There have been more poems in recent First batches, thanks chiefly to Alison Stone whose work and way in the world has brought other poets to us. That efflorescence, in turn, has made me think I should try harder to bring attention to the poetry of my late friend Robert Douglas Cushman. What follows are poems from his book, “The City Among Us.”
Douglas (as he was known to his New York pals) finished final revisions of his book just before the disease that he battled for a decade showed him the Bronx where he died in a hospice in 2003. Douglas thought deeply about the design of his “City.” The poems I’ve chosen below are tuned to this month in the year of our lord 2022 and represent his book imperfectly, but I hope one day a publisher will bring the complete work to the public precisely the way the poet conceived it.
Douglas wasn’t pious, but his book reveals he was a believer. It also shows how much faith he had in the City. Those of us who knew him had a clue there. I first met Douglas in the late ’70s in the West End Bar where he hung out with my brother’s crew. It was a New York bunch. South African exiles, Haile from Ethiopia — who jumped ship to swim to America knowing only pidgin phrases for food (chop-chop) and sex (zug-zug) — his Jewish wife Margo, her Dominican homegirl Maria, my brother’s Italian- and Irish-American comrades from the P.O., my hometown buddies finishing up at Columbia who soon realized a chat with Douglas was worth a year with the professors.
A true intellectual whose mind couldn’t be confined by any academic discipline, Douglas had a world view — a stance that shaped his approach to language and life (“diminish yourself in what you see”). He was often intense, but he could be easy too. Douglas was that rare Keatsian kind who lived for the sociable (not the glamorous) life without ever taking up all the air in the room.
When our West End crowd faded away, Douglas found new friends to invite to lunch in ungentrified Upper West Side diners where he’d (religiously) order a burger and a coke, buying the right to converse in public for hours. Over the years, his son Mathew inspired him to cultivate a thousand ways to be fully in New York (though it became harder for him to share his pleasure in the streets and parks and libraries and museums once he became ill). When Douglas realized he would have to leave his family and his City against his will, he faced the awful — that was one of his words and his poetry makes it sacred — truth. It’s there in the last lines (appended to a note on the last poem) of “The City Among Us,” which distance Douglas from his son Mathew and his playmates.
Tossing a ball,
Mathew and Dalton and Eddie
run farther from me.
And farther still.
………….
Fireworks At The Millennium
With great booms
the darkness opened into globe thistles.
They arose and disappeared
everywhere above the river.
Squeezing in at the railing,
we celebrated our time as a city.
At his first fireworks
he covered his ears and cried
his mother and I teased.
He’d grown more patient now
with our stories.
As our son left to join his friends,
I wondered if our love for him
was like his eyes.
Evolving from the darkness,
they see what was always there.
………….
Sundays
She wheeled her across the boardwalk
away from the smells of disinfectant
and uncleaned patients.
Her sister believed the casino
looming over them
was filled with women in long dresses
and possibilities always closed to her.
She knew it as the place
where the women from the bus
redeemed the vouchers
for the trip down from the city
and filtered to the slot machines.
For a few hours she and her sister
listened to the water
while the day washed them clean.
Young people paraded past one another.
A child chased the ocean out
and fled back crying
as the cold water covered his feet.
She threw crumbs from her sandwich
and they laughed as the gulls swooped
and caught them in midair.
She talked in their first language,
and her sister stuttered sounds in reply,
girls standing on the beach
near home.
Watching soaps in a language she no longer understood,
the brusk, spooned feedings,
being wiped off
before her diaper was changed,
the week left her sister’s face.
She looked out the window of the bus
as the old women recounted their losses
and cigarette fumes
filled the air.
………….
A Conversation Among Strangers
We talked about sports and politics and last month’s fire,
and so, again, I might have passed the afternoon
beneath the statue of a girl
who, with averted eyes,
lingers on swells of a beguiled ocean.
But the woman who shared a bench with me
began to recall talks with her son on the way to school,
he now grown and absent.
Others joined in.
The man across from us
told how his mother had passed the early morning
taking up each cold porcelain box
and turning it in her hand.
I remembered Peter,
who, I just heard, died last year.
He and Janey gathered up strays,
and we spent nights in conversations
that kept me from the bench
where I’d watched the reflection
of the Ferris wheel in the water.
I thought there was a city among us.
They walked away
until the woman remained.
“He has put your grief
in His bottle.
It is not in His book?”
We sat together,
not wanting to leave.
………….
The Community Garden
Thistles just opening suggested a wild field.
Hidden beneath them, paths led symmetrically
to a central ring.
Everything in the garden was fit to the design.
Close by, along the sides of a walk,
lots were each assigned a gardener.
At first all had been utter dishevelment.
Colors in commotion, tall cleone stole light
from cymbalaria sprawled on the ground.
But one woman would plant her garden
in reply to another’s,
and the whole began to takes its form
through conversations among themselves.
I visited with an old friend
enjoying the unfinished design.