Buttered popcorn smelling of warm cardboard,
Hot dogs topped in sauerkraut and cream,
Saltwater taffy sticking to your front teeth,
Water-ice and rosy sunset dreams,
Loitering white kites floating in the ozone,
Bonfires glowing in the wet sand,
Drive-in back seats bounce with urgent screwing,
Soldiers’ last farewells before Vietnam.
Porches, rooftops fly the US banner,
Triangular folded flags rest in widow’s hands,
Stars and Stripes laid on a young man’s scepter,
A great awakening to division in the land,
Kent State, flower children and police dogs,
Women’s lib, the pill, abortion rights,
Rock stars plead for segregation’s ending,
Washington marches, Martin Luther’s fight,
Just one question generation X won’t answer,
Has the American dream already faded from the world?
What about a flower for your lady?
Or some cotton candy for your girl?
The Ani Papyrus
I
His phallus in hand,
The creator ejaculates,
Bringing forth a voluptuous
Couple, brother and sister
Who are the Earth and the Sky
And all that afterwards ensues
II
The sister is The Sky
An immense blue skinned woman
With enormous breasts,
Surrounded by starry night
Which is her skin’s pigment,
Her mouth and anus are twin horizons
III
Each day the sun sets in her mouth,
And rises between her legs
Traversing death and in doing so,
She births the East and the West eternally
Loosely translated from
The Ani Papyrus, 1300 BCE
The British Museum
VIII.
AUTOGRAPHS, 34 BRONZE POEMS
1974-2008
Au fond, il n’y a que I’amour, quel qu’il soit.
—Pablo Picasso
Anne d’ Harnoncourt (1943-2008)
I lit a candle beneath Bernini’s canopy
In Saint Peter’s Basilica,
Laid a wreath of red roses on Raphael’s tomb
In the Pantheon,
Scraping tidbits of our last conversation
From the stones of the Venice Biennale.
I have knelt before Caravaggio’s saints
Like a Pilgrim and
Like a Pilgrim, wondered through the Roman Forum
On the point of tears.
Pausing in the Palatino to ponder all that was
Excellent in you, burdened by Life’s fragility,
And what is real and what is un-real, reconciling
The possible and the impossible while you sleep,
Anne, the Valide, Philadelphia’s Athena,
With your lynx eyes and Etruscan smile, your Herculesian
Voice & aristocratic lisp that turned p’ s into th’s,
The scepter your father bequeathed you held
Draped in Tanagrino scarves, shading that
Brilliance that glows like Leonardo’s moon.
Like a sister I revolt at this un-timeliness & waste,
Of a free and generous spirit, seeped
In choice and dedicated to that empire of color,
The red Degas, rest, rest, rest, removed,
Not so much because Life is untimely & wasteful,
But because the house you lived in was the essence
Of timeliness and the enemy of waste,
It was the opposite of emptiness—a rose figured
Lekythos Vase overflowing with the eternal
Fascination of Perfection.
At Petra, I stand on the rock of Isis,
In Cairo, I weep on the granite of Sphinx
Barefoot, I walk the labyrinth of Chartres’ Cathedral,
At Aya Sophia, I kneel on a silk prayer rug,
And cover my face and hair in grief, gazing,
Neither to the right nor the left,
But somewhere in that Netherland where Art dwells,
Immobile & irreducible & still living …
The only proof that anything
Has ever happened in the past.
For Emily Dickinson
The black beast telephone is at hand.
I have only to reach out
From this bed where I am suspended
On a nape of fear as thick and swollen
As the Dead Sea sprawled on its kidneys.
I close my eyes and drift and wait,
But next comes not the ooze of dying salt
But a typhoon of rushing water,
A deadly wall of brine and seaweed
That chokes and crashes into my prone body.
I dig my heels in sand, a burrowing crab
Imprinted in coral a billion years
Beneath this forgotten sea, and I shall
Be as forgotten as I clutch white rock
And stare insanity in the face.
Floating now, I enter a heedless tunnel
Of white mummies and plaster of Paris.
Through a hole I see the Black
Beast Telephone sitting on its distant throne,
Its obscene wheel numbered in red and black.
A hollow ringing in my ears vibrates my spine.
I am a striped zebra in black and white,
A convict struggling with lead and chain,
All thought churning like condensed vapor
In tubes running out of mouth & nose & ear.
“How much time, Judge?” “Six months to life.”
A welcome sentence if only penitentiary
Was my fate, and redneck guards,
With rubber hoses and solitary confinement,
Exercise in the yard and switchblade fights.
But I shall be one of those wretched and expensive
Inmates suckled on Freudian pap
With a blurred mouth, furry and soft with Novocain:
I grind a screech as they bear down,
With electrodes and chloroform.
A muffled roar and a peninsula of ancient turtles
Turn on their backs and die on the shore;
So, no more love
As I go down
& for the third time.
For Mary Mccarthy
We met coming in opposite directions on the Rue de Rennes Shadowed by the Tour Montparnasse, lost parody of Pan Am. The sun was in those sapphire-blue eyes that rarely if ever Believe what they learn in this unremorseful and imprecise World, bestowing that dazzling New England smile, polite, Smashing; the smile that stuns the most armed and vigilant Intelligence though you flash it in warning just before a Philistine & exquisitely formed pretension is squashed under Your raised eyebrow like a baby squab underfoot, but today You gossip housewifely, contentedly illuminated in Paris, Your arms full of flowers for the flat, veal chops in your Shopping bag for lunch. Mary, contrary to opinion it is not Your flowing & just mind I love, but your center of gravity.
For Elaine Brown
The world’s savagements
Wound you
And still all
That delicacy in you
You disdain
As weakness
But which
Is only
The coloration
Romantics
show their
Enemy
In
Oakland.
For Toni Morrison
I thought I might possess the Africa of my dreams
As I possess my soul hot and lustrous with longing
But only in Paris, London, or Rome
Where parts of it roam city streets begging, high on hemp,
Cocaine’s mark on every forehead.
Whatever I thought
I might possess the Africa of my dreams,
That nostalgic, malarial delirium
I hold against solitude and the long night—
Whispering “No, not yet” or groping blindly
For a toehold in the fluorescent, red-rimmed black holes of
Total ignorance,
Leaving disks of anti-History strung out all over my bed.
For Alice Walker
The fetish you gave me out of love which was
The five shorn tips of the fingers of your left hand
Truncated at the first joint, still bloody
Not yet curled and ivoried in mummification
Strung on a pendant of moon-shaped mother of pearl
You hung round my neck
Forehead pressed on mine
Over an ancestor’s grave
But I saw only the pulse
Of traumatized flesh left back there
A melancholy moan from Dahomey
Purple with mutilation
Which means
Some woman is
Dead,
Doesn’t it?
For Alberto Giacometti
In Karnak’s shadow
You wandered
Through Milan’s Duomo
No more than
A sprinkling
Of carborundum
With careful Swiss eyes.
“Maestro, are you lost?”
“No, only my railway ticket.”
We fed you English tea and pastry,
A sad-faced and scarred Ramses
Amongst the chattering Italians,
And drove you home
To your mother in Bale.
For Louise Neveson
Politeness forces one into Nothing
Those Nothings I build into my own
Private cathedral.
Who are you to say that one cannot
Believe in something
Beyond the pale, downcast liveries
Of the soul?
Today I am not one day older
But one thousand. I am Sphinx.
I turn and twist in that knowledge,
But whatever the price
Of this demi-glow tapping at
My chapel window
Whatever the price
Of this onrushing wind,
I am ready to pay that price
And with interest.
What more can a woman strive
Than to love once more?
Castor Semenya’s Ovaries
My lady of testosterone
Angel of the arena,
Princess of the piste
Empress of the 1:80 minute stop-clock
Goddess of the 800 meters
Return home to your Cape of Good Hope village,
To the sounds and cymbals in Ga-Masehlong
And hurrahs from the stadium crowds,
Triumphant in femininity, the way God made you,
Your shorn head high having run
The race of your young life and won,
With your feet, your ovaries, your uterus,
Your heart, raging in hormonal justice,
Having left your earthly opponents in the dust,
Posing the Sojourner Truth all time question;
Ain’t I a woman?
Pulverizing the image of womanliness to rise
To new heights the possibilities of womanhood
And mysterious shrug of nature misunderstood
By Philistines posing as Scientists
Denying your humanity, sexuality, and beauty
In the name of conformity,—that purgatory of
Misjudgements, and penitentiary of defamation
When the simple truth is just that;
You are a woman
The way God made you.
Jazz
Beat
Rimbaud,
Riding
The night train from
Bamako,
Gigging across the continent’s lap like
An Ella Fitzgerald scat,
Gentle White-Russian-Refugee-From-The-Beats,
Driving a rinky-dink taxi cab,
Tin that’s turning to dust
Under Africa’s haughty gaze.
Intruder in the sand,
Smiling cowry shells and
Humming my favorite tune,
Hoagie Carmichael on an upright piano.
Playing it again, Sam
Bogarting on,
Haunted by honey-white huts themselves,
Haunted by lizards and blood sacrifice,
You looked into Charlie Bird Parker’s eyes
And refused a drink.
You looked into Miles Davis’ trunk
And refused to blow,
Beau-de-lairing on,
Casting cowry shells in airports,
Terrifying respectable Afro-matrons,
Divining the ultimate revelation;
A black woman president of you-know-where.
Tim-buk-to.
Much.
Too much love, life, lust, vice, Sand-flushed toilets,
Afro-Western grigri on bed of nails,
Shrapnel of ancestor dust
Pierced my heart that day,
Down on the Niger river watching nubile Bambara girls
Wash clothes and sing in sweet girlish voices:
FrereJacques, old colonial cannibal pot,
Brother I never had,
Shivering
In anticipation of discovering a Past,
Beau-de-lairing on …
Mark Rothko
You are no musician,
Your glowing squares stand still
Like Moses’ tablets ignited.
No Jew.
No African.
You cannot sing or dance in rhythm,
You do not borrow black from our race,
It is your color
And that of your ancestors
As much as it is mine.
And you are right.
Have it …
For if anyone has earned it,
You have.
Even when you paint in blue, red, and yellow
It is still black.
No music.
Only fine-grained writing on the wall,
A history of those other niggers,
In those other ghettos,
Your offering to an always angry God
As temperamental as a palette.
Unloving and unforgiving balance sheet bureaucrat
When will He learn there are no accounts to be tallied,
No way to measure the evil stupidity of His Creation,
No rule by which the just can be judged,
No scale on which sin can be portioned out.
There is only the infinity of the Square,
The old Testament,
All foreground and no perspective:
When will He admit
There is no color?
Man has invented it.
Untitled
You rise.
I turn
And sink onto you
And ride,
Feeling the Goddess.
You tap my breasts softly
With your palm,
And I sing
The Gospels,
And if you had not fallen
Unfrocked,
If you had kept the Faith,
Wouldn’t the same psalms
Fall from your lips?
Untitled
What made me take this path when there are so many others?
Pale gravel on the left from the Orangerie to the Louvre
Though October promises the winter I want, the sun shines
Spotlighting flower beds that ring as false as stagecraft.
Even we ring false, possessed of everything except
Some ragged piece of puzzle we cannot read:
A blank gray space shaped rather like Italy’s boot
Obscures
our view.
But would you lie to me?
Suddenly the last doubt vanishes
The last trembling disbelief is gone.
You turn to me and say, “How lucky we are.”
Ah yes, I think, I could be blind, you could be dead,
And Paris could be burning.
Antonio Calderara
The poet is one who loves
And who remembers that he loves,
For this is The Perfect Recollection,
Invented & licensed by those who know
That love is hardest to recall
The morning after and the morning after that,
Finding us curled up in canonized squares
Of delicate light like stunned
Pink-lit snails abstracted
The slap of Eros on mortal flesh
Has left us amnesiac,
Running naked in the melancholy gray,
Galloping, a cavalry of love lost,
Sated and destroying Memory,
Whose universal shape is a square,
Whose shadow is a circle,
Whose face is invisible,
Railing into the distraught
Cosmos of brain matter,
Leaving only the poet’s Drunken Boat
Ransacking the pastel waters of Orta,
Heading for the marriage of the Emperor: Time,
And his bride: Memory,
Knowing that love is
Only this.
Lago d’Orta, July 29, 1973
Ken Noland
You are a dangerous man,
Like playing with
Double-edged razor blades,
Honed and platinum-plated to
That one millimicron
Of difference between rose and Rose.
Pale and slender mountain man,
Eyes horizontally striped
With pain,
Menace in that drawl,
Malice in that slouch,
Solitary as a whistle.
Pale and slender mountain man,
Tender as the summer green of
North Carolina hills,
Dyed into raw linen,
Running out Life
Along parallel lines.
You are a dangerous man,
Recalling only the sound of color,
Listening only to the color of sound,
Leaving color in court,
The Remembrancer,
Collecting debts from your enemies.
Akhmatova
Akhmatova, Akhmatova,
What I mean is
Take care.
Don’t fall, don’t.
You are the brightest.
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