.k.
I wish Eros would come to visit me
and everyone who cared enough,
and present us with a Modern or Exotic dance;
anything to introduce the ancient love rituals
here unnamed
and maybe unknown.
I wish the Beat didn't stop years ago,
and would Go On again,
and the time has come for the Birth of the Beat,
the real beat,
here and now;
crescendoing in an explosion
of affection for our fellows.
[672]
The adventure in the dark.
The jiggling Gypsy jewelry.
The Great Leap Forward in the exploration of the evening.
Call somebody up because I won't make it out
at this rate.
Not for quite a while.
Retaking the landscape
with tough but well-mannered Irish rebels
and Cuban girls from New Jersey;
black hair, chiselled ankles and red pumps.
Join the dance.
Re-introduce me to the scatology of
renewal and return
of conga beats
and seamless saxophone solos, spilling like quicksilver
across the gasping shores.
[673]
TV Times
I found myself in a room once
filled with trinkets
wondering what bazaars had unearthed them,
a room so strange,
the thought crossed my mind:
here is a place so far away
it is no longer here,
a time so far afield
it is no longer now,
and a woman stood demurely in the corner
with two drinks in her hand,
then crossed the room
with a slow swaying of skirts
and offered me one.
A slice of mango floated in it.
From somewhere comes a smell of ginger
across this disembodied promontory
across this detached vessel.
Then the sense too, that I had become detached, simmered.
Suddenly--television
a skewed set without an audience
broadcast surfing from Waimea Bay on a cigarette table,
and I suddenly thought: there come the last Americans
down the slope
in and out of the pipeline
a few at least among the Australians.
There come the last Americans
slipping down the lip
and into the white water
scoring big
and making love to the beachfront goddesses
in the evening afterwards,
the kind of girls who read Gertrude Stein all night
and talk back to their social studies teachers in third period
the next day.
Astronauts no longer circle the moon.
Hot rodders and hot doggers are no longer sacrificed
in crazy colonies.
Dick Gregory no longer tells jokes.
A decade of swindle
and Ubermensch ambitions
[674]
and awful energy
and cotton-candy dreams
on main street
like main street never was
at least in my town,
hatched by men and women
afraid first of others
and then of themselves.
Planting fear like seeds
in an infernal garden,
so America started to look like the old
Bandstand in West Philly:
abandoned, graffitied, sitting among chunks of old buildings,
and there are street corners near there where the locals
stand and drink and forget being forgotten
and laugh bitterly
and then there are waveriders
who left the land
to battle themselves
to battle the feeling that says
"no" as the big wave builds,
who now lie longhaired
in their beautiful baby's arms
laughing at the boobs we designed ourselves to be.
[675]
Untitled
In America
you may not get hired
or promoted but
you may get arrested.
Melancholy blocks of wasteland--
walking the hazy streets
some feasting and some dying.
Peculiar adventure
leaving an odd taste in one's mouth.
What is the purpose,
the purpose of this ordeal?
Some feasting and some dying.
I stand amid the strangeness of it.
I walk an uncanny mile.
What is this flavor?
What is this fate?
This odd, raw experience?
I look upon it with child's eyes
and ask--why?
[676]
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