Bill Roberts, Poet

Cruising On the Hudson

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

At one time I was gainfully employed

on Hudson Street on the eighth floor

of a building housing Oakite Products,

an old-line company that produced soaps

and metal-finishing chemicals,

my first and only job in New York.

The Hudson River was one block west,

and often at lunchtime I’d grab a sandwich

at a deli and walk over to see the ships

just in from or, more entertaining, getting

ready to cast off for European destinations.

I’d board some of those ships, unabashedly,

make my way into state rooms and join in

lavish parties, consuming canapes and

bubbly drinks, join in merriment with

the well-heeled travelers and their guests,

me an interloper who didn’t have enough

gumption or wherewithal to stay aboard,

visit far-off lands, extend my liberal education.

Instead, I heeded the warning bell that

sounded for us landlubbers to go ashore,

back to work, continue our humdrum lives.

That was in the early Sixties when Ethel

Merman was on Broadway in “Gypsy”

and the astounding “Threepenny Opera”

played nightly at Theatre de Lys in the Village.

Never would I have imagined an airplane

landing on the scabrous Hudson River to save

the lives of all aboard from disaster – the water

was for boats, not commercial airliners.

Thank goodness for the Hudson – it provided

me many noontime pleasures.  And it

saved the lives of a hundred and fifty folks

who hadn’t signed on for a river cruise.

(Published in the 2009 issue of MOBIUS:  The Poetry Magazine and nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize)

Note:  This is a true story, from beginning to end.  We, Irene and I, moved to New York from D.C. after a visit in 1959 when we saw both “Gypsy” and the incredible “Threepenny Opera,” the latter perhaps the best musical event of my life – magic!  We transferred ourselves in the fall of 1960, living in a lovely brownstone house (the equivalent of two rooms) at 68 Perry Street in the Village, a great place to live.  Too expensive, so we packed up and moved to a rent-controlled apartment on the eighth floor of another great building at 35 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights.  Our view was of the lower Manhattan skyline and further north, the great city right out our windows.  And all the ships coming and going, mainly sleek cruise liners but also enormous battleships and aircraft carriers, seemingly right below our windows.  A thrilling time to be in New York, but after three years we decided to move to Colorado.  Another of our smart choices in life.

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Gambler

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

My mother loved the tinkle

of the nickel falling

through the slot

the tug of the steel arm

as she pulled down

with deliberation

the dizzying whirr

of the three drums

rotating so madly

the chink, chink, chink

as they suddenly

bounced to a stop

then the silence

that followed

for she’d closed her eyes

waiting for the rattle

of coins falling

into the winner’s tray

or more often

the longer silence following

the immediate silence.

Note:  Mom usually played the nickel slots at broken-down North Beach, Maryland, where we’d vacation one week every summer, its water as nasty as the decayed town itself.  But there was magic of a sort.  What was it?  Well, for us kids it was the adventure of just getting away from home, driving all those miles (40 maybe), and camping in another person’s rooming house.  A whole week away!  Mom never brought any money back from the slots, but she did well at other gambling investments.  Her dime-a-day habit of playing the numbers (3-1-4 her favorite combo) about once a year netted her three hundred dollars in cash from Whitey, the old one-eyed numbers runner for the local mob.  About $13 to make $300 is a pretty fair return.  Too bad she didn’t have a dollar a day to play.  But so it goes.

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B Movies

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

We used to sneak in

to see movies

that weren’t worth

sneaking in to see.

The usher wouldn’t bother

to turn his head

because his eyes were closed,

having seen the movie before.

Those dull strips of celluloid

were turned out overnight

by industrious people

in far-off Hollywood.

They depicted the lives

of those of us

with so little sense

we’d sneak in to see ourselves.

Note:  We’re talking 1940′s here.  We’d pay to see the cowboy double-feature Friday nights at The Savoy on 14th Street near Columbia Road, often packing our six-shooters.  When the cowboys started firing at the bad guys, we’d unholster, fire our cap guns along with them, creating such a din inside the moviehouse, we’d have to scramble along the sticky floors to another seat, with the huffing, puffing ushers in futile pursuit.  Those episodes usually eclipsed the predictable events in the movies starring old-time favorites, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy and Dale, the Cisco Kid, the Durango Kid, Bob Steele, and especially all the good guys who didn’t sing those yippy-ki-yoo-ki-yea tunes.  But all those B movies – so dreadful.  Why pay to go see ourselves?  But the movies….a release from boredom, and so very important in my early life.

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How Poor Were We?

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

So poor the mice scampered next door

for three squares a day

and didn’t hurry back,

afraid they’d be eaten.

No, we couldnt even afford a stray cat.

We dressed in each other’s

hand-me-down clothes – threads

by the time they got to me.

My best friend was a skinny cockroach,

too weak to crawl to the neighbors.

We told each other bedtime tales -

his about crumbs, mine about delusions.

A teacher threatened to send me home

one day when I fell asleep in her class.

She relented when I told her my folks

had sent me off as their only hope.

I was so thin I fit in the pencil sharpener,

couldn’t slap chalk from the board erasers.

Then, the miracle meat Spam was discovered.

A cure?  If only we’d owned a can opener.

(Published in the Fall 2005 issue of the Parnassus Literary Journal)

Note:  Hyperbole?  Of course.  Or was it?  We were poor, but in those days, the late Thirties and early Forties, almost everyone was poor.  We just didn’t know we were, all of us pretty much lookalikes in the neighborhood.  One advantage I and my siblings had over most:  we ate well each day, our mother a wonderful cook, Dad the provider.  Our days often started with a huge mound of boiled rice, topped with butter, salt, pepper and crunchy bacon rolled into bits with our hands.  An Oklahoma luxury, we were told.  Got us going in the morning, sustained us throughout school hours.  Oh, yes, we did befriend the cockroaches and mice, all non-paying boarders in Mom’s boarding house.  Seemed to go with the territory there in D.C.  All of us survived tough times, mice and roaches included.

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Swept Clean

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Bring back old men with their gnarly

whisk brooms, just twigs tied together,

old black men bent in the gutters

sweeping the detritus of their fellow men

whose tasks were nobler perhaps

though they cast off their refuse

that gave thse humble men jobs once,

performed nobly, quietly, decently

and far more efficiently than the monster

machines that replaced them at enormous

cost to taxpaying refuse distributors

like you and me, who wouldn’t stoop

to such a job as those men performed

in days gone by when we took them

for granted with their arthritic hands and

deformed brooms that swept so clean.

(Published online in the November 27, 2008 issue of Mannequin Envy)

Note:  A pure nostalgia poem, remembering the early mornings when pal Rodney Miller and I sold newspapers – The Times Herald and The Washington Post – on opposite street corners at 18th and Columbia Road in N.W. District of Columbia.  After selling out, pocketing about two bucks in jingly change each, we’d run off to junior high school, arrive sweaty but happy.  One of my fondest memories – so very many, so fortunate I was – were the distinguished, quite handsome black men who unerringly swept the gutters all about us clean as a whistle.  They never spoke, that I recall, just went about business like the busy business folk who bought our papers.  What a cast of characters each weekday morning, from sleepy prostitutes to a dignified Supreme Court member.  None were finer though than the street cleaners.  Progress isn’t always measured with the right tools – those old guys really got the gutters clean.  God bless ‘em.

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The Never Again Lady

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

I’m in love with a raven-haired woman

I saw in a movie not long ago.

She visits me frequently in sleep, seeking

my protection.  It was an amateur movie,

made by professional killers during a war,

depicting life, or the moments before

the end of life, at one of their camps

of concentration outside Germany.

This lovely woman was completely

naked, visibly terrified, attempting pitiably

to cover her breasts and black pubis.

I was mesmerized by the jumpy scenes,

stunned by the basic cruelty one people

could inflict on another, represented by

this lovely lady, beautiful even in her silent

horror, though scream she must have -

no sound accompanied the jittery footage.

The theater where this and similar films

play wasn’t a modern plex of theaters but

the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

I confronted many horrors that sweltering day:

a ghastly-blue cattle car in which Jews

were transported, piles of old shoes,

rumpled clothing, broken eyeglasses,

and a haystack of multicolored hair,

handwritten letters questioning why

such horrors were happening, so much else

incriminating the perpetrators of so many

vile and indescribably savage acts.

I’m not sure if you’d care to visit this sacred

place that commemorates mankind’s atrocities.

Certainly the movie of that lone lady would

haunt you as it does me so many nights.

Yes, I love her, though we never met.

I miss her terribly, weep at her loss.

(Published in the Spring 2005 issue of Main Street Rag)

Note:  Our visit to the Holocaust Museum in the summer of 2003 was a deja vu event much like our first sight of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem in summer 1993 – staggering in its emotional impact.  Permitted the time now in retirement to sit and think back, it’s still hard to imagine how people – mainly the Germans but also their collaborators and supporters (many hidden behind masks of innocence) – could muster so much hatred to wantonly kill people so horribly as they did.  You have to pause and reflect:  those villains were human, highly cultured, advanced thinkers, yet they practiced a mass murder tirade the likes of which defy any reason whatsoever.  And today, we find those who, likemindedly, say it, the Holocaus, never happened.  Oh, my.  To those I say, visit the Museum in D.C., see for yourselves….if you dare.  The woman I describe in the poem was very real, still visits me on occasion.  Try as I might, alas, I can offer no protection.  It’s too late.  Best I can do is remember, as all good people must.

Posted in Human Nature, Love, Movies, Nostalgia, Prejudice, War | No Comments »

When Dinahshore Roamed

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

Her delicate bones

Are barely settled,

But once she roamed

This diminished planet,

Eating its veggies

And fruits and nuts

And the occasional cheeseburger,

Singing its praises

To the sky,

From peak to peak,

Shore to shore,

This talented

And now extinct Dinahshore,

So perfect God made only one.

It’s been tough going

Since you left, Dinalshore,

But, if it pleases you,

I’m still seeing the U.S.A.

In my Chevrolet….

Though it leaks oil badly.

(Published in the Summer 2001 issue, Issue No. 15, Vol. 7, No. 1, of Rattle:  Poetry for the 21st Century)

Note:  Dinah.  Was there anyone finah?  I’ve just come back from Palm Desert where I studied an old photo on the wall of a 5-star hotel, a picture of Dinah Shore in her golf finery, swinging a driver much like she could swing onstage.  What a beauty.  And what a great representative of this great country of ours – scolding us to see the U.S.A. in a Chevrolet.  Had one once.  It didn’t get me very far before it started leaking oil, chugged a death rattle, and stopped in the middle of M Street in D.C., zillions of motorists all about me screaming to get the hell out of their way – they still had plenty to see in the U.S. of A.

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Wild West

Friday, December 11th, 2009

It takes practice

to ride a cactus.

City slickers

feel the stickers.

Real cowgirls and cowboys

don’t make the OW! noise.

They ride ‘em hard,

never get scarred.

You too can ride….

if you have a tough hide!

(Published originally in the wonderful children’s magazine, Cricket, quite a few years ago when I used Bartlett Boswell as my pseudonym)
Note:  I often use this poem to warm up an audience when I recite.  To get them in the mood, I suggest they imagine themselves as six-year-olds again, wearing a cowboy/cowgirl outfit, sixshooter tucked in a sagging holster, staring up at one of those gigantic saguaro types of cactus with its many prickly arms, and the cactus stares down at them, repeating this poem of warning.  Would I enjoy being a kid again, say, just for a few minutes?  Wouldn’t we all?

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Eleven

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

I definitely peaked at eleven:

Harry Truman threw out the first ball

to open the Senators’ season,

I attended my first production of “The Mikado,”

a boarder introduced me to spaghetti

with tomato sauce, cauliflower and one meatball,

the Redskins came back miraculously

from the brink and beat the Cardinals in a doozy,

W. H. Hudson spoke to me in “Green Mansions,”

J. Edgar Hoover let me heft his submachine gun

in his surprisingly cluttered F.B.I. office,

a nice girl named Jane Trilling gave me my first real

kiss that made all my toes wiggle,

I was MVP on our 90-pound football team

that went undefeated with me at quarterback,

Dad gave me my own library card and put the first

ten dollars in my postal savings account,

my older sister taught me to be a confident jitterbugger,

Mom had her ninth and last child,

I tanned that summer without peeling,

and my favorite pitcher, Bob Feller,

came to town and won all three times with his fastball.

It’s been downhill ever since.

(Published first in the July 1999 issue, Vol. 5, Issue 6, of George & Mertie’s Place – defunct)

Note:  I probably borrowed a few months from ages ten and twelve, but who’s counting?  Eleven was a great age, circa 1947, to be a kid growing up in amazing Washington, D.C.  So much going on in my vast little world – pleasures, treasures of people, threats, illnesses always looming, acne, growing pains, slights, delights, fights, but oh the sights.  These days I value the stories of friends who grew up in small towns or on farms – so completely different from my experience! – and I wonder how they would have managed growing up in the big city.  God bless ‘em all, we’re all unique….unless we choose to follow those paid to lead us astray, their way.

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