I think Laurence is very good but she focuses too much on the family as a social unit; Thomas Wolfe is a truly great writer, the unfolding of a giant camera, I’m not saying this because he was tall, good-looking, or because he wrote on top of a fridge at one point. > Open Look Homeward, Angel at almost any page and you will see what I mean. The stone comes back into my pocket. > How can we talk about what Ontario was like 40 years ago without talking about the general mood of idealism in America as a whole at that time? > Why do we persist in the belief that Marilyn French OR Bret Easton Ellis are talking about anything of any significance? > I think it’s amazing that so few people read Thomas Wolfe these days. I think it’s amazing that so few people read Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson. These days.
DARKNESS
We’re in late spring or early summer now
in Alliston. Last night
it began getting dark around 8:30.
I have been a little melancholy for the last week,
& Alliston has been a relief.
Love’s like that.
I had eaten supper, some fish & a mixed stir-fry of bell
peppers, & I began to think about how beautiful
the dark is.
So I went outside & stood with my back
against the wall of the house
& let my eyes play over
the dark backyard
smudged poplars & elms, soft dark late-night hawks
& distant voices,
to watch the darkness doing nothing
except being itself.
But after a while
I began to feel that our little affair was foolish;
in fact I began to feel our affair, your underwear,
your reddish golden hair,
can I be gender conscious,
thank you, grazie, your perfect sweet-tipped pair,
wash slowly out of my kopf. It’s hard to be serious
about an imagined resentment
while you’re staring at a whole Milky Way full of
stars.
Probably a couple of rabbits down at the end
of the garden
don’t think I noticed them
squinting a bit to see the colour of
yellow zinnias
or the shiny bounce of small light
on a steel trowel left out from the afternoon.
No light from my friend Duck Moon. Should be a
fine dark yellow fingernail paring in another
week or so.
And then I will write about you
as a woman I meet on a fall day in a train station,
in Zurich, or in Kansas going all the way south
to Texas to see your aunt.
You Chinese goldfish,
you sexy bitch, full of planning your first child
with your black tie stockbroker husband,
you English crumpet, look at me in the dark,
I’m blushing like an Italian schoolboy
with fistfuls of change who can’t find his handkerchief
for the sake of looking.
ANNOUNCING BAGHDAD
I have been thinking about Madonna
on this blue April morning,
about how pretty she is, & how good she is
at faking defiance.
I like the Madonna video
called “Justify
My Love.” I think Gaultier designed
the cone-nippled bra she wears
with a clear & full perfection, but nobody wrote
a Persian Gulf video for her to bop to.
Although
all she ever does is tilt her head back
& grab her crotch.
But when she
does that
she does me, what can I say? there is something
extraordinarily beautiful about her eyes, blue
blue
blue, like Neil
Young singing “… there is a town in north Ontari io.”
Don’t mistake me.
I don’t want to pick on Madonna.
She’s terrific. She flaunts a form
of fundamental sexuality with a beautiful arrogance.
But it’s a mistake
to assume she’s defiant. We’re
just talking about having a good time. What
does she defy?
And as for singing
let’s tell the whole dangerous truth.
She hasn’t got a good voice. Madonna can’t sing for beans.
There’s Norman Schwarzkopf across the street
short hair raw slab face dark glasses,
big 60 lb. beer gut
hanging over his twill pants. He has a short-sleeved
Hawaiian sport shirt
on; and is signing autographs
as he moves through a crowd of people in Boston,
I think;
or perhaps it’s Philadelphia. He was a good student
at West Point.
Maybe somebody will do a photo of him,
if this is Philadelphia, or Windsor, or maybe it’s Detroit?
I don’t know what Jay Leno had to say about the
Persian
Gulf. But what an opportunity to be an asshole about other people’s
deaths. He probably had 2 or 3 lines every other night from August 15
to January 15; & then 2 or 3 lines per night until late March. A
big mouth with those big ears.
Almost none of his jokes are funny but the
studio audiences seem to break up.
So we’re supposed to think he’s
funny. The guy’s got a face like a package of breakfast cereal. What’s
so funny about that?
Even that little kid with the glasses
who does the Heinz ketchup commercial, he’s about 7 or so, is a much
better video communicator than Jay Leno.
And Madonna? Well at least
Madonna’s beautiful, and when you compare her to Jay Leno then you have
to say, Sure, she can sing, sort of.
But neither one is as good as the
little kid with the glasses.
Or sometimes
I think I love the dead Confederate soldier in that Matthew
Brady photograph
sprawled face up under a gun carriage eyes closed mouth
relaxed the gentle line of the jaw pressing into sweet
Pennsylvania earth.
The soil
where you are born, or where those touched
you as a child were born, is part of your bloodstream.
It is March & I am flying over the Avalon
Peninsula. Over the Gulf/Stream.
Down below through
the grey March clouds
the blue is astounding
as blue as Madonna, as blue
as the dark blue sands of the desert under a Persian
or Mesopotamian or Saudi moon.
As blue as my 4th image the Louisiana Gulf
where an old man is tying up a rowboat with a piece
of rope.
That is the granddaughter of the old man
dancing in a circa 40s roadhouse near Hamilton
on the cover of the book you picked up.
He gets
out wiping his hands & begins unloading
4 crates of crayfish.
I am at home again
with things I understand & feel comfortable with; I am not
being jacked off by a thousand eager & empty-headed
young newsguys
plus some well-intentioned Susan Haratas.
Takes a handkerchief out of his pocket & wipes his face
stuffs the handkerchief in under his collar & walks 150
feet to back his truck up to the boat.
If we don’t sell
our trucks & boats to Europe,
who in the name of Jesus
will we/
sell our trucks & bo
ats to?
Dolly Parton has a flamboyant Vanity Fair
cover, June, 1991,
well after the official cease-fire. She is sitting
on the shelf edge of an enormous tank
& almost spilling out of an expensive silver lamé
dress.
They have a huge orange VANITY FAIR behind her
blonde head, & a slightly smaller red, Desert Form! across
her sexy knees.
Dolly Parton
is loquacious,
she has big ba-booms, & she can’t sing for beans.
She can’t sing like Patsy Cline.
And she can’t sing like Lyle Lovett.
At the intersection of the Dhahran-Khafji highway, an equipment truck connected to the 82nd Airborne has built a wall of pale rosy white bricks at the back of their truck. They have painted a large sign in approximately 12″ – 18″ black letters, facing outward on the white bricks. The sign says:
P I N K F L O Y D
T H E W A L L
Patsy Cline was a great singer.
She sang that song called
“I Fall to Pieces.” She died in a plane accident
when I was a child. I like her voice & I think her death
probably means more to me even now than the children of
Baghdad, whom I think about,
but whom I find abstract. Lyle Lovett, well, he’s a great,
he’s a natural, he’s a great singer. And me? I’m just a guy
who keeps thinking about how infinite the desert sands seem
to be, the amazing blue of the gulf waters, the hot sun, & how
the women hustle, herd, nudge, their children along, comeon,
comeon, hurry up, if you’re not careful you’ll get us both
killed, with little gestures & clucking sounds that go back
perhaps 2 or 3 or 4 thousand years,
long before the invention of mainstream Nashville
or the use of mustard gas in WWI.
POSTSCRIPT
This page is also a concept of borders. Obviously now I’m going to talk about other things including social divisions, mangoes, the nature of the self, death, sex, jazz, love, the erudition of professors, darkness, gay as a phenomenon, bread, and the appearance of blue moons over Dubuque.
Taking this page as a border is simply a form of respect.
MONDRIAN’S BORDERS
for Victor Coleman
Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie
[which the English for some perverse reason
pronounce bugee wugee
& this is not, one gathers,
because they’ve seen any of the remarkable photographs
by Widgee – who probably knew every theatre
& late-night restaurant on Broadway –
from 4th up into Harlem –
]
was painted in 1942. The
Germans
from whom Mondrian has intelligently fled
are pouring into Russia
& the Russians are dying by the thousand as they stop them
cold in the huge white snow & blow their heads off
like slaughterhouse chickens
might, if they had stopped
to think,
have learned something from this painting. It is
a favourite of art critics, but it is not really about
Broadway at all; it is about New York as a set of grids
& according to Mondrian there is no poverty
& no stock exchange
it is all colour & music & Oklahoma –
pretty girls in flapper skirts perhaps, although it is 1942,
& perhaps they are drinking Pernod. Who the hell cares,
it’s a great painting, isn’t it, his only gureat,
& who the hell was Lissitzky – just some goddamn Russian
& probably dead of a head wound cf
Appollinaire
in that remarkable photograph showing the wide head-bandage
after he defended Paris from the Germans in WWI.
JULY LIGHT
Around late June somebody up in heaven
must spill a tub of soft butter into the air.
Partly
the heat perhaps, & the way light bounces off so much
foliage & bright glass;
but this light which lasts into
late August, this light,
goddammit, this particular
Summer Light
makes the entire
city as clear as an endless astronomical circuit –
every ash, elm, maple,
every child dropping a strawberry
popsicle on the pavement & crying, “O poopsy,”
every Samantha slipping
into a loose summer dress & feeling that she’s the most
beautiful girl in town,
even ideas, lost emotions, stray ends,
all become clear.
That’s what you want
isn’t it, Goffman. Clear?
PROFESSORS
Their tweed jackets seduced me at a tender age,
I was about 4½, and too adorable to break your heart.
That air of being between bohemia and the establishment.
Rimbaud’s well-educated rogues in charge of history.
The average lawyer thinks Einstein was a mathematician
and Georgia O’Keeffe is a West Ireland county.
Their comfortable 19th century furniture also seduced me,
there were flowers everywhere at G’s, geraniums and azaleas.
I wanted their wives to smell of lavender and sandalwood.
I checked the pockets of their overcoats for interesting
historiographic lint and crumbs of tobacco.
Their daughters have straw hair and play volleyball.
A specialist in the history of Irish speech idioms
taught me to appreciate the phrase as a floating module.
His wife had red hair that glistened like crimson pyrites.
Their good taste in Renaissance music is often amazing.
They have so many interesting & eccentric cousins.
I have always admired their slow calm reading ability
– Fernand Braudel in a long 5-day gulp,
just like a 17-course Italian meal.
Finish it off with a 685 page book on Vico.
You have to admire them.
WHO SAYS JEFF KOONS IS POSTMODERN?
Sure, I’ve got a brown paper bag
over my head
with holes punched in the sides
for my Sony Walkman, & the eyes are drawn on
with orange & blue chalk, just casual circles
so you can’t look directly into my eyes.
That’s what high school is like these days.
The world is too big.
I only like my friends to look into my eyes.
So for the rest of Gr. 13
I’m studying Lou Reed,
taking him
more seriously perhaps than he takes himself; The
Cure, The
Smiths,
Jane’s Addiction, Iggy Pop
singing about Dog Food dog food dog food.
Someone lays down a simple drum&bass line,
& you start tapping your foot,
moving your body to the music.
Learning about reality
as we go into the 90s.
Sometimes these simple images
lift up & swirl like exploding
chickens & beat their blood-stained wings
against the folded walls of my brown paper bag;
or,
in a different mood, Living Color appear
with all that great avant vivid jazz-funk flair
or Sinéad O’Connor comes on & settles
things down.
After all,
these are songs
about terrible & also moving things,
/>
the car accident dealt with
in a single line by The Cars; Fine Young
Cannibals question the nature of profit; Annie
Lennox or Bette Midler’s depictions of love. With
a minimalism more extreme than Giacometti.
With gorgeous voices
to smooth the edges,
an ironic back-beat,
raw honey & fresh lemon as yellow as the moon,
& music
to make your head sway.
Sometimes I listen to
Sam Cooke just to get back up after the Carnegie Hall
performance; & then I listen to Laura Hubert
singing, “I’m So Melancholy I Could Cry,”
which
when you stop to think about it
is
an extraordinarily joyful song.
STRIKE
I loaf on the bank with my shirt off,
socks
& shoes off too,
& watch my friends in the afternoon
Simcoe sunlight moving their clear white hands
like passenger pigeons
pregnant with messages of love. We
have some cold pizza, 2 chickens, 1 qt. of B&G white
& a doz. cold Blues.
It is about 78°
& some young kids
from the local high school are water-skiing – hunched
in that particular stance turning a far north logo
into a summer Ontario lake image. Their red life
preservers
bob up & down above the choppy blue water
like red beach balls attached to Donald’s back
or
Pluto’s, or Huey’s or Louie’s or Dewey’s. We can do
absolutely nothing this afternoon about Meech Lake
or the new constitution
or the striking PSAC workers
or even the letter carriers who refuse to bring us
our mail.
Although they love us. It isn’t personal. I
would have more to say about these events
but
I have a chicken leg in my mmmphmm mouth tastes good.
I am towelling my face & my eyes are full of Karen sitting
legs splayed in a black string bikini
reading
a paperback of Lives of Girls & Women.
I have let you
see us undressed & in return you must promise me
one thing;
you must believe me when I say that the
bourgeoisie begrudge us even this chicken,
even this
lake, even this ½ful bottle of Monnet brandy
China Blues Page 2