Nice Weather
Page 6
It’s very weird in New York.
Teen vampires are the teen obsession,
Rosebud mouths who don’t use a knife and fork.
Germany at first won’t save Greece, but really has to.
It’s hot hot in parts of Texas, but rain drowns Tennessee, people die.
It’s the euro. It’s the Greek debt. Greece knew
It had to stop lying, but timeo Danaos, they’re Greeks, Greeks lie.
Canoeing in the Ozarks with Pierre Leval: the rain came down so hard
The river rose twenty-three feet in the predawn hours and roared.
Came the dawn, there was improbably a lifeguard,
There was a three-legged dog, the jobless numbers soared.
Dreamers woke in the dark and drowned, with time to think this can’t be true.
Incomprehensible is something these things do.
They bring the Dow Jones into the Ozarks and the Ozarks into the EU.
A raving flash flood vomits out of a raindrop. The Western world is in the ICU.
Entire trees rocket past. One wouldn’t stand a chance in the canoe.
A three-legged dog appears, then the guy it belongs to.
You instantly knew
You’d run into a hillbilly backwoods crazy, itching to kill you.
Berlin and Athens, as the Western world flickers,
Look up blinking in the rain and lick the rain and shiver and freeze.
They open black umbrellas and put on yellow slickers
And weep sugar like honeybees dying of the bee disease.
EGYPT ANGEL
I’m not on your side, whichever side you’re on.
My enthusiasm for Nasser is long gone.
Hail, Hosni Mubarak, and farewell!
There’s the old dictator dolt
On TV, a contraption of dyed hair and hair gel.
Angels in revolt
Fill Tahrir Square. The angel Gabriel blows his horn
To announce to the reborn: You’ve been born!
And Koranically commands: Recite!
Here are the things that are right!
Day after day of secular celebration turns into night.
Not too many people are killed.
People are thrilled.
I’m your fat King Farouk,
Quacking poetry till I puke.
I’m president and premier and sultan and emir—
Prime minister and Sadat—
And oh my God he’s been shot!
I do nothing but think about you, dear.
I think about you a lot.
I revere
The crypto-philo-Semite Anwar Sadat,
And what he did, and in consequence the death he got.
The third president of Egypt agreed to put up with Israel.
He slithered through the Arabs like an eel.
It did not go down well.
The West oinked for oil and said please.
The Western nations hung out backstage like groupies.
They barked to be fed, like a seal.
They stole anything they could steal.
Anwar Sadat screwed the lightbulb of love into the socket
Out loud in the dark in the middle of the night.
Floaters swim by in my eye in the light.
Darling, don’t doubt me, don’t knock it.
I fold a linen handkerchief to make three points
To fountain whitely toward you from my breast pocket.
Point 1. My cornea detaches.
Point 2. I have galloping myopia.
Point 3. My cataracts won’t let me look at you.
It’s lenticular astigmatism.
It’s macular degeneration.
A rainbow coalition of coition ejaculates
A colorblind wine jelly of jism
And every radical ism.
White Europeans conceived these wretched Arab states,
Now fictively becoming democrats.
The breeze blows the blue of the sea
Inland from Tripoli.
Meet me in Tahrir Square.
Righty-o, I’ll meet you there.
Your Nile-green eyes gaze up at me from the pillow.
Baby, you’re my crocodile Nile. You’re my Cairo.
Tahrir Square is twirling like a dervish, spinning like a top.
In Tahrir Square tear-gas canisters pop.
My crocodile angel joins the demonstrators outside her shop.
The tornado funnels into focus from a censored blur.
The military clears a path for her.
Democracy is in the vicinity
Of Nefertiti.
We’ll meet in Tahrir Square.
Every angel has gathered there,
Including my own angel, wings of Isis flapping.
Bandages are unwrapping
The royal mummy, who’s been napping, but opens her charms.
My Egypt angel wraps me in her arms.
TRACK BIKE
The bicycle messenger who nearly knocked you over
Was me trying to.
That was me circling Columbus Circle
On a track bike, the kind with one gear and no brakes.
Look out! No brakes with a message!
I flashed around the velodrome
Of my life, clinging to your steeply banked curves,
And discovered the New World.
It’s as if your body were itself a person
And the person wasn’t you.
It’s as if I were a flesh-eating flower,
Whereas actually I’m originally from St. Louis.
The performing self opens the stage door.
I start my act.
I feel like running for office.
I feel like riding a fixed-wheel track bike for the simplicity.
You’ll play the viola
And I’ll play myself.
Komm, süsser Tod
Comes out of my mouth
Like a tail coming out of a dog.
Take my hand and we’ll wag down Fifth Avenue.
We’ll walk into the first church we see,
Which is to say the Apple Store.
I’m walking west on Central Park South
With my iPhone out.
I am calling you, oo oo oo, oo oo oo,
With a love that’s true, oo oo oo, oo oo oo.
We take the Time Warner Building
Escalators up the four floors to the top.
Something about how incredible it all is
Tells me to stand back from the edge of the vertiginous view.
I get dizzy imagining I’m on the balcony
That runs around the torch of the Statue of Liberty
Looking down on Columbus Circle.
The handlebars are in my hands.
I ride without brakes around and around.
I walk around the torch blazing.
I see you thirty blocks uptown
In my bed, light pouring in.
And we have tickets for the Bach at Lincoln Center.
And let’s check out
The Upper West Side Apple Store next door.
It’s one more crystal-clear Apple cathedral
For Saint Steve Jobs, who discovered America,
Where the deer and the antelope play
With the herds of touch screens on display,
Not far from Columbus Circle and pancreatic cancer.
Also by Frederick Seidel
POEMS 1959–2009
EVENING MAN
OOGA-BOOGA
THE COSMOS TRILOGY
BARBADOS
AREA CODE 212
LIFE ON EARTH
THE COSMOS POEMS
GOING FAST
MY TOKYO
THESE DAYS
POEMS, 1959–1979
SUNRISE
FINAL SOLUTIONS
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2012 by Frederick Seidel
All rights reserved
First edition, 2012
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eISBN 9781466879775
First eBook edition: August 2014