Nice Weather (2 page)

Lift their hoses high,

Like elephants raising their trunks trumpeting.

Flame will never be the same. Sifton, row the boat ashore.

Then you'll hear the trumpet blow.

Hallelujah!

Then you'll hear the trumpet sound.

Trumpet sound

The world around.

Flame will never be the same!

Sifton, row the boat ashore.

Tony and Charlie is walking through that door.

ARNOLD TOYNBEE, MAC BUNDY, HERCULES BELLVILLE

Seventy-two hours literally without sleep.

Don't ask.

I found myself standing at the back

Of Sanders Theatre

For a lecture by Arnold Toynbee.

Standing room only.

Oxford had just published

With great fanfare Volume X of his interminable

Magnum opus,
A Study of History.

McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the faculty,

Later JFK's

National Security Adviser, then LBJ's, came out onstage

To invite all those standing in the back

To come up onstage and use

The dozen rows of folding chairs already

Set out for the Harvard Choral Society

Performance the next day.

Bundy was the extreme of Brahmin excellence.

I floated up there in a trance.

His penis was a frosted cocktail shaker pouring out a cocktail,

But out came jellied napalm.

The best and the brightest

Drank the fairy tale.

The Groton School and Skull and Bones plucked his lyre.

Hercules Bellville died today.

He apparently said to friends:

“Tut, tut, no long faces now.”

He got married on his deathbed,

Having set one condition for the little ceremony: no hats.

I knew I would lapse

Into a coma in full view of the Harvard audience.

I would struggle to stay awake

And start to fall asleep.

I would jerk awake in my chair

And almost fall on the floor. I put Hercky

In a poem of mine called “Fucking” thirty-one years ago, only

I called him Pericles in my poem.

At the end of “Fucking,” as he had in life,

Hercules pulled out a sterling-silver-plated revolver

At a dinner party in London,

And pointed it at people, who smiled.

I had fallen in love at first sight

With a woman there I was about to meet.

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

That was the poem.

NICE WEATHER

This is what it's like at the end of the day.

But soon the day will go away.

Sunlight preoccupies the cross street.

It and night soon will meet.

Meanwhile, there is Central Park.

Now the park is getting dark.

LONDON

The woman who's dying is trying to lose her life.

It's a great adventure

For everyone trying to help her.

Actually, death avoids her, doesn't want to hurt her.

So to speak, opens her hand and gently takes away the knife

Everyone well-meaning wants her to use on herself.

There is no knife, of course.

And she's too weak.

If you're too ill, the clinic near Zurich that helps

People leave this world won't.

If you're that medicated and out of it and desperate,

You may not be thinking right about wanting to end your life.

If you're near death, you may be
too
near

For the clinic to help you over the barrier.

She weakly screams she wants to die.

Hard to believe her pain is beyond the reach of drugs.

Please die. Please do. Her daughters don't want her to die and do.

The world of dew is a world of dew and yet

What airline will fly someone this sick?

They can afford a hospital plane but

Can she still swallow? The famous barbiturate cocktail

The clinic is licensed to administer isn't the Fountain of Youth.

But what if she gets there and drinks it and it only makes her ill?

And she vomits? It's unreal.

DINNER WITH HOLLY ANDERSEN

My fourteen books of poems

Tie a tin can to my tail.

You hear me fleeing myself.

I won't get away.

I went to Washington, D.C.

My agent hired a plane to tow the tail

Through the restricted airspace

Above the White House.

The tin can makes a noise,

As if I were in chains.

RUNAWAY SLAVE

VIOLATES AIRSPACE OVER NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
!

Fighter jets

From Andrews Air Force Base scramble

To intercept my fourteen books

And enter the East Wing

Of the National Gallery and the astonishment

Of the Vuillards,

Banking hard to lock in on the happy

Honking getaway convertible

Dragging sparks and tin cans as it musically pulls away,

The wedding guests having roared

Out of the reception and into the courtyard

To wave goodbye

With their champagne flutes to the joy.

BAUDELAIRE

I walk on water in my poems, using the lily pads

Of the sidewalk homeless as stepping-stones.

I'd stop to talk, but they don't have cell phones.

Their alcoholic faces come in various plaids.

A terrorist in his underwear,

Shaving in the steam, wipes the bathroom mirror clearer.

I see, while death is near, life is nearer.

My shaven skin is softer than the air.

The tugboat thrusts itself into the fluid to begin,

Backs out, chug, chug, tug, tug, digs in,

Que c'est bon,
this is how, fowl and fang and fin.

The gulls, looking down at the meal down there, scream and grin.

His hands are in the basin washing, crashing.

His brain is on a boardwalk walking.

Her bigs don't stop stalking.

The mirror is asking for a thrashing.

I'm standing at a sideboard carving a wild duck I shot a lot.

My bullfrog croaks.

My unit smokes.

My Mumbai is hot. My Bali spits snot. I've shot what I've got.

Now it's time for the plane I'm on to come down

In pieces of women and men.

The anxiety increases in Yemen when

They pat me down in case I have something under my Muslim gown,

And I do.

I have a device.

In Paris, it had lice.

I went to Dr. Dax, who was distinguished. He knew.

Dax regarded my twenty-four-year-old thing

With barely disguised disgust.

I could see him thinking: I'm a doctor. It's his thing. I must.

O thing, where is thy sting? Dr. Dax made the prisoner sing.

It took a shirt of Nessus wrapped around my penis

To get rid of the crabs.

The burning ointment got lovingly applied by Babs—

Penis burned at the stake by Venus!

Babs of the beautiful
fesses

Was Babette, comtesse d'Eeks.

Our Lady of the Heavenly Cheeks

Would turn over onto her stomach to receive a special caress.

In those days before airport security,

A terrorist could spread his wings and fly.

One poet lived his life in the sky,

While the maid did his laundry and a countess oiled his impurity.

The maid was Charles Baudelaire.

I live my life in the air.

Life is inherently unfair.

I don't care.

iPHOTO

The second woman shines my shoes.

The other takes my order, curtseys. Thank you, sir.

Others stand there in the rain so I can mount them when I choose.

It's how protective I

Can be that keeps them going. Look at her:

She clicks her heels together, bowing slightly. Try

To put yourself in her shoes: boots, garter belt, and veil.

She's amused

To be a piece of tail.

She's smiling. Is she really so amused? I've recused

Myself from judging whether that means she's abused.

So far I've refused

To let myself be called confused.

I hope these photos of St. Louis will be used.

A FRIEND OF MINE

“I walked in the door and into so much light

My eyesight did a kind of tremolo.

The living room began to snow

Cartwheels and pixels. You know what,

People's lives together are complicated.

They are quiet,

Complicatedly. My heart

And me get lost in the forest, afraid.

Yet I would choose you to lead me

To the clearing. I see

Your instincts are correct.

You ask the right questions.

You don't mind the answers!

When I move East for good next month

Maybe I will spread my wings

With happiness and soar.

Or I will shout
wheee
as I plummet downward.

Ah, but in my new New York apartment,

I am only on the fourth floor.

So I will hit the ground quickly!”

DO NOT RESUSCITATE

The mummy in the case is coming back to life.

It sits up slowly. I can't bear it.

The guard pays no attention. He knows it is my wife.

Her heart sits blinking on her shoulder like a parrot.

I get up from my bed, woozily embalmed, and it's

Another gorgeous New York day to try to live.

I loved my wife to bits in fits. I loved her tits.

Her bandaged mummy mouth had nothing else to give.

The man can't stay awake. He wakes and sleeps.

It's either age or it's his medications.

He's giving me the creeps—

All the poems he wrote, and so few dedications.

CIMETIÈRE DU MONTPARNASSE, 12ÈME DIVISION

I have a friend who has a friend

Who asked her to place her hand

And place a flower on Samuel Beckett's grave

On his behalf.

This man, who is in the theater, had corresponded with Sam.

My friend asked me to join her to do this.

It seemed reason enough to come to Paris.

And it was.

And there, quite a surprise, was Susan Sontag's grave.

And now it's time to get the fuck out

Of this beautiful pointlessness.

ROME

I impersonate myself and here I am,

Prick pointing at the moon, teeth sunk into your calf.

I ought to warn the concrete that my passion dooms the dam.

The poem I'm writing looks up at me and starts to laugh.

Summer! Of course you are! You are my miracle!

Just now we were in Rome.

I have to be in Rome with you to be so lyrical—

Or else it's noon Alaska time, the Auschwitz hour in Nome.

At Rockefeller Center, winter in New York, I pause.

Let's watch the skaters lark around the rink.

The worn-out dance floor of ice looks like a blind eye of gauze.

It's time to have a rinkside drink and have a little think.

I thought I'd never reach hydroplaning speeds again.

It's Sagaponack and the freezing April Atlantic.

Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten …

It's about to happen. It's a feeling not dissimilar to being frantic.

Oh what a feeling. It's like America—

It's like Italy—with nothing else to compare it to.

Excitement mounts till
la repubblica italiana
is
isterica!

Orgasm is an Italian opera aria of bombast and dew.

As in-your-face as a red Turkish fez

With a tassel—as hidden as an Israeli agent's gun—

“I'll call you back in five minutes,” my vivid Italian girlfriend says

In English. Does she mean
cinque minuti italiani
or American?

In Via Michelangelo Caetani, near the Ghetto, where

The Red Brigades left Aldo Moro's body in the trunk of a parked car,

There's a plaque. There are flowers. I bow my head. I stare.

We've covered him with a blanket and I've shot him ten times so far.

A HISTORY OF MODERN ITALY

I see Silvio in a yellow slicker

Jumping up and down in a downpour,

Sing-songing
Rain rain go away,

Come again another day.

His fists are clenched.

His nanny in a nurse outfit is smilingly drenched.

Silvio Berlusconi is not happy.

He feels crappy.

I'm talking to myself again.

I scroll down Broadway in the rain.

I'm hidden under an umbrella, but I hope it's obvious

I rejoice for Italy, more or less.

Not exactly talking to myself, more like quiet shouting.

I'm under a black umbrella spouting

A fancy accent (but I hate being taken for English). Yo!

Ooga-Booga
says to Bunga Bunga: So long, Silvio!

We've circled to use up fuel

And now we're short final.

There's the rainy runway.

President Napolitano of Italy holds out his hand as if to say

Immortal blue from which no rain can fall

Fell. How to recover from a stall? Fall!

Brace for death. For landing.

Don't call it death. It's a matter of rebranding.

Cassius Clay turning into Muhammad Ali

Is the model of modernity.

Silvio Berlusconi is the
beau idéal
of hilarious iniquity.

The eurozone trees have rebranded into autumn. Italy is free!

Or rather Italy is sort of free.

The catastrophic lyrical elation of Leopardi

Described his country pityingly.

Then came Mussolini.

Duce! Duce! Duce!
Adriano Visconti flew into the blue

In his heroic Macchi C.202

Like a pearl diver free-diving for pearls,

Or Berlusconi diving to the bottom for girls.

Fascist Visconti with his RAF mustache—