This Place of Prose and Poetry. Lucian Krukowski

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      Will God (if we go that way) still exist after all intelligible life in the universe has ended—or does (will) He (continue to) exist in a context that is no longer teleological—one that (for us) has no point or purpose?

      After life and progress have ended—after all that—what else can God have in mind?

      Those not entranced by the myth of divine creation, might believe that we do not, anymore than do tadpoles, create the world through our perceptions. The world is antecedent to the unexamined solipsism of tadpoles—and it also precedes the fretful solipsism of our own existence. Whether the world will continue beyond us, is a matter of extrapolation from the evidence—itself a matter of belief—that it was there before us.

      WALKING

      I went walking down the street one day.

      T’was not the merry month of May.

      It was rather on a rainy morning in October

      when, last I looked, I found myself to be

      deeply underneath the weather.

      The rain came down; the news was bad.

      My girlfriend, just turned sixty, had reverted,

      rightly so, to her younger dear old dad.

      My future had never been so poorly laid.

      On reflecting, I could only see a crooked path.

      The facts are clear—nothing could be clearer

      than that I am alive—although barely, as she said.

      But “barely” takes the prize for being better

      in every way (I say) than being “not-alive.”

      My building will eventually crumble. Weary

      It has been of late—and largely empty, too.

      But now the rubble shows a face—much like

      Papa Fraga’s “Miss O’Murphy” smirking at me

      from her couch. I should-a, would-a, jumped her then,

      before she could exhale and denigrate my little lust

      by laughing with her big and raucous mouth.

      But I was proud—yes, proud enough to just

      stand still and watch her divine—behind contract —

      as the smoke of lust came out in puffs and gusts.

      Penelope then showed up—she was tall and bony —

      but surely very smart. We left shortly, P and I,

      to find a sunrise of the kind that would enhance

      our chance to prematurely find that pot of gold

      which usually waits for darkness to appear.

      But it’s now dark enough—she said.

      Sunrise is too late for us to wait.

      I know. But I’ll be dead by light of day,

      and you will have just passed sixty-eight —

      still young enough to do your own cavorting.

      I said to her—I need a different now.

      I need a woman who will zip me up.

      I could use a bitch to knock me down —

      not merely nibble at my toes—one that runs

      upstairs, will do the dishes and wash the clothes.

      Then, on command, she’ll fetch the Holy Grail

      from which we’ll drink our fill until such time

      when full and weeping,

      I set sail to find a whiter whale.

      I cannot wait for the crease to cross her dimples,

      or hair to sprout from-out my inner ear, or feet

      that wander and don’t come back on call.

      Did you call just now?

      I thought I heard a bell.

      No—not the one that tolls.

      Write—please do—when

      you again are well.

      A DEAD HORSE IN BROOKLYN

      When I was young, my mother and I lived for extended periods in my aunt’s house, one of many red-brick two-family buildings on east fifth street in Brooklyn, which my uncle had bought with money he made running a saloon—free lunch and a nickle a beer—during the great depression.

      The reasons for our frequent stays were always the same—battles between my mother and father. But intrusive as these reasons are on the memories I have of that time, the story I want to tell is not about them—rather, it is about a dead horse.

      The year was 1934; I was five, and the streets were filled with push-carts and horse-drawn wagons moving up and down the streets, selling ice and coal, fruit and vegetables. A little truck whose backside was loaded with ice and dead fish, would come once a week—announced by the cry of “fishi-up.” The fish were mostly flounder, and the little Italian fish-monger (in a Slavic-Jewish neighborhood) protected himself from criticism by his inordinate skill at filleting: “Why, you can see daylight through the bones.”

      There were also some who came to buy what little we had—their voices punctuating our young shouts with the stentorian cry, “Buy-cash-clothes.” And then there were the street musicians, transient but festive decorations on the shapes of poverty.

      I particularly remember one such group whose leader had diseased eyes—I could tell; they were red and crusted and didn’t move. But he walked slowly down the center of the street, playing most marvelously on the violin (much better than my father, I thought) while an accordion and a singer accompanied him on either side. A young boy, my age—perhaps his son—scurried to pick up the pennies, wrapped in newspaper, that the women would throw down from their windows.

      The only motor vehicles I remember were the huge black truck that delivered ice in summer and coal in winter, and the small electric truck (a technological miracle) that whirred along the avenue bringing Stuhmer’s Pumpernickle to the corner grocery.

      Each brought along it’s own fantasy: The coal truck had sliding chutes on its sides under which thick dirty men would position barrels and fill them, making clouds of dust. The barrels were then wheeled up the alleys between the houses and emptied into coal bins like the one in my uncle’s basement—three barrels of large soft coal to one barrel of the small hard stuff—the mix for burning depended on how cold the weather was. Although I knew that the house belonged to my aunt, the basement with its stove, coal-bin and shovels, belonged to my uncle.

      The bread truck was the opposing principle to the coal trick in the contest for the future of our young souls. This truck was small, spotless, and rectilinear, and it was painted a golden brown, the same color as its bread and the uniform of the driver.

      I found out later that the truck was an early experiment in electric vehicles. It made a soft whirring sound as it moved slowly down the street, and it seemed to us to float above the turning of its wheels. The driver was also small, a somewhat bony man; he sat very straight on a backless stool, steering with a bar and two large pedals; and he seemed so immersed in the good fortune of his job and his responsibility as emissary of the Stuhmer Company, that he never looked at us when he drove past. Nevertheless, he was the wind-gust that contested with the coal-lump for our allegiance.

      The women of the neighborhood would often talk about the relative virtues of the coal-man and the bread-man,