— I —

Tables sag with provender

Prime ribs, suckling pigs, purple pomegranates

Chewed-on, puked up, wasted detriti

Litter the Persian carpets, lounging, waiting not caring

Whisked up by a brown man in a white coat

Armed with dustpans and broom

 

Club chairs and sofas gleam with silk and gold fabric

Pilfered from global’s trades

Champagne–sodden linen

Saturates scattered lines of mirror-razor blow

 

Gilded pillars disguise rebar-enforced concrete,

The charade ascends to false ceilings

Silent for the time

While the palace king lies sniffing and twitching

Thumbing dumb obscenities into the dark world’s cyberspace

 

Further down the highway

The White House slumps with fatigue

Gardens frozen over

Random shutters flapping against shattered hand-blown glass

 

Inside, the snow has drifted

Across the marble carpet

The creeping frozen whiteness stains

Cherry wood antiquities

Ignorance bleaches cursive parchment documents illegible

 

Wind blows through the oval offices

Banning compromise

While snarling red hyenas

Gnaw on history’s broken bones,

An American nightmare.

 

 

— I I —

‘Way back in America

A youngster lay awake

Pivoting from romanced dreams to a new now

Curious about what led to his life

 

The prairie locomotive

Rolled across the fruited plain,

And Abraham Lincoln conducted civil discourse

with leaves of grass

 

Poets, thugs, and novelists

Scribbled burning narratives

Of hardscrabble love and

Cowardly war’s abandoned bravery

 

A young reader soaked up an America that came before

And dreamt it out again

Embracing the raucous paradox of the well-told lie

And the talking union’s hard-won wisdom

 

When all across America

The music came alive

From rock and roll to blues

From jazz to Appalachia’s ballads, reels and waltzes,

Laughed and cried over tuned steel

Stretched tight across strutted wood and banjo-fretted mule skin

 

He devoured the tales told,

History’s lies, fiction’s truths

And learned to play the tunes

Not knowing that

In time’s short run, attenuated only by youth,

 

Fiction’s eager songs and history books

Would toss ecstatic new dreams against real-world necessity,

Projecting the unjust, accelerating present

Onto the blurred, misrepresented past,

A breathless new awareness

Born from the plowed prairie sod of an early American Dream.

 

— III —

 

Reverb’s echoed decibels bounce down the Fillmore hall

Dancers spin in galaxies around a mirrored ball

Lenses from the balcony, the Hindu Vishnu’s eye

Conjure up goddesses of peace and war —

Bangkok hooker children, contorted napalm flowers,

Rattled frightened soldiers

One boy’s helmet shouts MEAT IS MURDER from flimsy camouflage

 

Vishnu dreams of dawn and flings the dancers’ galaxy across the bay

Dropping freaks in random droves on Oakland’s great highway

Staring up at concrete walls,

Built by grateful workers who now must watch their children bundled off to war

The building that once housed public worth, now charnels sanctioned death

 

Vishnu dreams of morning light, they listen for the roar

Silver buses stuffed with blue-jeaned, chino’d boys

The convoy halts, a snorting concert of air pressure

Doors fly open and the Government Issue (G.I.) boys

Step off the murder meat express

 

Beyond Vishnu’s dream, a green gate rolls aside

A square black open maw commands

form a single line, it squawks / fall in / form a single line…

 

Dancers rush the pig enclosures

Vishnu’s sleeping breath flows over the dueling choruses,

Hell no, they whisper, nobody goes / hell no nobody goes / hell no nobody…

Form a single line / fall in / form a single line…

 

Sleeves rolled high on biceps, the G.I. draftees stand stock still, listening…

Hell no nobody goes / hell no nobody goes / hell no nobody…

Form a single line / fall in / form a single line…

 

The Government Issue boys cross the street, first a trickle, then more, first a walk, then run

Vishnu finds the dancers braced to take the blows

She dreams the boys surround freaks and dancers with embraces.

As they stand together, the band begins to cry

Hell no, nobody goes / hell no nobody goes / hell no nobody…

 

At the bottom of the fortress, the tic tac pig squad shouts bullhorn warnings

Order you to / order you to / order you to…

Disperse! In the name of the people!

Protestors slap knees, draftees flip birds,

“We are the people dammit. We are the people, are the people!”

 

On that day, Vishnu dreams and nobody goes to the tower

No scared, no angry, no patriotic boys,

No rag-tag, torn-shirt, tear-gassed army in the street,

Nobody goes, nobody goes, nobody goes

 

Ten days later, back asleep, Vishnu floats the dancers over mountains and prairies and forested hills to Arlington, the Pentagon.

 

They build a penta galaxy surrounding power offices, the asymmetry of fives,

The dancers dance and Shiva dreams the granite mass uprising,

Tearing plumbing roots and ragged wires, defying gravity,

Its ugly pimpled backside floating upward, a tumbled humpty dumpty

Inside embedded war rooms, Old white men wept and lifted phones

To put an end to war.

#   #   #

All four of my grandparents came to this country around 1900 from the area we loosely referred to as Russia, although borders were fluid then. My grandfathers were leaving to avoid serving in the czar’s army, and they were all fleeing from Cossacks and pogroms and the terrors of anti-Semitism. They settled on the Lower East Side of New York, with all the other Eastern European Jewish immigrants. They worked hard, met and married their spouses, and each couple managed to save enough to move to New Jersey by the time they had children. (It may seem surprising now, but at that time New Jersey was the countryside, with houses and yards and room to breathe, unlike the NY tenements.) Each couple had two children, and all four of those children went to college. This was the American Dream, and they had achieved it.

I never knew my paternal grandparents, they died before I was born, but my maternal grandparents lived with us when I was growing up, so I knew them very well. They were both so proud of being Americans. They had worked hard to lose their accents, and were so successful that nobody talking to them would ever have dreamed they were immigrants. They always voted. They taught me to value the freedom we were guaranteed in America, not by preaching about it, but by telling stories about the old country. In a first- or second-grade assignment about what we were thankful for, I said I was thankful for my country, because we were safe from the terrible things that happened to people in other countries. To me this was the American Dream.

By the time I was in high school, the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement made me start to question whether the American Dream was all that it had been cracked up to be. There were obviously things that were very, very wrong in this country. But if we got involved in the struggle, made our voices heard, maybe we could fix them. Maybe that was the American Dream.

So I protested, I demonstrated, I did whatever I could. And the Vietnam War DID end, perhaps as a result of our protests. Harvard students succeeded in getting ROTC thrown off campus and getting a Black Studies Department established, although the demands to stop campus expansion into working class neighborhoods were less successful. However, I believed that we could actually make a difference, and that “Power to the People” was more than just a slogan. Over the years I continued to protest, to demonstrate, and then also to support political candidates who believed in the things I believed in, with both my time and my money. Surely people working together to make our country a better place was the American Dream.

A week ago I thought we were about to elect our first woman President, having already succeeded in electing our first African-American President, and that seemed like a pretty good realization of the American Dream. If you work hard enough, no matter your color or gender, you can achieve anything!

Now, in the week since the election, it seems like the American Dream has turned into the American Nightmare. I cannot even grasp how terrible things are getting already, and how much worse they are likely to be after the inauguration of the unmentionable one on January 20th. Harassment of women, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Muslims, and, of course, Jews has become shockingly common. So much so that now we are advised to wear a safety pin on our clothing to show that we are “safe” to talk to, and that we will help any member of these groups if someone else starts attacking them. How frightening that this should even be necessary!

The old labor movement song Which Side Are You On? seems all too appropriate now. I weep for the American Dream!

My maternal grandparents came to this country from Bialystock, Russia in 1906 to escape the pogroms. They raised four children, my grandfather ran a successful jewelry business in Toledo, OH, were free to worship as they pleased and found prosperity in the heartland of America. One could say they lived the American Dream.

Two of my grandfather’s sisters did not leave Russia. After WWI, that area of Eastern Europe became part of Poland and that part of the family perished in the Holocaust except for one niece. That niece, Paula, my mother’s first cousin, married a Zionist. They escaped overland making their way to Palestine, arriving in 1939. During the two years my brother spent in Israel, while studying for the rabbinate, he found Paula and her husband and family. She looked a lot like my mother. I visited during the summer of 1972. When I walked in the door of their Ramat Aviv apartment, with my long hair braided and criss-crossed across my head, Paula drew in her breath. She said I looked like her dead sister, Eshkie. Her words still give me chills. We will never forget!

My paternal grandparents came from Kovno, Lithuania, separately in the late 1800s. My grandfather was a back-peddlar with a territory that included St. Louis, Conway, AR and Greenville, MS. One of his sisters ran a boarding house in St. Louis. While home once he met the dark-haired beauty he would marry; my grandmother Lizzie. They went on to have eight children, but Lizzie was bipolar. She had the last two, including my father, her youngest child, to “cure her” because she was more stable when flooded with pregnancy hormones. My grandfather eventually opened a general store in St. Louis and prospered, but Lizzie needed to be institutionalized when my father was 12. One of his sisters came home from college to care for the younger children.

Lizzie’s younger brother, however, had a head for numbers. He gave a financial report without notes at the gas company in St. Louis in front of important businessmen. One was so impressed that he invited Uncle Meyer to move to Detroit and join this two-year-old company called General Motors in 1911. Meyer Prentis rose to become Treasurer, a position he held for 32 years. That is the American Dream.

My dad and most of his siblings moved to Detroit and worked at GM at some point in their lives. My dad worked for Chevrolet in Flint, MI in 1937 before WWII. But when he returned from the war, with a partner he bought a used car lot, which became a DeSoto (really) dealership, then a Chrysler dealership. The featured photo was taken in July of 1957. I am the little girl with the Dutch boy haircut in front. I am 4 1/2 years old. My dad is in the middle of the back row behind me, one of his brothers is seated on the left, another, with sun glasses, is standing on the right. He had set up the shot on a timer. We Sarasons love our family photos. He was assistant comptroller of GM. We were living the American Dream.

Several of my dad’s brothers did not marry Jewish women. One converted to Southern Baptist to marry his wife. Both his surviving daughters married Baptist ministers. This uncle was a brilliant actuary but had inherited his mother’s chemical imbalance. He was severely bipolar and needed hospitalization at various points in his life. His wife developed MS and his eldest daughter was born with Cerebal palsy. She died before I was born. Christmas presents came from their Jewish aunts, who were always involved. When my grandfather died, he had cut this son out of his will, since he had left our religion. But the brothers and sisters had a family meeting and voted to overrule their father’s wishes and give their needy brother his share of the estate. If only we could look at that as an example for this era. Doesn’t this example of family love, goodness and caring express an aspect of the American Dream? I fear for the loss of civility and care for the Family of Man in our civic discourse.

My father had financial set-backs, lost his business when my brother was half-way through college. He went to work for his cousin, working at his Buick dealership. From my perspective, that cousin saved my family. It was never discussed. It must have been hugely humiliating for him, but he never complained. Is this the American Dream?

In 1970, just as I entered college, my father became the first Director of Endowments for the Jewish Welfare Federation in Detroit. He told me in a private conversation one night before I left for school. He was excited to begin a new career. He said he would “do good and make good”. He set a charitable example for me when I was 17 years old. It made an impression on me. My parent’s marriage was crumbling, but my father always provided a sense of stability for me, both emotionally and in the way to lead your life. It may not have represented the Ozzie and Harriet picture we had from TV, but he was a man who overcame set-backs, kept smiling and moved forward. Perhaps he gave me a small slice of his American Dream. In retirement, after divorcing my mother, he settled in California, where he had wanted to live his whole adult life. That was his dream.

This week, we witnessed the unthinkable. A man hugely unqualified to lead the greatest nation on earth was elected on a platform of hate and lies. He tapped into a desperation many Americans feel, but also the darker side of prejudice and bigotry that has no place in a civilized society. I mourn for the progress that has been made from the New Deal, through the Great Society to the strides made by the Obama administration, despite constant obstruction. I have a transgender child and fear for her safety. Last week, in the building where I attended high school, though it is now a middle school, students started screaming, “Build the wall’, while Hispanics in the class cried. It was on the news and all over the Internet. When I attended 9th grade there, someone called me a kike. We were at a play rehearsal. I had to go ask my mother what the word meant before I could get angry at the 12th grader.

A friend once asked me where bigotry came from. I told him it is passed from parent to child, but Rodgers and Hammerstein said it well in “South Pacific” in the song “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”.

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear.
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

So how do we break this cycle of hatred, of distrust, of suspicion of “the other”? It certainly doesn’t begin by starting one’s political career by questioning the legitimacy of our first president of color, then moving on to racial slurs and inciting his frantic followers to express their deepest feelings of hatred toward non-whites, and immigrants, the “liberal media”, and demeaning women. I truly fear for the peace and well-being of the dream of the greater good with the alt-right ascending and hate having its day. The American Dream lies, shattered at the moment. Lady Liberty, whose poem was written by Jewish poet Emma Lazarus states: “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free”. She is weeping right now.

 

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Death?

Perhaps I’ve seen plenty of death, although we can never get enough. We’re not allowed to; the damned thing just keeps on comin’. And I doubt that we are morbid by nature; we simply have no control over the end of life beyond the magic and ministrations of good medicine from CAT scans to ayahuasca.

I can’t measure cause and effect versus coincidence here, but the deaths of parents, friends, loved ones, important figures in my life don’t bring me to wonder at the great beyond.

I didn’t wonder where my father, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my childhood friends and my musician pals went. I’ve thought I was going to die, right then, right there. I reeled under blows of abandonment and empathized with sickness. I ached with sadness as deep and natural as a river’s flow. And I cringe from the regret that comes from loss: I’ve only I’d… I coulda… woulda… shoulda…

But I survive and shelter my memories in fond real-life recollections that can evoke tears, smiles, or great loneliness. But loneliness and loss, even rage at abandonment is human, very here-and-now. It’s a life thing, death, and it does not for me, evoke a stairway to the great beyond.

Perception?

I’ve never been able so see or hear ghosts, despite the fact that everyone in my San Francisco household heard the angry expletives and useless thumping in the upstairs bedroom closet. I never had a clue, despite my comrades’ testimony.

When we were mining for silver in a Colorado mineshaft, we were all on the lookout for a ghost who was supposed to hang out in the dank gloom of the abandoned stopes, or side tunnels. Nobody ever heard or saw that guy either.

I’ve always had a hard time with reincarnation, where, ostensibly, beings die, travel to the great beyond, and return in another form. I once thought I might be the reincarnation of a soldier who died on a barren Russian steppe, but I’d probably just seen a photo. The folks I did know always seemed to reappear from former lives as Egyptian princesses or brilliant musicians. That didn’t make sense.

After the demise of trillions of bugs, slaves, eels, serfs, overanxious merchants, intestinal bacteria, and downtrodden whores, why did my friends come back with memories of life in grand palaces, royal sarcophagi or thrilled audiences? I don’t seem to have the facility to reincarnate, not even as a cutworm.

My own private beyond?

My personal great beyond began in childhood with a set of closet-door mirrors. I could close the mirrors around me and watch my body disappear down a curving corridor of a million reflections, each image becoming murkier until I disappeared into the subsequent loss of light. Then I’d imagine that, no matter how fast I changed my expression in that mirror, my new grimace would reverberate into the distance at 186,000 miles per second, quicker than I could ever catch it.

My great beyond-edness burgeoned thanks to early exposure to astronomy, via my old man. After I plagued him nightly to describe the distances of intergalactic space, I would scamper off to bed. I had painted the far wall of my bedroom an inky, deep-space blue and glued stars to it — a launch pad into my great beyond.

Then, as I drifted off to sleep, I taught myself how to transport myself from my bedroom wall to the farthest point I could imagine in our galaxy. If I travelled at 186,000 miles in a second, how far would I travel in a minute? An hour? A day, a year, a million years? Wow!

I would grok myself to that distant place and start again, imagining a deeper, farther, more distant galaxy and then I’d leap to other galaxies until I reached the edge of the Universe. Then I’d try to picture what lay beyond that. Jeez!

For a while, my old man worked at M.I.T. with “Papa Flash,” Dr. Harold Edgerton, a high-speed photographer who developed the stroboscope (my old man helped perfect the exactly timed electronic flash for Papa Flash’s image captures).

I would stare at Edgerton’s photos of a light bulb shattering with a projectile suspended in the dissembling glow, of milk drops suspended in a perfect crown above a flat surface, imaging the strobe light splitting time down and down and down to microseconds.

Later, as quantum physics emerged, I peered deeper into the micro beyond, down to a yanctosecond equaling one second divided by 10 x 10 x 100 to the twenty-fourth power, one septillionth of a second, watching scientists hover over monstrous magical-mystery colliders, seeking to establish the elapsed time for a quark to decay.

Today, I like to imagine the great beyond as cartoon expansion and contraction of the Universe. Bwoop! The Universe explodes. Bweep! The Universe contracts, bwoop, bweep, like chewed bubblegum or warm silly putty squeezed and released and squeezed again between the infinite thumb and finger of an ethereal hand. From this perspective, the great beyond elicits laughter. That’s good enough for me.

A final mystery

I did learn to the great beyond of death one more time, when I held my mother’s hand and felt her breathing slow in hospice. After one long, last, calm, quiet breath, her heartbeat stopped and her body collapsed. A diminutive casper ghost-spirit squiggled brightly out of her fourth chakra and rose into the room above her bed. I knew that what I’d seen was real, connected to the great energy of the Universe but I had no idea where my mother’s tiny casper spirit went. Once again, the great beyond showed me its mysteries but not its truths.

#  #  #

 

 

It is an auspicious day for a cremation
There will be no tears today
Tears would drag your spirit back to earth

Your pallbearers wear earrings and black shirts
Sporting logos of Harley-Davidson, Heavy Metal;
On your wreath, a banner
Advertises the Sheraton Nusa Dua

The cremation tower, sunny white and yellow,
Adorned with your photo, bespectacled, wise,
Makes three revolutions around the crossroads
So your spirit will not find its way home

The villagers bear you to the cemetery
Tourists follow, taking snapshots
Vendors sell cold drinks

The tower flames quickly, but
The formaldehyde that preserved your body resists
They turn up the propane

Wide-eyed, a small boy approaches the pyre
You witnessed many cremations in your ninety years
But perhaps it is his first