Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker

ODE TO THE AUTOMOBILE AND HUMAN HAPPINESS

How much human happiness can we stand?

I don’t know but don’t we all like to drive fast?

Exceeding the speed limit is a blast,

the cup runneth over running a light and

getting away with it; happy too is a leisurely drive

with public radio Bach on the first of May

along the tree-lined Hutchinson River Parkway

heading north, sun bright, elated not yet to arrive,

remembering the early cars, the first boyfriend

and his forest green Chevrolet, its new car smell

and his shaving lotion smell, parked on the hill

of glowing kisses that would never end,

remaining unconsumed since that first day

like the bush that beckoned Moses to its burning,

promising happiness, or at least promising

freedom, which is what all cars do, anyway.

So what do I feel, giving my Prius away

dear as it is, to my dear and handsome son

now that I am a city-dweller? One

feeling is loss, the other feeling: Hooray.

He’s manually skilled, he’s in good shape,

he’ll take it camping, climbing with his wife.

I wish them happy highways in this life;

I give away the car. Love’s what I keep.

—from Rattle #79, Spring 2023

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Alicia Ostriker: “I don’t usually write in traditional forms, but this poem somehow asked to be in quatrains. I also don’t usually write about happiness (who does?), so it made me happy that I could do that, and gather past, present, and future happinesses into a single poem, like a little distillation of joy. As Robert Frost says: ‘For once, then, something.’”

Alicia Ostriker

GHAZAL: FREEDOM IN AMERICA

My grandfather’s pipe tobacco fragrance, moss-green cardigan, his Yiddish lullaby

When I woke crying: three of my earliest memories in America

Arriving on time for the first big war, remaining for the second, sad grandpa

Walked across Europe to get to America

When the babies starved, when the village burned, when you were flogged, why not

Log out, ship out, there was a dream, the green breast of America

My grandfather said no President including Roosevelt would save the Jews in Europe

He drew out an ample handkerchief and wiped away the weeping of America

One thing that makes me happy about my country

Is that Allen Ginsberg could fearlessly write the comic poem “America”

Route sixty-six entices me westward ho toward dreaming California

I adore superhighways but money is the route of all evil in America

Curse the mines curse the sweatshops curse the factory curse the boss

Let devils in hell torment the makers of bombs over Baghdad in America

When I video your rivers your painterly meadows your public sculpture Rockies,

When I walk in your filthy cities I love you so much I bless you so much America

People people look there: grandpa please look: Liberty the Shekhina herself

Welcoming you like a queen, like a mother, to America

Take the flute player from the mesa, take the raven from his tree

Now that the buffalo is gone from America

White man, the blacks are snarling, the yellows swarming, the umber terrorists

Are tunneling through and breathing your air of fear in America

If you will it, it is no dream, somebody admonished my grandfather

He surmised they were speaking of freedom in America

—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

[download audio]

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Alicia Ostriker: “When I was young I used to plan my poems. I knew what I wanted them to ‘say.’ Now they are like crawling into the dark. I write in order to understand what confuses/troubles/baffles me. I write to clarify what I’m feeling. I write to include the contradictions, wrestle the obsessions, because I don’t know who I am when I’m not writing. For example: what does it mean to be a third-generation American Jewish woman poet? This poem struggles with the ‘American’ part.”

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

May 31, 2023

January 3, 2014