Of Africa, Iran.
We stir a black hole swirl, star
Figure skaters twirling on the black, galaxies
Unspooling on the surface tension
Of the morning coffee
In the cup.
The little bubble prickles
Are a house, a dog, a car.
One day an asteroid will come,
A mountain coming from the sky,
And from a long way off at last
The truth will see
Nothing can be done and nothing can remain.
THE STARS ABOVE THE EMPTY QUARTER
A cat has caught a mouse and is playing
At letting it go is the sun
Over the desert letting the traveler reach the oasis.
The sink vomits all over itself
Is the sand boiling down from the blond sky in a storm.
A pre-Islamic Golden Ode lists
The hundred qualities of a camel.
Suavity, power, the beauty of its eyes.
Its horn, its tires, its perfect bumpers, its perfect fenders.
The way it turns left, the way it turns right.
The great poet Labīd sings
His Song of Songs about the one he loves.
How long it can go without water and without God.
Sings the nomad life of hardship, calls it ease.
He stares at the far-off stars.
He mounts the kneeling camel at dawn.
He lowers himself and rises.
I sing above the sand under the sun.
CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE
His space suit is his respirator breathing him
From its own limited supply of oxygen.
The hand-controlled jet nozzles squirted him away
On a space walk in short bursts that have gone haywire.
But will stop when there is no fuel seconds from now. Now.
The long tether back to the mother spaceship sticks
Straight out from his back weightlessly
In the zero gravity of space.
It has sheared off at the other end.
Absolutely nothing can be done.
The spacecraft is under orders not to try and to return and does.
He urinates and defecates
And looks out at the universe.
He is looking out at it through his helmet mask.
New York
AT GRACIE MANSION
I like motorcycles, the city, the telephone.
TV but not to watch, just to turn it on.
The women and their legs, the movies and the streets.
At dawn when it’s so hot the sky is almost red.
The smell of both the rivers is the underworld exhumed.
I remember the vanished days of the great steakhouses.
Before the miniaturization in electronics.
When Robert Wagner was mayor and men ate meat.
I like air-conditioning, leather booths, linen,
Heat, Milan, Thomas Jefferson.
The woman got red in the face touching her girlfriend live
On one of the cable public access shows you do yourself.
Part of the redundancy built into servo systems
That can fail was when she started to spank the girl.
I took her heat straight to my heart.
I never watch TV.
But sometimes late at night. My friend
The junior senator from Nebraska, the only
Medal of Honor winner in Congress, reads Mandelstam,
Reads Joseph Roth. What happens next?
When Wagner’s first wife died of cancer,
And Bennett Cerf died of cancer,
Phyllis Cerf and Bob got married—and then Bob died of cancer.
Bobby, Jr., restored by Giuliani, dropped dead on a plane to L.A.
At the age of forty-nine.
How’s that again?
Bobby died suddenly in a hotel room in San Antonio.
Bennett expired from Parkinson’s.
It ought to matter what battlefield you died on.
A deputy mayor under Koch and the founder of Random House.
I like it when the long line of headlights on behind the hearse
Is stuck in backed-up traffic on the Drive.
A tug tows a barge slowly by
The closed smoked-glass windows of the limousines.
I read Olmsted. I kiss the parks commissioner.
I like anything worth dying for.
I like the brave. I like the Type A personality which is hot.
I like the hideous embarrassment of Nelson Rockefeller
Dying inside somebody young.
He had an attack heart.
I watch a floater in my eye cross Jimmy Walker on the wall.
I like the bead curtains of hot rain outside on the street.
I hold a “see-through on a stem,” an ice-cold martini.
Take the heat in your hand. It is cold.
Take the heat. Drink.
THE PIERRE HOTEL, NEW YORK, 1946
The bowl of a silver spoon held candlelight,
A glistening oyster of gold.
The linen between us was snowblind, blinding white.
I felt a weight too light to weigh
Which was my wings.
I heard the quiet of his eyes.
I heard the candle flame stand still.
I saw the long line of her jaw become
Too beautiful to bear. I was a child.
I lifted my empty spoon and licked the light.
HOTEL CARLYLE, NEW YORK
Inside the dining room it was snowing.
Men and linen stayed warmly candlelit.
The gay waiters returned from the heat of the kitchen
Unsmilingly cold as Lenin.
Women were vast white estates
Measured in versts.
The chandeliers were Fabergé sleighs
Flying behind powerful invisible horses,
Powerful invisible forces,
On runners of serfs over
The foam of snowdrifts of fine linen.
Take us
Home from the ball
Through the dark, in the deepening snow!
Through an onion-domed metropolis,
Down the ghosts of avenues,
Furs covered us as we raced through the silence
Of the candlelight of the Carlyle.
Our corner table in the back room was
The last White Russian winter of the Czar
Across from a robed Black African
Ambassador to the UN and his entourage
At the height (in the depth) of the 1991 recession.
It was 1917.
I couldn’t overthrow anything.
You were my height and depth.
We were a perfect fit.
You were my destiny if only
I would overthrow myself and take over!
Your grave dignity looked at me until I saw
The long line of your jaw become
Too beautiful to bear.
Life achingly said, Do something!
And I didn’t dare.
DAS KAPITAL
The without blinds or curtains and incapable of being opened
That let the light in after dawn to mop the blood up into day
Are lighted up tonight because people are working late.
Some of the office towers are lighted up empty
So they can be cleaned overnight,
Hours the undertaker needs
To prepare the corpse to last.
The Gross Anatomy class debris
Becomes the Puerto Rican Day parade.
And the cleanup after becomes
Bare clean stainless steel tables with drains.
CHRISTMAS
A man comes in from the whirl
To a room where he does yoga
High above the homeless. He runs smack
Into still space.
; He sits in the air.
He hangs upside down to the floor.
A forest of severed trees,
A million needles on sale,
Christ has fragrant breath.
He faints into heightened awareness.
He levitates to the Cross.
He comes to in his own arms.
MOOD INDIGO
One was blacker.
The other one was frightened.
They cut the phone wires.
They used my neckties.
They had me on my stomach.
They tied a hangman’s noose around my neck
And stretched the rope of neckties down my back
To my wrists and ankles.
The slightest movement choked me.
He grabbed a carving knife I had
And stabbed me in the temple over and over,
While his partner looked on in horror,
And never even broke the skin,
A technique used in Vietnam.
He find the biggest knife he can
An stab this white boy pretty good
An never even break the skin,
A torture used in Vietnam.
A war there is
And stuck it in a sideburn hard
And didn’t even scratch the surface.
NOON
A shallow, brutal flood of energy
With high cheekbones and almond eyes.
Cow-eyed bull with a vagina seeing red everywhere.
The muleta in the mirror between her thighs.
She sits down naked in front of herself.
Arouses her. Her fury
Flattens Holland and then floods it.
The shallow, brutal flood of energy
Has the bones and Hera’s eyes.
The cow-eyed bull with a vagina seeing red everywhere
On fire in a room of Rubenses.
A little girl in the Rubens Room
Is feminism, sword in hand.
The muleta trembles in the mirrored hand teasingly. ¡Toro!
Her fantasy is to have said to a god deeply
Asleep beside her in bed, in a normal voice, “How did you sleep?”
Waking the bastard up. ¡Olé!
7:00. The sun is in heaven.
9:00. The blue is nude.
Noon. The Sag Harbor noon
Siren goes off. The garden flows
Back and forth. There’s a breeze
To help with and fan the gross.
The mirrored suit of lights goes rigid
Shaking the trembling muleta. The raw sword asks the hairy hump,
The battered, beaten, victimized and sweetened,
Wounded, weakened, tenderized, and moaning to die, to charge. The stadium
Of right-thinking women roars. Bleeds, bellows and roars.
Vive l’amour! Vive la mort!
SPRING
I want to date-rape life. I kiss the cactus spines.
Running a fever in the cold keeps me alive.
My twin, the garbage truck seducing Key Food, whines
And dines and crushes, just like me, and wants to drive.
I want to drive into a drive-in bank and kiss
And kill you, life. Sag Harbor, I’m your lover. I’m
Yours, Sagaponack, too. This shark of bliss
I input generates a desert slick as slime.
DUNE ROAD, SOUTHAMPTON
The murderer has been injecting her remorselessly
With succinylcholine, which he mixes in her daily insulin.
She’s too weak to give herself her shots. By the time she has figured it out,
She is helpless.
She can’t move any part of her face.
She can’t write a note.
She can’t speak
To say she hasn’t had a stroke.
It’s terrifying that she’s aware
That something terrible is being done to her.
One day he ups the dose. And gets scared.
She has to be rushed to the local hospital and intubated.
They know at the hospital who she is,
One of the richest women in the world.
The murderer hands the attending a faked M.R.I.
It flaunts the name of a world authority. Showing she has had a stroke.
The neurologist on call introduces herself to the murderer and concurs.
Locked-in syndrome, just about the worst.
Alive, with staring eyes.
The mind is unaffected.
And with the patient looking on expressionlessly,
Screaming don’t let him take me home, without a sign or sound,
The doctor tells the murderer he can take her home,
If that’s their wish.
Their little beach house has forty rooms.
Her elevator is carved mahogany.
The Great Gatsby swimming pool upstairs is kept full and never used.
Her tower bedroom flies out over the winter ocean, spreading its wings.
Mother, you’re going to die,
He tells her, once they’re alone.
You have the right to remain silent.
I’m making a joke.
I’ll read you your rights.
He takes a syringe.
A woman has the right to bare arms. I particularly like them bare.
I might as well be talking to cement.
London
IN MEMORIAM
Great-grandson of George Boole as in Boolean algebra.
First in his class at Cambridge till he received an inheritance.
Spent it all brilliantly in a flash flood of champagne.
Loved girls and genius. Loved Lord Rothschild his friend.
After a gentleman’s Third fled to Paris.
Out of money but life was sweet.
Whisky and style and car-running across borders.
Imprisoned in Spain terrifying.
Meanwhile his father with whom he’d almost had a rapprochement died.
Rothschild visited him in prison once.
How can a boy renounce himself? He began.
But years later he was wonderfully still the same.
Letting rooms to pretty lodgers.
Selling off the Georgian silver piece by piece.
Fired as the engineering consultant for refusing to lie to England.
British Steel tried hard to ruin him but he won.
Stuttered and lisped and wouldn’t look you in the eye
In a lofty gwandly Edwardian way.
Jimmy, in America it’ll make you seem shifty.
Laughter and delight and he looks you in the eye for a second.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Noël Coward sweeps into a party late in 1928
In evening clothes, London.
Spotting the other divinity
In the room, twenty-year-old Tallulah Bankhead standing on her head,
Her dress down over her head,
No underpants, no face,
Too lovely, her whole life ahead of her—
Time for a Coward mot.
Hair slick, svelte in black and white, in tails,
Coward sublimely drawls,
Ah, Tallulah—
Always standing there with her mouth hanging open.
Paris & Tahiti
THE BALLAD OF LA PALETTE
I fly to Paris with the English language
To write a script set in Tahiti.
This will be translated into French for the cast
By a son of the Hollywood blacklist.
The wife of the Hollywood blacklist son has cancer,
Only it will turn out she doesn’t.
The Cajun singer on a CD
The movie director plays for me
We meet with an hour later
Outside in the light at La Palette.
We discuss a score,
A young Rimbaud good ole boy.
His week of concerts has sold out.
He brings
the bayou to the Seine.
The overloaded sound system howls.
Testing, un, deux, trois.
With kids, has cancer,
Only doesn’t.
Down in the bayou,
They hunt in the middle of the night with flashlights.
The spotted Catahoula hound, pink as a pig,
With the strangest voice you ever heard,
Trees the trembling prey
Without a word.
ANYONE WITH THE WISH
The lagoon of the biggest atoll in the world,
So wide across you can’t see the other shore,
Is soft as dew.
Water is love
In Rangiroa.
Fish move away from you without fear,
Like buffalo on the plains before they disappeared.
The boat far above you on the surface waits,
The pale hull,
The motor as gonads.
You haven’t come here only for the shark show.
Their fixed smiles glide.
Their blank eyes go along for the ride.
They bury their face in life explosively,
And shake their head back and forth to tear some off.
Every day a guide sets out a bait
So anyone with the wish can swim with the sharks,
And circle the meat,
And feel close to the teeth.
Sharks swim in the love.
THE RESUMPTION OF NUCLEAR TESTING IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC
People in their love affairs.
People in their loneliness.
People in their beds alone.
People in each other’s arms.
I woke up this morning.
I went to sleep last night.
I woke up this morning.
I went to sleep last night.
The beauty of Tahiti.
That lagoon in Huahiné.
Manta rays were mating.
One on top the other.
Venus, with Chinese eyes,
On the motu at Maupiti.
I wish I was a head of state.
I’d wave away my bodyguards.
I’d never been unhappy.
Now, I would never be.
A force de frappe is Gaston Flosse.
Tahitians always call him Gaston.
Gaston did this. Gaston said that.
Nobody better mess with Gaston!
Poems 1959-2009 Page 18