The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Remembering Ed Zimmerman
Ed was born June 11, 1924 and grew up in the Bronx, the
youngest of three children of immigrant parents. His father, Benjamin, came to
the U.S. as a 12 year-old with a sewing machine hanging from his neck and made
a living as a tailor in New York's Garment District. He never learned to read
or write English, but he and his wife Toby made education a top priority for Ed
and his siblings, insisting "a B+ isn't good enough for a
Zimmerman."
Ed graduated from DeWitt Clinton High at age 16 and attended
Columbia College on a New York State Regents scholarship, while working
part-time as a movie house usher at the rate of 33 and 1/3 cents an hour. While
at Columbia, he began writing short fiction and poetry. He also embarked on a
self-guided education in classical music, traversing all of Beethoven's string
quartets until he found his favorites, the final ones, which he felt
"broke all the rules" and which, at age 19, he chose for his funeral.
Ed graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1944 then joined the Signal Corps-6th Army. He was in training when the U.S. dropped the atom bomb and on leave in Los Angeles with a buddy a few days later when Japan surrendered. He wrote, "The celebration lasted through the night. We, being in uniform, were repeatedly hugged and kissed by women of every age. We cooperated." Serving in occupied Japan, Ed monitored the VHF radio transmission stations in the hills of Kobe and worked in Yokohama as editor-in-chief of an Army newspaper.
Lt. Zimmerman came home in 1946 and enrolled at Columbia Law School on the GI Bill. After graduation in 1949, he headed off to Oxford to study literature for the summer then settled down to the serious business of law, first serving as a law clerk to U.S. District Judge Simon H. Rifkind then to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed. He went into private practice at Sullivan and Cromwell in New York in 1951. That same year, on a boat to England for vacation, his name was the last on the ship's manifest; the first was Caroline Abbot. They married in 1956.
Stanford University Law School came calling in 1959. Ed loved teaching at Stanford—and taking writing workshops with Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry—but he was equally proud of his work recruiting the best and the brightest to the Law School faculty. In 1965, he took a sabbatical to work in the U.S. Justice Department, where he served as Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust in 1968 and argued before the Supreme Court in U.S. vs. Container Corp., a leading case on the antitrust implications of information exchanges. In 1969, Ed accepted a partnership offer from Covington & Burling and practiced antitrust law there until his death. Ed was also a Founding Trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In 1975, Ed began collecting Oriental carpets, buying pieces that "spoke" to him. His interest in celebrating the beauty and craftsmanship of handmade rugs drew him to Washington, D.C.'s Textile Museum and eventually to its management. He was President of the Board of Trustees from 1986 to 1996, helping lead a period of enormous growth and stability for the museum. The museum bestowed its Award of Distinction upon him in 2008 in gratitude.
Ed's deep knowledge of and passion for the arts—from
classical music to textiles, opera and ballet—found its deepest expression in his love of
words. There were summer workshops on the Cape with poets Alan Dugan and
Stanley Kunitz, afternoons composing verse at his beloved country house, Goose
Woods, and weekly meetings for nearly 30 years with the Capitol Hill Poetry
Group, some of Washington, D.C.'s finest poets. Ed's poetry has been published
in The Partisan Review, The Other Side of
the Hill II, Hungry as We Are, Ten Years-Castle Hill, and The Innisfree Poetry Journal. He was
also a featured poet at the Library of Congress Poetry-at-Noon Series in 2009.
Ed is survived by his wife and muse of 56 years, Cassie; his
daughter, Sarah, an architect; his son, Lyle, a biologist; his daughter Miriam
and son-in-law, Steve York, documentary filmmakers; and his granddaughter,
Rebecca York, an artist and musician.
Ed's poems previously appeared in Innisfree 9 and Innisfree 14. In this issue, we present a selection of poems from his books as well as a few left on his desk at the time of his death. At the request of the family, Ed's poems are preceded and succeeded by two poems from two of his friends and colleagues in the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, Jean Nordhaus and the Editor.
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I. A poem by Jean Nordhaus: The Natural Sonneteer for my friend, Ed ZimmermanWhatever he has to say, he writes it down II. Poems by Ed Zimmerman:
Blue Sea in Every Window
After too many decades away we return to the small house on the dune, to the white bare room with blue sea in every window. Time has mangled people and mangled places — there are gaps where close friends used to be, frames of new houses despoil hills and swales that flowed like bayberry velvet, the beautiful girl we knew has become a wizened bird of a woman. We walk the road going to the house where our small children once played but now see only brambles, the rose-trellis ruined, and cannot find a pathway in. But the sea is constant and its rote soothes us in our sleep, the morning light continues to startle, the sun is red at night as it sinks into the bay. And you defy the years and again become the girl I knew from the tiny sea-side town who is learned about yawls, ketches and skiffs, jibs and foresails, about the patterns of the tides and the winds, about who is truly skilled in sailing and who is not. I stand grateful and amazed that you trusted your life to a landlubber, unskilled, awkward, always surprised by the weather.
[from A Piercing Happiness]
After Pruning
The apple trees stand butchered but alive — they will bloom again despite this savagery. Their severed limbs lie tangled in the pasture piled for rotting with yellowed garden waste, but my avaricious eye cannot ignore the wealth that lurks within the snarl, and so I pry out branches wide as arms, limbs thick as calves but heavier, and one stout segment in the shape of two thighs and a crotch. I am dazzled by this abundance, by this promise, despite mayhem, of more fruit from living trees and this gift of dense firewood. They make me grow reckless and almost wish for winter and its fires so that I can feed the wood-stove apple limbs and crotches even though I know it is unwise to rush the seasons.
The Limits of Poetry
Poetry is not an instrument fit To convey the anguish a father feels For a daughter, most at peace with animals, Who is guilt-ridden at having had To will the death of an old sick cat That, perhaps, had not been as loved As retrospect requires, that now Is entombed in the garden's earth, honored With a pretty bush, and recollected In the quieter house as a purring machine, A small outboard motor, A motor-mouth of love.
Printer's Error
The new club member directory arrived and I am dismayed to find my name not listed— not even an empty line to mark where, during decades of belonging, it had resided. My better sense instructs me not to see an eerie portent in this printer’s error, but the damage has been done and I grow jealous of those yet in the array of published names— figures on the shore as I am carried farther out— and jealous of all whose names are not etched in disappearing ink, such as the young, descending the escalator, en route to work, bodies glowing, hearts beating in rhythm, unremarkable, but belonging to every club.
The Cinematographer
I do not know the plot as yet but know this night is fit for a dramatic exit. The streets are empty, the buildings ruined by fog, spires appear and disappear, and down in the harbor baffled ships bleat and complain. I do not know the plot as yet but know the camera should film me from behind as I stride into the mists and disappear, making my farewell to music of a viola that blends with groping horns, all falling silent in half a minute, leaving in the viewer's sight only bare pavement, leaving in the viewer's ear an echo of a Mahler song. I do not know the plot as yet but know the lens should scan the gloomy skies, and search from empty gray horizon to gray horizon.
[from A Piercing Happiness]
Lovely A.
I am authorized to tell you that we cannot live forever, that our cells will not forget to die. I am, like you, disconsolate. I had intended a permanent existence with time to relish every crystal truth the computer, retrieving and retrieving, ever sang, with time for every delta on the coastline of Brazil, with time at Svalbard where the ice is blue and indolent seals flop unconcerned until they push off, lazy, to the Pole. But now I know that lovely A. who once presided in a black silk sheath lies disarranged—a loose necklace of bone in the earth in Queens.
[from A Piercing Happiness]
Easy Women
(From the N.Y. Times obituary of Clyde Tombaugh , the astronomer who located Pluto, whose father had admonished him: "Clyde, make yourself useful and beware of easy women.")
He left Kansas for the night skies of Flagstaff and began to interrogate ten million dots, sifting them over and over and over again until he caught a twitching residue of light— the missing planet, once X, now Pluto— making himself useful. As for easy women surely there must have been one or two gentle, dazzled, longing souls for whom the young sky-searcher was a prince of star-light, at least one who, had she been at his side while he looked and looked and looked, might have edged close to ward off the chill of the night's vast loneliness and who in a flush of urgency might have been easy, though he, no doubt, would have stayed useful, leaving her, who cared not a whit which smudge harbored Pluto, to confront alone the terrible enormity of the desert sky.
[from At Truro]
Googling Lionel
Something the other day reminded me of Lionel, my brilliant boyhood friend, whose mind was agile, whose temper gentle, who at an early age liked to wander through mazes of mathematics and did so surely, as though on well-lit highways. It has been more than half a century since we spoke but his image remains clear in my mind and I think of him time and again— cheerful, quick, unassuming, finding humor in the awful—and since I often wondered what he had made of his life and whether he knew what I had made of mine, I thought it time to reconnect, compare the totals, reminisce. So I went to the great vat of facts, typed his name, discovered to no surprise that my friend had flowered, taught admiring students at warp-speed, published more than a hundred papers on topics such as the asymptotic properties of order statistics, and displayed kindness, charm, grace, common sense, and wit. What I hadn't bargained for, what numbed, was the shock of finding that these affirmations of my friend were in a stale obituary, a decade old, that I had been harboring a ghost, that I was lonelier than I had realized.
Connoisseurship
We are dropping like leaves from a November tree And I have become a connoisseur or funerals.
Some were scripted by the guest of honor who Cast the speakers and the ushers, selected the music, The location, the presider, so that the ceremony Was, in effect, a last work, subject Of course to a few conventions —the invocation Of some Deity or other, the preacher's assurance That the deceased was never happier, was being borne On the eagle’s wing, had a Very Important Personage As a personal guide to the next strata of life.
Some arrangements were left entirely to survivors Because the deceased had not anticipated The event, or was too ill, or did not care. Usually then the adult children are in charge. They can be tall, impressive, in prime of life, Fierce in their adulation, in their insistence That the ceremony fit, but when the hooded Casket is wheeled from the altar, down the aisle They follow, crying like five-year olds.
Family Day at the Ballet
The lobby thrums with the scurryings of the very young. Dressed for holiday they buzz in tilting circles around and under their keepers. A taut voice warns: "Sarah, you are starting to get lost." Then all file in for Columbine and Harlequin, for black-suited dancers with tricorner hats mirrored by small dancers with tricorner hats. And a golden line of dancing fat men confronts itself in miniature—wave after wave of replication as two generations glissade across the ballet stage. The viewers are in titters and the mothers proud, but I, impelled by something half like justice, want another tier to the array—old ones who celebrate, who move as best they can, shuffling, galumphing in slow arthritic circles but dancing in black suits or gold, wearing the indicated hats, starting to get lost.
Father's Day
In the dream I had displayed a singular defect of character— I had neglected to bury my father and the two black-suited men glared at me as they deposited their linen-covered burden at my feet.
I protested that all had been seen to years before—rites, eulogies, interment—but they would not listen and turned their faces away leaving in my direction only outstretched arms, fingers pointing at the bundle below me.
I awoke, suddenly aware it was the anniversary of my father's death, a date half forgotten but noted by some secret timekeeper, who struck chimes with the dream, reminding me of unfinished business, leaving me to grope for what it was.
Decoration Day, 1938
(March 15, 2011. The last doughboy is buried.)
Q. What was the weather like?
It was end-of-school weather, short-sleeved-shirt weather, first-sunburn weather, line-the-boulevard weather, as we waited for the parade.
Q. Were there bands and marchers?
There were high school bands, American Legion and National Guard bands, bands with snarling silver trumpets and thumping drums. There were marchers from ROTCs, the Army Reserves, the Boy Scouts, and the Camp-Fire Girls wearing their beautiful new breasts.
Q. Was your world a happy place?
Adolph Hitler was in the daily papers, Mussolini in the rotogravure, Coughlin on the radio and in the neighborhood, the Brown Shirts of Kuhn in Yorkville and the Silver Shirts of Pelley in middle America, all gushing hatred. But we were young and played stick-ball, punch-ball, roller-skate hockey, basketball, and football on a rocky lot. Our parents were frantic, but we were happy.
Q. What do you most clearly remember seeing?
One open car with three frail figures waving feebly— drummer boys from the Civil War who had long outlived their great commanders who had been transformed into avenues— Burnside, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. A clump of elderly men with boy-scout hats and khaki shirts marching with banners that pleaded "Remember the Maine." But most of all a mass of merry, youngish veterans who rode on floats of cardboard boxcars marked quarante hommes et huit chevaux— hero doughboys, confident victors of the Great War to End All Wars. They shouted lewdness at spectator girls.
Q. How did the parade end?
I can't recall. It must have petered out— they must have run out of wars.
Q. What made you wish to write this poem?
I did not want those trusting doughboys buoyant enders of all wars to perceive others assemble on dim streets. I did not want those innocents to disappear from memory without at least a footprint, at least a chord that echoes for a minute before the great silence.
Homage to a Minor Deity
Fiona Ridgeross wore a crimson birthmark The size of a luncheon plate across her face But we, 15-year old boys In her high school English class, otherwise Intensely interested in feminine beauty or even The sexual attractiveness of tables and chairs, Did not notice the splotch. She had revealed The way a clump of words can resonate, Rise and fall like ocean waves, hint At scraps of haunting song, and what we desired Most of all was for her to write in the margin Of a page of our work, "How nice." Anna Sergeyevna
(Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, Ch.25)
After they left, Anna Sergeyevna Fell into the pit of depression Though Heaven knows why. She could not read, she could not sew, Could not take pleasure in the shapes of things, And could not play her proper parts. She was haunted by a heavy sadness As stars are hounded by dying specks Of terrible density that warp orbits And limn the diminution of our Sun. What brought her back only Heaven knows— A sunny day, a visitor perhaps, A false anticipation of a love, Some ordinary thing that made the stars less bleak. Something healed or seemed to heal And she resumed her proper daytime roles Although at night she locked the blinds Against the stars' implacable light.
Sleeping Quarters
During the Great Depression I shared a bedroom with two cats and a snoring great-grandmother. The cats stretched themselves out beside me like young horses, their bodies rattling all night. The east window framed a grape arbor, alive with dawn's chiming birds.
In third grade I would go to sleep every day at arithmetic period and had to go to the back with the dumbbells. After I got used to the snoring, the dawn bird chorus, the rattling cats, I moved up front with the scholars.
Sixth grade, we went back to our big house, leaving the cottage where I'd had to share a room; I got back my old nest overlooking oak trees. But I had to lock my arms tight to my chest every night so my wrists would not fall below the bed springs and be slashed by the mad man. Silent as death he was— let me sleep all night. Still, there he was, under my bed, razor ready.
Aunt Sally Got the Blues
After they left and the laughter died she became lost in a dark corridor that seemed endless. She did not know why. Because they left? It was unlikely. But she could not read or sew or cook or play
her customary role of being wise She was haunted by a massive invisible sadness as stars are hounded by specks of terrible density that warp their orbits. What brought her back only heaven knows—a sunny day, a visitor perhaps, a crossword puzzle that almost solved itself, some ordinary thing that made the skies less bleak. Something healed or seemed to heal and she embraced her proper daytime life, although at night, she locked the blinds against the stars' unloving light.
The Family V
Mr. Viridian, vendor of rugs, who used to sit on a throne-like chair, commanding his minions to unroll Cleopatras from Tabriz, Heriz, and Samarkand, was kind to me and helped me savor crimson lac, cobalt blue and aubergine. But he grew too old to tend his store, and they stashed him into a colorless room where he would not breathe and did not keep.
Madam Viridian, who once was lithe and used her breasts as scimitars cutting to anguish each yearning wretch, grew too wide for a full embrace, grew too sere for a spurt of lust, yet waddled serenely in the night aflame with ardor, like a girl, all cochineal and madder red, and was kind to me, disclosing how there is beauty in a love of love.
Uncle Viridian, poet and fraud, who used to rock his porcelain words, purporting to seek epiphanies but only hunting the little space, the consolation of warm thighs, was nightly harassed by chilling dreams of former loves forever young who mocked how his passion had wilted away, yet was kind to me, warning me from aniline dyes and clinking rhymes.
ViVi Viridian, daughter of grace, was kind to me when I was young, and taught me how to nurse a drink, taught me how to nurse a love, taught me no and taught me yes. She vanished with swift elegance before she slowed or swelled or grayed yet inhabits every color I perceive, magenta, gold, or indigo, and coaxes me in my half-light to praise the family Viridian.
Sixteen Cunningham Dancers
They assume stances Fokine never dreamt of even in nightmares, and move to control the chaos in which they spin They fall lightly like November leaves, lie on their backs, arms held up, hands cocked — (a field of flowers broken by sleet). Before he died Merce Cunningham decreed that his hand-picked troupe of dancers would tour the world for two years and then disband forever. But they are defiant as they end their dance and sharply slap sixteen pair of hands against sixteen pair of thighs, and look
as though they will dance forever. [from At Truro]A Young Woman Writes from London
Life in general is not bad—London bustles and hones my imagination. But in November it is also raw and dark and I live in a cramped room. When tired I feel as though I am floating in a gray sea, quite lost, belonging to no one and to no place, with only tiers of fog on the horizon. I long for a clean, airy house, bright with sunlight, with high ceilings, banks of flowers, pictures coloring the wall, decent furniture, and a fine piano. And although none of the males around are suitable for the purpose, I feel in the mood for a violent love affair.
[from A Piercing Happiness]
Kamila Stosslova
Fame came late for Janacek and later still, at sixty-three, passion. Implausible, obdurate, futile it fixed upon a bewildered young woman, dark-eyed and less than half his age. For the eleven years left of his life he wrote love letters, sometimes three a day, that flustered her. Sometimes out of kindness she replied and tried to infuse sanity as when she warned that were he to know her he would soon be bored. But it did not matter and he grew more passionate as he aged transforming her into a melody for the first violin in his second string quartet, lodging her dark eyes onto the gypsy girl of a song-cycle, setting echoes of her in roles of four operas, the Sinfonietta, the Glagolitic Mass, and more in the great starburst of fecundity of his final decade. And near the very end of his life, after a chaste visit, with her son in attendance, he wrote: "And you are sitting beside me and I am happy and at peace. In such a way do the days pass for the angels."
[from A Piercing Happiness]
Five Pacific Bucks
In the woods behind our country house five young male deer saunter into view, too old to be fawns, too young to carry multi-tiered racks of antlers. Each, though, has a sprout of horns, some more scant than others, like the first tentative moustaches of high school juniors. They are at peace with one another, travel as a herd, graze for a bit and then move on, vanishing together as suddenly as they appeared. I had not expected the sight of five pacific bucks and almost regret the fact that soon those antlers will blossom into elaborate candelabra, that these deer will struggle with each other for the ownership of does, and that like school alumni returning for reunions, each will paw the ground and shake his massive rack, showing why he is more important.
Their Plenitude
I'm glad my father isn't alone tonight searching empty rooms, my mother gone; he isn't well equipped for solo grief. I'm thankful the others are with him in the house— the aunts and uncles, the first and second cousins— voices, cards, the smell of cake and coffee.
I never gave much thought to family ties. A boy is not apt to be amazed by eight bustling sets of aunts and uncles, or by "The Girls," my mother's maiden cousins who in summer houses fluffed my pillows, saw me into bed, closed the door.
Of course by now they're dead, all of them, the aunts, the uncles, my father decades ago, but the gratitude that surges through the dream is vivid, and whether I loved each in their time I cherish all now—their plenitude drifts down like rain upon my old-bone sleep.
For Stanley
Italian! Italian! he sang out scornfully to the opening of Mendelsohn's Fourth Symphony whose brocades of sound he found too flashy. And for Beethoven's Fifth he sang Dih, dih, dih, daah, and asked "So what ?" and he repeated dih, dih, dih, daah, so what? My boyhood friend Stanley was a severe interlocutor of the music we listened to on clunky records that scratched and hissed. He was severe as only the young can be when confronting the idols of their elders. I was too uncertain and unknowing to inject iconoclasms of my own, but learned, almost a lifetime ago, that music is a conversation. Sometimes a composer is dull as mud, his music routine and vacuous as extended discussion of the weather. Sometimes the music has a little wit or flavor but ends up like a one-joke movie. And every now and then, perhaps in the middle of the night when four hours of sleep has fooled the mind into wakefulness, one encounters, in the dark, music with something to say, poignant or astringent, new in style or old, but fresh. And like conversing with a brilliant partner time goes quickly, one feels brilliant, one wants the conversation never to end.
Farrell Declines to Sleep with Balanchine
(After lines by Louise Bogan)
Good night, good night, there is so much to love, from the skitter of half-steps to the arced jeté, I could not love it all, I could not love it enough.
You sing by movement, in tones full or slant, new configurations that never pall. Good night, good night. There is so much to love
in every motion that you spin me to, how could I risk those lucent angularities? I could not. Love it all? I could not love it enough
and know the night's fierce murmurings are less enduring than your supple tutelage. Good night, good night, there is so much! To love
you as I do I must be purely motion, in the stance and orbit you devise, else I could not love it all. I could not love it. Enough
passion can be squandered in ordinary ways— I'd dance in bed as any woman would. Good night. Good night. There is so much to love I could not love it all. I could not love it enough.
On the Death of Merce Cunningham
A master of movement, Merce Cunningham decreed that on this death his small, hand-picked troupe would circle the earth in a final tour and then disband, even though they still danced the way he taught them to— taking turns skipping over one another, forming perfect circles from broken rings, floating to earth lightly like November leaves, effortlessly rising up as though buoyed by water. And yet he commanded the death of his own creation— surely a kind of post-mortem suicide— perhaps out of fear they would soon be corrupted, perhaps out of jealousy of those who survived, perhaps as a witty unexpected motion that makes the commonplace startling and memorable.
A Piercing Happiness
On a soft September afternoon in the garden of the museum seven middle-aged docents, transform themselves by wearing resplendent silk ikat robes contrived a century and a half ago in Tashkent, Bukhara or Samarkand. The cloth glitters with each movement and flaunts flowers never seen in the light of day, alien fruits, five-fingered figures that could be hands without palms or combs, all splattered with clouds of color unlike those of any sunrise or sunset that we know. The shapes are strange but the colors pure— shining golds, clear greens, deep blues, swirling reds and darkest aubergines. The coats were portable wealth to early owners and to me, fortuitous bystander to this parade, an unexpected source of piercing happiness.
III. A poem by Greg McBride:
Diminished
I stride into the mists and disappear. —Edwin M. Zimmerman (1924-2012)
It was a good thing to tell his story with our stories, each of us one thin strand of who and what he was, and he for me a keeper of the best of who I am. But keepers depart, one by one, a piece of me tucked under an arm. His story, my story, that intersection now closed. Remembering him, remembering me, I drive away under skeletal trees, turn onto Woodside Parkway, take the detour, and hope that when I get home, someone will know who I am.
Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |
