Poems 1959-2009
Page 5
But also the Lehrer NewsHour and a wood fire and Bach.
A short erect tail
Winks across the killing field.
All will be revealed.
I am in a killing field.
I remember the chasse à courre in the forest in the Cher.
I remember the English thoroughbreds ridden by the frogs.
I remember the weeping stag cornered by the dogs.
The stag at bay in the pond literally shed a tear.
A hunt servant in a tricorn hat waded out to cut its throat.
Nelson Aldrich on his horse vomited watching this.
The huntsman’s heraldic horn sounded the hallali.
The tune that cuts off the head. L’hallali!
Back to the château to drink the blood. L’hallali!
I am in Paris being introduced at Billy’s,
1960, avenue Paul-Valéry.
One of her beautiful imported English Lillys or Millys
Is walking around on her knees.
It is rather like that line of Paul Valéry’s.
Now get down on all fours, please.
We are ministers of state and then there is me chez Billy.
Deer garter-belt across our field of vision
And stand there waiting for our decision.
Our only decision was how to cook the venison.
I am civilized but
I see the silence
And write the words for the thought balloon.
When the woods are the color of a macaroon,
Deer, death is near.
I write about its looks in my books.
I write disappearing scut.
I write rut.
The title is Kill Poetry,
And in the book poetry kills.
In the poem the stag at bay weeps, literally.
Kill poetry is the hallali on avenue Paul-Valéry.
Get rid of poetry. Kill poetry.
Label on a vial of pills. Warning: Kill kill kill kills.
Its title is Kill Poem,
From the Book of Kills.
The antlered heads are mounted weeping all around the walls.
John F. Kennedy is mounted weeping on the wall.
His weeping brother Robert weeps nearby.
Martin Luther King, at bay in Memphis, exhausted, starts to cry.
His antlered head is mounted weeping on the wall.
Too much is almost enough, for crying out loud!
Bobby Kennedy announces to a nighttime crowd
That King has died, and then quotes Aeschylus, and then is killed.
Kill kill kill kills, appalls,
The American trophies covered in tears that deck the American halls.
FROM NIJINSKY’S DIARY
And when the doctor told me that I could have died.
And when I climbed up from the subway to the day outside.
White summer clouds were boiling in the trees.
I felt like falling to my knees.
Stand clear of the closing doors, please! Stand clear of the closing doors, please!
And when the camel knelt to let me mount it.
Winged angels knelt in silhouette
To worship at the altar made of blue
That the sun was fastened to.
It all came down to you. It all comes down to you.
In New York City “kneeling” buses kneel for the disabled.
My camel kneels. We fly into the desert.
I flee in terror to my tranquilizer the Sahara.
I stroll slowly down sweet Broadway.
It is as you say. We are here to pray.
VIOLIN
I often go to bed with a book
And immediately turn out the light.
I wake in the morning and brush and dress and go to the desk and write.
I always put my arm in the right sleeve before I slip into the left.
I always put on my left shoe first and then I put on the right.
I happen right now
To be walking the dogs in the dangerous park at night,
Which is dangerous, which I do not like,
But I am delighted, my dog walk is a delight.
I am right-handed but mostly I am not thinking.
(CHORUS)
A man can go to sleep one night and never wake up that he knows of.
A man can walk down a Baghdad street and never walk another drop.
A man can be at his publisher’s and drop dead on the way to the men’s room.
A poet can develop frontotemporal dementia.
A flavorful man can, and then he is not.
The call girls who came to our separate rooms were actually lovely.
Weren’t they shocked that their customers were so illegally young?
Mine gently asked me what I wanted to do. Sin is Behovely.
Just then the phone rang—
Her friend checking if she was safe with the young Rambo, Rimbaud.
I am pursuing you, life, to the ends of the earth across a Sahara of tablecloth.
I look around the restaurant for breath.
I stuff my ears to sail past the siren song of the rocks.
The violin of your eyes
Is listening gently.
NECTAR
A rapist’s kisses tear the leaves off.
Aiuto!
The world looks so white on the white pillow.
I think I know you. I don’t think so.
Winter is wearing summer but it wants to undress for you, Fred.
Oh my God. Takes off the lovely summer frock
And lies down on the bed naked
Freezing white, so we can make death.
Joel and I were having lunch at Fred’s,
The restaurant on the ninth floor of Barneys
Where Joel likes to eat when he is in New York,
Who had just landed, and when I ask him what astonishment
He is carrying around with him this time,
He takes out of his jacket pocket
A beige pochette,
And out pops a stupefying diamond ring I know from Paris.
It opens its big eye.
It went nonstop to Florida in his pocket on the plane.
Now returns with a stop in Manhattan to the JAR safe, place Vendôme.
I have to try it on.
It is incredible what travels
Unprotected in that pocket through the time zones.
I look down at my finger
And field-trip an alternate universe.
Don’t I know you? I don’t think so. It is not for sale.
Diane von Furstenberg in those sweet bygone days
Got it in her head I had to meet her friend
The jeweler to the stars.
Two hummingbirds hummed across the pont des Arts,
And through the cour du Louvre, to Joel’s JAR.
At her old apartment at 12, rue de Seine,
We lived like hummingbirds on nectar and oxygen.
ON BEING DEBONAIR
Shirts wear themselves out being worn.
Suits fit perfectly,
But a man does
Decades of push-ups and no longer fits.
I take myself out to dinner.
It is a joy to sit alone
Without a book.
I use myself up being fine while I dine.
I am a result of the concierge at the Carlyle.
I order a bottle of Bordeaux.
I am a boulevard of elegance
In my well-known restaurants.
The moon comes over to my table.
Everything about her is typical.
I like the way she speaks to me.
Everything about me is bespoke.
You are not
Known, and you are not no one.
I remember you from before.
Sometimes I don’t go out till the end of the day.
I simply forget till
I rush out, afraid the day
will end.
Every sidewalk tree is desperate
For someone.
The desert at this time of year
Is troops in desert camouflage.
Bring in the unmanned drones.
I dine with my Carlyle smile.
She tells me spring will come.
The moon stops by my table
To tell me.
I will cut your heart out
And drink the rubies and eat the coral.
I like the female for its coral.
I go to Carnegie Hall
To make her open her mouth onstage and scream.
HOMAGE TO PESSOA
I once loved,
I thought I would be loved,
But I wasn’t loved.
I wasn’t loved for the only reason that matters—
It was not to be.
I unbuttoned my white gloves and stripped each off.
I set aside my gold-knobbed cane.
I picked up this pen …
And thought how many other men
Had smelled the rose in the bud vase
And lifted a fountain pen,
And lifted a mountain …
And put the shotgun in their mouth,
And noticed that their hunting dog was pointing.
FOR HOLLY ANDERSEN
What could be more pleasant than talking about people dying,
And doctors really trying,
On a winter afternoon
At the Carlyle Hotel, in our cocoon?
We also will be dying one day soon.
Dr. Holly Andersen has a vodka cosmopolitan,
And has another, and becomes positively Neapolitan,
The moon warbling a song about the sun,
Sitting on a sofa at the Carlyle,
Staying stylishly alive for a while.
Her spirited loveliness
Does cause some distress.
She makes my urbanity undress.
I present symptoms that express
An underlying happiness in the face of the beautiful emptiness.
She lost a very sick patient she especially cared about.
The man died on the table. It wasn’t a matter of feeling any guilt or doubt.
Something about a doctor who can cure, or anyway try,
But can also cry,
Is some sort of ultimate lullaby, and lie.
FOG
I spend most of my time not dying.
That’s what living is for.
I climb on a motorcycle.
I climb on a cloud and rain.
I climb on a woman I love.
I repeat my themes.
Here I am in Bologna again.
Here I go again.
Here I go again, getting happier and happier.
I climb on a log
Torpedoing toward the falls.
Basically, it sticks out of me.
At the factory,
The racer being made for me
Is not ready, but is getting deadly.
I am here to see it being born.
It is snowing in Milan, the TV says.
They close one airport, then both.
The Lord is my shepherd and the Director of Superbike Racing.
He buzzes me through three layers of security
To the innermost secret sanctum of the racing department
Where I will breathe my last.
Trains are delayed.
The Florence sky is falling snow.
Tonight Bologna is fog.
This afternoon, there it was,
With all the mechanics who are making it around it.
It stood on a sort of altar.
I stood in a sort of fog,
Taking digital photographs of my death.
A RED FLOWER
The poet stands on blue-veined legs, waiting for his birthday to be over.
He dangles from a muse who works the wires
That make a puppet move in lifelike ways onstage.
Happy birthday to a semper paratus penis!
His tiny Cartier wristwatch trumpets it!
He dares to wear a tiny thing that French and feminine.
Nose tilted up, arrogance, blue eyes.
He can smell the ocean this far inland.
We are in France. We are in Italy. We are in England. We are in heaven.
Lightning with a noose around its neck, feet on a cloud,
Drops into space, feet kicking, neck broken.
The parachute pops open … a red flower:
Plus ne suis ce que j’ai été,
Et plus ne saurais jamais l’être.
Mon beau printemps et mon été
Ont fait le saut par la fenêtre.
DICK AND FRED
His dick is ticking …
Tick tick tick tick …
The bomb looks for blonde.
It smiles like a dog.
Werner Muensterberger liked to say to his patients
A stiff prick has no conscience …
Tick tick tick tick …
Fred Astaire in a tuxedo is doing a blind man with a white cane.
He is looking for blonde.
He looks for brunette.
He licks to play golf.
A bomb is blind.
There was a king.
His name was King Wow.
Anyhow,
In the kingdom of Ebola,
It was on his mind
Constantly. Be kind,
King, be a kind king.
The oceans rose.
About the queen his mother, Gertrude.
Shit with a cunt!
The prince was blunt.
Shit with a cunt.
Cunt with a dick!
Judith slew Holofernes.
Cut his head off.
Slew slime.
Cunt with a dick
Cut the monster’s head off.
Holofernes’ startled head farts blood
And falls off.
Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.
Viagra has caused blindness
In thirty-eight impotent men
Who paid for their erections with their eyes.
One man in his eighties took the pill
For the first time and went blind
When his penis started to rise
For the first time in years.
Imagine his double surprise!
The joyous, fastidious, perfectionist
Fred Astaire flies!
Astaire,
Debonair,
Tap-dances the monomania and mania
Of Napoleon Bonaparte’s tiny penis, the up.
Fred flies, fappingly, bappingly,
Tick-tick-tick-tick-tappingly,
That athletic nonchalance that Fred Astaire defined.
A penis in a tuxedo is flying all over the place
With the white cane of the blind!
Fred is dancing on a tilting dance floor on the ocean floor
In a sunken ocean liner
In 1934—lighter than air!—Fred Astaire!—
In the depths of the Great Depression.
White people froze the world markets to a great whiteness.
The world will end tomorrow.
They walk around like penguins in their tuxedos.
The planet is frozen.
NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2004
It used to be called the Mayfair.
Leonardo Mondadori used to stay there.
The lobby was the bar.
Fancy Italians were on display.
They sat in the lobby for years.
They seduced from the lavish armchairs.
They told their driver and car to be waiting outside
On their European cell phones.
I was a Traveller then upon the moor.
I walked directly through and down the three stairs.
Their women were theirs.
The Milanese women wore couture.
They smoked
cigarettes and smiled and did not blink.
They were going to eat at Le Cirque.
Who could have been kinder than Leonardo?
It was a long time ago.
THE ITALIAN GIRL
Monsoon is over but it’s raining.
The rain keeps coming down. It gets you down. It’s draining.
The sticky heat in Singapore is really not that entertaining.
The boutique hotel air-conditioning is aquaplaning.
The rain stops just inside the door and the fashion show goes on.
So they board the little tram at the zoo to do the “Night Safari”
To experience wild animals who are separate but equal.
The Chinese tour guide puts her finger to her lips: “Let us be quiet.”
They hear the silence roar
In humid Singapore.
Nobody has hair like this Italian girl, in this humidity!
She came three days ago to do the fashion show.
She hadn’t cut her mane in weeks.
She loves the hippos bathing in the perspiring water.
Her curls are African lions exploding from a thicket.
THE BIG GOLCONDA DIAMOND
The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal, of the Bronx and Harvard,
Is Joel Arthur Rosenthal of JAR, place Vendôme.
The greatest jeweler of our time
Has brought to Florida from his safe
A big Golconda diamond that is matchless,
So purely truthful it is not for sale, Joel’s favorite, his Cordelia.
His mother in Florida can keep it
If she wants, and she doesn’t want.
Love is mounted on a fragile platinum wire
To make a ring not really suitable for daily wear.
I wore the bonfire on a wire, on loan from Joel,
One sparkling morning long ago in Paris.
I followed it on my hand across the pont des Arts
Like Shakespeare in a trance starting the sonnet sequence.
WHAT ARE MOVIES FOR?
Razzle-dazzle on the surface, wobbled–Jell-O sunlight,
A goddess and her buttocks walk across a bridge,
Electrocute the dazed, people can’t believe it’s her.
The Seine sends waves toward Notre Dame.
She’s here without an entourage, she stands there all alone.
A woman standing at the rail is jumping in broad daylight
From the pont des Arts, and thinks of jumping.
Her flames almost reach the Institut de France.
It bursts into flame.
A tenement suddenly collapsing vomits fireworks.