Nat Lipstadt

Nat Lipstadt Apr 2023

“These fleeting temples we make together” (Danusha Lameris^)

they’ve tried to mechanize, machine tool, the kindness business,
since it seems that being kind is no longer intuitive, au naturel,
but you and I can still scratch off the genes rusted shut that
help the elderly who set out to cross the street knowing full well
20 seconds ain’t enough to make over four lanes with a gait that
don’t move giddy up no more, even with a walker or a cane

the city sidewalks are tremulously arrayed with cracks and rough,
mini sized rises, even small hillocks, that we rushabouts rate noticed
until we have been tripped up in a prior excursion in that same spot

a child once ran out of the park onto the avenue, looking distressed,
in a city that’s overloaded with risk and dangerous one doesn’t want to imagine, wife says “something’s wrong,” sure enough a dawdler,
walking home with her dad, looks up and he is not visible; panicked,
who knew that in an a city of millions, where separation is a hell lot wider than five degrees of separation, that she would know my children, and let me walk her home; the father of course, hunting for her in all the wrong places, I walk her home…the mother, semi-stunned, asks how she could ever thank us, was surprised at my answer…”When your husband returns home to confess his misdeed, having lost his child, just greet him without opprobrium and blame,
for he has already punished himself far worse than you ever could…”

it is in the small things that we acknowledge that we are more alike
than not, and we are knotted in a single strand in ways we cannot
always ken, and sometimes, do not want to acknowledge, for this
temple building business is not without risk, but surely it is a structure built of bricks of loving compassion, and essences of goodness, the small kindnesses in our blood cells, that all of us innately possess...

Small Kindnesses

By Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/magazine/poem-small-kindnesses.html

#fleeting #temples #lipstadt

Nat Lipstadt Apr 2023

“not particularly smart”

~for J Donovan Carrasco & Mike Marshall,
two far superior story tellers~

<>

now that I am in my seventh or eight decade,
(not particularly sure when you start counting)
memories bust out like the way flashbulbs POP on olden cameras,
a briefly hellish bright,, illuminating, yet annoying as all get up.

this peculiar flash came to me this morning, don’t know why,
deemed worthy of writing down for no particular reason.

when I was a child in one of those indistinguishable early grades,
my teacher informed my father at an annual parent teacher partee,
that I was “not particularly smart,” which angered him greatly,
for reasons he couldn’t then particularly express clearly, if at all.

He went home undecided whom he had to hide (1),
the teacher or me.

unsure, he was, which was the smarter course of action
(for my mother had passed and he without a consultant),
but informed me, who promptly hid (as in escaped)
in the only place suitable in our tiny house, behind the couch,
that was my mother’s pride an joy.

more tired than angry, he reflected while sitting on said couch
behind which I found refuge from all troubles,
while listening to my breathing/sniffling/panting,
he decided that
perhaps
the teacher was kerrect, and furthermore, I too,
was not to blame,
(told to me years later by his serious drinking bar buddies)

“given the stock he came from, it was less my fault,
and more his.”

3/23/23
nyc

(1j hide as give a hiding, a countable noun, if you give someone a hiding, you punish them by hitting them many times).

#lipstadt

Nat Lipstadt Apr 2023

For Whom Do I Write?

write for the blind and sing for the deaf, be their guide, be their intimate, aid them to escape boundaries, by granting them saws to cut loose binding emotions, share your most intimate courage

for we are all blind and deaf without poetry…

#lipstadt

Nat Lipstadt Apr 2023

how to love a poem…

if the hearts skips rapping beats in a pausing arrhythmia,
loving the twist of each verbal panache,
eyes pooling, temperature rising,
the world sudden surroundings turns vibrant colors,
you judge a poem lovely, lovingly, fulsomely,

anything else,

and you’ve not yet learned how,
to love

anything,

April 9, 2023
NYC

#lipstadt

Nat Lipstadt Apr 2023

so many women~poets have I loved

so many women~poets have I loved

my occupation undisguised,
my intentions opaque~opposite,
my profession, lover

they,
most know, some suspect, a few clueless,
despite clear sky mountains of hints,
fastest currents of verbal affection

you scoff, think me old~poet~foolish,
know my loving has taken me to
every continent,
subway & metro, English gardens, Canadian planted fields,
my offers of shoulders, gentlest hands,
accepted and kindly re~fused, but still,
yet loved

grasping their words, parsing their phrases,
uncovering their remorse and spiced joys,
their gains, and losses, shared conjoined
the curl of a hair lock, the shape of the eye…

entrapment by poems of enticing whimsy delicious,
for it is in the well of their poems that my love,
born, thrived, drowned and died

something in the way they wrote, delicacies
plucked and ****** me in, the insight inside scraps
of life glories and sadness proffered,
that I loved,
broke me

oh fool, oh fool, how dare you cross the Styx
river~boundary of common sense, allowing hope to infect,
phantasies and poems inspired, conspired, died?

so
much more to tell, but nothing herein to be consummated,
I loved them with a purposed seriousness of imagination,
and only write this today after years of adventures,
because I no more…possess the powerful skills of
imagining loving

early April 2023
NYC

#lipstadt #womenpoets

Nat Lipstadt Apr 2023

19.4% lesser

tattoo ourselves in electric ink memorializing calendars,
diaries of observantional digits, black on white, no gray,
birthdays, anniversaries, dates of passing, starting lines,
occasional achievements, departure dates, even glaring failures,
sundial mundane records of diurnal habitude…even
defining self by, bye, byte marks upon flesh, upon our calendar

not my first trip-tracking, he ruefully rues, wry smiling,
many voyages of indeterminate measuring length,
leaving litter of arrays of hopeful estimations & destinations,
each unequal, any or all possibilities, each day notated,
without critique or commentary, the numbers are the
gaols (jails) of goals, target, indeterminate determination,
terrific, horrific, introspections, inverse images resolve, resolute

a year ago, +/- a few days,, new travelogue commenced,
notated but not annotated, just numerical truths,
(sans comments for the divine nature of numbers don’t lie)
and today my calculator app informs, that I am now
19.4 % lesser, but that clarifies less than expected

naturally this provokes a natty,
spirited, self-inquiry, lessened,
lessor, for better or for worse?
have the physical alterations
accompanying this reduction
mean exactly what,
if, it should be, a greater lesser?

here is the hard part.

your have always been a mirror~poet,
laughing, bemoaning the unvarnished, unshaven
AM sightings of a human perpetual dissatisfied,
the external never denying the interior “less~than,”
a J Peterman catalogue of weathered ****** expressions,
counter-parted by multiple Venn diagram intersections,
of experiential labeled bits & pieces of emotional empirical
less than good, not even close to perfect, so now that I am

gaunt, spare, lean, grayed, narrower, again ruefully rue,
the even more visible truth reflection eye~hidden:

I,
am the sum of the weight of my history, my deeds,
my disbeliefs, murderous deeds, weak choices
and that hasn’t changed nary an ounce, no matter
many times examined, indeed I am forever a lesser man,
there, internal infernal
too…

early April 2023
NYC

#lipstadt #lesser

Nat Lipstadt Apr 2023

(Un)Countable Nouns (comment by T.S. Eliot)

“Countable nouns can be counted, e.g. an apple, two apples, three apples, etc. Uncountable nouns cannot be counted, e.g. air, rice, water, etc. When you learn a new noun, you should check if it is countable or uncountable and note how it is used in a sentence.”

“countable nouns” goes ding ding in the left-side-brain receptors,
where the write side is humbly aboded, unbounded, and well-recv’d,
countable nouns not simplistic apples, the mundane, not sweet, crisp,
important stuff like sins and dreams, lies and schemes: life alterations!

a single sin, two sins, then three, soon you’re another noun, a sinner,
a dream, two dreams, three, teach labels you a serial day-dreamer,
it takes just one little lie, be well on your way to a pants-on-fire-liar,
a get-rich-quick-scheme forms a life long persona, dastard schemer!

methinks these self-adjectives deserve a special denomination, for my
sins, lies, dreams and schemes are uncountable countable nouns!
they are a class of biological, taxonomic things, living and breathing,
a singular genus, many species, like slime molds of human characteristics

you don’t believe I’m a scoundrel, here is not the place to list,
each action/no action curse-courses animating suppressed brain cells,
when the lids close, the enumeration of sins & deeds, all sheep,
vivid colored, injured pointed hooves, silent screamed reslaughtered,
confession offers no solace, until someday the sticking point of the right brain actually resolve the misdeeds, undoing stabbings, healing

time to quit the confessional, no beads or Hail Marys will ever suffice, elides the wrong religion and mine done don’t lets you off so easy,
no siree…no siree…
even a few miscreant visions, originate from childhood indifferent…

perhaps you tire of my self-flagellate:

**these deeds, actions, some remediable, but not all, and these 50 years on, my palpitations fiercest knowing, that they are now
uncountable countable nouns!

April 2023

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.”

T.S. Eliot
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

#lipstadt #uncountable #nouns