The Wall Comes Down

Off the Nollendorfplatz

          —Berlin a.d. 2000

The ussr was splitting at the seamsBefore the Wall came down. Two more regimes

And no one will remember what it was,Except that Baku's oil replaced the Shah's.

My homeland was the stairs and not the steppes:Odessa. Vodka? Thanks. And with a Schweppes.

It was the Berlin Brits who taught me that.And I teach them? Back flips. An acrobat,

You might say, since I'm a top. One must give inOnly so far. I'm not a knees-up Finn.

My friends who did go home when all four powersPulled out are making book in their off-hours

Or, on the corner selling nested dolls.I can at least buy better alcohols.

I didn't, you did? Well, free enterpriseIs not just ümlauts on Big Macs and fries.

I'm no dumb muzhik. When I had my payI'd go to see—how is it that you say—

The "People's Theatre"—Volksbühne. TwiceI saw the Gorkii Tiefe. Good advice

On how to be flat broke and how not to be.It taught me my commodity is me.

In my small way I prosper. I sell sexAnd then put on a value-added tax.

Marx himself might admireSuch a laborer worthy of his hire.

Crossing the Red Sea

Above us, towering on either side,The riven breakers, sectioning the sea,Reveal the life still moving there within:Its circling sharks; sedate, side-winding eels;Rays, rippling at their edges; offset eyesOf backward-jetting squid; the octopusGesticulating vainly; flying fishIn vibrant archery across the void.Forerunners of the Pharaoh's chariots,Crack troops of sand crabs hurry into ruts.Jehovah could, to ease our exodus,Presumably have levitated us,Or summoned up an instant fleet of arks.Would then the forty years of wilderness,Our landscape of the Promise, seem the same?Behind us is the lingering remorseFor bondage and our loved Egyptian nightUnder the Dog Star as the flood beganAnd all work eased; and, too, for clay and strawWe molded into brick the sun dried out,To let us have the pride of craftsmanship,And should have warned us water is not struckFrom rock except for drinking purposes.Not all our masters knew not Joseph; someRemembered and took us as concubines, A hedge against lean years and impotence,As plague authenticated Aaron. Tribe,Hold, in your coming desert, memoryOf passage, of the sea's split plentitude.

Faustus

Opera cape and top hat, false sword-cane,The Evil one doesn't attain his fullStature until the nineteenth century:A handsome presence on the boulevards;Upstaging actors in the theatres,A textile baron in the center box;Or Grand Duke in the chambre separée;The Walloon owner of condemned coal mines;The Flemish syndicalist whose blind eyeIs always turned; the Randlord on Park Lane;Proconsul home from Cairo; Rajah weighedIn diamonds untouchables have mined;Untouchables who traffic in child brides;And, scrivening away in reading rooms,A less than suave Karl Marx, Mephisto quickTo offer scrip for our immortal souls.Box office, hell mouth, trapdoor in the stageAdmit invisibly the Devil we,Or Devil we would be had not our ownDecades their figures of the boulevards:The rapper, dealer, tenured Maoist.Red tights are where you find them, cloven hoovesIn brand-name sandals, horns on Botox foreheads.Met on the street one cannot say to Him"Get thee behind me," Rosa Parks might hear.