Poems 1959-2009

by Frederick Seidel

  Suffer the little sunflowers to come unto me.

  Their childish big faces gaze at everyone with love.

  They sing so sweetly in the cold. They sing completely.

  Shy wings repeat the

  Seven last words of Christ,

  I don’t feel anything but it hurts.

  I’m typing this with fingers of cold wax.

  I can see my breath in the salon.

  In August,

  With green leaves warbling liquids of birdsong,

  We have reached the Pole.

  The Poulenc ripples chastely as an eel

  Off the shores of silence, immaculately

  To the place where they press olives.

  Jesus prostrates himself on the ground.

  Jesus jaywalks through the perfumed night air

  Back and forth. How sweet it smells.

  He is davening and stops.

  Abba, Father.

  He looks for them and finds them

  Fast asleep, Peter especially. Could

  You not watch with me one hour? They couldn’t

  Even stay awake.

  They sleep in the dark.

  Who when I thought my son was dying slept.

  My son was dying slept.

  There she was.

  Who when I thought my son was dying slept

  And slept while I paced,

  While they performed the emergency operation.

  For hours. But then I too.

  Could you not watch with me one hour?

  Can’t wake from my life either.

  I too must wake.

  The sun streams in and makes

  Sunbeams of my solid house.

  Blond air is my igloo.

  The houseflies cryogenically unfreeze

  And regain consciousness in order to be flies.

  Before they fly, they jitter-walk around and pause

  To rub their two front legs together.

  Androgynous Akhenaten is singing his hymn to the Aten.

  The awed wide-eyed words rise

  On the wings of my houseflies,

  Franciscan in their intimacy which shook the earth.

  The radio is singing Christ is risen.

  The sunflowers are singing to the sun.

  These words I say to you are sunflowers singing to the sun.

  There was a God

  With human chromosomes, nearly human … I fly

  Across the inland flatness of the Cher

  In my old car, in love. I give you God. I fly my car.

  I’m bringing God back to God.

  It doesn’t matter what happens.

  And when I said my car was me, instantly

  My dingy bronze Simca’s alternator was broken, yesterday.

  We overheat up to the red.

  We’ll try to float to a garage.

  I’m going nowhere fast. The

  Same old 66.

  Same difference.

  Shades of the past. It doesn’t matter what happens.

  Just outside the door,

  The dear cur snores on its tires. It sleeps in la France profonde.

  The centerlines are silver, the roads are gold, en Berry today.

  Shed a joyous tear for me

  And my bronze-colored pal.

  I made a clearing. I meditated. I made a temple.

  To meet you in.

  Carved the everywhere of Buddha out

  Of polished quiet.

  And Krishna’s smile. And Krishna’s

  Heavenly hands pressed together in candent greeting.

  Introibo ad altare Dei.

  You’ve put my eyes out so I will see.

  The heat-seeking missile desires the faraway sun.

  Thy pheromones invite thy suitor.

  The radio announcer on France Musique

  Is speaking so melodiously his words perspire,

  That professional sugar sound I abhor, but I can’t hear.

  I am listening to the rustle of your long black dress

  On the telephone last night as you pulled it up

  A thousand miles away.

  Someone could have walked in.

  The husky hush of your voice.

  Raise your evening gown for me forever.

  THE LAST POEM IN THE BOOK

  I don’t believe in anything, I do

  Believe in you, vanished particles of vapor,

  Field of force,

  Undressed, undimmed Invisible,

  Losing muons and gaining other ones,

  Counterrotations with your

  Robed arms raised out straight to each side

  In a dervish dance of eyes closed ecstasy,

  Tireless, inhuman,

  Wireless technology

  Of a ghost,

  Of a spinning top on its point,

  Of a tornado perspiring forward a few miles an hour

  Uprooting everything and smelling sweetly like a lawn.

  It’s that time of year.

  It’s that time of year a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day,

  A thousand times a day,

  You are reborn flying to out-ski

  The first avalanche each spring,

  And buried alive.

  I went to sleep last night so I could see you.

  I went to see the world destroyed. It was a movie.

  I went to sleep that night so I could see you.

  And then a drink and then to sleep.

  That’s Vermont.

  The universe hung like a flare for a while and went out,

  Leaving nothing, long ago.

  Each galaxy at war exhaled

  A firefly glow, a tiny quiet, far away …

  On and off … worlds off and on—and then

  The universe itself brightened, stared and went out.

  I cannot see.

  I will not wake though it’s a dream.

  I move my head from side to side.

  I cannot move.

  The nights are cold, the sun is hot,

  The air is alcohol at that altitude

  Three thousand miles from here—is here

  Today a thousand times.

  You haven’t changed.

  There is a room in the Acropolis Museum.

  The kouroi smile silence.

  The way a virus sheds. The way

  A weave of wind shear

  And the willingness to share is the perfect friend

  Every child invents for his very own. I don’t know.

  The Parthenon suddenly made me cry.

  I saw it and I sobbed,

  And it doesn’t share.

  I was so out of it

  You came too close. I got too near

  The temple, flying low. I got too near

  The power, past the ropes. I touched the restoration work.

  It could mean a loss of consciousness

  In the right-hand seat to be with God.

  The Early Warning Ground Proximity Indicator is flashing.

  Never mind. I knew it was.

  The alarm ah-ooga ah-ooga and the computer-generated

  Voice says

  And says and says Pull Up Pull Up Pull Up Pull Up.

  You say come closer.

  You say come closer.

  I cannot move.

  You say I have to whisper this. Come closer.

  I want to hear.

  There also is the way a virus sheds.

  I want to see. And the ground whispers

  Closer. In the Littré the other day and you were there

  In the Petit Robert. Grévisse—Larousse—

  Ten million years from now, will there be anything?

  The rain came down convulsively on the dry land,

  As if it would have liked to come down even harder,

  Big, kind, body temperature

  Shudderings, and on the far bank of the newborn river,

  The joyous drumming of the native drums,

  Making a tremendous sound twel
ve feet beneath the snow

  Without an avalanche beeper in those days. It’s true—

  I don’t believe in anything I do

  Believe in, but I do believe in you

  Moving your face from side to side to make a space to breathe.

  I think I am crying on all my legs

  From a dark place to a dark place like a roach.

  I am running on the ground with my wings folded—

  But now I am extending them,

  Running across my kitchen floor and

  Running down the rue Barbet-de-Jouy,

  Trying historically before it’s too late to get into the air.

  I have on my ten Huntsman suits,

  And many shining shoes made to my last.

  I believe in one Lobb.

  Faites sur mesure. Everything

  Fits my body perfectly now that I’m about to disappear.

  I don’t believe in anything.

  Lightning touches intimately the sable starless. Thunder.

  You start to breathe too much.

  It starts to rain, in your intoxication.

  Communism and capitalism go up in flames

  And come back down as rain—I’m coming now—

  But Greece stays parched.

  I’m coming now.

  I’m being thrown violently at the sky,

  The deck of the carrier shrinking to a dot,

  Thirty-some years ago

  Suddenly catching sight of Chartres Cathedral miles away;

  Horizon to horizon, a molten ocean

  The beautiful urine color of vermeil,

  Color and undercolor as with a fur;

  Soaring stock-still above the windblown waves of wheat,

  Dialing on the seemingly inexhaustible power.

  Break it.

  I swim over to the sealed

  Aquarium window of the TV screen to try.

  President of the United States descending the stairs

  Of his helicopter pixels snap a salute at the American flag

  Pixels. I turn the sound off

  And the Marine band explodes.

  I’m coming now.

  I can’t breathe.

  I’m coming now to the conclusion that

  Without a God. I’m coming now to the conclusion.

  SUNRISE (1980)

  1968

  A football spirals through the oyster glow

  Of dawn dope and fog in L.A.’s

  Bel Air, punted perfectly. The foot

  That punted it is absolutely stoned.

  A rising starlet leans her head against the tire

  Of a replica Cord,

  A bonfire of red hair out of

  Focus in the fog. Serenading her,

  A boy plucks “God Bless America” from a guitar.

  Vascular spasm has made the boy’s hands blue

  Even after hours of opium.

  Fifty or so of the original

  Four hundred

  At the fundraiser,

  Robert Kennedy for President, the remnants, lie

  Exposed as snails around the swimming pool, stretched

  Out on the paths, and in the gardens, and the drive.

  Many dreams their famous bodies have filled.

  The host, a rock superstar, has

  A huge cake of opium,

  Which he refers to as “King Kong,”

  And which he serves on a silver salver

  Under a glass bell to his close friends,

  So called,

  Which means all mankind apparently,

  Except the fuzz,

  Sticky as tar, the color of coffee,

  A quarter of a million dollars going up in smoke.

  This is Paradise painted

  On the inside of an eggshell

  With the light outside showing through,

  Subtropical trees and flowers and lawns,

  Clammy as albumen in the fog,

  And smelling of fog. Backlit

  And diffuse, the murdered

  Voityck Frokowski, Abigail Folger and Sharon Tate

  Sit together without faces.

  This is the future.

  Their future is the future. The future

  Has been born,

  The present is the afterbirth,

  These bloodshot and blue acres of flowerbeds and stars.

  Robert Kennedy will be killed.

  It is ’68, the campaign year—

  And the beginning of a new day.

  People are waiting.

  When the chauffeur-bodyguard arrives

  For work and walks

  Into the ballroom, now recording studio, herds

  Of breasts turn round, it seems in silence,

  Like cattle turning to face a sound.

  Like cattle lined up to face the dawn.

  Shining eyes seeing all or nothing,

  In the silence.

  A stranger, and wearing a suit,

  Has to be John the Baptist,

  At least, come

  To say someone else is coming.

  He hikes up his shoulder holster

  Self-consciously, meeting their gaze.

  That is as sensitive as the future gets.

  DEATH VALLEY

  Antonioni walks in the desert shooting

  Zabriskie Point. He does not perspire

  Because it is dry. His twill trousers stay pressed,

  He wears desert boots and a viewfinder,

  He has a profile he could shave with, sharp

  And meek, like the eyesight of the deaf,

  With which he is trying to find America,

  A pick for prospecting passive as a dowser.

  He has followed his nose into the desert.

  Crew and cast mush over the burning lake

  Shivering and floaty like a mirage.

  The light makes it hard to see. Four million dollars

  And cameras ripple over the alkali

  Waiting for the director to breathe on them.

  How even and epic his wingbeats are for a small fellow.

  He sips cigarette after cigarette

  And turns in Italian to consult his English

  Girlfriend and screenwriter, who is beautiful.

  In Arizona only the saguaros

  And everybody else were taller than he was.

  Selah. He draws in the gypsum dust selah

  He squats on his heels for the love scene, finally

  The technicians are spray-dyeing the dust darker.

  It looks unreal, but it will dry lighter,

  Puffs of quadroon smoke back out of the spray guns.

  The Open Theater are naked and made up.

  Between his name and néant are his eyes.

  THE TRIP

  Nothing is human or alien at this altitude,

  Almost a drug high, one mile in the blue,

  I am flying over what I will have to live through:

  So this is love, four curving jet trails of flock.

  How different it was to look up and see

  The train you rode on curving away from you

  On a long bend—like your child body, part

  Of you, apart from you. It felt so odd,

  How hauntingly it straightened and disappeared.

  This is love reflected in the window

  Tippling a complimentary cup of broth,

  Myself and Magritte, the desert takes a drink.

  I gaze through my forehead at the rising desert,

  Dots and dashes like meanings, pain-points of green,

  Cactus crucifying the beautiful emptiness.

  I hold my own hand while I slowly find

  The horizon on the other side of my eyes.

  It I feel close to, it cannot come near:

  There and beyond one like heaven, as Che is. Once,

  On the new Metroliner fleeing New York,

  Fleeing the same girl I am flying to …

  The experimental train dreamed of flight,

 
Eupeptic sleek plastic, Muzak, its steel skin twinkled.

  We rose on music from under Park Avenue

  To the fourth floors of Harlem where only the bricked-up

  Windows didn’t reflect us. I saw them, the slightly

  Lighter bricks within the brick window frames.

  THE ROOM AND THE CLOUD

  The tan table of the desert is an empty

  Sunlit plaza by de Chirico

  That has no meaning, that is like the desert

  Rising in the windows of an Astrojet

  As it so coldly dips to right itself.

  A rich man in Arizona drives a tan

  Mercedes, bulbous and weightless as an astronaut.

  It barely moves, it walks through space the way Mao does,

  Tan freezing silence like a freeze frame.

  Across a desk top, in his fuselage,

  The rudimentary tail brain of his two

  Propels the largest living dinosaur,

  Schizophrenia. And when he tilts

  His head Tucson turns, a slow veronica,

  The horizon lifts to one side like a drawbridge.

  Years float by, cold novocaine nirvana

  Aloft in a holding pattern as if forever.

  They bring the stairs up, First Class ducks out first.

  Step one is to be rich. The two men are beaming:

  My host with the Mercedes and his guest

  Fly in on the freeway through a desert noon.

  Their conversation seems to them an oasis,

  Air-conditioning sanitizes the air.

  The giant saguaros stand up, without hearts or hair,

  Autoplastic adaption that can’t fail.

  I see a desert. I look down at the typed page:

  We are the room and the cloud on its painted ceiling.

  THE SOUL MATE

  Your eyes gazed

  Sparkling and dark as hooves,

  They had seen you through languor and error.

  They were so still. They were a child.

  They were wet like hours

  And hours of cold rain.

  Sixty-seven flesh inches

  Utterly removed, of spirit

  For the sake of nobody,

  That one could love but not know—

  Like death if you are God.

  So close to me, my soul mate, like a projection.

  I’d loved you gliding through St. Paul’s sniffing

  The torch of yellow flowers,

  The torch had not lit the way.

  Winter flowers, yourself a flame

  In winter. In the cold

  Like a moth in a flame.

  I seemed to speak,

  I seemed never to stop.

  You tossed your head back and a cloud

  Of hair from your eyes,

  You listened with the beautiful