Poems 1959-2009
Page 14
Buttocks of a Percheron.
My beautiful with goosepimples
Climbs the ladder to the high diving board
In her high heels
And ideals.
The mirror of the swimming pool is looking up at her
Round breasts.
She bounces up and down
As if about to dive.
In her ideals, in her high heels,
The palm trees go up and down.
The mirror of the swimming pool is looking up at her
Bikini trim.
The heated swimming pool mirror is steaming
In the cold.
The Christmas tree is on.
A cigarette speedboat cuts the bay in two.
It rears up on its white wake.
Ay, Miami!
Ninety miles away
Is Mars.
The cigarette smokes fine cigars,
Rolls hundred-dollar bills into straws.
My Christmas
Is in his arms.
56. COSMOPOLITANS AT THE PARADISE
Cosmopolitans at the Paradise.
Heavenly Kelly’s cosmopolitans make the sun rise.
They make the sun rise in my blood
Under the stars in my brow.
Tonight a perfect cosmopolitan sets sail for paradise.
Johnny’s cosmopolitans start the countdown on the launch pad.
My Paradise is a diner. Nothing could be finer.
There was a lovely man in this town named Harry Diner.
Lighter than zero
Gravity, a rinse of lift, the cosmopolitan cocktail
They mix here at the Paradise is the best
In the United States—pink as a flamingo and life-announcing
As a leaping salmon. The space suit I will squeeze into arrives
In a martini glass,
Poured from a chilled silver shaker beaded with frost sweat.
Finally I go
Back to where the only place to go is far.
Ahab on the launch pad—I’m the roar
Wearing the wild blazer, black stripes and red,
And a yarmulke with a propeller on my missile head.
There she blows! Row harder, my hearties!—
My United Nations of liftoff!
I targeted the great white whale black hole.
On impact I burst into stars.
I am the caliph of paradise,
Hip-deep in a waterbed of wives.
I am the Ducati of desire,
144.1 horsepower at the rear wheel.
Nights and days, black stripes and red,
I orbit Sag Harbor and the big blue ball.
I pursue Moby-Dick to the end of the book.
I raise the pink flamingos to my lips and drink.
57. SEX
The woman in the boat you shiver with
The sky is coming through the window at.
We will see.
Keep rowing.
You have
An ocean all around.
You are rowing on bare ground.
The greasy grassless clay is dead calm.
You love your life.
You love the way you look.
You watch a woman posing for you.
How awful for you. There’s no one there.
Inside the perfume bottle life is sweet.
The glass stopper above you is the stars.
You smell the flowers,
Some far-off shore.
The slaves are chained in rows rowing.
The motion back and forth
Is the same as making love.
You fuck infinity and that takes time.
It’s a certain way of talking to arthritis
That isn’t heart disease or trust.
You can’t remember why
Your hands are bleeding back and forth.
The thing about a man is that—
Is what?
One hand reaches for the other.
The other has a knife in it to cut the head off.
The fish flops back and forth
In the bottom of the boat.
The woman pulls the boat along
By its painter that the king slash slave is rowing.
58. SONG
How small your part
Of the world is when
You are a girl.
The forests and deserts are full
Of the animals
We ride and eat
And the wind and the light
And the night,
But if you are
A girl you may
As well live in Boston
Or be a grain of white rice
Or be a fleck
Of mica in a sidewalk.
I wanted to have
A monocle and stick—
Put on my top hat,
And be a grain
Of radium,
And radiate a stadium with my act.
It’s about holding
The wide-eyed bearded head of
Holofernes
Aloft. From the carrier deck
We climb to altitude
With an attitude, with
Our laser-guided bombs targeting
The white enormous whale.
We need the sperm oil to light
Our lamps, have to stop
The huge white life for whalebone stays to cage
Our corsets.
59. THE SEAL
What did the vomit of a god
Smell like? Like no one else
And there were clouds of it
In the White House.
It was an impeachable
U.S. bald eagle
Because it was barking and sporting
In the moisture like a seal.
Tubby smooth
Energy tube of seal seeks tender veal
For the White House mess and in a zoo
It smells like that.
To be slick
And sleek and swim
And in yours have hers,
Her hand, her heart.
Once it was a god,
Now they toss it fish
And watch it leap
And make it beg.
They’re looking
At TV and look
It doesn’t look that bad.
The ones from outer space are landing now.
A seal went out to play
In the middle of an enormous bay
All the cities surrounded,
The size of the Dust Bowl, as brown,
And sang of a 21st century that was lyrical
About effluents and landfill,
And set the presidential seal
On doing something about race and ass.
60. HER SONG
I am presenting
Myself to
You for the punishment
I preserve.
Sometimes you seem to
Understand I am
Banished.
I am the emptiness of
Bandages
That wrap
The mummy. My heart
I preserve in a dish—
It is a dog collar on all fours.
Inside is the
Eloquence
Emptied out.
Your hand
Starts to thunder,
Starts to rain much
Harder.
You raised your hand
To touch my cheek.
You saw my eyes
Go berserk.
It is the terror.
It asks you
To make it more.
Don’t fall
In love
With me and I won’t either.
Don’t stop when
I say stop.
61. GREEN DRESS, 1999
You want
To change your name to be new
For the
Millennium so do.
The trumpet sounds
Your smile.
&n
bsp; You soar just
Sitting still.
Flapping wings of a
Flamingo, clouds
Of my angina
Blossom darkly into dawn.
Sunset follows
While they play
The songs one wants
To hear. Your
Legs made of eleven
Kinds of heaven
Leap to
Where they want to go.
But I don’t know
How long I have the
Future for.
In the jungle of
The body is the beating of the
Tom-tom.
Living dot com—
How many hits on your site?
If dance is what you do, the bar
Is where you go to
Work. If what you do is drink,
You also hit the heart.
62. LETTER TO THE EDITORS OF VOGUE
I’m seeing someone and
I really want to,
But I
Am stuck in glue.
I would go anywhere
To be near
The sky above
And smell the iodine
Wine of the port of Algiers,
Or for that matter the freezing
Nights on the dunes
Of the Sahara are blood
That you can drink till dawn
Under the terror of
Stars to
Make you blind.
I am drinking gasoline
To stay awake
In the midst of so much
Murder.
My daughter squeaks and squeaks
Like a mouse screaming in a trap,
Dangling from the cat who makes her come
When he does it to her.
Her killer goes out into
The streets to join his brothers
In the revolution
Who don’t have jobs.
The plastic packed beautifully
Inside a tampons box that I carefully leave in the loo
At Café Oasis goes rigid and the
Unveiled meet God.
63. JAMES BALDWIN IN PARIS
The leopard attacks the trainer it
Loves, over and over, on every
Page, loves and devours the only one it allows to feed
It.
How lonely to be understood
And have to kill, how lovely.
It does make you want to starve. It makes an animal kill
All the caring-and-sharing in the cage.
Start with the trainer who keeps you alive
In another language,
The breasts of milk
That speak non-leopard. Slaughter them.
What lives below
The surface in a leopard will have to live above
In words. I go to sleep
And dream in meat and wake
In wonder,
And find the poems in
The milk
All over the page.
Lute strings of summer thunder, rats hurrying
Away, sunshine behind
Lightning on a shield of
Pain painting out happiness, equals life
That will have to be extinguished
To make way. The sound trucks getting out the vote
Drive the campaign song down every street.
Hitler is coming to Harlem.
Hitler is coming to Harlem!/There will be ethnic cleansing./
A muddy river of Brown Shirts/Will march to the Blacks.
Happiness will start to deface
Pain on the planet.
64. ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI
You wait forever till you can’t wait any longer—
And then you’re born.
Somebody is pointing something out.
You see what I’m saying, boy!
Can’t find a single egg at his debutant
Easter egg hunt and has to be helped.
Jewish wears a little suit with a shirt with an Eton collar.
Blood cakes on the scratch on your little knee.
Excuse me a minute.
The angel is black as a crow.
The nurse comes back in the room.
It shakes the snow from its wings.
The waterfall hangs
Down panting in the humidity.
The roar at the top of the world
Is the icebergs melting in pain.
Don’t play on the railroad tracks.
It is so hot.
The tracks click before you hear the train
Which the clicks mean is coming.
British consuls posted to St. Louis in those days
Before air-conditioning had to receive extra pay.
The congressman with a bad limp was bitter.
They had operated on the wrong leg, made it shorter.
My father’s coal yards under a wartime heavy snow.
The big blue trucks wearing chains like S/M love.
Blessed are the poor, for they will have heat this Christmas.
The tire chains/sleigh bells go chink chink.
The crow at the foot of the bed caws you
Were the Age of Chivalry and gave my family coal.
And when it was hot your ice trucks delivered
To the colored their block of cold.
65. HAMLET
The horsefly landing fatly on the page
And walking through words from left to right is rage.
It walks, stage right to left, across the stage.
The play is called The Nest Becomes a Cage.
I’m reading Hamlet, in which a bulging horsefly
Soliloquizes constantly, played by
Me. He’s getting old, don’t ask me why.
His lines are not familiar. Then I die.
I have been thinking, instead of weeping, tears,
And drinking everybody else’s, for years.
They taste amazingly like urine. Cheers!
I tell you this—(But soft! My mother nears.)
You wonder how I know what urine tastes like?
I stuck my finger in a hole in a dike
And made the heart near bursting burst. Strike
While it’s hot. You have to seize the mike
And scream, “This is I! Hamlet the Dane!” True—
Too true—the lascivious iceberg you
Are cruising to, Titanic, is a Jew
Ophelia loved, a man she thought she knew.
One day I was bombing Belgrade, bombing Belgrade,
To halt the slaughter elsewhere, knowing aid
Arrives through the air in the form of a tirade
Hamlet stabs through the arras, like a man does a maid,
Only in this case it was the father of the girl,
Poor Polonius, her father. She is a pearl
At the bottom of a stream, and every curl
Of nothing but herself is drowned. I whirl
Around, and this is I! a fellow fanned
Into a flame. The horsefly that I land
On her has little legs—but on command
Struts back and forth on stage, princely, grand.
66. FREDERICK SEIDEL
I live a life of laziness and luxury,
Like a hare without a bone who sleeps in a pâté.
I met a fellow who was so depressed
He never got dressed and never got undressed.
He lived a life of laziness and luxury.
He hid his life away in poetry,
Like a hare still running from a gun in a pâté.
He didn’t talk much about himself because there wasn’t much to say.
He found it was impossible to look or not to.
It will literally blind him but he’s got to.
Her caterpillar with a groove
Waits for love
Between her legs. The crease
Is dripping grease.
He’s blind—now he really is.
; Can’t you help him, gods!
Her light is white
Moonlight.
Or the Parthenon under the sun
Is the other one.
There are other examples but
A perfect example in his poetry is the what
Will save you factor.
The Jaws of Life cut the life crushed in the compactor
Out.
My life is a snout
Snuffling toward the truffle, life. Anyway!
It is a life of luxury. Don’t put me out of my misery.
I am seeking more Jerusalem, not less.
And in the outtakes, after they pull my fingernails out, I confess:
I do love
The sky above.
Area Code 212 (2002)
67. I DO
I do
Standing still.
I do in my head.
I do everything to keep active.
Everything is excellent.
I do pablum. I do doo-doo. I do heroic deeds.
I do due
Diligence.
I do heroic deeds. I don’t move.
I do love
The sky above
Which is black.
I do white gloves at the dances,
But I don’t dance with the fascists.
I do beat and smash their stupid wishes.
I take you to be my.
The river is turning into
A place to drown.
The road lay down
In front of the car.
Everything in hell was
Talking English long ago.
I mean English.
I mean fruit bowl. I mean upper crust. I mean, really!
The ocean swings back into view in inland St. Louis.
The time is then.
My headmaster’s exotic psychotic wife goes completely
Round the bend and maintains
The Mississippi is down there and up here
Is Berchtesgaden. I am shooting up on this.
Breast milk leaks from the insertion point.
His wife—my bride—wanders around the campus saying I do.
68. THE BATHROOM DOOR
Decapitated, he looks much the same,
The same homeless mind.
He watches a starving man
Eating his hiccups
Because he has nothing else to eat
In front of the mirror that is
Brushing his teeth.
Then he goes to bed headless. Then
He hears his wife get out of their bed
And lock the bathroom door
That they never lock.
Both of them are drunk.
He sleeps with his eyes shut in the dark
For a few minutes and then he gets up.
But he doesn’t get up.