In NYC: A Holiday Lobby

a FEW REVIEWS ARE IN

 

WHAT WAY TO GO TODAY from 2009

WHAT WAY TO GO TODAY

Here's my poem that won Rick Dale's Beat Poetry Contest on December 3, 2009.

WHAT WAY TO GO TODAY

Almost dusk:
Last summer on one Wednesday, in July,
I sat on a bench, a grey wooden tired
Bench on a boardwalk out at old Long Beach.
In the sky a lonely and lost grey kittiwake tipped
As the hot pink sun set in blazing technicolor over
Hot pinkish sand and the fading blue ocean water.

That morning:
I had thought about seeing great art...
Vermeer, or Courbet, or maybe Monet.
But, I drove to the beach instead to think
To think about everything creative that had been
Created before I got here, and when I was here,
And what will be created when I leave this place.
When one day I leave my place and all places in my
Consciousness that is now in this time and was
At a past time and will be in some next time;
Maybe all time exists at the same time.
The great minds of theoretical physicists search
For the "Theory of Everything" as they sit
In their cluttered rooms, their great thinking rooms.
In universities, they ponder the mathematical equations
And Schrodinger's cat and all those mysteries.

In the evening:
It is during the quiet and still and sad night when
I miss most the people I never met:
Edie Beale, and the Rat Pack, and even Rod Serling
Who made me want to time travel: to go back to simpler places
Like Nedick's, or the Belmore, or Bickford's, and Willoughby.
Then the longing, a longing when distant sounds and faraway
Foghorns drive thoughts to reflect on a life visible through some
Smoky cracked mirror, a haunted and haunting steamy mirror.
As I am sort of old now and getting older
There is a vague and odd feeling that I,
Like the kittiwake, somehow must have lost the way.

© Marjorie Levine 2009

BACK TO BROWN, taken in 2024

 

from 2023

WITH ROBERT KLEIN ON BLOOPERS AND PRACTICAL JOKES

from PINKY THINKER PRESS

my poem that appeared in THE DILLYDOUN REVIEW

 

THE DISTANT LEFTOVER

You with your constant smell of indifference

And I so hungry for even a sweet side glance. 

But it was not to happen. 

Maybe it was fate on the snowy evening I sailed

Away from you: 

The last night I entered that ferry

The same ferry that always took me back to you

Because I was seduced by silly things

That never mattered. 

I must have looked so crumbled, so forlorn,

That a nun stopped reading the Bible and moved 

To sit closer to me, to give me comfort 

And solace… and she did. 

As I drifted the waters to reach my home

You disappeared and grew smaller in every way 

Possible, so in many of my later years you 

Became a blurred washed memory.

And after a great time, when my forgotten passion 

Surfaced and took hold of me,

When the longing that once lived inside of me

Cornered my thoughts and turned you into a rumination,

I tried to find you.

But you were gone. 

Really gone.

And there was a heavy stillness in my place. 

On cold nights, I remembered the ferry and

All I could hear was the nun,

The nun who so many years ago told me:

“You will still be here

In the morning.”  

© Marjorie J. Levine 2020

"T" is Dead.... Again

This piece below was written in June of 2007:

"T" is Dead!

I watched several times "Made in America" on HBO On Demand... which was the controversial and confusing last episode to the phenomenal series "The Sopranos." Many fans were disappointed and even angry that the series did not come to a more satisfying conclusion with more clear closure. It was so layered with different innuendos and possibilities that some diehards referred to the last episode of "The Sopranos" as the Zapruder film of TV finales. But, now I am even more convinced than ever that my initial impressions and interpretations are valid.

The textured theme for the entire run of this series has been the meaning of life and the afterlife. "You probably don't even hear it when it happens, right," Bobby asks Tony in "Soprano Home Movies" when they are out in his little boat on the lake. That one line was a nuanced foreshadowing in terms of the final scene of "Made in America" which opens with the soundtrack of a funeral dirge and then moves along to the family dinner at Holsten's. A suspicious guy in a Members Only jacket enters the restaurant and he nervously looks around. We are thinking he could be dangerous. When he gets up to go to the bathroom, the tension that has been building is unbearable. And all of this is happening while Meadow unsuccessfully attempts several times to park her car. Just as she runs across the street, Tony hears the bells as the restaurant door opens and he looks up and seems startled. Then, the infamous quick and unexpected cut to a dark and silent screen that lasts for about 20 seconds before the credits roll. "What the fuck?" we all initially thought. And all across America customers were calling their cable companies.

After I calmed down, I realized Tony Soprano got whacked by the guy in the Members Only jacket! In his death there was no lighted "Inn at the Oaks" filled with deceased family members, no big answer to "where am I going," and no insight into his desert revelation, "I get it." There was no validation to Paulie's spiritual hallucinations and no parallel experience to Christopher's vision of hell when he was in a coma. Carmela was wrong... Tony did not go to hell. And even Bill Burroughs got it wrong in his monologue that was used in the opening segment to Season 6. The blank and silent screen at the very end implies Mama Livia was right all along! "It's all a big nothing," she told AJ. How funny is that? In my book, that's surreal, mind-boggling, and ultimately amazing. The series ended in great irony and dark comedy.

My jaw drops open at that final 20 second blank screen each time I see it. David Chase has to be disappointed that people reacted so negatively at first to his masterpiece. They did not "get it," so maybe it was a bit too esoteric. But it remains a twist so bizarre, so richly funny, so blended with the theme of the entire series, that "I just can't shake it." In the end, Mama was right and "It's all a big nothing!"

"T" RIP.

In June 2007, I sat shiva for Tony Soprano.

CHAIRS UP, AND THAT WAS A WRAP