Robert Cooperman

On the Death of Ernst Hemingway

July 2, 1961, we were driving
to a Catskills bungalow colony,
how Jews who couldn’t afford
even the sleazy resorts vacationed.

Right before static wiped out
our Ford’s radio reception, the news:
Ernest Heminway had killed himself,
my dad gasping, Mom in tears
Dad reaching a comforting hand for hers,
as if it had been her beloved brother,
and not a stranger, who truth be told,
was an anti-Semite.

Just read The Sun Also Rises
and Hemingway’s depiction
of Robert Cohn, who, amid all
the drunks and philanderers,
is the novel’s one real villain.

But I was too young to know that,
and Mom was close to inconsolable,
Dad not far behind; Jeff and I confused
how a stranger could affect them so,

until years and years later, Beth gently
broke it to me that Jerry Garcia had died.

The Price of Fancy Cars

In our apartment house,
Jake’s lawyer father drove a classy
Lincoln Continental that didn’t save him
or his wife from his violent-senility:
the old man institutionalized, in restraints
when his mother visited that one time,
Mr. Silver begging her to pull their car
around for his escape, then snarling
he’d get her for stashing him,

“In this goddamn looney bin!” 

She cringed, then ran, afraid
he’d leap at her, even trussed up
like a rodeo calf, as he had before
she was safe from him: hiding in a closet
or behind a door, raging he’d caught her
with her lover.

A Caddy, our block’s only other fancy car;
it belonged to Ed’s dad, who never drove
that four wheeled opulence; he had men for that,
their suit-pants creases switchblade-sharp,
their stares harder than brass knuckles,
whenever they made deliveries.

One day, his chauffeur drove him away;
he never returned, our parents hissing,
“Don’t ask Edward about his father,”
after the cops showed up with warrants.

 

Mom and Weed

My kid brother, still living at home,
asked me to score him a lid,
which he kept beneath his t-shirts.
Still, Mom, ever the bloodhound,
sniffed out the stash and tossed it.

“I thought it was just dirt,” her lie
evident even to an idiot like me.

“In that case, you owe me twenty bucks,”
I demanded, Jeff not paying me yet.

She just laughed, so I recalled
a few years earlier: I was over for supper,
before the long subway ride to my apartment,
Dad and I watching the Knicks,
he asked, casually as if for a stick of gum,

“You got any of that marijuana?”
My fingers trembled amazement
as I handed over the joint, showed him
how to inhale as if sucking the world
into his lungs, and not the tepid drags
on his civilized, deadly Camels.

The next morning he called, chuckled,
“Your mother and I had a good time,
but don’t give us that stuff again,”
as if the incident were my idea.

In the background, Mom’s silver laughter:
still deliciously stoned.

Mom and Dad Vacation in Spain

Why Spain?  At the time,
I’d less idea than why
my dad wore white belts
and loafers with his pastel blue
leisure trousers that screamed,
“I don’t care how uncool
my kids think I am.”

But looking back, Brooklyn
was icicle-November,
and they’d probably
dreamed for years,
of swimming and sunbathing
someplace warm and dry.

They returned smiling-tanned
as movie stars, brought
my kid brother a guitar,
me a fringed leather jacket
that made me look too much
like a Midnight Cowboy to wear,
while Mom reassured Jeff and me
how much they’d missed us.

But every now and then I’d catch
the faraway look in their eyes:
still caressing suntan lotion
into each other’s backs on a beach,
or dancing cheek to cheek
in a small, quiet nightclub,

like they used to, before
Jeff and I got between them.

 

An Answer to the Recent Decision About Frozen Embryos by the Alabama Supreme Court

So now frozen embryos
are considered children?

Tell you fellas what:
I’ll accept that

the instant a frozen embryo
chucks a football

through my kitchen window
and I see the tyke slithering

along as fast as they can,
on their cell wall,

so they won’t have to pay
to get the glass replaced. 

 

Robert Cooperman's latest collection is Hell At Cock’s Crow (Kelsay Books).  Kelsay is also bringing out Steerage.