Dedication # 1 for Sid Grossman: Meeting the FBI

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We put the bail money in the freezer
as though it were once alive,
as though it would rot and the smell of it
would give us away. One fellow
put up his house for the Party,

and when we stayed in jail,
the city repossessed it: the new owners
seemed nervous, as though the walls or curtains
may contain Soviet fallout, messages from Krushchev.

Some of the people who went underground
were never heard from again. Maybe they
wandered off, maybe they filled out the new
identity, maybe it was the one chance to leave

a bad marriage, a town they couldn't stomach.
One got his hair done, another committed suicide
by falling in the water intake at ConEd, a last
glitch in the machine. I took the name Milt Wineman
and lived in New Britain; I would practice in the mirror,

Milt, Milton, Mr. Wineman until I felt dizzy
with the meaningless sounds my tongue made.
I made up stories, a war wound, a woman
who left me, I tried on silk shirts and blue ties
and stacked cans in an A&P on Water St.
careful not to steal, careful to take one deliberate
action after another: move with the right hand and then the left.
And when I saw the FBI following me, I smiled:
my name had come back to me.

The handcuffs came first, and I learned after
time to flex a little when they twist, to give slack
so my fingers didn't go blue. Then the ankle cuffs,
and then the chain that tied them together, even though

I had never so much as struck another man in the face.
We drove, one at the wheel, two by my side, from New Haven
to Hartford. When I spoke, the driver hit the gas, let the throttle out.

The jail was built in the civil war. No plumbing:
we used a tin bucket to shit. A cook in the prison
hospital was a party member; he had the run of the place.
He brought me down an apple, and later a pear, water still beaded
on it from the tap under which he washed it. It took me
until they were almost rotten to eat them: I stared at the soft
light on their skins, the green almost blue color, the color
of burnished copper, the color of new earth. Finally I
took a bite. I could see the cook grinning at me, I could
see his big, black hands, one nail cut up to the cuticle,
the knife-hand shiny like old wood. Keep it up brother,
he said. When I bit into the apple, and then the pear, I could taste another     world.