Why is this idiot patriot
Smiling?
He is horribly
In love.
It is embarrassing to see
The red, white, and blue.
The field of stars
Is the universe, his mind,
Which thinks about her constantly
And dials her number. Hello. It’s me.
It really hurts
To see it in his face.
The awful smile of a dog
Is a grimace.
You can believe
In God again—God looks like him.
The Easter koan says the gas tank must be full
But empty. The taut wind sock
Sounds the trumpet,
Summoning all
To the new.
The trumpet sounds!
Sweet is spreading salt,
But only on the ice where people walk,
Only it is rice in slow motion showering fragrant
Spring rain on the couples.
83. APRIL
A baby elephant is running along the ledge across
The front of an apartment building ten stories up.
What must be the young woman handler desperately gives chase,
Which has a comic aspect as she hangs on by the rope.
But the baby elephant falls, yanking the young woman floatingly
To her death on a ledge lower down.
The baby elephant lies dead on Broadway.
Every year it does.
Birds bathe in the birdbath in the warm blood.
The bed upstairs is red.
The sheets are red.
The pillows are blood.
The baby elephant looks like a mouse running away
Or a cockroach scuttling away on a shelf,
Followed by the comically running sandpiper
Holding the rope.
It is everywhere when you restart your computer.
You don’t see it and then you do.
A half has already fallen to the street,
And the other is falling and hits the ledge.
Now is a vase of flowers
Maniacally blooming red.
The medallion cabs seem very yellow
Today—as yellow as lymph.
Every April 1st Frank O’Hara’s ghost
Stops in front of the Olivetti showroom
On Fifth Avenue—which hasn’t been there for thirty years.
He’s there for the Lettera 22 typewriter outside on a marble pedestal
With a supply of paper—to dash off a city poem, an April poem,
That he leaves in the typewriter for the next passerby,
On his way to work at the Museum of Modern Art, because
The baby elephant is running along the ledge, chased by its handler.
84. MAY
A man picks up a telephone to hear his messages,
Returns the handset to the cradle, looking stunned.
The pigeon on the ledge outside the window
Bobs back and forth in front of New York City, moaning.
A man takes roses to a doctor, to her office,
And gets himself buzzed in, and at the smiling front desk
Won’t give his name to the receptionist, just leaves red roses.
The doctor calls the man the next day, leaves a message.
There isn’t anything more emptiness than this,
But it’s an emptiness that’s almost estival.
The show-off-ness of living full of May
Puts everything that’s empty on display.
The pigeon on the ledge outside the window
Moans, bobbing up and down, releasing whiteness.
The day releases whiteness on the city.
And May increases.
Seersucker flames of baby blue and white
Beneath a blue-eyed Caucasian sky with clouds
Fill up the emptiness of East Side life
Above a center strip that lets red flowers grow.
They call them cut flowers when they cut them.
They sell the living bodies at the shop.
A man is bringing flowers to a doctor,
But not for her to sew them up.
And May is getting happy, and the temperature is eighty.
And the heart is full of palm trees, even when it’s empty.
The center strip migraine down Park Avenue sees red.
Girl with a Red Hat in the Vermeer show is what it sees.
Vermeer went in a day and a half from being healthy to being dead.
A city made of pigeons is moaning in a morgue that’s a garden.
The red hat reddens the Metropolitan.
It’s its harem.
85. VENUS WANTS JESUS
Venus wants Jesus.
Jesus wants justice.
That one wants this.
This one wants that.
I want.
It means I lack.
Working men and women on
May 1st march.
They want to increase
The minimum wage and they will form a line.
My fellow glandes march
Entirely
Around the girl while
Around the world bands
Are playing.
On the White House lawn, “Hail to the Chief”
Greets the arriving helicopter slowly curtsying
On the landing pad.
They ought
To wait till the rotor stops. The president
Descends
The stairs waving. Behind him is
The uniformed aide with the attaché case carrying
The codes.
The president
Can place a lei around
A billion necks
In an hour.
They wanted to live till June.
They wanted the time.
They wanted to say goodbye.
They wanted to go to the bathroom before.
86. MV AGUSTA RALLY, CASCINA COSTA, ITALY
Each June there is a memorial Mass
For Count Corrado Agusta in the family church,
Whose factory team of overwhelming motorcycles
Won every Grand Prix championship for years.
The courtyard in front of the sinister stark house
Where Corrado was raised blazes with victory.
The charming young choir in the tiny church sings,
To the strumming of a guitar, that other glory story.
In her MV Agusta T-shirt, the reader reads aloud the lesson.
The roaring of a lion about to devour her
Is an MV 500cc GP racer getting revved up for the rally:
The caviar and flower of Grand Prix four-stroke power.
The champions have no idle, so not
To die they have to
Roar. They roar like the lions in the Colosseum.
They roar like a pride of bloodred hearts in the savannah.
Someone blips
The throttle of the three-cylinder
500, one kind of sound, then someone pushes into life
The four. Its bel canto throat catches fire.
The priest elevates the Host
And his bored theatrical eyes,
To melodramatize the text,
Roar.
It’s like the Mass they hold in France
To bless the packs of hounds before a hunt.
The choir of hunting horns blares bloodcurdling fanfares
And lordly stags answer from all the forests around.
I stand in the infield with other connoisseurs near tears
Behind the bars of the gate to the track, smelling burning castor oil.
On the other side of the gate is the start/finish line,
And Monica Agusta standing with her back to me, close enough to touch.
87. JUNE
Eternal life begins in June.
Her name is fill the name in.
My contub
ernalis, my tent mate,
My woman in the tent with me in Latin.
The next world is the one I’m in.
My June contubernium.
My tent mate through the whole campaign.
The June moon, burning pure champagne,
Starts foaming from its tail and rising.
One minute into launch and counting.
The afterlife lifts off like this.
The afterlife begins to blast.
The breathing of my sleeping dog
Inflates the moonlit room with silence.
The afterlife begins this way.
The universe began today.
The afterlife is here on earth.
It’s what you’re doing when you race
And enter each turn way too fast
And brake as late as possible always.
Of course the world does not exist.
A racebike raving down the straight
Explodes into another world,
Downshifts for the chicane, brakes hard,
And in the other world ignites
The flames of June that burn in hell.
My contubernalis, my tent mate.
My woman in the tent with me does octane.
Ducati racing red I ride,
Ride red instead of wrong or right.
The color red in hell looks cool.
In heaven it’s for sex on sight.
88. JUNE ALLYSON AND MAE WEST
In the middle
Of the field of vision
Is a hole that is
Surrounded by a woman.
The hole is life.
The ones who are
About to be born
Have no choice.
The hole is life.
The ones who are
About to be born
Have no choice.
In the middle
Of the field stood
The middle of the light
Which is love, a heart of light.
I got better.
I can remember taking
A streetcar.
It was June.
The name of the movie star was June
Allyson who was with me in my hospital room.
I bet the glorious wicked star Mae
West would.
June made Mae good.
Mae made June bad.
Is it bearable?
The situation is
No one ever gets well.
People can’t
Even stand up.
They pay to cry.
89. JULY
Phineas is crossing the pont des Arts,
But he is doing it in New York.
He has made up the Phineas part.
That is not his name.
Nothing is.
Nothing is his.
He is living in Paris,
On Broadway.
Two minutes from his door
Is the pont des Arts arcing
Over the Seine.
Bateaux mouches like bugs of light
Slide by at night under his feet, fading away in English.
Shock waves vee against the quais.
Mesdames and gentlemen, soon we have Notre Dame.
The letter P is walking across the pont des Arts.
Back in New York,
Except he is in New York,
He is in Paris.
He strolls home to the rue de Seine, punches in the code and goes in.
The next morning the streets
Are bleeding under his feet.
They are cleaning themselves.
Apparently, they are not that young.
The trees are green.
In the jardin du Luxembourg he says her name.
He watches the children riding the donkeys on the red dirt.
An adult holds the halter and walks alongside.
One tree is vomiting and sobbing
Flowers.
The smell is powerful.
How quatorze July it is to be a donkey and child.
90. HUGH JEREMY CHISHOLM
With Jeremy Chisholm at the Lobster Inn on our way to Sagaponack,
Eating out on the porch in the heat, flicking cigarettes into the inlet.
We ate from the sea and washed it down with Chablis,
Punctuated by our unfiltered Camels, in our eternal July.
Billy Hitchcock landed his helicopter at a busy gas station
In Southampton July 4th weekend, descended from the sky like a god
To buy a candy bar from the vending machine outside,
Unwrapped the candy bar and flew away, rotors beating.
Chisholm found a jeweler to paint his Tank Watch black.
It had been his father’s, one of the first Cartier made.
The gold case in blackface was sacrilege.
Chisholm wore it like a wrist corsage.
In a helicopter that belonged to the Farkas family,
The carpet of cemeteries seemed endless choppering out to JFK.
So much death to overfly! It could take a lifetime.
They were running out of cemeteries to be dead in.
Hovering at fifteen feet,
Waiting for instructions on where to land,
Told to go elsewhere,
We heeled over and flew very low, at the altitude of a dream.
Bessie Cuevas had introduced me to this fin de race exquisite
Who roared around town in his souped-up Mini-Minor,
Who poured Irish whiskey on his Irish oatmeal for breakfast,
Who was as beautiful as the young Prince Yusupov
Who had used his wife as bait to kill Rasputin and, later in Paris,
Always in makeup, was a pal of the Marquis de Cuevas, Bessie’s dad.
Yusupov dressed up a pet ape in chauffeur’s livery
And drove down the Champs-Elysées with the ape behind the wheel.
WASPs can’t get lung cancer smoking Camels,
Chisholm said, taking the usual long deep drag—look at cowboys!
That July they found a tumor
As big as the Ritz inoperably near his heart.
91. AUGUST
Sky-blue eyes,
A bolt of lightning drinking
Skyy vodka,
A demon not afraid of happiness,
Asks me about my love life here in hell.
I lunge at what I understand I belong to.
I flee, too.
It’s her fate. It’s too late.
I see the sky from a couch at the Carlyle.
Blond is dressed in black.
It all comes back.
The sky is black.
Thunder violently shakes
The thing it holds in its teeth
Until it snaps the neck
And rain pours down in release and relief,
Releasing paradise,
The smell of honeysuckle and of not afraid of happiness.
Lightning flashes once
To get the sky eyes used to it,
And then flashes again
To take the photograph.
The blackout startled her and started it.
Lightning flickers in Intensive Care.
I am speaking in Ecstatic.
The couch is floating on the carpet.
The waiter burns
From all the discharge and surge, and brings more drinks.
Coition is divine human
Rebirth and ruin having drinks in a monsoon,
In the upholstered gallery outside the bar, in the gold light.
The Prince of Darkness dipped in gold is God.
92. SEPTEMBER
The woman is so refined.
The idea of refinement gets redefined.
Doing it with her is absurd.
Like feeding steak to a hummingbird.
Her hair colorist colored her hair gold
To give her a look. It made her look cold.
Her face suddenly seemed see-through lik
e a breath
In a bonnet of gold and she was in a casket and it was death.
She looked more beautiful than life.
She said she wanted to be my wife.
She comes with a psychiatrist to maintain her.
She comes with a personal trainer.
The September trees are still green in Central Park
Until they turn black after dark.
The apartments in the buildings turn their lamps on.
And then the curtains are drawn.
One person on a low floor pulls the curtain back and stares out,
But pulls the curtain closed again when there’s a shout,
Audible on Fifth Avenue, from inside the park.
Somewhere a dog begins to bark.
I climb into the casket of this New York night.
I climb into the casket of the curtained light.
I climb into the casket and the satin.
I climb into the casket to do that in.
Into her roaring arms, wings of a hummingbird,
A roar of wings without a word,
A woman looking up at me and me looking down
Into the casket at the town.
I see down there His Honor the Mayor
In St. Patrick’s Cathedral, head bowed in prayer.
His friend—wings roaring—hovers beside him in the pew.
Death is all there is. Death will have to do.
93. THE TENTH MONTH
Someone is wagging a finger in her face—Charlotte!
Down here in hell we don’t do that!
As if she were a child. Charlotte has arrived
To test the torture.
This is a test. This is only a test. Charlotte
Is yelling at Charlotte for a violation.
Charlotte, as a Human Rights Watch
Observer of sorts, has descended from heaven to an early fall.
Oh dear, is it really October?
Is Charlotte really nearly over?
She still says actress—most actresses today would call themselves
An actor. A star walks down upper Broadway being beautiful
With her famous eyes. Hello from hell,
She tells her cell phone.
She’s ready to hand
Down the indictments and waves her wand.
The crimes sparkle in the moonlight.
Actually, it’s rather wonderful to stalk
The Upper West Side midday,
Between the Hudson River and Central Park,
Looking for a self to put the handcuffs on.
It’s lovely if there’s been a human rights violation.
There’s also cruelty to animals,
The child pornography of do-gooders.
Poems 1959-2009 Page 16