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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Night
Store Windows
The Yellow Cab
Downtown
Before Air-Conditioning
Midterm Election Results, 2010
Midwinter
Snow
Charlie
Arnold Toynbee, Mac Bundy, Hercules Bellville
Nice Weather
London
Dinner with Holly Andersen
Baudelaire
iPhoto
A Friend of Mine
Do Not Resuscitate
Cimetière du Montparnasse, 12ème Division
Rome
A History of Modern Italy
Mount Street Gardens
Moto Poeta
School Days
Back Then
Annunciation
The Green Necklace
Arabia
Victory Parade
Poems 1959–2009
Arnaut Daniel
The State of New York
The Terrible Earthquake in Haiti
La civilisation française
At the Knick
A Toast to Lorin Stein
Rainy Day Kaboom
Lisbon
Then All the Empty Shall Be Full
They Show You the Harp
Istanbul
Transport
Oedipal Strivings
News from the Muse
Sweet Day, So Cool, So Calm, So Bright
Cunnilingus
Pointer in the Field
Palm Sunday
They’re There
One Last Kick for Dick
What Next
Rain
Egypt Angel
Track Bike
Also by Frederick Seidel
Copyright
TO KARL MILLER
NIGHT
The city sleeps with the lights on.
The insomniac wants it to be morning.
The quadruple amputee asks the night nurse what time it is.
The woman is asking for her mother,
But the mother is exhausted and asleep and long since dead.
The nun screams to stop the charging rhino
And sits bolt upright in bed
Attached to a catheter.
If a mole were afraid of the dark
Underground, its home, afraid of the dark,
And climbed out into the light of day, utterly blind,
Destroying the lawn, it would probably be caught and shot,
But not in the recovery room after a craniotomy.
The prostitute suspects what her client might want her to do.
Something is going on. Something is wrong.
Meanwhile, the customer is frightened, too.
The city sleeps with the lights on.
The garbage trucks come in the night and make noise and are gone.
Two angelfish swim around the room and out the window.
Laundry suns on a line beneath white summer cumulus.
Summer thunder bumbles in the distance.
The prostitute—whose name is Dawn—
Takes the man in her mouth and spits out blood,
Rosy-fingered Dawn.
STORE WINDOWS
I smile in the mirror at my teeth—
Which are their usual brown.
My smile is wearing a wreath.
I walk wreathed in brown around town.
I smile and rarely frown.
I find perfection in
The passing store windows
I glance at my reflection in.
It’s citywide narcissism. Citizens steal a little peek, and what it shows
Is that every ugly lightbulb in that one moment glows.
A preposterous example: I’m getting an ultrasound
Of my carotid artery,
And the woman doing it, a tough transplanted Israeli, bends around
And says huskily, “Don’t tell anybody
I said that your carotid is extraordinary.”
I’m so proud!
It’s so ridiculous I have to laugh.
The technician is very well endowed.
I’m a collapsible top hat—a chapeau claque—that half
The time struts around at Ascot but can be collapsed flat just like that. Baff!
Till it pops back. Paff! Oh yes,
I find myself superb
When I undress.
A lovely lightbulb is my suburb,
And my flower, and my verb.
The naked man, after climbing the steps out of the subway,
Has moderate dyspnea, and is seventy-four.
He was walking down the street in Milan one day.
This was long ago. He began to snore.
He saw a sleeping man reflected in the window of a store.
THE YELLOW CAB
Tree-lined side streets make me lonely.
Many-windowed town houses make me sad.
The nicest possible spring day, like today, only
Ignites my inner suicide-bomber jihad.
I’m high on the fumes of my smokin’ sunglasses,
But my exhaust pipe has a leak, which smells bad.
Take away my hack license. Open the windows. I’m passing gases.
A driver of a medallion taxi has gone completely mad.
Yellow cab, yellow cab, where have you been?
I’ve been to the mirror to try to look in.
Yellow cab, yellow cab, what found you there?
Soft contact lenses on four wheels and a fare.
The million leaves on the Central Park trees are popping
Open the champagne.
There’s too much joy. There’s no stopping.
Love is on top, fucking pain.
DOWNTOWN
July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.
It is beautiful that they have to disappear.
It’s like the time you said I love you madly.
That was an hour ago. It’s been a fervent year.
I don’t really love fireworks, not really, the flavorful floating shroud
In the nighttime sky above the river and the crowd.
This time, because of the distance upriver perhaps, they’re not loud,
Even the colors aren’t, the patterns getting pregnant and popping.
They get bigger and louder when they start stopping.
They try to rally
At the finale.
It’s the four-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery—
Which is why the fireworks happen on this side of the island this year.
Shad are back, and we celebrate the Hudson’s Clean Water Act recovery.
What a joy to eat the unborn. We’re monsters, I fear. What monsters we’re.
We’ll binge on shad roe next spring in the delicious few minutes it’s here.
BEFORE AIR-CONDITIONING
The sweetness of the freshness of the breeze!
The wind is wiggling the trees.
The sky is black. The trees deep green.
The man mowing the enormous lawn before it rains makes goodness clean.
It’s the smell of laundry on the line
And the smell of the sea, brisk iodine,
Nine hundred miles inland from the ocean, it’s that smell.
It makes someone little who has a fever
feel almost well.
It’s exactly what a sick person needs to eat.
Maybe it’s coming from Illinois in the heat.
Watch out for the crows, though.
With them around, caw, caw, it’s going to snow.
I think I’m still asleep. I hope I said my prayers before I died.
I hear the milkman setting the clinking bottles down outside.
MIDTERM ELECTION RESULTS, 2010
My old buddy, my body!
What happened to drive us apart?
Think of our trips to Bologna.
Think of our Ducati racebikes screaming.
We drank hypersonic grappa.
We got near the screaming Goyas.
What’s blinding is Velázquez.
We never left the Prado—
And never saw Madrid!
That’s what we did.
We met for lunch at the Paris Ritz.
We walked arm in arm
Through Place Vendôme.
Each put out a wrist
To try on a watch at Patek Philippe.
Unseparated Siamese twins,
We had to have the same girlfriend
And slept with her together.
We hopped on the Concorde,
Front cabin, seat 1.
Oh not to be meek and ache
And drop dead straining on the toilet seat.
Everyone on the sidewalk walks faster—
And didn’t you use to walk
Springing up on the balls of your feet!
A single-engine light airplane
Snores in the slow blue dreamy afternoon.
This is our breakup.
We are down here falling apart.
The ocean crashes and crashes.
I put my arms around you—
But it’s no good.
I climb the stairs—
It’s not the same.
It’s a flameout and windmill restart!
MIDWINTER
Midwinter murder is in my heart
As I stand there on the curb in my opera pumps,
Waiting for the car to come and the opera to start,
Amid the Broadway homeless frozen clumps.
Patent leather makes my shoes
Easter eggs by Fabergé.
The shoes say New York is still run by the Jews,
Who glitter when they walk, and aren’t going away.
The morning after the Mozart, when I take my morning stroll, I feel
Removed all over again from the freezing suffering I see.
Someone has designed a beautiful, fully automatic, stainless steel,
Recoilless assault shotgun down in Tennessee.
The dogs tied up outside the Broadway stores
In the cold look with such touching expectancy inside.
A dog needs to adore. A dog adores.
A dog waiting for an owner is hot with identity and pride.
I’d like to meet the genius in Tennessee, or at least speak
To the gun on the phone.
I’d like to be both the dog owner and the dog. I’d leak
Love after I’d shot myself to shit. I’d write myself a bone.
SNOW
Snow is what it does.
It falls and it stays and it goes.
It melts and it is here somewhere.
We all will get there.
CHARLIE
IN MEMORY OF CHARLES P. SIFTON (1935–2009)
I remember the judge in a particular
Light brown chalk-stripe suit
In which he looked like a boy,
Half hayseed, half long face, half wild horse on the plains,
Half the poet Boris Pasternak with a banjo pick,
Plucking a twanging banjo and singing Pete Seeger labor songs.
I remember a particular color of
American hair,
A kind of American original orange,
Except it was rather red, the dark colors of fire,
In a Tom Sawyer hairstyle,
Which I guess means naturally
Unjudicial and in a boyish
Will Rogers waterfall
Over the forehead,
And then we both got bald …
My Harvard roommate, part of my heart,
The Honorable Charles Proctor Sifton of the Eastern District.
Charlie,
Harvard sweet-talked you and me into living in Claverly
Sophomore year, where no one wanted to be.
We were the elect, stars in our class selected
To try to make this palace for losers respected.
The privileged would light the working fireplaces of the rejected.
Everyone called you Tony except me, and finally—
After years—you told me you had put up with years of “Charlie”
From me, but it had been hard!
Yes, but when now
I made an effort to call you Tony, it sounded so odd to you,
You begged me to come back home. Your Honor,
The women firefighters you ruled in favor of lift their hoses high,
Lift their hoses high,
Like elephants raising their trunks trumpeting.
Flame will never be the same. Sifton, row the boat ashore.
Then you’ll hear the trumpet blow.
Hallelujah!
Then you’ll hear the trumpet sound.
Trumpet sound
The world around.
Flame will never be the same!
Sifton, row the boat ashore.
Tony and Charlie is walking through that door.
ARNOLD TOYNBEE, MAC BUNDY, HERCULES BELLVILLE
Seventy-two hours literally without sleep.
Don’t ask.
I found myself standing at the back
Of Sanders Theatre
For a lecture by Arnold Toynbee.
Standing room only.
Oxford had just published
With great fanfare Volume X of his interminable
Magnum opus, A Study of History.
McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the faculty,
Later JFK’s
National Security Adviser, then LBJ’s, came out onstage
To invite all those standing in the back
To come up onstage and use
The dozen rows of folding chairs already
Set out for the Harvard Choral Society
Performance the next day.
Bundy was the extreme of Brahmin excellence.
I floated up there in a trance.
His penis was a frosted cocktail shaker pouring out a cocktail,
But out came jellied napalm.
The best and the brightest
Drank the fairy tale.
The Groton School and Skull and Bones plucked his lyre.
Hercules Bellville died today.
He apparently said to friends:
“Tut, tut, no long faces now.”
He got married on his deathbed,
Having set one condition for the little ceremony: no hats.
I knew I would lapse
Into a coma in full view of the Harvard audience.
I would struggle to stay awake
And start to fall asleep.
I would jerk awake in my chair
And almost fall on the floor. I put Hercky
In a poem of mine called “Fucking” thirty-one years ago, only
I called him Pericles in my poem.
At the end of “Fucking,” as he had in life,
Hercules pulled out a sterling-silver-plated revolver
At a dinner party in London,
And pointed it at people, who smiled.
I had fallen in love at first sight
With a woman there I was about to meet.
One didn’t know if the thing could be fired.
That was the poem.
NICE WEATHER
This is what it’s like at the end of the day.
But soon th
e day will go away.
Sunlight preoccupies the cross street.
It and night soon will meet.
Meanwhile, there is Central Park.
Now the park is getting dark.
LONDON
The woman who’s dying is trying to lose her life.
It’s a great adventure
For everyone trying to help her.
Actually, death avoids her, doesn’t want to hurt her.
So to speak, opens her hand and gently takes away the knife
Everyone well-meaning wants her to use on herself.
There is no knife, of course.
And she’s too weak.
If you’re too ill, the clinic near Zurich that helps
People leave this world won’t.
If you’re that medicated and out of it and desperate,
You may not be thinking right about wanting to end your life.
If you’re near death, you may be too near
For the clinic to help you over the barrier.
She weakly screams she wants to die.
Hard to believe her pain is beyond the reach of drugs.
Please die. Please do. Her daughters don’t want her to die and do.
The world of dew is a world of dew and yet
What airline will fly someone this sick?
They can afford a hospital plane but
Can she still swallow? The famous barbiturate cocktail
The clinic is licensed to administer isn’t the Fountain of Youth.
But what if she gets there and drinks it and it only makes her ill?
And she vomits? It’s unreal.
DINNER WITH HOLLY ANDERSEN
My fourteen books of poems
Tie a tin can to my tail.
You hear me fleeing myself.
I won’t get away.
I went to Washington, D.C.
My agent hired a plane to tow the tail
Through the restricted airspace
Above the White House.
The tin can makes a noise,
As if I were in chains.
RUNAWAY SLAVE
VIOLATES AIRSPACE OVER NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM!
Fighter jets
From Andrews Air Force Base scramble
To intercept my fourteen books
And enter the East Wing
Of the National Gallery and the astonishment
Of the Vuillards,
Banking hard to lock in on the happy
Honking getaway convertible
Dragging sparks and tin cans as it musically pulls away,
Nice Weather Page 1