Poems 1959-2009
Page 20
Into a tile hole
Which amplifies the sound.
The leading edge of the wing is your face
That comes to earth to me.
I watch you wait.
A twentieth-century
Power outage brings the darkness back
In the vicinity of Jesus Christ, a Caucasian male.
I want the General Assembly to know
How China greets the day.
They don’t like blonds and they don’t like blacks.
The smell won’t go away.
The smell of sperm on the edge of the axe.
Among them Mandelstam, among the millions.
Into the aurora borealis cathedral he walks, filling the choir.
He and the other children weave
A rose window with the face of Shakespeare as the rose.
The tale he tells is made of Northern Lights.
Hairs of titanium are the bridge cables, of spun glass.
Horror has been hammered
Into white gold and gold gold,
Benumbed. Stalin has become sweet butter and salt
On an ear of summer butter-and-sugar corn.
The phonograph record pinned
Under the needle reaches the scratch.
Don’t stop thump don’t stop thump don’t stop.
Snow is falling.
A candle burns.
I watch you waiting for me to wake.
THE STORM
The perfect body of the yoga teacher
Stains a timeless pose.
Her perfect tan
Is an untouchable.
The beauty of her body
Is a storm
About to hit.
The monsoon air is rank and sweet.
Lightning storms a room
Which thunder overpowers
With stun grenades
That blind and deafen.
Her skin contains the storm
Inside the pose.
Rain squalls wash
The sidewalks raw.
The bombing run unleashes
Mushrooms on a path.
The Stealth flies unseen
Inside out.
High above the homeless,
Back and forth,
Job walks inside out
Weeping storms.
The widow throws her body
On her husband’s pyre.
The pose is pain
About to fall in floods.
The goal is grain
Enough to feed the world.
Bodies floating down the Ganges
Do the pose but while they do
The king is entering the field.
The queen is entering a grove.
The king is singing to the troops.
The storm is starting.
LITTLE SONG
My tiny Pitts
Fifteen and a half feet long
Brightly painted so it can be seen easily
By the aerobatics judges on the ground
Is a star.
The invisible biplane
Parked on display in my living room
With an inferior roll rate cheerily
Outperforms the more powerful Sukhoi’s
Loops and spins.
G’s of the imagination fasten
My five-point harness
To the star upside down
The sky is my living room
A chuck behind each wheel.
EISENHOWER YEARS
Suddenly I had to eat
A slowly writhing worm
A woman warmed on a flat stone in a jungle clearing
Or starve. I had to charm a Nazi waving a Lüger
Who could help me escape from a jungle river port town or die.
I had to survive not being allowed to sit down,
For ten hours, in a Mexico City
Jail, accused of manslaughter because
My cab driver in the early morning rush hour
Had killed a pedestrian and jumped out and run.
The prostitute even younger than I was that
I had spent the night with had been
So shy I had gone home with her to meet her parents
When she asked. In the Waikiki Club
Where she worked, I’d faced her machete-faced pimp wielding a knife.
At the Mayan Temple of the Moon, “that” instead of “whom,”
Which the explorer Richard Halliburton
Has written everyone must climb on a night of the full moon
At midnight who wants to say he or she has lived,
The guard dog woke the guard up.
I heard the lyrical barking from the top.
I saw the wink of the rifle barrel far below in the moonlight and hit
The deck like a commando on the ramp along the outside of the pyramid to hide.
When at last I looked up Orson Welles stood there, doe-eyed sombrero silence
Expecting a bribe. I walked with him all innocence down the ramp.
I walked past him out the gate and he fired.
I felt invulnerable, without feelings, without pores.
A week after I got back home to St. Louis I fainted
At the wheel of a car just after I had dropped off a friend,
And for four months in the hospital with a tropical disease I nearly died.
Suddenly in the jungle there was an American professor named Bud Bivins
Who had fled from Texas to avoid the coming nuclear war.
The Nazi found passage for us both on a tramp steamer which ran
Into a violent storm in the Gulf not long after Bivins had gone mad
And taken to pacing the deck all night after the cook had demanded
On the captain’s behalf that we pay him more, on top of what
We’d already paid, or swim, with his butcher knife pointing to a thin line
Of green at the horizon, the distant jungle shore.
The captain would be delighted to let us off immediately if we wished.
No one saw Bivins when we reached port.
In the middle of the night a huge wave hit
The rotten boatload of tarantulas and bananas, slam-dunking us under.
The cook and all the others, including our captain,
Kneeled at the rail holding on, loudly praying, so who was at the wheel?
Bivins was last spied on the deck. I was sixteen.
VICTORY
Nothing is pure at 36,000 feet either.
Even in First, there is only more.
The wing is streaked
By the jet engine’s exhaust. Sometimes
I stand outside a toilet
Which is occupied, staring out
A window somewhere over Malaysia at dawn.
I am the wing,
The thing that should be lift,
Soiled by power.
Make no mistake about the heat.
It also has to eat.
It eats the fuel it’s fed.
It eats the air.
It eats the hair.
It eats what’s there.
The jungle devours me with its eyes which are
Screamed skyscrapers of plasm.
I said dismal. I meant passion.
The sky unfreezes me alive.
There is heaven the mainland. And there is heaven the island.
There is the warm water of heaven between.
The minister of defense bull’s-eyes on the helicopter pad
With security all around wearing a curly wire into one ear.
Code-named Big Fish, he likes Eau Sauvage
To be there ahead of him wherever he goes.
There is heaven the novel, and heaven the movie.
Below you is the sky at 35,000 feet.
Above you is the muezzin until it ends.
I have the lift, but think I ought to land.
The blank eye of the sky muezzins the faithless to rise
And face the heat
And urinate and defecate and eat and act
Another day.
I wish I knew your name.
Powerful forces have built a road
Through the jungle. Muslim apparently
Women fully clothed are apparently allowed to expose in the lucky
Warm water with their brown kids sporting like putti flying fish.
Quiet on the set, please, thank you. The actors are rehearsing.
My penis is full of blood for you
Probably won’t win her hand.
But you bet
Susanna the movie has to pull in the Elders.
She has designs.
She was designed to. She is audience response questionnaire–designed to
Get them to feast their eyes.
They’re sitting in the dark and certainly
They’re in the dark about
The lights will go on and the vile will be caught by a questionnaire.
Jungle covers an island in the South China Sea.
The interior is the first step in.
Perpetual summer sleeps with sixteen kinds of snakes.
My penis is full of love for you starred
In a road movie with Dorothy Lamour and
The beautiful bay
Used to be a breeding ground for sharks
Where we’re swimming now. The head
Of the British fleet, here for the joint
Naval exercises, told me he remembered it well, charming man.
The Steadicam glides everywhere,
Holding its head in the air like a King Cobra.
The ecology
Of the island is fragile, but the second airport will never be built.
This isn’t Acapulco 1949 about to Big Bang.
You step into the jungle and it’s thick.
You step into the warm water and it’s thin.
But nothing jiggles the Steadicam.
The poisonous viper is authorized to use deadly force
Only on the jungle path to the waterfall above the golf course.
Someone has seen a ten-foot lizard
Near the set. Someone was seen feeding a monkey
Bananas. The set itself is a subset of itself,
A jungle set in the jungle.
Islam is aerosolized into the atmosphere,
Coating the jungle scenes with time.
St. Agatha is the martyr whose breasts got hacked off,
But in the movie they don’t.
The breasts that don’t get removed
Anticipate the replenishing monsoon.
God is everywhere you’re not,
And you are everywhere. I wish I knew your name.
Congestion in the brain is cleared
By the tropical haze which mists the coconut palms
And by the horrible heat of heaven. Oddly sudden
Mountains rise right out of the sea, jungle-clad. Hairy
Angels are friendly, but not too friendly.
Palm trees can mean Palm Beach,
But where the monkeys are semi-tame
We are semi-saved.
I never sleep on planes, but woke
Belted in, seat upright, table stowed,
To the roar of the reverse thrust,
Semi-saved. I undressed into the ocean
Surrounded by security and businessmen talking into cellular phones.
The jungle is within. The jungle also comes down
To the heavenly warm water lapping the sand.
The jungle is the start and the jungle is the end.
The jungle is behind. The jungle is ahead.
Ahead of me is heaven.
VERMONT
The attitude of green to blue is love.
And so the day just floats itself away.
The stench of green, the drench of green, above
The ripples of sweet swimming in a bay
Of just-mowed green, intoxicates the house.
The meadow goddess squeaking like a mouse
Is stoned, inhales the grass, adores the sky.
The nostrils feed the gods until the eye
Can almost see the perfume pour the blue.
A Botticelli ladled from a well,
Your life is anything you want it to—
And loves you more than it can show or tell.
Milan
RACINE
When civilization was European,
I knew every beautiful woman
In the Grand Hôtel et de Milan,
Which the Milanese called “The Millin,”
Where Verdi died, two blocks from La Scala,
And lived in every one of them
Twenty-some years ago while a motorcycle was being made
For me by the MV Agusta
Racing Department in Cascina Costa,
The best mechanics in the world
Moonlighting for me after racing hours.
One of the “Millin” women raced cars, a raving beauty.
She owned two Morandis, had met Montale.
She recited verses from the Koran
Over champagne in the salon and was only eighteen
And was too good to be true.
She smilingly recited Leopardi in Hebrew.
The most elegant thing in life is an Italian Jew.
The most astonishing thing in life to be is an Italian Jew.
It helps if you can be from Milan, too.
She knew every tirade in Racine
And was only eighteen.
They thought she was making a scene
When she started declaiming Racine.
Thunderbolts in the bar.
With the burning smell of Auschwitz in my ear.
With the gas hissing from the ceiling.
Racine raved on racing tires at the limit of adhesion.
With the gas hissing from the showers.
I remember the glamorous etching on the postcard
The hotel continued to reprint from the original 1942 plate.
The fantasy hotel and street
Had the haughty perfect ease of haute couture,
Chanel in stone. A tiny tailored doorman
Stood as in an architectural drawing in front of the façade and streamlined
Cars passed by.
The cars looked as if they had their headlights on in the rain,
In the suave, grave
Milanese sunshine.
MILAN
This is Via Gesù.
Stone without a tree.
This is the good life.
Puritan elegance.
Severe but plentiful.
Big breasts in a business suit.
Between Via Monte Napoleone and Via della Spiga.
I draw
The bowstring of Cupid’s bow,
Too powerful for anything but love to pull.
Oh the sudden green gardens glimpsed through gates and the stark
Deliciously expensive shops.
I let the pocket knives at Lorenzi,
Each a priceless jewel,
Gods of blades and hinges,
Make me late for a fitting at Caraceni.
Oh Milan, I feel myself being pulled back
To the past and released.
I hiss like an arrow
Through the air,
On my way from here to there.
I am a man I used to know.
I am the arrow and the bow.
I am a reincarnation, but
I give birth to the man
I grew out of.
I follow him down a street
Into a restaurant I don’t remember
And sit and eat.
A Ducati 916 stabs through the blur.
Massimo Tamburini designed this miracle
Which ought to be in the Museum of Modern Art.
The Stradivarius
Of motorcycles lights up Via Borgospesso
As it flashes by, dumbfoundingly small.
Donatello by way of Branc
usi, smoothed simplicity.
One hundred sixty-four miles an hour.
The Ducati 916 is a nightingale.
It sings to me more sweetly than Cole Porter.
Slender as a girl, aerodynamically clean.
Sudden as a shark.
The president of Cagiva Motorcycles,
Mr. Claudio Castiglioni, lifts off in his helicopter
From his ecologically sound factory by a lake.
Cagiva in Varese owns Ducati in Bologna,
Where he lands.
His instructions are Confucian:
Don’t stint.
Combine a far-seeing industrialist.
With an Islamic fundamentalist.
With an Italian premier who doesn’t take bribes.
With a pharmaceuticals CEO who loves to spread disease.
Put them on a 916.
And you get Fred Seidel.
Bologna
A PRETTY GIRL
Umber, somber, brick Bologna.
They could use some Miami Jews
In this city of sensible shoes.
In the city of Morandi,
The painter of the silence
Of groups of empty bottles,
Arcades of demure
Men dressed in brown pneumonia
Look for women in the fog.
Bare, thick, spare, pure,
Umber, somber, brick Bologna.
This year’s fashion color is manure,
According to the windows
Of fogged-in manikins
In Piazza Cavour.
Reeking of allure,
Arcades of demure
Young women dressed in odorless brown pneumonia
Give off clouds of smoke,
Dry ice in the fog.
Bare, thick, spare, pure:
Shaved heads reading books flick
Their cigarettes away and cover their mouths with their scarfs,
Leaned against the radical Medical School,
Punks with stethoscopes, horoscopes.
They listen to the heart with the heart,
Students in the medieval streets.
Their tangerine fingernails heal
The Emergency Room in gloves
Till dawn, and still come out eager to Day-Glo Bologna.
The tangerine tirelessly sheds disposable latex
Gloves until the day glows.
Emergency path lighting
On the airplane floor has led me to the exits
Through the cold and the fog.
Follow the tangerine path through the dark and the smoke.
Beneath the unisex jeans
Is cunnus soft as shatoosh.
The Communist mayor who underwrites the Morandi Museum
Takes a right-wing industrialist through the silence.