Poems 1959-2009

by Frederick Seidel

  The president of French Polynesia,

  Gaston Flosse, has flown in to Paris.

  Their Kingfish, their Huey Long,

  Is very close to Jacques Chirac.

  They’re strolling down the rue de Seine.

  Chirac is France’s president.

  Faster

  A GALLOP TO FAREWELL

  Three unrelated establishments named Caraceni in Milan

  On streets not far apart make custom suits for men.

  They are the best,

  Autistically isolated in the pure,

  Some might say in the pure

  Pursuit of gracefully clothing manure.

  Superb, discreet, threading their way to God,

  The suits curve with beauty and precision,

  Perfection on the order of Huntsman in Savile Row

  And their jacket cutter, Mr. Hall.

  The attitude to take to shoes is there is Lobb.

  The one in Paris, not the one in London.

  No one has surpassed

  The late George Cleverley’s lasts,

  The angle in of the heel, the slightly squared-off toe, the line,

  Though Suire at Lobb is getting there.

  His shoes fit like paradise by the third pair.

  Like they were Eve. The well-dressed man,

  The vein of gold that seems inexhaustible,

  Is a sunstream of urine on its way to the toilet bowl.

  A rich American sadist had handcuffs made at Hermès

  To torture with beauty the duchesse d’Uzès.

  A cow looking at the understated elegance would know

  Simplicity as calm as this was art.

  A briefcase from Hermès

  Is ravishing and stark.

  Flawless leather luxury made for horses out of cows

  Is what the horsy cows grazing daily in the Faubourg St-Honoré store

  Want to buy. Tour group cows in a feeding frenzy

  Devour everything like locusts.

  There are travelers who prefer the British Concorde to the French

  For the interior in beige and gray.

  Hermès has created a carry-on in water buffalo

  For them called the Gallop.

  Their seat is in the first cabin.

  Three kinds of Caraceni suits chose the aisle.

  The most underrated pleasure in the world is the takeoff

  Of the Concorde and putting off the crash

  Of the world’s most beautiful old supersonic plane, with no survivors,

  In an explosion of champagne.

  A VAMPIRE IN THE AGE OF AIDS

  He moves carefully away from the extremely small pieces

  Of human beings spread around for miles, still in his leather seat.

  He looks like a hunchback walking in the Concorde chair,

  Bent over, strapped in, eyes on the ground

  To avoid stepping on the soft.

  He will use his influence to get

  The cockpit voice recorder when it is recovered copied.

  He loves the pilot in the last ninety seconds’

  Matter-of-factness turning into weeping screams,

  Undead in the double-breasted red velvet smoking jacket Huntsman made.

  ANOTHER MUSE

  Another muse appeared, but dressed in black,

  Which turned to skin the minute the light was out.

  He had become a front without a back.

  Arousal was a desert with a spout.

  A string of women like a string of fish

  Kept dangling in the water to keep them alive.

  Washed down with Lynch-Bages to assuage the anguish

  Of eating red meat during a muff dive.

  One woman, then another, then another.

  Drops of dew dropped into a flat green ocean.

  They leaked purity and freshness, and mother.

  The glass eye of each dewdrop magnified his lack of emotion.

  You get a visa and some shots and buy

  Provisions for the Amazon and fly

  Instead to Africa and tell them I

  Will always be your friend and then you try.

  He was too busy musing to unchain them,

  The women on a string inside the slave pen.

  Feminists in nylons in his brain stem.

  Escaped slaves recaptured. They crave men.

  Women with shaved legs. Women in bondage.

  Come out of the closet in their leg irons.

  Hooded and gagged and garter-belted Lynch-Bages.

  He hears the distant screaming of the sirens.

  He lifts his glass. He bows. Testosterone,

  The aviation fuel that gives him wings,

  Drinks to the gods. His kamikaze starts its flight from his zone

  For her zone. Redlined, on full honk, he sings.

  RED GUARDS OF LOVE

  The Red Guards of love rhythmically stomp their feet

  In the stands as their leaders denounce themselves and beg to be retrained.

  Venus is dancing a tango called Banco! (as in baccarat).

  She’s wearing donkey’s ears. She’s wearing an amazing necklace

  Of fetus heads.

  The Guards rove through the modern cities,

  Stoning to death the busts they don’t like in the libraries.

  The hypnotic suit of rights very slowly struts.

  YANKEE DOODLE

  Hart Crane wrote The Bridge—

  The Great American Hart Attack stampedes

  Rush hour to a standstill in every stanza.

  The John Philip Sousa outburst of trombones,

  And fireworks powdering the summer night,

  Are very American Charles Ives. Nowadays,

  When an earring in one ear makes a pioneer,

  Gender Studies find Tender Buttons

  Is all about the sacred body

  Of the rhino and author, Miss Stein,

  And parts of her companion, Miss Toklas.

  Leonard Bernstein pounces on the piano

  To illustrate the point literally with his dick.

  Now, Robert Frost is different.

  Someone saw Frost

  Whipping a tree. I would like to strip

  You and whip you till I see Stars and Bars,

  O big American Beauty.

  OVID, METAMORPHOSES X, 298–518

  A daughter loved her father so much

  She accused him of sexual abuse.

  But I am getting ahead of my story.

  Ten years after

  He had simply been being a good father

  She made the charge.

  But I am ruining it.

  Not that the man was ever told.

  And when the accused is not even advised

  He has been accused,

  And is therefore deprived of a chance to defend himself, society—

  Shit! the teleprompter stopped—

  Which camera is on?

  So it goes these days

  With the help of radical feminist therapy

  Redressing so many obvious wrongs.

  Also because the specialists

  Advise against confronting the incestuous rapist

  Who may of course have done nothing and be innocent,

  But who if he has will deny it to the grave.

  One slightly feels he must have done something for the charge

  In the first place to have been made.

  Muse, put your breast in my mouth

  If you want me to sing.

  (Fuck the muse.)

  Sunlight yellow as a canary.

  Perfume from the garden made the room tropical.

  The maid in her uniform struggles to draw the heavy curtains.

  Darkness in spasms spreads as she tugs.

  Light covers the hot and humid girl on the bed

  And then is yanked away

  By the maid. The last light the maid sees slants across

  The girl’s eyes and nose like a blind
fold.

  One of the eyes is green as an emerald.

  The fourteen-year-old nose is classical.

  The eyes are open in the darkness.

  Darkness shrink-wraps her

  And where her hands are.

  The maid leaves the room adjusting herself.

  Please,

  The girl says to her father, Please

  Let me go to Harvard, Daddy.

  They are on a cruise.

  The water the white ship cuts through is flowers.

  The tube they lean their elbows on is warm.

  The sky is black. The stars are out.

  White birds fly overhead in the middle of the ocean.

  Bam bam

  Men are shooting skeet on a higher deck.

  Her mother is up there shooting.

  The girl is in the stateroom with her father

  Who is panting as if he were

  Having a heart attack while she undresses.

  She can’t stop herself.

  They are doing it.

  The maid comes in the room without knocking.

  It is time to wake the princess from her nap.

  She pulls the curtains back

  And finds the girl

  Standing naked on a chair.

  She has a noose around

  Her neck attached to nothing,

  Which is a metaphor for love.

  If you really love your father that much,

  The maid says an hour later

  To the naked girl in her arms,

  I will have to do something.

  It happens that

  The girl’s mother is off at Canyon Ranch,

  Best of the Fat Farms, getting in shape.

  She has been there already a week,

  And the king is extremely interested when he is told

  One of the women in the palace

  Is obsessed with His Highness.

  Oh, really, how old?

  Oh, young, about your daughter’s age.

  The girl walks into her dream

  Late that night when the maid arrives to take her

  To her father.

  A bird throbbily coos in the warm darkness outside.

  The night air smells so sweet.

  She immediately trips and knows perfectly well

  What that means, but can’t, won’t, not.

  The maid is sexually excited.

  The virgin is in a delirium.

  It’s the familiar fear-of-heights terror

  Of being irresistibly drawn

  To the edge. You fall

  From the other side of the edge toward the street

  To get to Mars.

  She feels the moisture of desire.

  The man is fast asleep after a lot of drinking

  So when the maid says, This is the one,

  In the dark room he at first grabs the maid

  Who redirects his hands and he is immediately

  Inside the girl.

  For the next two nights the maid

  Stands outside in the corridor perspiring,

  With her eyes tightly shut, clenching and unclenching her fists.

  The father has hidden a flashlight next to his penis in the darkness

  In the bed so he can see

  Who it is the next night,

  When it dawns on him he can simply turn the light on.

  He does and tries to kill her,

  But she is too fast.

  The next thing he hears she is in Sagaponack.

  She backtracks to Islip and flies

  Out West and keeps going to Hawaii and Bali and on.

  She sees the Komodo dragons twenty feet long

  And carnivorous and fast and keeps going.

  Sri Lanka, southern India, Myanmar

  (Where Ne Win, the senile military dictator who has tried to ruin

  Rangoon and everywhere else and everyone, still keeps the daughter

  Of the great patriot democrat of the country

  Under house arrest, but one day that will end).

  For nine months she travels, pregnant.

  On the day she turns into a tree,

  She gives birth to a boy.

  HEART ART

  A man is masturbating his heart out,

  Swinging in the hammock of the Internet.

  He rocks back and forth, his cursor points

  And selects. He swings between repetitive extremes

  Among the come-ons in the chat rooms.

  But finally he clicks on one

  World Wide Web woman who cares.

  Each of her virtual hairs

  Brings him to his knees.

  Each of her breasts

  Projects like a sneeze.

  He hears her dawning toward him as he reads her dimensions,

  Waves sailing the seas of cyberspace—

  Information, zeros-and-ones, whitecaps of.

  Caught in a tangle of Internet,

  Swinging in the mesh to sleep,

  Rocking himself awake, sailing the virtual seas,

  A man travels through space to someone inside

  An active-matrix screen. Snow falls.

  A field of wildflowers blooms. Night falls.

  Day resumes.

  This is the story about humans taking over

  The country. New York is outside

  His study while he works. Paris is outside.

  Outside the window is Bologna.

  He logs on. He gets up.

  He sits down. A car alarm goes off

  Yoi yoi yoi yoi and yips as it suddenly stops.

  Man has the takeover impact

  Of an asteroid—throwing up debris, blotting out the sun—

  Causing the sudden mass extinction

  Of the small bookstore

  At the millennium. The blood from the blast cakes

  And forms the planet’s new crust:

  A hacker in Kinshasa getting it on with one in Nome.

  Their poems start

  With the part about masturbating the heart—

  Saber cuts whacking a heart into tartare—

  Heart art worldwide,

  Meaning that even in the Far East the subject is love.

  Here in the eastern United States,

  A man is masturbating his art out.

  An Ice Age that acts hot

  Only because of the greenhouse effect

  Is the sort of personality.

  Beneath the dome of depleted ozone, they stay cold.

  Mastodons are mating on the Internet

  Over the bones of dinosaur nuclear arms,

  Mating with their hands.

  SPIN

  A dog named Spinach died today.

  In her arms he died away.

  Injected with what killed him.

  Love is a cup that spilled him.

  Spilled all the Spin that filled him.

  Sunlight sealed and sent.

  Received and spent.

  Smiled and went.

  PUBERTY

  I see a first baseman’s mitt identical to mine

  On the right hand of the best who ever lived.

  The dark deep claw of leather

  Called a trapper hungrily flaps shut and open

  While Stan Musial stands there glowing and magnified

  In Sportsman’s Park on the red dirt behind the bag,

  A crab whose right claw is huge,

  Costumed legs apart and knees slightly bent,

  Springy on spikes, a grown man on springs,

  Source of light with wings

  (And when he is at bat, one of the beautiful swings).

  The pitcher goes into the windup and rears back with desire.

  Stan the Man pounds our glove

  Broken in with neat’s-foot oil.

  We get a runner caught in a rundown between first and second.

  I can’t get the ball back out of the pocket

  To throw to the pitcher covering second in time.

  T
hen fifty years pass.

  Nothing is next.

  THE INFINITE

  The beauty of the boy had twisted

  Into a shape brain damage has.

  Into the room walked a twenty-year-old

  Helix with a head

  Lopsidedly.

  The radiant

  Grimness of the Shostakovich

  Fifteenth Quartet, the last,

  Most austere, most beautiful solemn terror,

  The most music one repeated note can make, put out green leaves.

  The twentieth century was drawing

  To a close with a foal caught in amber smiling

  At his mother.

  Whose infinite eyes as he limped

  In the room smiled.

  TRUE STORY

  A gerbil running on an exercise wheel whirs away the hours

  To eternity by reciting the Iliad.

  Just a gentle gerbil under Joseph Stalin, the eagle Osip Mandelstam.

  Biting the arctic stars, black sky,

  Spruce trees line his lower jaw.

  Stalin flutters like a moth against his hot light.

  Lightning flutters against the hot night.

  St. Petersburg and Moscow are having sexual intercourse

  In a slaughterhouse,

  And will produce many sons.

  But in the meantime there are the mixed moans.

  The cockroach telephones Boris Pasternak from the Kremlin to croon

  His fellow poet will be all right—but adds, “You don’t really say

  Much to save your friend,” and hangs up.

  HOT NIGHT, LIGHTNING

  The United Nations is listening

  Via simultaneous translation to the poet Mandelstam.

  Tier after tier of the Tower of Babel tribunal being

  Breast-fed by their headsets hear his starry eyes,

  Marbles of melody and terror.

  PowerBooks, powder of the rhinoceros horn, delegates

  In every kind of suit and sari and sarong and dream

  Men and women around the round world wear, rip

  The ribbon from a box of chocolates

  And find inside his wife and him,

  And hear him begging Nadezhda not to leave the box.

  A United Nations of all the languages is going

  Through the air, a motorcycle going fast

  Into the Nevada desert,

  The joy of the original

  Into a beautiful emptiness.

  Through the double-parked side streets of New York

  Into a tunnel, under a river,

  The joy of the original goes