Friday
I see that Berne Madoff, the financier who bilked his clients of $64.8 billion with an elaborate Ponzi scheme, has died. The occasion gives me an excuse to share this entertaining poem, appearing in Poetry magazine in 2018. “Pyramid Scheme” begins by reflecting on the nature of such schemes but ends up going in a very different direction. At times I lose the thematic thread but hang on for a fun ride.
I suppose that makes the poem itself a pyramid scheme: we think we’re getting one thing but end up with something far different in the end. In this case, however, the money that comes pouring down upon the speaker in the final stanza is the sun’s rays, “which you don’t even have to pay tax on/ because sun money is free money.” Not that the speaker is against taxes—”because i believe that hospitals and education/ and the arts should be publicly funded.” It’s a nice thought to have the day after tax day.
At one point the speaker wonders whether love itself is a pyramid scheme and then hints at the way that this is so. We think everything will be beautiful and then encounter references to screaming arguments and pain. Or shifting to all “curse of the mummy” pyramid movies, the mentions “trapdoors and malaria.” Even the positive allusions to love are conveyed through images of old cartoons. “When i look at you, my eyes are two identical neighborhood houses on fire,” the poet tells his love. “When i look at you my eyes bulge out of my skull like a dog in a cartoon.”
But whatever disappointments or caricatures we get, love is still at the center of things. As we look back at Madoff’s life, it good to remember that what makes our lives rich has little to do with money. For those of us living at the bottom of the pyramid, a golden moment may involve “eating cold pizza on your steps at dawn.” Down here, people learn important lessons from relationships, such as that arguments are not the same thing as honesty and screaming is not the same thing as passion. Madoff made billions and all for what? Did he ever once achieve the happiness the speaker describes at the end of the poem?
When I read the poet’s images of fraudulent millionaires and their get-rich schemes, I think of Henry Vaughan’s image of the miser in “The World”:
The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves…
In contrast, Vaughan speaks of seeing “eternity the other night/ Like a great ring of pure and endless light.” For Hera Lindsay Bird, love is at the core, which may amount to the same thing. The image of the two lovers walking down the street “with the grass blowing back and forth” is reminiscent of Archibald MacLeisch’s imagist poem “Ars Poetica,” where love is captured in the image of “the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.”
Madoff, like all pyramid grifters, lost sight of that. As Bird’s poem makes clear, such people are as one dimensional as a triangle.
Pryamid Scheme
By Hera Lindsay Bird
For RWT
the other day i was thinking about the term pyramid scheme, and why they called it pyramid scheme and not triangle scheme
and i asked you what you thought
you thought it added a certain gravitas, and linked the idea of economic prosperity
with some of history’s greatest architectural achievements
unconsciously suggesting a silent wealth of gold and heat
a triangle is two dimensional, and therefore
a less striking mental image than the idea of a third dimension of financial fraud
which is how many dimensions of financial fraud the term pyramid scheme suggests
but i had to pause for a second at the financial fraud part
because it occurred to me i didn’t know what pyramid schemes really were
i knew they had something to do with people getting money from nothing
like
the person at the top of the pyramid scheme, or more accurately
triangle scheme, acquires a number of investors and takes their money
and then pays the first lot of investors with the money from another bunch of investors
and so on and so forth
all the way to the bottom of the triangle
or pyramid face
which is the kind of stupid thing that happens
if you keep your money in a pyramid and not a bank account
although if you ask me banks are the real pyramid schemes after all
or was love the real pyramid scheme? i can’t remember
maybe it’s better to keep your money in a pyramid than a bank
and i should shop around and compare the interest rates on different pyramids
maybe i should open up a savings pyramid
with a whole bunch of trapdoors and malarias
to keep the financial anthropologists
i mean bankers out
my emeralds cooling under the ground like beautiful women’s eyes
i think this was supposed to be a metaphor for something
but i can’t remember where i was going with it
and now it’s been swept away by the winds of
whatever
but knowing me, it was probably love
that great dark blue sex hope that keeps coming true
that cartoon black castle with a single bird flying over it
i don’t know where this poem ends
how far below the sand
but it’s still early evening
and you and I are a little drunk
you answer the phone
you pour me a drink
i know you hate the domestic in poetry but you should have thought of that before you
invited me to move in with you
i used to think arguments were the same as honesty
i used to think screaming was the same as passion
i used to think pain was meaningful
i no longer think pain is meaningful
i never learned anything good from being unhappy
i never learned anything good from being happy either
the way i feel about you has nothing to do with learning
it has nothing to do with anything
but i feel it down in the corners of my sarcophagus
i feel it in my sleep
even when i am not thinking about you
you are still pouring through my blood, like fire through an abandoned hospital ward
these coins are getting heavy on my eyes
it has been a great honor and privilege to love you
it has been a great honor and privilege to eat cold pizza on your steps at dawn
love is so stupid: it’s like punching the sun
and having a million gold coins rain down on you
which you don’t even have to pay tax on
because sun money is free money
and i’m pretty sure there are no laws about that
but i would pay tax
because i believe that hospitals and education
and the arts should be publicly funded
even this poem
when i look at you, my eyes are two identical neighborhood houses on fire
when i look at you my eyes bulge out of my skull like a dog in a cartoon
when i am with you
an enormous silence descends upon me
and i feel like i am sinking into the deepest part of my life
we walk down the street, with the grass blowing back and forth
i have never been so happy