Two Poems by Adam Schonbrun

Adam Schonbrun

SAN FRANCISCO ACID TRIP

I'm on Haight Street looking for
Love Street--2 hits of Mr. Bob,
Smoking a pipe in a loud chequered
      Suit--living in my car,
On Foodstamps, the blotter taken
After

     Shirley, homeless astrologer
With connections to the Manson Klan,
Straight gray hippy hair, malnourished
Frame, reads my palm...

     She asks to sleep in my car:
The 1967 Mercury Montego convertible
(lent to me by D.E.), I say sure
we'll park under the Golden Gate
&

    then I took the trip
& lay fearful in the dark
of the McDonald's parking lot,
Black kids on bicycles
Popping wheelies & screaming...
Head saying: no, these
aren't cannibals, but where
Do the drums keep coming from?

      1984 in the front seat
      looking at the emblem: MONTEGO
     becomes MONT EGO-- That

m o u n t a i n of self
all must climb--
but who counted on this angst?

Shirley sees me back on the Haight
in front of the Pall Mall--she's
Begged, borrowed, scored two Tuna-fish
sandwiches; but I refuse to eat, I'm tripping on LSD (that cat
From the Church of the Subgenius keeps lifting his pipe to my head
Saying:

It's all BULLSHIT, man, worship it!)
And she wants me to eat--the baggies turning green...
Early 80's still speedy chemicals...

Where's the white vehicle of our love?
Gave it to X to transact a deal.

The street dims in slow yellow hues
As she pulls her fist
From down by her hip
& cracks it across my jaw.

I go down.
My glasses fly off.

Sight comes back only later
In a wave of Terror: Here, I'm kissing concrete...

I sleep under Oakland Bay Bridge.

I can't, can't come down.

ON THE D-TRAIN FROM SHEEPSHEAD

They keep the lights on
The court in the Bay
So the turf glows moon-green
Where the footballers play
& the creation myths'
midnight gems on the playground
cuss & sweat as Whitman says:
All heroic deeds were performed
in the open air.

Through the hole in the fence
My family's walked
To grandma's before she died
& now to Aunt Rhoda's.

In "Sea Isles Apartments,"
Frail Claire's body smoked away
The sweet odor of soups--

Riding the D
I remember
their stories
of the apartment
with the shakes
too close
to the El.

The photo of her hair,
long & tied in back,
smiling with my slim old man
holding a big Blue
caught off the Bay--

My students
eat too much sugar
& I wonder how they sleep;

My friend in the Trauma Center
of Brookdale fixes gunshot wounds.
At Coney Island, delivered 22 babies.

Light! Hope!
Friend with your hands heal.
Believe, Old Brooklyn, the testament...
The sky can't be
only smoke & filth.
Streetball on the blacktop
Loved your rainbow laces,

Walt discussed politics here.

Brooklyn, once farms
& sprawling in Flatbush,
Brooklyn where my mother's car
Got stolen, where my father became an orphan,
Brooklyn, the bridge, the fireworks,
"The city's fiery parcels all undone,"

the kid from PS 269, Julio,
eaten by the polar bear
at Prospect Park Zoo,

here grandmothers threw salt
on the brownstone steps--
in winter gave soup & lullabies.

Born in New York, Adam Schonbrun received his BA from Haifa University in 1986. His first book AN IMAGE OF AN ANGEL won the Ron Adler Memorial Poetry Prize in 1985. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Penn State, where he was Katey Lehman Fellow in Poetry from 1988-1991. He’s published poetry in the Jerusalem Post, Caesura, Puerto del Sol, The Jewish Quarterly, The Forward among many others. In 2005, he was Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He’s published 8 volumes of poetry, including most recently New and Selected Poems (2008) by Safed Publications. Schonbrun has been teaching at Safed College, a branch campus of Bar Ilan University, since 1995. He lives in the city of Safed in Galilee with his wife and five children.