Poems 1959-2009
Page 15
She comes back to bed.
She says I am so afraid.
She says I feel cold.
He asks her what she has done.
He makes her stand up and walk. He calls 911.
He will go to the theater
Of the locking of the bathroom door, hiccup
Click, and how he stayed in bed
For the rest of his life.
He remembers something else.
That he did get up. He stood
Outside the door.
He went back to a bed
Even more terrible than the loyal eyes
Of a dog about to be euthanized.
Than the efforts of a racehorse
Who will have to be shot to rise.
69. DOWNTOWN
Think of the most disgusting thing you can think of.
It is beautiful in its way.
It has two legs.
It has a head of hair.
It goes downtown.
It goes into an art gallery.
It pulls out a gun.
It kills its friend.
Never mind how much money they made.
Start thinking about what matters.
The MV Agusta motorcycle
Is the most beautiful.
I Do was one.
The Bathroom Door was another.
I Do was one.
Pulled out a gun and fired.
It was point-blank.
It died instantly.
The fragment was Sappho.
You can imagine how beautiful.
The person is walking
Ahead of you on the sidewalk.
You see its back but its face
Is facing you as it walks away.
As if the neck were
Broken, but the face is calm.
The name of the face you
Face is the United Nations.
It is a lovely Picasso walking away
On a broken neck and looking straight ahead back.
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell.
70. THE SERPENT
Who is this face as little
As a leaf,
The neck a stem?
The furnace waits.
Someone is happening
To someone. Someone is
Alive and enters
Defiantly.
Her lips are full.
The mouth is open.
The living room is full
Of mahogany and art.
The serpent concentrates its gaze until the serpent is
A sumo wrestler agile as a dragonfly,
A furnace eating only good
To stay big.
The girl is a delicate
Drop.
The beautiful face
Is a leaf.
The dragonfly
Practices touch-and-go landings
At the little airport, landing to take off,
See-through with heartbeats.
The serpent is not a serpent
But a lyre.
It asks to play.
It asks the girl to let a dragon fly.
Someone is sailing clay pigeons
And blowing them apart perfectly.
Someone is kissing
The other.
71. GETAWAY
I think you do
But it frightens you.
I have the guns
In the car.
I wanted to save
Someone and
The rest. It will happen.
I will take you hostage.
Also I wasn’t
Going to fall in love
But when you’re fleeing
You’re flying.
Someone had to take
My blindfold off for me to
Just take off. I turn the key in your ignition.
Contact! The propeller flickers.
We are taking off to
Elope.
Have another
One
For the road. Burn the birth certificates.
Run the roadblock.
All the whirling lights
On the roofs of their cars.
They’re going to check
The trunk and find our bodies.
I won’t.
We jump out firing.
I am already in you.
I am rafting down your bloodstream.
That is already over.
I have entered.
72. NOTHING WILL
Root canal is talking
To the opposite—
Twenty-three years old,
With eyes like very dilated
Dewdrops sideways.
Age is visiting
The other side of the moon,
When the moon was young.
Wow, to see the side
That never faces the earth is cool,
And kiss newborn skin
That you could eat off of.
A clean twenty-three-year-old
Heart is tourism
For the senator
Visiting the strange.
You fly there, then get out and walk.
The space shot lands
And he gets out and flies and then on foot.
He is looking at her tits.
The future will not last.
It is coming toward her
On safari
To watch the ancient king of the savannah roar and mate
Despite a root
Canal spang in the middle.
Nothing will.
Not even root canal. Revive his satrapy.
He is rowing down a canal
Of royal palms on either side
And the ocean is near. The oil spill is near
Enough for her to hear it greasing the shore.
73. PH
Phineas has turned
To face the quiet Phoebe to
Touch her cheek.
Phineas, who is tender but not meek,
And certainly is not weak,
Is also not named Phineas.
The name is art.
Phineas turns to touch her tenderly,
But the cab runs over a
Pocked-moon stretch of Brooklyn roadway
And his hand is knocked
Into being a brute.
What is the pH of New York?
PH is
Singing to PH,
Date palm to date palm.
The dunes in every
Direction tower.
Their color is octoroon
In Manhattan at dawn.
That is the color
Of the heart they share
Which is an oasis
Where one can pause
Before going out to die
In the dunes,
Strangling without water
And without a gun
To shoot at night at the stars.
For the moment, they sing.
The saddle has no camel under it.
They know.
74. VENUS
Venus is getting
Smaller.
Finally, she is
The size of a mouse.
A fully developed young woman
That size
Makes it difficult
To caress her breasts.
The curly wire
To a Secret Service agent’s ear
Ends in a plug actually bigger
Than her derrière.
What a magnificent goddess!
And enormous—when
She stands on the back of your hand
With her glorious assets!
Her steatopygous ass
Sticks straight out—a Hottentot harvest moon!
Her breasts are prodigious.
Her ass is steatopygous.
Her head is
Classically small.
Her eyes and her mouth
Are equally oceans
and drops from a dropper.
Venus shrank down
To go to Harvard, and got a tiny degree.
Her Junoesque figure
Is the size of a sea horse.
Mr. Universe
Is in love,
But how will he get in?
Venus, goddess, tell him how!
75. NIGRA SUM
I’m having a certain amount of difficulty
Because I am finding it hard.
It is all uphill.
I wake up tired.
It is downhill from here.
The Emancipation Proclamation won’t change that.
Evidently there have been irregularities apparently.
It is time to get out.
I am going to go public with this
Beautiful big breasts and a penis
Military-industrial complex.
I live in the infield with other connoisseurs
Behind the bars of the gate to the circuit,
Sniffing burning racing oil till I’m high.
On the other side of the gate is the start/finish,
And the red meat of the racebikes raving to race.
I’m not from anywhere. I’m from my head.
That’s where I didn’t grow up
And went to school.
Oh, I am totally vile and beautiful!
A military-industrial complex with soul!
Nigra sum sed formosa.
I am black but comely,
O ye daughters of Jerusalem:
Therefore has the king loved me, and brought me into his
Chambers. For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone:
Rise up, my love, my fair one,
And come away.
Tomorrow I set sail for the bottom, never to return.
The master cabin has its own head—which I’m from.
I’m from my head.
76. RAIN IN HELL
That was the song he found himself singing.
He heard a splash before he hit the concrete.
There was no water in the pool.
He couldn’t stop himself in time.
One day, while he was waiting for the light to change,
And suddenly it began to rain,
And all at once the sun came out,
He saw a rainbow of blood.
He was so excited.
Splash.
That he dove off
The diving board without a thought.
There was no water in the pool.
He heard a splash
Just before he hit the concrete.
Gosh—
From good in bed
To as good as dead!
You smell the rain before it comes.
You smell the clean cool pierce the heat.
He has the air-conditioning on
But keeps the car windows open driving back to town.
It is the story of his life.
He smells the rain before it falls.
It was the middle of the night
In 212, the area code of love.
The poem he was writing put
Its arms around his neck.
Why write a poem?
There isn’t any rain in hell
So why keep opening an umbrella?
That was the song he found himself singing.
77. DIDO WITH DILDO
The cord delivers electricity
From the wall socket to my mouth
Which I drink.
I want you all to know how much
My hair stands on end.
You will leave me alive.
You will leave me and live.
I hold midnight in my hand.
The town siren sounds because it’s
Noon. The sunlight throws spears
Into the waves
And the gulls scream.
You get there.
Something instantly is wrong.
It only seems it’s instantly.
It always is
The case that different time zones
Produce
Different midnights.
I hold a new year in my hand.
She stood on her toes to kiss me
Like in the nineteen fifties.
I glued my mucho macho lips to destiny.
I hurl a fireball at the logjam.
I turn on the TV.
I turn the oven off.
I make a call on my cell phone
To the mirror.
I see in the mirror Aeneas
Has changed.
He is drinking vodka odorlessly.
Into Dido wearing a dildo.
78. JANUARY
I have a dream
And must be fed.
The manta rays when you wade out
Ripple toward your outstretched hand.
The answer is
The friendliness of the body.
There is no answer, but the answer is
The friendliness of the body
Is the stars above
The dock at night.
And in the afternoon lagoon flags lazily flap
Their bodies toward yours
To be fed. I landed on
An atoll in the soft
Perfume.
The airport air was sweet. The blond January breeze was young.
The windchill factor
Which is Western thought
Received an IV drip of syrup of clove.
I have a dream. I have a dream the
Background radiation is a
Warm ocean, and a pasture for
Desire, and a
Beach of royal psalms.
The IV bag is a warm ocean,
Is a body not your own feeding your body.
My body loves your body
Is the motto of Tahiti.
Two flying saucers mating,
One on top the other, flap and flow, in love.
Each is a black
Gun soft as a glove.
79. FEBRUARY
The best way not to kill yourself
Is to ride a motorcycle very fast.
How to avoid suicide?
Get on and really ride.
Then comes Valentine’s Day.
It is February, but very mild.
But the MV Agusta is in storage for the winter.
The Ducati racer is deeply asleep and not dreaming.
Put the pills back in the vial.
Put the gun back in the drawer.
Ventilate the carbon monoxide.
Back away from the railing.
You can’t budge from the edge?
You can meet her in front of the museum.
It is closed today—every Monday.
If you are alive, happy Valentine’s Day!
All you brave failed suicides, it is a leap year.
Every day is an extra day
To jump. It is February 29th
Deep in the red heart of February 14th.
On the steps in front of the museum,
The wind was blowing hard.
Something was coming.
Winter had been warm and weird.
Hide not thy face from me.
For I have eaten ashes like bread,
And mingled my drink with weeping,
While my motorcycles slept.
She arrives out of breath,
Without a coat, blazing health,
But actually it is a high flu fever that gives her glory.
Life is death.
80. IN CAp FERRAT
God made human beings so dogs would have companions.
Along the promenade dogs are walking women.
One is wearing fur
Although the day is warm.
The fur
Trots behind a cur.
The mongrel sparkles and smiles
Leading her by the leash.
The month of March, that leads to hell,
Is plentiful in Cap Ferrat
.
There is gambling around the bend
In the bay at the Casino in creamy Monte Carlo.
White as the Taj Mahal,
White as that stove of grief,
Is the cloud
Just passing by.
The air is herbs.
The sea is blue chrome curls.
The mutt sparkles and leers
And lifts a leg.
White as the weightless Taj Mahal,
White as the grief and love it was,
The day is warm, the sea is blue.
The dog, part spitz, part spots, is zest
And piss and Groucho Marx
Dragging a lady along.
The comedy
Is raw orison.
Dogs need an owner to belong to.
Dogs almost always die before their owners do.
But one dog built a Taj Mahal for two.
I loved you.
81. MARCH
He discovered he would have to kill.
He went to Paris to study how.
He returned home to throw out the colonial French.
He never left the United States.
He was a boy who was afraid.
He talked arrogance, secretly sick at heart.
He oozed haughty nonchalance, like a duke sitting on a shooting stick.
He grinned toughness on the playing field running behind his teeth.
He strutted in the school library, smirking
Like Charlie Chaplin twirling his cane jauntily.
He was a genius but he was afraid
He would burst into flames of fame and cry.
This Ho Chi Minh was arrogant. This Ho Chi Minh was shy.
Then he discovered poetry. It was in Florida
One March, at spring break, with his sister and parents,
Having parted for the week from his first girlfriend ever.
He wrote: The sea pours in while my heart pours out—
Words to that effect.
Even for age thirteen,
This was pretty dim.
This was the year of his bar mitzvah.
It was his genocidal coming of age in Cambodia.
Everyone who wore glasses was executed.
He took his off.
They killed everything in sight in a red blur.
It rained
A rainbow of the color red.
They wore black pajamas in a red bed.
They killed anyone named Fred.
This to start Utopia. Everyone was dead.
The Algerians blew up the French.
The French horribly tortured them to find out.
82. EASTER
The wind lifts off his face,
Which flutters
In the wind and snaps back and forth,
Just barely attached.
It smiles horribly—
A flag flapping on a flagpole.