Poems 1959-2009

by Frederick Seidel

  On the trembling beach, dogs howl everywhere. One

  Heave, and the water of the swimming pool

  Sprang up, turning on its side like a pole-

  Vaulter as it rose –4

  In impossible slow motion. Whisper. Roar.

  Because the stirred-up air only smells sweeter.

  Because on Bali the earthquake toll is this sweet.

  The Ketjak dancers roar and whisper ketjak

  In ecstasy, the monkey dancers, k-tchuck.

  They sway, but stayed seated, ketjak, ketjak.

  –3, C-4, we have ignition.

  Lit up, the streets of Cairo are singing of urine,

  The streets of Bombay are quiring human faeces.

  –2 is the sea anemones

  Which elsewhere are galaxies. Time-space is the amoeba’s

  Pouring motion into itself to move.

  Organizations of gravity and light,

  Supremely mass disappears and reappears

  In an incomprehensible –1 of might.

  Sat up at last, the quadriplegic boy

  Feels beyond pain, feels beyond joy—

  Still, stately as the Christ of Resurrection.

  I wake beneath my hypnopompic erection,

  Forty stanzas, forty Easters of life,

  And smile, eyes full of tears, shaking with rage.

  “NOT TO BE BORN IS OBVIOUSLY BEST OF ALL”

  Your face swims to my window, beautiful

  Translucence, a pearl, the fetal teardrop, little

  Sea horse unswaying as time flows by. You nose

  The glass, forever about to have a soul.

  New York flows by, not now flows by, not now,

  The traffic flows by. Moonlit dunes of amnesia

  Flow by, flow by. In the rearview mirror dawn

  The messenger sent back without a reply

  Turning back into the Sahara.

  O idea swimming on the blue,

  Your face swims to the window, beautiful

  Translucence against the blinding id of blue,

  A leaf, the afterimage of a leaf,

  Almost enough shade. I breathe in

  Your breath and breathe a million miles away.

  A mirror is backing through a blinding desert,

  Autoroute to the end. Already there—

  Still waiting! It is too late to be yourself.

  TO ROBERT LOWELL AND OSIP MANDELSTAM

  I look out the window: spring is coming.

  I look out the window: spring is here.

  The shuffle and click of the slide projector

  Changing slides takes longer.

  I like the dandelion—

  How it sticks to the business of briefly being.

  Shuffle and click, shuffle and click—

  Life, more life, more life.

  The train that carried the sparkling crystal saxophone

  Osip Mandelstam into exile clicketyclicked

  Through suds of spring flowers,

  Cool furrowed-earth smells, sunshine like freshly baked bread.

  The earth was so black it looked wet,

  So rich it had produced Mandelstam.

  He was last seen alive

  In 1938 at a transit camp near Vladivostok

  Eating from a garbage pile,

  When I was two, and Robert Lowell was twenty-one,

  Who much later would translate Mandelstam,

  And now has been dead two years himself.

  I sometimes feel I hurry to them both,

  Stand staring at the careworn spines

  Of their books in my bookshelf,

  Only in order to walk away.

  The wish to live is as unintentional as love.

  Of course the future always is,

  Like someone just back from England

  Stepping off a curb, I’ll look the wrong way and be nothing.

  Heartbeat, heartbeat, the heart stops—

  But shuffle and click, it’s spring!

  The arterial branches disappearing in the leaves,

  Swallowed like a tailor’s chalk marks in the finished suit.

  We are born.

  We grow old until we’re all the same age.

  They are as young as Homer whom they loved.

  They are writing a letter, not in a language I know.

  I read: “It is one of those spring days with a sky

  That makes it worthwhile being here.

  The mailbox in which we’ll mail this

  Is slightly lighter than the sky.”

  FINALS

  A fat girl bows gravely like a samurai

  On a bank of the Charles touching her toes,

  Her tights in time with a sunrise sculler’s stroke,

  Then stroke, then stroke, dipped in pink, until

  He crabs an oar, a burst of sudden white.

  Four winters of grinding away then freaking on this

  Soft-focus air not quite body temperature!

  It feels pristine as the sweet-smelling world

  Near a lawn sprinkler felt to a child.

  Expulsion into Paradise for finals!

  A red dome, and a green, a blue, a gold,

  Veritas just above the leafiness.

  The locked iron gates on Memorial Drive—

  The eyes of a bachelor waiting for water to boil.

  MEN AND WOMAN

  Her name I may or may not have made up,

  But not the memory,

  Sandy Moon with her lion’s mane astride

  A powerful motorcycle waiting to roar away, blipping

  The throttle, a roar, years before such a sight

  Was a commonplace,

  And women had won,

  And before a helmet law, or

  Wearing their hair long, had made all riders one

  Sex till you looked again; not that her chest

  Wasn’t decisive—breasts of Ajanta, big blue-sky clouds

  Of marble, springing free of her unhooked bra

  Unreal as a butterfly-strewn sweet-smelling mountainside

  Of opium poppies in bloom.

  It was Union Square. I remember. Turn a corner

  And in a light-year

  She’d have arrived

  At the nearby inky, thinky offices of Partisan Review.

  Was she off to see my rival Lief,

  Boyfriend of girls and men, who cruised

  In a Rolls convertible?

  The car was the caca color a certain

  Very grand envoy of Franco favored for daytime wear—

  But one shouldn’t mock the innocent machinery

  Of life, nor the machines we treasure. For instance,

  Motorcycles. What definition of beauty can exclude

  The MV Agusta racing 500-3,

  From the land of Donatello, with blatting megaphones?

  To see Giacomo Agostini lay the MV over

  Smoothly as a swan curves its neck down to feed,

  At ninety miles an hour—entering a turn with Hailwood

  On the Honda, wheel to wheel, a foot apart—

  The tromboning furor of the exhaust notes as they

  Downshifted, heard even in the photographs!

  Heroes glittering on the summit before extinction

  Of the air-cooled four-strokes in GP.

  Agostini—Agusta! Hailwood—Honda!

  I saw Agostini, in the Finnish Grand Prix at Imatra,

  When Hailwood was already a legend who’d moved on

  To cars. How small and pretty Ago was,

  But heavily muscled like an acrobat. He smiled

  And posed, enjoying his own charming looks,

  While a jumpsuited mechanic pushed his silent

  Racer out of the garage, and with a graceful

  Sidesaddle run-and-bump started its engine.

  A lion on a leash being walked in neutral

  Back and forth to warm it up, it roared and roared;

  Then was shut off; releasing a rather heady perfume<
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  Of hot castor oil, as it docilely returned to the garage.

  Before a race, how would Hailwood behave?

  Racers get killed racing.

  The roped-off crowd hushed outside the open door.

  I stood in awe of Ago’s ease—

  In his leathers, like an animal in nature—

  Inhumanly unintrospective, now smiling less

  Brilliantly, but by far the brightest being in the room.

  I feared finding his fear,

  And looked for it,

  And looked away so as not to mar the perfect.

  There was an extraordinary girl there to study

  Instead; and the altar piece, the lily

  Painted the dried blood MV racing red,

  Slender and pure—one hundred eighty miles an hour.

  A lion which is a lily,

  From the land of Donatello: where else could they design

  Streamlined severe elegance in a toy color?

  A phallus which was musical when it roared? By contrast,

  Hailwood’s Honda had been an unsteerable monster,

  Only a genius could have won on it,

  All engine and no art.

  A lily that’s a lion: handmade with love

  By the largest helicopter manufacturer in Europe,

  Whose troop carriers shielded junta and emir from harm,

  And cicatriced presidents clutching

  A golden ceremonial fly whisk and CIA dollars.

  How storybook that a poor country boy

  Should ride the Stradivarius of a count—

  The aristocrat industrialist Agusta—against

  The middle-class son of a nicely well-off businessman;

  English; and weekly wallowing near death

  On the nearly ungovernable Japanese horsepower.

  A clone of Detroit, Honda Company, in going for power,

  Empire-building

  In peacetime displaced to motorcycle sales.

  Honda raced no more. No need to to

  Sell Hondas now. The empire flourished elsewhere

  Than glory. I swooned in the gray even indoor air

  Of a garage in Finland, as racetime neared.

  Daylight blinded the doorway—the day beyond,

  The crowd outside, were far away. I studied

  The amazing beauty, whom Ago seemed determined to ignore.

  Seated like Agostini in skintight racing leathers.

  Her suit looked sweet, like Dr. Denton’s on a child;

  Until—as she stood up—the infant’s-wear blue-innocence

  Swelled violently to express

  The breasts and buttocks of a totem, Magna Mater,

  Overwhelming and almost ridiculous,

  Venus in a racing suit,

  Built big as Juno—out of place but filling up

  The room, if you looked at her, which no one else did;

  Though I still couldn’t tell

  Who she was, whose friend she was, if she was anyone’s;

  Whose girl, the one woman in the room.

  The meaning of the enormous quiet split

  Into men and woman around the motorcycle.

  I thought of Sandy Moon,

  Advancing toward me through the years to find me there,

  Moving toward me through the years across the room

  I’d rented, to hide and work,

  Near Foley Square; where I wrote, and didn’t write—

  Through the sky-filled tall windows

  Staring out for hours

  At the State Supreme Court building with its steps

  And columns, and the Federal Courthouse with its,

  And that implacably unadorned low solid, the Department

  Of Motor Vehicles. I’d leaf

  Through one of my old motorcycle mags

  And think of Sandy Moon—and here she was,

  Naked and without a word walking slowly toward me.

  Women have won. The theme is

  Only for a cello, is the lurking glow

  Pooled in the folds of a rich velvet, darkly phosphorescent.

  Summer thunder rumbled over Brooklyn, a far-off sadness.

  Naked power and a mane of glory

  Shall inherit the earth. Outside the garage,

  The engine caught and roared—time to go.

  FUCKING

  I wake because the phone is really ringing.

  A singsong West Indian voice

  In the dark, possibly a man’s,

  Blandly says, “Good morning, Mr. Seidel;

  How are you feeling, God?”

  And hangs up after my silence.

  This is New York—

  Some mornings five women call within a half hour.

  In a restaurant, a woman I had just met, a Swede,

  Three inches taller

  Than I was among other things, and immensely

  Impassive, cold,

  Started to groan, very softly and husky voiced.

  She said,

  “You have utter control over me, and you know it.

  I can’t do anything about it.”

  I had been asking her about her job.

  One can spend a lifetime trying to believe

  These things.

  I think of A.,

  Before she became Lady Q.,

  Of her lovely voice, and her lovely name.

  What an extraordinary new one she took

  With her marriage vows,

  Even as titles go, extra fictitious. And ah—

  And years later, at her request, paying a call on the husband

  To ask if I could take her out

  Once more, once, m’lord, for auld lang syne. She still wanted

  To run away;

  And had,

  Our snowed-in week in the Chelsea

  Years before.

  How had her plane managed to land?

  How will my plane manage to land?

  How wilt thy plane manage to land?

  Our room went out sledding for hours

  And only returned when we slept,

  Finally, with it still snowing, near dawn.

  I can remember her sex,

  And how the clitoris was set.

  Now on to London where the play resumes—

  The scene when I call on the husband. But first,

  In Francis Bacon’s queer after-hours club,

  Which one went to after

  An Old Compton Street Wheeler’s lunch,

  A gentleman at the bar, while Francis was off pissing,

  Looking straight at me, shouted

  “Champagne for the Norm’!”

  Meaning normal, heterosexual.

  The place where I stayed,

  The genteel crowded gloom of Jimmy’s place,

  Was England—coiled in the bars of an electric fire

  In Edith Grove.

  Piece by piece Jimmy sold off the Georgian silver.

  Three pretty working girls were his lodgers.

  Walking out in one direction, you were in

  Brick and brown oppidan Fulham.

  Walking a few steps the other way, you heard

  Augustus John’s many mistresses

  Twittering in the local Finch’s,

  And a few steps further on, in the smart restaurants,

  The young grandees who still said “gels.”

  There was a man named Pericles Belleville,

  There is a man named Pericles Belleville,

  Half American.

  At a very formal dinner party,

  At which I met the woman I have loved the most

  In my life, Belleville

  Pulled out a sterling silver–plated revolver

  And waved it around, pointing it at people, who smiled.

  One didn’t know if the thing could be fired.

  That is the poem.

  PRESSED DUCK

  Caneton à la presse at the now extinct Café Chauveron.

  Chauveron himself cook
ing, fussed

  And approved

  Behind Elaine, whose party it was;

  Whose own restaurant would be famous soon.

  Poised and hard, but dreaming and innocent—

  Like the last Romanovs—spring buds at thirty, at thirty-two,

  We were green as grapes,

  A cluster of February birthdays,

  All “Elaine’s” regulars.

  Donald, Elaine’s then-partner,

  His then-wife, a lovely girl; Johnny

  Greco, Richardson, Elaine, my former wife, myself:

  With one exception, born within a few days and years

  Of one another.

  Not too long before thirty had been old,

  But we were young—still slender, with one exception,

  Heads and necks delicate

  As a sea horse,

  Elegant and guileless

  Above our English clothes

  And Cartier watches, which ten years later shopgirls

  And Bloomingdale’s fairies would wear,

  And the people who pronounce chic chick.

  Chauveron cut

  The wine-red meat off the carcasses.

  His duck press was the only one in New York.

  He stirred brandy into the blood

  While we watched. Elaine said, “Why do we need anybody else?

  We’re the world.”

  WHAT ONE MUST CONTEND WITH

  There was a man without ability.

  He talked arrogance, secretly sick at heart.

  Imagine law school with his terrible stutter!—

  He gagged to be smooth. But it wasn’t good.

  Hadn’t he always planned to move on to writing?

  Which of course failed, how would it not? He called

  Himself a writer but it didn’t work,

  He chose middling friends he could rise above

  But it made no difference, with no ability.

  He talked grand, the terrible endearing stutter.

  Batting his eyes as if it felt lovely.

  He batted and winced his self-hate, like near a sneeze.

  He wrote and wrote, still he could not write,

  He even published, but he could not write:

  The stories one story of honey and abuse—

  Love and the law—he was the boy … de Sade

  Scratching his quill raw just once to get it off.

  His pen leaked in Redbook the preseminal drool.

  He must do something, do something. Boy you can

  Reminisce forever about Harvard,

  The motorboat won’t run on your perfume,

  Endless warm anecdotes about past girls

  Aren’t a wax your cross-country skis will ride on.

  He took an office just like Norman Mailer.