Poems 1959-2009
Page 6
A soda jerk pulls the lever
That squirts the soda
That makes an old-time ice cream soda of flames.
A Pullman porter turns down the stateroom bed, white crisp sheets,
Clean as ice,
The clickety-click American night outside,
A Thousand and One Nights inside the star’s head.
Miles of antebellum slums, old St. Louis hot at night,
Rows of antebellum houses of white trash in the Southern moonlight:
Developers took advantage of Title 1 funds to pulverize
The picturesque so they could put up miles of projects,
The largest undertaking of its kind in the United States,
So poorly constructed that a few years later
The whole hideous thing would have to be leveled.
I feel such joy.
I stare at sparkles. I don’t care.
The carbonated bubbled bloodstream gushes out.
Kiss me here. Ouf! Kiss me there.
The crocodile of joy lifts the nostrils of his snout.
His eyes of joy stare at her eyes.
I want to eat between your eyes and hear your cries.
I don’t care who lives or dies.
I am the crocodile of joy, who never lies.
THE OWL YOU HEARD
The owl you heard hooting
In the middle of the night wasn’t me.
It was an owl.
Or maybe you were
So asleep you didn’t even hear it.
The sprinklers on their timer, programmed to come on
At such a strangely late hour in life
For watering a garden,
Refreshed your sleep four thousand miles away by
Hissing sweetly,
Deepening the smell of green in Eden.
You heard the summer chirr of insects.
You heard a sky of stars.
You didn’t know it, fast asleep at dawn in Paris.
You didn’t hear a thing.
You heard me calling.
I am no longer human.
E-MAIL FROM AN OWL
The irrigation system wants it to be known it irrigates
The garden,
It doesn’t water it.
It is a stickler about this!
Watering is something done by hand.
Automated catering naturally
Does a better job than a hand with a watering can can.
Devised in Israel to irrigate their orange groves,
It gives life everywhere in the desert of life it goes.
It drips water to the chosen, one zone at a time.
Drip us this day our daily bread, or, rather, this night,
Since a drop on a leaf in direct sunlight can make
A magnifying glass that burns an innocent at the stake.
The sprinkler system hisses kisses on a timer
Under an exophthalmic sky of stars.
Tonight my voice will stare at you forever.
I click on Send,
And send you this perfumed magic hour.
WHITE BUTTERFLIES
I
Clematis paniculata sweetens one side of Howard Street.
White butterflies in pairs flutter over the white flowers.
In white kimonos, giggling and whispering,
The butterflies titter and flutter their silk fans,
End-of-summer cabbage butterflies, in white pairs.
Sweet autumn clematis feeds these delicate souls perfume.
I remember how we met, how shyly.
II
Four months of drought on the East End ends.
Ten thousand windshield wipers wiping the tears away.
The back roads are black.
The ocean runs around barking under the delicious rain, so happy.
Traditional household cleaners polish the imperial palace floors
Of heaven spotless. THUNDER. Cleanliness and order
Bring universal freshness and good sense to the Empire. LIGHTNING.
III
I have never had a serious thought in my life on Gibson Lane.
A man turning into cremains is standing on the beach.
I used to walk my dog along the beach.
This afternoon I had to put him down.
Jimmy my boy, my sweetyboy, my Jimmy.
It is night, and outside the house, at eleven o’clock,
The lawn sprinklers come on in the rain.
THE CASTLE IN THE MOUNTAINS
I brought a stomach flu with me on the train.
I spent the night curled up in pain,
Agonizingly cold and rather miserable.
I went out for a walk earlier today:
Snow started falling
Like big cotton balls this morning
And the park looks beautiful.
I will try to eat tonight: steamed cauliflower.
You would love it here.
It is still quite nice somehow.
You would like the emperor.
Some days the joy is overpowering.
The last time I was here,
He told a story.
It was Christmas.
Snow kept falling.
The emperor held his hand up for silence and began.
His fingernails have perfect moons, which is quite rare.
You hardly see it anymore, I wonder why.
The emperor began:
“Prehistoric insects were
Flying around brainless
To add more glory to the infant Earth.
Instead of horrible they were huge and beautiful,
And, being angels, were invincible.
Say the Name, and the angel begging with its hand out would
Instantly expand upward
To be as tall as the building …”
The ruthless raw odor of filth in an enclosed space,
And the slime tentacles with religious suckers,
And the four heads on one neck like the four heads carved on Mount Rushmore,
Hold out a single hand.
Hold out your hand.
Take my hand.
A FRESH STICK OF CHEWING GUM
A pink stick of gum unwrapped from the foil,
That you hold between your fingers on the way home from dance class,
And you look at its pink. But you know what.
I like your brain. Your pink. It’s sweet.
My brain is the wrinkles of the ocean on a ball of tar
Instead of being sweet pink like yours.
It could be the nicotine. It could be the Johnnie Walker Black.
Mine thought too many cigarettes for too many years.
My brain is the size of the largest living thing, mais oui, a blue whale,
Blue instead of pink like yours.
It’s what I’ve done
To make it huge that made it huge.
The violent sweetness in the air is the pink rain
Which continues achingly almost to fall.
This is the closest it has come.
This can’t go on.
Twenty-six years old is not childhood.
You are not trying to stop smoking.
You smoke and drink
And still it is pink.
The answer is you can drink and smoke
Too much at twenty-six,
And stink of cigarettes,
And stand outside on the sidewalk outside the bar to have a cigarette,
As the law now requires, and it is paradise,
And be the most beautiful girl in the world,
And be moral,
And vibrate into blank.
DANTE’S BEATRICE
I ride a racer to erase her.
Bent over like a hunchback.
Racing leathers now include a hump
That protects the poet’s spine and neck.
I wring the thing out, two hundred miles an hour.
I am a mink on a mink ranch
determined not
To die inside its valuable fur, inside my racesuit.
I bought the racer
To replace her.
It became my slave and I its.
All it lacked was tits.
All it lacked
Between its wheels was hair.
I don’t care.
We do it anyway.
The starter-caddy spins its raving little wheel
Against the Superbike’s elevated fat black
Rear soft-compound tire.
Remember: racer—
Down for second gear instead of up!
Release the clutch—the engine fires.
I am off for my warm-up lap on a factory racer
Because I can’t face her.
I ride my racer to erase her.
I ride in armor to
Three hundred nineteen kilometers an hour.
I am a mink on a mink ranch about
To die inside its valuable fur,
Inside my leathers.
She scoops me out to make a coat for her.
She buttons up a me of soft warm blur.
Is this the face that launched
A thousand slave ships?
The world is just outstanding.
My slavery never wavers.
I use the word “slavers”
To mean both “drools”
And, changing the pronunciation, “trades in slaves.”
I consider myself most of these.
Mark Peploe and I used to sit around
Cafés in Florence grading
Muses’ noses.
Hers hooks like Gauguin’s,
His silent huge hooked hawk prow.
I am the cactus. You are the hyena.
I am the crash, you the fireball of Jet-A …
Only to turn catastrophe into dawn.
BOLOGNA
My own poetry I find incomprehensible.
Actually, I have no one.
Everything in art is couplets.
Mine don’t rhyme.
Everything in the heart, you meant to say.
As if I ever meant to say anything.
Don’t get me wrong.
I do without.
I find the poetry I write incomprehensible,
But at least I understand it.
It opens the marble
And the uniforms of the lobby staff
Behind the doorman at 834 Fifth.
Each elevator opens
On one apartment to a floor.
The elevator opened
To the page.
The elevator opened on the little vestibule
On the verge of something.
I hope I have. I hope I don’t.
The vagina-eyed Modigliani nude
Made me lewd.
I waited for my friend to descend
The inner staircase of the duplex.
Keyword: house key.
You need a danger to be safe in.
Except in the African bush where you don’t,
You do.
The doorway to my childhood
Was the daytime doorman.
An enormously black giant wore an outfit
With silver piping.
He wore a visored cap
With a high Gestapo peak
On his impenetrably black marble.
Waits out there in the sun to open the car door.
My noble Negro statue’s name was Heinz,
My calmly grand George Washington.
You’ll find me
At my beloved Hotel Baglioni
In Bologna
Still using the word Negro.
I need a danger to be safe in,
In room 221.
George Washington was calmly kind.
The defender of my building was George Washington
With a Nazi name
In World War II St. Louis.
Heinz stood in the terrible sun after
The Middle Passage in his nearly Nazi uniform.
He was my Master Race White Knight.
I was his white minnow.
The sun roars gloriously hot today.
Piazza Santo Stefano might as well be Brazzaville.
The humidity is a divinity.
Huck is happy on the raft in the divinity!
They show movies at night on an outdoor screen
In the steam in Piazza Maggiore.
I’m about to take a taxi
To Ducati
And see Claudio Domenicali, and see Paolo Ciabatti,
To discuss the motorcycle being made for me.
One of the eight factory Superbike racers
Ducati Corse will make for the year,
Completely by hand, will be mine.
I want to run racing slicks
On the street for the look,
Their powerful fat smooth black shine.
I need them
To go nowhere fast and get there.
I need to begin to
Write the poem of Colored Only.
When Heinz took my little hand in his,
Into the little vestibule on the verge
Of learning to ride a bicycle,
I began Bologna.
Federico Minoli of Bologna presides
In an unair-conditioned apartment fabulously
Looking out on the seven churches
In Piazza Santo Stefano, in the town center.
The little piazza opens
A little vestibule on the verge of something.
The incredible staircase to his place opens
On seven churches at the top.
The only problem is the bongo drums at night.
Ducati’s president and CEO is the intelligent Federico.
Late tonight I will run into him and his wife
At Cesarina, in the brown medieval
Piazza, a restaurant Morandi
Used to lunch at,
Bologna’s saintly pure painter of stillness.
I will sit outside in the noisy heat and eat.
RACER
FOR PAOLO CIABATTI
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.
The F-16s take off in a deafening flock,
Shattering the runway at the airbase at Cervia.
They roar across horizontally
And suddenly go straight up,
And then they lean backwards and level off
And are gone till lunchtime and surprisingly wine.
So funny to see the Top Guns out of their G suits get so Italian
In front of the fire crackling in the fireplace.
Toasts are drunk to their guests, much use of hands.
They are crazy about motorcycles
In the officers’ mess of the 23rd Squadron.
Over a period of time, one plane in ten is lost.
I hear the man with the silent chow chow
Tooting his saxophone
Down in the street, Via dell’Indipendenza, Independence Street.
The dog chats with no one.
The man chats with everyone
With gusto and delight, and accepts contributions.
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.
I enter the adytum.
Trains are delayed.
The Florence sky is falling snow.
The man with the silent chow chow
Is tooting in the street
Below my room at the Hotel Baglioni—the Bag in Bo—
My marble home away from home, room 221.
He buzzes me through three layers of security,
Poetry, Politics, Medicine, into the adytum.
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.
AT A FACTORY IN ITALY
The Man of La Mamma is a tenor as brave as a lion.
Everything is also its towering opposite.
Butch heterosexuals in Italy spend lavishly on fragrances.
The in thing was to shave your head, the skinhead look.
Guys spend more on beauty products here
Than in any other country in the world.
Everyone is also a boss.
The English executive assistant to the Italian CEO stays blondly exuberant
When sales to America plummet, when the dollar is weak.
Her name is Alice Coleridge. Her phone rings nonstop. Pronto, sono Aleecheh!
The world at the other end of the phone is a charging rhinoceros.
A descendant of Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks Italian to the rhinoceros.
Poetry has power, as against the men and women actually making things
On the assembly line on the ground floor.
Someone had the brilliant idea of using
Factory workers in the ads,
And using a fashion photographer to add elegance and surprise.
They found an incredible face on the ground floor
With a nose to die for, and paid her to straddle
A motorcycle her assembly line had made and pose in profile.
So what did the Italian nose do? She ran with the money to get a nose job.
FRANCE FOR BOYS
There wasn’t anyone to thank.
Two hours from Paris in a field.
The car was burning in a ditch.
Of course, the young star of the movie can’t be killed off so early.
He felt he had to get off the train when he saw the station sign CHARLEVILLE—
Without knowing why—but something had happened there.
Rimbaud explodes with too good,
With the terrible happiness of light.