The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press

those bony fingers
wrote sonnets and tales,
of the dusty trunk
where his last unfinished novel
awaited his renewed attention.
Then came the stroke,
cruel snap of synapse —
week after week
in St. Vincent’s.
We had just met.
We had talked of his poems,
his Lovecraft memoir —
his boisterous wife
intruding everywhere
with incoherent chatter
of Chekhov plays,
of Frank’s world fame,
of her childhood
among the Yiddish actors
thrust from Russia
fleeing the Tsar’s pogroms,
to Shanghai
to Canada to California.
I liked them both.
I called her charodeika,
enchantress,
she called me
Britannica.
We talked Tchaikovsky,
Akhmatova and Pasternak.
Now at St. Vincent’s
Lyda’s mad wheelchair
glides in the corridor
as she pigeonholes doctors,
nurses, orderlies,
telling them all
her Frankele is a famous author.
He lapses in
and out of memory,
recites “The Gods Are Dead”
to completion, cries out
as Lyda maligns his hero,
calling him Lousecraft.
“Lovecraft! Lovecraft!” he shrieks
44
in the thinnest tenor, cracking.
“He was the kindest man I knew!”
Lyda goes on
about her trip to Moscow,
“You’ll see! They know me there!
They haven’t forgotten my family!
They’re meeting me
at the Aeroflot terminal.
And I’ll come back
and open my bookstore in Chelsea
in that huge loft I’ve chosen.
And Frank will be there,
sign books for his fans every day.
Ray Bradbury wrote,
and Stephen King is sending us
ten thousand dollars.”
“My wife,” Frank tells me,
“is an alcoholic,
and a manic depressive.
What can I do?”
I visit Lyda at home,
watch roaches crawl
across discarded magazines.
I argue with her
as she opens the trunk,
tries to throw out
Frank’s manuscripts.
I put the papers back,
distract her with a pile of envelopes.
“Let’s clean up this,” I say.
We throw away bank statements.
Decades of misery blink before me,
whole years in which
a mere three hundred dollars
stood between him and the Reaper.
Soon Frank is home,
confined to his bed,
then to a hobbling walker.
Lyda throws parties,
serves wine and cold cuts
amid the thriving roaches.
Her new dog wets
Frank’s manuscripts.
The kitchen sink
is a mold terrarium,