and everything turned to blood and mud
and you get covered with blood and rain
and rain and mud
then you come back home again,
come back home and make good in business.
You don’t know how and you don’t know why;
it’s enough to make God stand still and wonder.
It’s something that makes you sit down and think
and you want to say something that’s clear and deep,
something that someone can understand:
that’s why I got to be confidential
and see things clear and say what I mean,
something that’s almost like a sermon,
O world without end,
amen.
When you can’t see things then you get like Nelly
and somebody has to put you out
and somebody has to put you away
but you can always see through Nelly.
She unrolled like a map on the office floor,
you could see her in the dark—
a blind pink cat
in the back seat of the Judge’s car.
But she’d get cold in the Globe Hotel,
singing songs like the Songs of Solomon,
making the Good Book sound immoral
then she’d say she was Mother Mary
and the strength of sin is the law.
World without end
amen.
Gentlemen, I had to fire Nelly,
she didn’t see when a man’s in business,
she didn’t know when a man’s a Christian
you can’t go singing the Songs of Solomon,
shouting Holy, holy, holy,
making Mother of Christ a whore,
cold as rain,
dead blood and rain like the goddam war,
cold as Nelly telling you hell you killed her baby,
then she couldn’t take a letter
but would sit down and cry
like rain.
It got so bad I couldn’t sleep
with her hair and eyes and breasts and belly
and arms around me
like rain, rain,
rain without end
amen.
I tell you gentlemen almighty God,
I didn’t kill her dead baby,
it was the rain
falling on men and girls and cities.
Ask the Judge (he’s got a girl)
about a baby:
a baby wants life and sun, not rain by God that’s death
when you float a baby down the sewer into the
East River with its lips
making foam at the stern of ships
head on for Liverpool in rain.
You can’t see what happens in rain
(only God knows, world without end)
maybe war, maybe a dead baby.
There’s no good when rain falls on a man;
I had to make it clear,
that’s what I wanted to explain.
Selections from
The McSorley poems
by Geoffrey Bartholomew
East Village
(Originally published in 2001)
I sit alone here at night, listening
doors and windows twisted
by McSorley’s heavy sag
everything out of whack
creak and groan of ghosts
they speak, you know
but Woodrow Wilson there
I can’t understand him
he garbles his words
My brother Jerzy’s dead thirty years tonight
we grew up here on 7th Street
St. George’s, God and girls
stickball, cars and beer
then we started the skag
Jerzy shot up first
I was belting my arm
when he sat back
his eyes went real wide
like flooring the Buick
feeling that crazy rush
Bill McSorley up there by the icebox
resembles Teddy Roosevelt
a smaller moustache
timid eyes, sour mouth
really did love his old man
vowed to keep the bar as is
kill time in this real place
now just a face on the wall
the bar a mute witness
to Bill’s doomed love
My favorite relic is the playbill from the 1880s
a windmill and two dutchgirls
on a forlorn spit of land
the ocean a white-capped menace
What Are The Wild Waves Saying?
some March nights it blows
so hard against the windows
I’d swear it’s Jerzy’s voice
Larry, homeless black wraith, taps the window
I make him a liverwurst on rye
some nights he has d.t.s
tonight he’s souful
I fucked up, he says
shoeless, he begins again
his scabrous circle
East Village Odysseus
The ripe nude in the painting back there
I don’t like her much
she knows she’s got it
that mouth of plump disdain
the parrot probably trained
to do weird shit, yeah
they liked that stuff back then
And on every wall this guy Peter Cooper
rich and famous in 1860
John McSorley’s buddy
they say he brought Lincoln here
after some Great Hall speech
that’s real strange, me here
where Lincoln once drank
At night I oil the old bar
there’s a sag in the middle