Merrily We Roll Along
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FUNNY, MOVING, FURIOUS, and dazzling, Eleanor Lerman’s Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande, 2005) sounds the note of the times, the era of American Imperialism, the days of our Bush-filled lives. Lerman is able to capture brilliantly the wacky and weary sense of stymied idealism of a generation that grew up hoping for better things for America. What is all the more remarkable, given the failures of the last 25 years to find peace with the end of the Cold War, is that Lerman is still able to strike a note of cautious optimism that she will find the moment “When the weight of experience / grows lighter with each step” and that the love she’s been waiting for will be there “behind the open door.”

Achieving this tone of tentative tranquility has not been easy for Lerman, not just because of the way post-Soviet history has unfolded, but also because of how Lerman started out. Her first book, Armed Love, published when she was in her very early twenties, created a sensation 35 years ago. In 1973, even after Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton had taught us “where madness touches love,”

nice Jewish girls who wrote poetry weren’t supposed to tell
the reader to
Get out the pistol honey
and warn me about eating silver
bullets because one
blue blue morning
suicide and money won’t be enough.

Nor did they describe themselves as “a mental hermaphrodite awash/ in a wedding cake of chemical dreams.” Men could write about making up “with the bitch queen and/ return[ing]to Spring Street involved with the orange juice and/ narcotics diet,” but women were not expected to talk about such matters.

Yet the violence of Armed Love could not have been sustained. Her second book, Come the Sweet By and By, published two years after Armed Love and winner of the first Juniper Prize, tries to be a kinder, gentler book, and as a result it seems comparatively flat, forced, and even mechanical. The poems, many of which are highly structured (although never taking traditional forms), are locked in their own architecture. This is not to say that the best don’t crackle with a fiery wit and fierce desire, but the volume as a whole is strangely stalled.

And then there came silence. Lerman wrote comedy. She co-authored with her brother two true-crime books. She made do. But it took her over 25 years to come out with a third book of poetry, The Mystery of Meteors (2001), and another four years after that to publish Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds. The wait has been worth it, as the latest book is one of the finest volumes of poetry published in recent years. Perhaps Lerman needed to live through her own history before she could connect her life to the public world of politics. Raised in an era in which the mantra of feminists was “the personal is political,” she needed time to develop a sense, not so much of the boundaries between private and public, but of the ways they can shape one another.

Her laboratory was Forest Hills, a neighborhood in New York City that has made itself home to various recent waves of immigrants. There Lerman lived among women who had recently arrived from Russia and Eastern Europe, the little sisters “far from home, far from the frozen herring and rusting submarines.” With those women she forged a bond. “We are the first waves of women,” she tells them, “we are the generations,/ born to carry you across the frontier that sometimes appears at the edge of history,/ the silver line drawn by the ancestors when their hearts were still shaped like knives.” But the little sisters are not so weak. The Russian émigré is a “dangerous woman” who could “sew gold into the ragged lining of anybody’s coffin. Who knows that money does buy freedom.”

History changes us, but not always for the better. “The world remakes us, but/ that is automatic.” More important, for Lerman, history harms us, and she urges her reader: “Think how it will not change./ For every kindness we have paid with extinction./ See that star exploding? It is history, hammering at our heads.” In “The Bondage Club” she puts “it this/ way: peace is impossible, violence endemic, guilt the/ natural foundation of our lives.” Nevertheless she would like to dance in the moonlight. “We could try that/ too. It won’t work, but it might be our kind of fun.” It is “our kind of fun” that just might be some consolation in this world where we are imprisoned by our own worst psychic forces, and in her happiest moods Lerman is willing to consider such consolations.

These moments of fun come more often than one might expect, but always with a kind of irony. “Starfish” ends in a mood of contentedness that seems a bit too sweet to be trusted. “Life,” she tells us,

lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
Then life send you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

The lyricism is undercut by the childlike language of “dreamland” and the image of smiling starfish. It is too cute, too happy in a book in which she threatens to release the pie-eating dog “into the world to remind you how the animal/ always comes back to haunt us and how the new/ days are just the old days, starting right about now.” This same strategy of child-like lyricism that underscores a smiley-face unreality is also found in “The Magellanic Clouds,” which concludes:

Loving us, loving us, loving us, the Small Magellanic Cloud
puzzles the astronomers because it seems to have no purpose.
But we know better. We whisper its name to our children so they
may be comforted.
We tell them that every day, stars are born in the Small Magellanic
Cloud
and then spin off into the universe, remembering us, wishing us well.

The Small Magellanic Cloud expresses Lerman’s desire to believe in a cosmic benevolence or at least in a tale that could be told to children so they will experience the love of adults as one of a wider world.

Closer to the truth is the view held in “Muons Are Passing Through You” that “the infinite is already in you./ It is in you and of you, and it may save you./ But if it saves you, it will give you no choice.” In the end we have no option other than to “be death, be stardust” because we are made of the same atomic particles that are scattered throughout the universe. Lerman is in her most hopeful mood when she is most cosmic—when she can look past the hard knocks of post-Soviet history and back to the Big Bang.

Or forward. One of the most moving poems in this book is “The Causeway,” which is spun out of two phrases “across the causeway” and “coming home.” It concludes—and it’s worth quoting at length, which is the only way to communicate its incantatory beauty—as follows:

aching decades of labor and struggle begin to
climb down from their machines and even I,
skilled with my tools, proud of my weapons,
allow that it may be time to lay down these
great endeavors and come home. Oh how long
we have all traveled and how far to set just
this first footfall upon your sacred promise
that in the evening, there would be a bridge.

Yet if God has made a sacred promise to provide a bridge to a land perhaps not of milk and honey—which we now know are probably not good for our health—but of affection and moderate exercise, He has plenty to answer for. There are “our weeping grandmas who would not love us because love/ begets slaughter.” There is biological cancer “that rammed itself against the liver …/ with the mad efficiency of a Panzer tank,” and there is the historical “Eastern European Nazi cancer” as well. “I hate to tell You this,” Lerman informs God, “but there are people my age who think You are out of Your mind.” In the concluding poem, “Jews in New York,” the Jews “have called a meeting to discuss their grievances/ with Him and plan to begin the proceedings by telling/ Him a joke. Soften the guy up. If he’s in a good/ mood, maybe he’ll start to explain some of this.”

I won’t claim to be impartial. Lerman is two years younger than I am—she’s reached, as I have, spreading middle age. Like me, she’s a New York Jew (although she stayed there). She speaks my language; she knows my people; she’s queer. So I might be a bit prejudiced, but Lerman’s been around for a while, and I think she’s here to stay. At least I hope so. In the meantime, Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds is so good a book that I have been pushing it on to people who don’t read poetry. It tells the kind of jokes that softens people up, puts them into a good mood, and then forces them to explain why they’ve allowed things to get so bad. Maybe then God will listen to our grievances, or maybe we’ll vote him out of office.

Following are three complete poems by Eleanor Lerman:

Someone Like You

Steam-heated rooms, winter, and your
thin arms waving away everyone you were
accused of loving. That’s how I remember you:
blonde as the girls of tomorrow, proud of
the quality of your drugs. In and out of
the shops on Cornelia Street to buy your cake
and cigarettes, in and out of the boys’ bars,
other women’s lives—the days went on
and on like that. The dangerous years.

It should have been a disaster, the kind of life
that I led then. The life in which I wanted
someone like you. Instead, when we met again
one night in the no-name town where we grew up,
we kissed like friends. And you said, Sister, I hear
you got a job. You’re making money. Why don’t
you tell your mother that you won’t be home?

Two hours later, back in the Chelsea Hotel,
I said that you could bite and you could scream
and you could tell me everything that anyone
had ever done to you and still, I wouldn’t
feel a thing, since I had wised up to the fact
that some women want to see how much
it really takes to kill them; some women
already know the answer in advance

So in the morning, we woke up without our
girl disguises and left it all behind us: the crimes
that we committed, the sex we thought was
owed us, the razors and the rubies that we wore
when we were those creatures, that generation,
the kind of lovers who crave the taste of blood.

The Body, Which Used To

The body, which used to
float down the boulevards, wraithlike,
radiating attraction, topped by
a face like a knife with a baby pout

now refuses to get out of bed.
Why? Ask it. Go on, anyone,
see what it has to say.
Are you sick? Are you tired?

The poor body shudders under its
thin sheet, each flat year laundered,
faded, gone, gone, gone.
What can it do but pull the lever

that operates a moan while the body
plunges back into sleep, into its
one dream of finding its way home
to queer street in the diamond days

when it was as brave as a boy,
as young as it would ever be, and
driving a stake into its own heart
was only a trick

Homage to the Commune

Having spent “the formative years”
in front of the blond wood television,
watching the Martians invade Maple Street,
aim their death rays at our hapless cities
and flap off to their spaceships, dragging
with them our most buxom girls

has unexpectedly enriched my thinking,
especially now that I am in my decline.
That I haven’t much to do except sit around
the house all day in my Yankee cap and
Tibetan hiking boots (which is a good costume:
homage to my father, homage to the days
of the commune), encouraging myself
to think that “anything is possible.”
That in fact, “you can never tell”

So when the letter arrives—as I
always knew it would—announcing that
The Committee in its wisdom has decreed,
I will have no doubt that indeed, somewhere,
people are stamping papers and drafting legislation
aimed at global capitulation, or at least
the Final Solution for my little town

What I will do then is get the others, the believers
The ones who spent their lives, like me,
spoiling for a fight. We’ll call the Martians
(You didn’t know they’ve been our friends
since we all tripped together in the 60s?)
We’ll get our dads. And we’ll go rocking
down the highway like we used to,
demanding justice and freedom and
whatever else those people who think
they’re now in power think they can spare

David Bergman, whose most recent book is The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture, is the poetry editor of this journal.