And the Ducati motorcycle factory
In Via Cavalieri Ducati breathes to life
Another piece of sculpture that goes fast.
Art and engineering meet and make
A brain wave
Of beauty suitable to ride.
The advice of my physician
Is, turn sixty.
I limit lovemaking to one position,
Mounted on a Ducati, monoposto:
Equivalent to warm sand as white as snow,
And skin as brown as brandy,
And swimming in the blue of faraway.
A well-dressed man is lying on a bed
With Leopardi in his arms.
The fog outside the window is Bologna.
He does the dead man’s float
Next to the sleek hull of the sloop A Pretty Girl,
Stuck in a sheet of glue
Which extends for a hundred miles
Without a sip of wind,
Under a sky.
The blue is infinite.
He can see three miles down.
He free-floats in glass in his body temperature.
He does not know yet that he has dived in
Forgetting to let the ladder down,
And he does not know
He cannot climb back up.
There are no handholds.
The sloping sides are smooth.
The deck too high.
She heads for the horizon under full sail
In his flash hallucination. You never
Leave no one onboard,
But he does not know yet what has happened since
A Pretty Girl is not going anywhere.
The sailboat pond in Central Park
Is where a boy’s days were a breeze.
He does the dead man’s float
Next to the motionless boat,
But in art there is no hope.
Art is dope.
The fog glows,
Tangerine toward sundown.
The Communist mayor who is said
To be tough but fair
Is waiting.
Take me, silence.
Going Fast
GOING FAST
I
Extra Heartbeats
Red
As a Ducati 916, I’m crazed, I speed,
I blaze, I bleed,
I sight-read
A Bach Invention.
I’m at the redline.
When I speak you hear
The exhaust note of a privateer.
I see an audience of applause.
Pairs of hands in rows.
Palestinian and Jew.
And black and brown and yellow and red.
Wedding rings wearing watches
Pound lifelines into foam.
Fate lines. Date lines. Date palms. Politics. Foam.
The air blurs with the clapping.
The sidewalks sizzle with mica.
The colors tremble and vibrate.
The colors in the garden start to shake apart
While the applause swells.
The four walls of the world pump,
Pump their chemicals.
When I give my lectures,
The tachometer reads at the redline.
When I speak you hear
The exhaust note of a privateer.
The flutter in my chest is extra heartbeats,
My ectopy.
And Rabin is calling Arafat.
And Arafat, Rabin.
The touch-tone beeps are rising
To the sky like the bubbles in champagne.
The chemo is killing the white cells.
The white cells are killing the red cells.
They’ll have to kill me first.
They’ll find me
Flying on the floor.
II
Candle Made from Fat
The most beautiful motorcycle ever made
Was just made.
I ride to Syria
To Assad on one.
A hundred and sixty-four miles an hour
On the 916
Makes a sound,
My friend, makes a sound.
I seek the most beautiful terror.
Massimo Tamburini designed it.
I ride to Syria
To President Assad on one.
Hafez al-Assad, a hundred and sixty-four miles an hour
On the Ducati 916
Makes a sound,
My friend, makes a certain sound.
A group that calls itself
The Other Woman,
In southern Lebanon, apparently with money
From Iran, is assembling the bomb.
It’s red,
Flying through the desert
Toward the border with Israel,
As I approach my sixtieth birthday.
The school bus entering the outskirts
Of Jerusalem is full.
The motorcycle
Is screaming, God is great.
The kangaroo effect
Is boing-boing-boing as the white light bounds away,
Leaving in their blood the burning curls
Of Jewish boys and girls.
III
Lauda, Jerusalem
My violent Honda 125cc Grand Prix racer
Is the size of a bee.
It is too small to ride
Except for the joy.
My on-fire 1996 RS125R
Flies on its little wings,
A psalmist, all stinger,
On racing slicks.
It absolutely can’t stop
Lifting its voice to scream.
It mounts the victory podium.
Lauda, Jerusalem, Dominum.
I am a Jew.
I am Japan.
I shift gears over and over.
I scream to victory again and again.
Fall leaves inflame the woods.
It is brilliant to live.
The sorrow that is not sorrow,
The mist of everything is over everything.
IV
Poem Does
The god in the nitroglycerin
Is speedily absorbed under the tongue
Till it turns a green man red,
Which is what a poem does.
It explosively reanimates
By oxygenating the tribe.
No civilized state will execute
Someone who is ill
Till it makes the someone well
Enough to kill
In a civilized state,
As a poem does.
I run-and-bump the tiny
Honda 125cc Grand Prix racer. Only
Two steps and it screams. I
Slip the clutch to get the revs up, blipping and getting
Ready not to get deady,
Which also is what a poem does.
They dress them up in the retirement centers.
They dress them up in racing leathers.
They dress them up in war paint and feathers.
The autumn trees are in their gory glory.
The logs in the roaring fire keep passing
The peace pipe in pain, just what a poem does.
Stanza no. 5. We want to be alive.
Line 26. We pray for peace.
Line 27. The warrior and peacemaker Rabin is in heaven.
28. We don’t accept his fate.
But we do. Life is going ahead as fast as it can,
Which is what a poem does.
V
Israel
An animal in the wild
Comes up to you in a clearing because it
Has rabies. It loves you. It does not know why.
It pulls out a gun.
You really will die.
The motorcycle you are riding
Is not in control of itself.
It is not up to you to.
The sky is not well.
It wants to make friends.
It stalks you to
At a hundred and sixty-four miles an hour.
It asks you to
Take down your pants.
Daphne fleeing Apollo
Into the Sinai shrinks to a bonsai.
The Jewish stars that top the crown
Prime Minister Rabin is wearing
As he ascends to heaven assassinated, twinkle.
The main tank holds the dolphins.
Land for peace is not for them.
Daphne fleeing Apollo
Across the desert of your desk becomes
In India a cow.
The icing on the cake
Is stone. The Ten Commandments
Are incised in it.
You take a bite
Of Israel and spit out teeth, señor.
You throw your head back and wheelie
On the RS125R
And the Ducati,
Surrounded by security rushing you forward,
Suddenly aware you have been shot.
VI
Killing Hitler
A Ducati Supermono walks down the aisle
At a hundred and forty-one miles an hour
To kiss the Torah, trumpeting,
An elephant downsized to a gazelle that devours lions.
Red Italian bodywork
Designed by the South African
Pierre Terblanche is sensuous lavish smoothness
With mustard-yellow highlights.
Even the instrument binnacle
Is beautiful and the green
Of the top triple clamp
Means magnesium, no expense spared, very trick.
The rabbi weighs only
301 lbs. with the tank full.
It wails straight
To the Wailing Wall.
It is big but being small
The Supermono has a mania.
The double con-rod balance system is elegance.
The total motorcycle bugles petite magnificence.
How to keep killing Hitler
Is the point.
How to be a work of art and win.
How to be Supermono and marry Lois Lane in the synagogue, and love.
MY TOKYO (1993)
TO THE MUSE
I’d had a haircut at Molé.
I called you from the first pay phone that worked.
You were high above Park Avenue,
Having damask troubles in their library.
I saw the man approaching not see me.
I held the phone and heard the servants getting you.
I watched him squat in the street near the curb while the traffic passed,
Spreading under himself sheets of newspaper;
Which when he rose he folded neatly
And carried to the trash basket at the corner.
Across the street were Mortimer’s’ outside tables set for lunch.
Now the maître d’ was seating an early customer,
While a woman pushing a shopping cart
Picked through the trash in the trash basket the man had used,
And the butler finally came back
To the phone to say you had gone.
FROM A HIGH FLOOR
City of neutered dogs,
How homeless can you be
In a nine-room apartment
With windows on three sides?
Waiting to be shot
At sunrise by sixteen windows!
Everything you need is
A wall to stand in front of.
With a southern exposure.
Paneling in front of
The wall you stand in front of.
The doorman calls upstairs.
Shall I send it up?
It is coming up.
Your back is to the wall
This pleasant afternoon,
This autumn afternoon,
This final afternoon.
You on all sides of you
In the mirrored bathroom.
You on all sides of you
In the walk-in closet.
In your booklined blindfold.
In the deep fatigue
The sunset warms with rouge.
The homeless homeless have
The center strip of Broadway.
To live where you should jump.
THE HOUR
They can’t get close enough—there’s no such thing.
Look. When they smile. Each rising like a tree
Inside the other, breathing quietly.
Two women start their hour by moistening.
The engine pulling them around the bend
Exposes irresistibly the train
They’re on extending from them through the rain.
And then it’s night. And it will never end.
They’re in a limousine. The plane they’re on
Is over water. Dawn reveals the two
Berlins becoming one. And now they knew
The time had come. And now the rain is gone.
Two passengers aboard their lives undress
Down to their hands. The lifelines touch. They stay
Behind their smiles. The guard comes in to say
The hour is over, and they tell her yes.
HAIR IN A NET
If you’re a woman turning fifty,
You’re a woman who feels cheated.
This message now will be repeated.
The bittersweetness known as Jesus
Was not some nice man saying he is
Not quite a feminist and not quite not one.
Every man’s a rapist until he’s done.
The bitch relieves the dog. The wound, the gun.
The Sermon on the Mount, the Son.
Was it better back in Peapack
Riding over hills to hounds,
Your consciousness not yet raised?
At Foxcroft, under Miss Charlotte,
Polishing your boots till they were bittersweet,
The fields were a girl’s cantata.
Doing the rumba at the regatta,
Plato in Greek, amphetamines your stallion, were your alma mater,
And the Metropolitan, and the Modern … and then S/M.
Oh, the tiny furs and the red stench of the fox
Of all those white girls taking cold showers
And then lining up to jump
Hair in a net in a hat over perfectly maintained fences.
Everything male is a rapist, certainly God,
Except for Henry James.
At the Institute for Advanced Study,
Which your father helped organize,
Your father made lives,
Scientists he saved from the Nazis,
Putting his face on the cover of Time,
Or was that for his part in building the Atom Bomb?
And otherwise—the man made gushers in Texas rise.
He macadamized the roads of Greece.
His sword was terrible and swift.
He strode up the hill in the heat.
He dove into the ice-cold pool and burst
Instantly into death like a flame.
RACKETS
Reginald Fincke was his name,
The son of Reginald Fincke.
All his friends called him Rex.
Rex lost his eye playing rackets.
The match at the New York City Racquet Club,
In the battleship-gray rackets court,
With the lines done in red like a Mondrian,
Was stopped short,
With the light from the skylight streaming down,
And the overhead electric lights also on
(So the light in the court would be even).
A dashingly handsome young man,
Flawless brutal power.
Hot elegance of a thoroughbred being hot-walked
By George Santayana and Learned Hand through Harvard.
The slender long shaft of the rackets racket,
With its rather small head, so graceful.
>
The rifle shot crack of the rackets ball
When a hard forehand drive meets the faraway front wall
(And the clang if the ball hits the telltale).
And the lovely backhand backswing
Flowing back to a cocked position.
A rackets ball is a rock. A rackets ball is a rocketing rock.
Once the ball is served,
In between each shot,
The marker calls out Play!
If the path for the next shot is free,
If the other man is not in the way.
When the ball is crackling back and forth,
Picking up speed off four stone walls,
Accelerating right at you, exploding away,
In the lightning exchanges of a rally,
Over and over the marker cries Play!
Meaning the other man is not in your way,
Play!—Play!—Play!—Play!
Meaning the other man is not in your way,
Except when the marker yells Time!
The ball can do such damage!
George Santayana, what kind of insane is it
If someone has to okay each shot!
And the gasp from the gallery when the marker called Play!
And immediately Fincke was struck.
Fincke was his name,
Fincke went his game.
He’ll never fight in a war,
Not that there’ll be a war,
Now that he’s lost an eye.
He’d become number one in the world earlier that year,
Crushing the previous number one in a private court near Oxford.
He answered a challenge at Tuxedo Park.
Ten thousand dollars had been put up.
Eight million men will die.
The instinct for self-preservation is real though in young men
It pulls its head in but sticks its neck out.
The enormous gun starts firing at the world,
Fires and recoils, fires and recoils.
Franz Ferdinand and his wife the duchess, the duchess,
Are dead at Sarajevo. It echoes.
Welcome to the Racquet Club, Mr. Princip.
Welcome, everyone, to the Porcellian.
Wise—he would have said simply hardworking, sane. Plain
Human magnificence, ugly as Socrates.
Fat hairy caterpillar eyebrows.
Learned Hand was America’s.
My former wife’s mother was Hand’s daughter, one of three.
(He had always wanted a son.)
She curled her pinky in smiling imitation
Of the ancient crone she had known as a child
Who seized every opportunity to say,
Her fabulous diamonds winking away,
Poems 1959-2009 Page 21