Nice Weather

by Frederick Seidel

And dinner at Derrick’s grandparents’ in New York

  Who dwelled in a mansion on Madison

  Which took up much of the block,

  Ancient and magnificent Dr. and Mrs. Seth Milliken.

  I was talking about the early aviator Louis Blériot

  When all of a sudden Dr. Milliken—who hadn’t spoken in years—

  Gasped: I ADORED the fellow!

  We were terrified.

  His nurse rose from her chair next to his and started to cry.

  And apparently he never spoke again.

  Aldrich became Paris editor of The Paris Review.

  I followed him and Blair Fuller in the job. Youth! Paris des rêves!

  Fifty years later, Barack Obama rules.

  Lady Gaga reigns.

  Lorin Stein seizes the Paris Review reins.

  The joy or whatever

  Of being the new editor begins, as it happens, April Fool’s Day.

  You know what I’m going to say.

  I lift my glass to my friend.

  RAINY DAY KABOOM

  I get young when I’m not looking.

  Or it happens when I turn out the light.

  Sometimes I hear Indians

  When I need to be scalped

  And need to be helped.

  How did it happen?

  It happened overnight.

  How come you got young?

  They put my body in a pot.

  They cut my feet off so I would fit.

  They put my face in a fishbowl

  So everybody could see it.

  It floated around,

  Looking for food.

  Looking for a smile.

  Then I saw you.

  I saw you opening a black umbrella.

  I saw you checking yourself in a lobby mirror.

  I saw the flames leap like a cheerleader.

  Sis boom bah.

  I take the microphone and read

  My poem “My Poetry”

  For the podcast, at your request.

  I doff my yarmulke.

  My scalp, actually.

  Welcome to South Waziristan.

  I’m the Taliban.

  I wrote their poem “My Poetry.”

  I meant it as an IED.

  O say can you see me driving over it up-armored?

  I ask to see the desk where you work so I can see.

  Already at your request I’ve

  Recorded Al Qaeda’s poem “Death”

  And the Taliban’s “My Poetry.”

  I’m a roadside bomb singin’ in the rain.

  LISBON

  Quite frankly, nothing much happens.

  You walk downhill all day

  From the fascistically monumental Four Seasons Hotel Ritz.

  I have to say,

  I’ve had a pleasant stay.

  My Junior Suite makes me feel like Mussolini, it is huge.

  I think of the edifice as Salazar in stone.

  Salazar’s slogan for Portugal was “Proudly alone,”

  My kind of dictator.

  He wanted a grand hotel in Lisbon

  And arranged to have one.

  I consider that admirable.

  It’s all downhill

  From the hotel.

  You walk downhill all day

  On the Avenida de la Libertad and never lose your way.

  You end up at the harbor. Obrigado.

  And it’s off in a cab to Brasileira, the café in Chiado

  Where Fernando Pessoa spent so much time writing his immortal

  Multiple-personality-disorder poems,

  Now called Dissociated Identity Disorder.

  That’s where you find the statue.

  That’s where you pay homage.

  He sits at a little bronze table outdoors

  At the edge of the busy café tables, having an espresso

  Made of bronze.

  There is a chair next to his as part of the statue

  So you can be photographed sitting next to him by someone.

  I weep when we meet.

  We bow deeply to each other.

  His eyes mist over.

  It is fate.

  Tomorrow is Election Day 2008.

  I’ll fly nonstop Lisboa to Obama.

  Really, the worst were the Portuguese.

  But does it really make sense to talk about better and worse? Please!

  In sixteenth-century Portugal, there were thirty-two thousand African slaves.

  They came overseas in waves.

  They sailed over in their graves.

  It comes over me in waves.

  They died and went on living. At Cabo de São Vicente, the black Atlantic

  Spanks the gruesome cliff at the outer edge of Europe and gets sick,

  Throwing up white.

  The white is made of night.

  The wrath fucks froth against the cliff.

  Waterboarding makes the cliff stiff.

  I voted for Obama and I ask Obama if.

  Yes we can. I ask Pessoa.

  I ask Lisboa. Did they know about the Shoah?

  Yes we can.

  We can do anything known to man.

  It’s heaven up there above the sky.

  It’s heaven down here, too.

  I got to heaven without having to die.

  It was a near-death experience with Bush 43. Phew.

  But meanwhile the economy. So what are we going to do?

  We’re going to get through.

  It’s heaven up there above the sky.

  Hey, it’s heaven down here, too.

  I love the future I won’t live to see. I don’t know why.

  And don’t even know if it’s true.

  Maybe I’ve already lived to see the future.

  My multiple personalities climb to altitude on a single pair of wings.

  Luxury Man rises to the top and Evening Man brings

  To the podium the first African-American president to sing fado,

  Chicago fado dado didi dado. Obrigado.

  Please fasten your seat belts for takeoff, we’re beginning our descent.

  That isn’t what I meant.

  That long-ago Inauguration Day,

  In a bitter cold Washington, D.C.,

  The slender prince spoke without a hat or coat, elegance, eloquence.

  His death in Dallas practically the next day was intense.

  That’s how the poem began.

  It’s time to leave the poem behind.

  People saw a god trying to be a man.

  People want to be blinded, to be blind.

  The tragedy of Kennedy

  Decanted me.

  Beautiful things that go fast have enchanted me,

  But it’s time to leave Jack Kennedy and my motorcycles behind.

  It is time to attend a new Inauguration.

  It’s checkout time at the Ritz in Lisbon.

  The bill will be considerable.

  I drank tons of their best port in my Baby Mussolini Suite.

  I’m inside a seat belt on a plane. It’s time to vote for victory over defeat.

  Sieg Heil!

  I said that to make you smile.

  But you’re not smiling.

  (Why aren’t you smiling?)

  I said that to put you to sleep,

  But you’re Sieg Heiling.

  I want to put you to sleep.

  I think I’m falling asleep and I have a dream.

  And everyone, come on everyone,

  Come gather at the Lincoln Memorial!

  Come together now! All together now!

  And there is a woman singing.

  I’ve fallen asleep in front of the set

  And the vote keeps coming in

  And millions of people are on the Mall.

  And it is bitter cold.

  And hopes are soaring! In the bitter cold they’re ecstatically ignoring!

  I face a yawning lion shaving in my mirror in the morning, roaring,

 
And there’s my grandchild standing in the doorway, adoring—

  Many teeth to brush, a beard to shave!

  OK, it’s not solace, but it’s not nothing, still to be able to roar, to rave

  With vim and vigor about the loss of vim and vigor.

  It’s sort of like a finger on a trigger

  Is facing me in the morning mirror, and starts to snigger.

  It’s sort of like walking downhill in Lisbon

  On the Avenida de la Libertad all day, but then I start to run

  To get to the economy and Obama and the election—

  Though I’d have to say,

  I had a pleasant stay.

  The breadlines in America will eventually go away,

  And we will live to see another day.

  A great leader lasts longer than a day.

  The rain comes. The sun shines. He does not melt away.

  A black man on a white horse shall chase the redskins away.

  It’s the dignity at Appomattox of Robert E. Lee

  Live from Phoenix on TV.

  That old white warrior John McCain gracefully concedes.

  Nobly gives the nation what it needs.

  A thousand years from now, you know it,

  This day will be remembered, poet.

  By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

  By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

  Told his message to the people,

  Told the purport of his mission.

  Car horns are celebrating up and down Broadway.

  Tractor-trailer air horns joyously blasting.

  Harlem to Times Square—Tribeca to Mecca.

  Fado dado didi dado.

  A nation conceived in liberty conceives.

  Kids high-fiving, others crying.

  Fado dado didi dado.

  THEN ALL THE EMPTY SHALL BE FULL

  I see you in the morning and I see you in the evening.

  That doesn’t stop the other things.

  The shorebirds and the shellfish make merry in the giant oil spill.

  The fire drill bell rings and rings and rings.

  Not everyone who wants to will.

  I see you in the morning and I see you in the evening.

  It’s back to school. And, in our district, it is time to vote.

  It’s time to recognize it’s fall,

  And every larder will be full.

  The fuel is mystical and has to be to feed us all.

  I grab the supertanker by a hawser and I pull,

  And rewrite everything I ever wrote.

  THEY SHOW YOU THE HARP

  Indeed, the human papillomavirus

  Would seem to require us

  To abjure oral relations,

  Nutritious sixty-nine, the yodeling muff-divings and fellations.

  Unless you want to be a dancer

  With oral cancer,

  There’s your answer.

  Stick to intercourse,

  Though it’s not safe either, of course.

  Ride a horse.

  The virus is spread

  By love bugs in the bed.

  And there is an unfunny increase in cancer of the mouth

  Among the young, whose mouths are going south.

  It’s love. There’s nothing else to talk about.

  You end up with half your mouth cut out.

  They used the Internet to elect their candidate

  And lived on love and the little sleep they could get.

  When you take a tour of a seniors’ retirement home and they remove the tarp,

  You see how deformed their hands are, and they show you the harp.

  ISTANBUL

  Stray dogs with a red plastic tag in one ear

  Have been licensed

  By the city to be safe and allowed to live in the street,

  So they wander around, or more likely just lie there,

  Healthy, checked by a city vet, without a care.

  They’re red-tagged Turks and they’re an elite.

  You walk past them in the street.

  They’re bums, they’re the homeless, not educated.

  It’s complicated, but they’re regulated.

  It isn’t complicated.

  The red tag is their fez.

  That’s what the republic Atatürk founded says.

  The Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul

  Has toothsomely been called the best hotel in the world.

  The luxury takes place in what was once a prison.

  To be a prisoner of luxury

  In the old center of the city

  Is such a Turkish incarceration

  To luxuriate in.

  The Turkish hot chocolate the Four Seasons serves perspires

  Oriental desires.

  Think swarthy sweetness.

  Think secular Atatürk.

  But Sultanahmet has turned more than a bit Islamic.

  From Claridge’s and London I have come

  To the holy city of Byzantium

  To see Ayasofya.

  I see the Blue Mosque and I see a

  Fanta-zi-a projected on the air

  Whose six minarets make it Disney beyond compare,

  A fat, domed flying saucer with sticking-up spikes of hair.

  I am awakened to the opposite of despair

  By the Blue Mosque’s muezzin’s dawn call to prayer.

  Another nearby mosque’s muezzin immediately starts to call.

  Come one, come all!

  Antiphonally back and forth, and I go back to sleep.

  I dream I’m dead in the trunk of a car. I’m the survivor.

  I’ve hired for the morning a car and driver.

  It’s my Disney Fantasia

  To drive to Asia.

  Let’s cross the Bosphorus.

  It won’t be hard for us.

  Each day I take my pills from the day’s section of the tray

  Lest the Lord disappear me and throw me away.

  I find myself across the bridge in Asia thinking of Aldo Moro.

  Who on the Golden Horn thinks of Aldo Moro anymore, though?

  I’m back at the Four Seasons.

  The Red Brigades had their reasons.

  Be so kind as to cover yourself please with the blanket, presidente.

  We’re going to drive you to another location for your safety.

  So he covered himself.

  Moretti immediately pumped

  Eleven rounds into the blanket point-blank.

  The car was left on a street pointedly

  Equidistant from the Christian Democratic headquarters

  And the Communist Party headquarters.

  I’ll stay in bed under the red bedspread.

  A Turkish flag of red soaks the bed.

  I’m better red and dead.

  I’m full of bull in Istanbul.

  Awake!

  Listen to the Voice! Climb out of the trunk! Rise and shine!

  The bullet-riddled Moro is divine.

  Each bullet hole is a portal to the immortal.

  I’ve breathed so many million tears my legs ache.

  My fellow Armenians, my brain is about to break.

  I walk up the hill to Topkapi Palace past the red-tagged dogs.

  I’ve heisted so much bullion.

  I’ve lived a life of luxury.

  I’ve lived my own Topkapi of poetry.

  I’ve lived through four seasons. The muezzin calls.

  The dueling muezzins call. It’s dawn. It’s dark. I SEE.

  There’s the Statue of Liberty,

  And there’s the United States of America,

  And America’s holding the Statue of Liberty up in the air

  Just exactly the way a grinning actor holds up his Oscar.

  We’re in a holding pattern over land and water

  On a rotating stage, circling New York Harbor.

  We turn past the torch.

  We’re on final approach.

  It’s the end of my flight and “Istanbul” ’s a
lmost over.

  The tugboats towing Ellis Island are the size of ants.

  They trumpet like elephants.

  The Blue Mosque broadcasts one of its beautiful chants.

  TRANSPORT

  The time is coming when it won’t be maintenance.

  The time is coming when it won’t be minimal.

  I walk with my long-dead dog up a hill.

  We’re walking in the Cher in France.

  I’m worried about the coming presidential election.

  I realize I’m dreaming but it’s real.

  I’m in my bed but what I feel

  Is happiness that goes beyond Manhattan.

  I’m sprinting up the familiar steps to cast my vote.

  Two minutes later I’ve already forgotten

  The pink rose made of meat inside my skull is rotten—

  And I’m floating off the bed. I start to float.

  Everywhere in French Polynesia I flew Air France.

  Each island hop I told the stewardess or pilot

  I was learning to fly and would love to visit the cockpit.

  Here I am floating off a runway in a cockpit trance

  In a jumbo jet

  Going back to Paris. Goodbye, Papeete—

  Many years ago, and many wars—and maybe

  It’s coming but it’s not here yet.

  Tons of weight ooze into the sky without a cough,

  With me practically at the controls in the cramped third seat.

  Even back then, pre-9/11, only a Frenchman could invite

  A student pilot into the cockpit of a brand-new jumbo jet for takeoff.

  I’m on an elephant and I am higher than you.

  I am enormously proud and my trunk can pull up a tree.

  I am as big as a jumbo jet about to crash into the sea.

  A terrorist on board has blown it apart—the plane has split in two.

  People are spilling out of the windows of the buildings,

  Or are jumping out to escape the vaporizing heat

  And exploding when they hit the street.

  I know I put them somewhere—I am looking for my water wings—

  So I can float above the island of Sifnos,

  And float over Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles,

  And float over Ryōan-ji and the Kyle of Lochalsh.

  Bring back the Hindenburg please God to transport all of us.

  OEDIPAL STRIVINGS

  A dinosaur egg opens in a lab

  And out steps my paternal grandfather, Sam,

  Already taller than a man,

  And on his way to becoming a stomping mile-high predator, so I ran.

  I never knew my mother’s father, who may have been a suicide.

  He was buried in a pauper’s grave my mother tried