“Grimy Elizabeth,” Time magazine intones.
This city escaped the race riots,
never quite sank,
and, consequently, never rose.
It's not a town for poets,
you live here,
you work the factory or a trade.
Down the burg, in Peterstown,
Italian bricklayers sit
on stoops, boxes, chairs,
playing poker
Into one a.m.
Drive up Elizabeth Avenue
and you'll hear the salsa music blast
from every window.
Even the potted geraniums dance.
In La Palmita, old Cuban guys sip coffee
from little plastic cups.
They talk politics, prizefights, Castro,
soccer, soccer, soccer.
Our mayor looks like a lesser Mayor Daley;
Smokes cigars, wears loud plaid suits,
the penulitimate used car salesman.
He's been in since '64, a Mick
with a machine.
He's been reelected because he's a consistent evil
and here in Elizabeth, we appreciate consistency.
Half the law of life is hanging out,
hanging on
to frame houses, pensions.
Every Sunday, ethnic radio:
Irish hour, Polish hour,
Lithuanian hour. My father
sits in the kitchen
listening to Kevin Barry.
He wishes he could still sing.
Two years ago, they cut his voice box out:
Cigarettes, factory, thirty years' worth
double shifts.
My fathers as grimy as Elizabeth,
as sentimental, crude.
He boxed in the Navy, bantamweight.
As a kid I'd beg him to pop a muscle
And show off his tattoo.
We are not the salt of the earth.
I've got no John Steinbeck illusions.
I know the people I love have bad taste
in furniture. They are likely to buy
crushed-velvet portraits of Elvis Presley
and hang them next to the Pope.
They fill their lives with consumer goods,
Leave the plastic covering on the sofas
and watch Let's Make a Deal.
They are always dreaming
the lottery number
that almost wins.
They are staunch Democrats who
voted for Reagan.
They are closing, laid off when
Singer's closed,
stuck between chemical dumps and oil
refineries in a city
where Alexander Hamilton
once went to school.
In the graveyard by the courthouse,
lie Caldwells, Ogdens, Boudinots.
Milton is quoted on their graves.
Winos sleep there on summer afternoons
under hundred-year-old elms,
they sleep on the slabs of
our Founding Fathers
and snore for history.
I have no illusions. We belong:
the winos, the immigrants, the prospering
Portuguese with their sweet-looking daughters
marching off to school and leaving
their parents'
broken English behind.
The Irish of Kerry Head have vanished,
but up in Elmora, you can still see
the Jewish families walking
home from synagogue.
They are devout, they are well dressed,
they read the Talmud.
They are not full of sh**.
Twelve years ago I used to go
to the Elmora Theater
with twenty other kids.
It was a rundown movie house that never
got the features ‘til they'd been out a year.
Because the Elmora was poor, it showed
foreign films; art films we didn't
even know were art:
Fellini, Wertmüller, Bergman.
It cost a dollar to get in.
We'd sit there, factory workers' kids,
half hoods,
watching Amarcord, while in the suburbs
they played all the other sh**.
When the grandfather climbed the tree
on Amarcord and screamed,
“I want a woman!”
We all agreed.
For weeks, Anthony Bravo went
Around school screaming, “I want a woman!”
every chance he got.
I copped my first feel there,
Saw Hester Street, The Seduction of Mimi.
Once they had a double feature:
Bruce Lee's Fists of Fury
Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal.
I remember, two hundred kids exploding
when Jack Nicholson choked the nurse
in Cuckoo's Nest.
Sal Rotolo stood up,
tears streaming down his face,
and when they took Jack's soul away,
we all sat there silent.
It lingered with us all the way home,
empty-eyed and sad.
Here in Elizabeth, tasteless city,
where Amarcord was allowed
to be just another flick,
where no one looked for symbols,
or sat politely through the credits.
If Art moved us at all,
it was with real amazement;
we had no frame of reference.
And so I still live here,
because I need a place where
poets are not expected.
I would go nuts
in a town where everyone read Pound,
where old ladies never swept their stoops
or poured hot water on the ants.
I am happiest in a motley scene,
stuck between Exxon and the Arthur k**…
I don't think Manhattan needs another poet.
I don't think Maine could use me.
I'm short, I'm ugly,
I prefer Mrs. Paul's Fish Sticks
to blackened redfish.
I don't like to travel because I've noticed
no matter where you go,
you take yourself with you,
and
that's the only thing I care to leave behind.
So I stay here.
At night, I can still hear mother's yelling,
“Michael, supper! Get your a** in gear!”
Where nothing is sacred,
everything is sacred.
Where no one writes, the air seems strangely
Charged with metaphor.
In short, I like a grimy city.
I suspect culture
because it has been given over
to grants, credentials, and people
with cute haircuts.
I suspect poetry because it talks to itself
too much, tells an inside joke.
It has forgotten how to pray.
It has forgotten how to praise.
Tonight, I write no poem. I write to praise.
I praise the motley city of my birth.
I write
to be a citizen of Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Like a goddamned ancient Greek,
I stand for the smallest
bit of ground, my turf, this squalid city.
Here, in the armpit of the beast.
Tonight, the ghosts of Ogdens, Caldwells, Boudinots walk
among the winos.
They exist in the salsa music
blaring on Elizabeth Avenue.
They rise up and kiss the gargoyles
of Cherry Street.
They are like King David dancing naked
unashamed before the covenant.
Tonight even the stones can praise.
The Irish dead of Kerry Head are
singing in their sleep.
And I swear the next time someone makes
a face, gives me that bit-the-lemon look,
as if to say, My Gawd…How can you be a poet and live in that
stinking town?
My answer will be swift.
I'll kick him in the balls.