Sample Poems by Joan E. Bauer

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Remembering Zappa


Be regular and ordered in your life
so that you may be violent and original in your work.
—Frank Zappa quoting Gustave Flaubert


So many myths. No—Zappa’s scientist dad
didn’t invent mustard gas, but he did work
in a Maryland arsenal where it was stored.

True: his mother poured olive oil down his ear
& a doctor pushed radium up his nose.
I endured some quack asthma cures too.

Zappa played drums & guitar, then inspired
by Edgar Varèse, composed experimental music
for his high school orchestra.

Only a semester of college. Later wouldn’t pay for
his kids to go. In ’81, I taught his daughter Moon
the brightest eighth grader I ever knew

& I felt a kinship, though I wasn’t a devotee
of the quirky, satiric songs that underwrote
her dad’s brilliant, genre-bending orchestrals.

Military-industrialist brat, virtuoso guitarist,
obsessive composer, free speech absolutist,
patriarchal family man.

In June ’91 in Prague, Zappa appeared in
an oversized white sweatshirt, dark jeans.
His mustache & sideburns, a bristly frost.

He’d declined treatment for late-stage cancer
to perform as long as he could around the world.
That night: ‘Reggae Improvisation in the Key of A.’

Zappa told his ebullient fans jamming the stadium:
‘Just the beginning of your new future,’
then invited any Soviet troops: ‘Dance to this.’

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In the Shadow of the Inquisition


Happy is the country without a history.
—Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)


In a Milan ‘coffee-house’ near a piazza that now bears
his name, a round-faced philosopher & jurist argued:

‘Unjust & unnecessary punishment is tyranny.’

He shared his belief in free will & rationality.
His views on justice & the social contract influenced

the Declaration of Independence, as Beccaria’s treatise,
On Crimes & Punishment, praised by Voltaire,

was a best-seller in the bookstores of Boston, New York,
Philadelphia & the capitals of Europe.

Of aristocratic birth, Beccaria began his Jesuit education
at eight, but abhorred being caged with ‘fanatical’ clerics.

A‘little Newton’ who excelled at mathematics, he grew up
the stubborn son who defied his father to marry.

Moved to outrage & pity by the Inquisition, he argued
against religious intolerance & the imposition of death

for heresy, witchcraft, consorting with gypsies,
shooting a rabbit or stealing grapes.


Treason, he reasoned, was the greatest crime,
but even that he would not punish by execution.

His views would shape the Bill of Rights:
a ban on cruel & unusual punishment.

In 1889, the death penalty was abolished in Italy,
though restored, for twenty years, by Mussolini.

In Milan, a bronze statue, a monument to Beccaria,
stands on the site of the bygone hangman’s house.

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‘Cooking Is An Art But You Eat It Too’


for Marcella Hazan (1924-2013)


Born in an Adriatic port town, Cesenatico,
a mini-Venice without the crowds,

she earned a double doctorate in science,
taught mathematics, but had never cooked at all

when she found herself in New York City speaking
no English, with a husband who could deal

with anything but a bad meal. She abandoned
cookbooks, trusting the memory of her family’s

classic northern Italian meals. Soon she was teaching
cooking in her apartment, writing books in Italian,

translated by her husband, Victor, into splendid prose.
Polenta, risotto, squid with tomatoes, Swiss chard.

An easy favorite: roast chicken with lemons inside.
That craze for balsamic vinegar, we owe to her.

She didn’t even know who Craig Claiborne was
when he came to dinner. Hazan & Claiborne.

My mainstays as I began cooking. Volumes
smudged, dog-eared, then lost in a fire.


Coiffed silver hair, elegant dress, double-string
pearls. A radiant, grandmotherly smile. Still

she was ‘a tough biscotti,’ voice deep, raspy,
commanding. She drank Jack Daniels, not wine.

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Bellissima


(1 h 55 min Italy 1951)


Long ago, my sister was The Voice of the Paradise Theater
singing the Coming Attractions, like a canticle of faith.

In the land of matinees & enchantment, I was a believer.
She was devout. We had our saints:

Cagney, Garland, Hepburn, Capra.
Even now, our hands clutch DVDs like a rosary.

Should we pray for a blessed Visitation?
Would we settle for the Second Coming of Fred Astaire?

*

In my sister’s birth year, Luchino Visconti shot Bellissima,
a gritty, claustrophobic satire with the fearless

Anna Magnani as Maddalena, a working-class mother
with BIG DREAMS for her spindly five-year-old, Maria.

Magnani plays the mother as full-throttle diva & whirlwind,
while Visconti, a Marxist & neo-realist, skewers

pesky neighbors, rapacious hair stylists & drama teachers,
the cynical would-be seducer who bilks

Maddalena out of a fortune as she preps Maria
for her audition as the ‘prettiest girl in Rome.’
Visconti gives us dilapidated tenements set against
Rome’s phantasmic film world. Heart-breaking

as the child sobs, abandoned & forgotten while
her mother wanders Rome in crazy machinations.

The spell broken when studio flacks mock the child
& Maddalena, freed of her obsession, damns them all.