Poems 1959-2009 (3 page)

Desertification turned into desert.

The sky above was shooting stars.

The Martians rode across the desert

In their outfits and their armbands,

Clanging cymbals and banging a big drum.

Boom! Boom!

I am in favor of global warming.

I don't care about great-grandchildren.

I won't be here.

I won't be there.

Angel, I can see your mouth wide open,

But can't hear what you are singing.

The shaking roar of the liftoff

Does a vanishing act straight up.

Fiddles and viols, let me hear your old gold.

Trumpets, the petals of the antique rose unfold.

This is the end.

Testing, one, two, three, this is a test.

 

A coconut can fall and hit you on the head,

And if it falls from high enough can kind of knock you dead.

Dead beneath the coconut palms, that's the life for me!

And green jungle and white beaches and the blue South China Sea.

That New York night at Café Lux when Cathy Hart was there,

I knew that I was not prepared, but how does one prepare?

When the coconut that kills you smiles and says, Please, Fred, have a seat—

And feeds you fresh coconut milk to drink and sweet coconut meat to eat.

I learned it was her birthday—which meant of course champagne!

I ordered up the best Lux had with my extinguished brain.

Do not resuscitate the zombie under the coconut tree!

It's me on my Jet Ski painting a contrail on the blue South China Sea!

Happy birthday, Doctor Hart.

You stopped my heart.

You made it start.

You supply the Hart part. I'll supply the art part.

 

It was summer in West Gloucester.

It was winter in West Gloucester.

The birds sang in the brambles.

Hands cut off for stealing.

Hands cut off for stealing wings and song.

New Eden 1960.

Jack Kennedy campaigning.

Every morning showered sparks of frost and freshness.

Our fifty-acre magic carpet flew

Out over the Atlantic.

The birds sang in the brambles till

The total-whiteout blizzard stopped everything but lust.

 

I can only find words for.

And sometimes I can't.

Here are these flowers that stand for.

I stand here on the sidewalk.

I can't stand it, but yes of course I understand it.

Everything has to have a meaning.

Things have to stand for something.

I can't take the time. Even skin-deep is too deep.

I say to the flower stand man:

Beautiful flowers at your flower stand, man.

I'll take a dozen of the lilies.

I'm standing as it were on my knees

Before a little man up on a raised

Runway altar where his flowers are arrayed

Along the outside of the shop.

I take my flames and pay inside.

I go off and have sexual intercourse.

The woman is the woman I love.

The room displays thirteen lilies.

I stand on the surface.

 

The homeless are blooming like roses

On every corner on Broadway.

I am unclean.

I bathe in their tears.

The homeless are popping like pimples.

They're a little dog's little unsheathed erection sticking out red.

It makes us passersby sing.

Ho ho. It's spring.

West Siders add fresh water

But feed the flowers with urine.

Sir, can you spare some change?

Can you look at me for a change?

Uncooked hamburger

Erupts when he lowers his trousers.

It's his song.

It's raw oozing out of a grinder.

He looks like a horrible burn from Iraq.

His wound ripples

In a hot skillet.

America doesn't look like that.

He bends down to eat garbage.

I bend down with a bag to clean up after the dog.

I take the shit out of the bag

And stuff it back up inside the dog

And sew the anus closed,

And put the dog in a two-fifty oven to scream for three hours.

The homeless are blooming like roses.

I'm hopeless.

I bathe in their screams.

I dress for the evening.

My name is Fred Seidel,

And I paid for this ad.

 

I own nothing. I own a watch.

I own three watches.

I own five motorcycles.

It's all I do.

The undercarriage of the plane, whining to the down position for landing,

Locks in place, sick of sex.

My fancy life

Is plain and strange.

I always select Map

On the monitor at my seat.

It constantly displays where I am in my trip.

It refreshes the truth minute by minute.

You're over an ocean with the other people in the cabin.

You're far from your destination.

It will be hours at this altitude

Without sex.

I remember rushing out to an airport in Paris that morning on a whim,

Trying to get on any flight to divided Berlin

So I could watch the Wall coming down, which it did.

Which I did. I suppose it did some good.

I take my watch off at night but first thing in the morning slip

The platinum jail cell on my wrist like a noose and close the clasp.

Meanwhile, time is passing.

Sometimes I shave twice—

On waking as usual and then again

In the evening to be smooth,

Don't ask for whom.

My new motorcycle goes a thousand miles an hour.

The plane has touched down in the rain

In a country I don't know.

Talk about plain and strange.

I don't speak their singsong ugly language. Having arrived,

I am ready to leave already.

I love it out on the runway.

It's late at night. I love an empty airport.

They stamp my passport.

 

My dog is running in his sleep.

He's yipping, his paws twitching, fast asleep.

Hey, wait a minute, he's been dead two years.

The sunlight's pouring down outside.

Salt Lake City, how exotic, here I come!

I can't believe how far it is to here.

I can't accept, Get on a plane and go,

Just pack and leave yourself behind and fly,

And take the free trolley three stops to the Mormon Temple.

It turns out there's nothing much to see.

The girl guides are darling, but watch it, they're sinister.

They're programmed to save you right there in the Visitors' Center.

Welcome to Saudi Arabia in the middle

Of snow-capped Switzerland!

No yodeling, no alcohol—and I'm forbidden even

To
think
about the inside of the Temple.

Picture a blue-eyed sky

Above a white man waiting on God.

I mean a waiter.

I mean serving a meal.

Here I am, cooked through.

Here I am, covered with snow.

The prehistoric lakebed is sunbaked in a crust of prayer, salt, lies,

Gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc.

Here we are at the Grand America Hotel

On Main Street, opposite the Little America Hotel

On Main Street. My room the size of a ballroom

Stares at the mountains.

The owner of Sinclair Oil and his wife

Designed their Taj Mahal and bought the best.

Handloomed English woolen carpets on every floor

Guarantee a blue-flash shock.

Bush and an army of Secret Service stayed here last week—

I'm here this.

I get the afternoon tea pianist to play Bach

When I get back from my motorcycle race.

It's
L'année dernière à Marienbad
, dude.

It's Mr. Sinclair Oil's idea of classy wow.

It's the Ice Age—spa for the tuxedoed dead.

Joy ahoy!

 

TO JONATHAN GALASSI

My last summer on earth

I spent admiring Milan,

But they were having a heat wave.

The Japanese were everywhere.

They eat lice.

They order
risotto milanese
.

They eat everything.

My cell phone has changed my life.

I never talk to anyone.

I spent the summer in Bologna.

Bologna is my town.

Bologna is so brown.

I ate shavings

Of tuna roe on buttered toast

Despite the heat,

Brown waxy slices of fishy salt

As strong as ammonia, Bologna.

Bologna, it takes a prince to eat
bottarga
.

Italy, your women are Italian!

Your motorcycles are women.

Milan, your men are high-heeled women.

Bologna, your brown arcades

Are waterfalls of shade.

Fascist Italy was ice cream in boots.

Its
crema
straddled the world.

It licked south in the heat.

It licked its boot.

Fascisti!
They take American Express!

Comunisti!
You forgot to sign!

I have my table at Rodrigo in Bologna.

I always eat at Bice in Milan.

It is sweet to eat at Bibe, outside Florence,

To walk there from Bellosguardo through the fields.

Montale's little Bibe poem is printed on the menu.

I write my own.

Islam is coming.

 

I stick my heart on a stick

To toast it over the fire.

It's the size of a marshmallow.

It bubbles and blackens to

Campfire goo—

Burnt-black skin outside

Gooey Jew.

From the twentieth century's

24/7 chimneys, choo-choo-

Train puffs of white smoke rise.

The trains waddle full of cattle to the camps.

The weightless puffs of smoke are on their way to the sky.

Ovens cremate fields of human cow.

Ovens cremate fields of human snow.

The snow turns into sleet.

The sleet turns into smoke.

Eat a heart for a treat.

It is sweet.

It tastes like meat.

I turn toward the east and bow five times.

One puff of white smoke signifies the College of Cardinals

Has found a new pontiff.

The vote flutters like a moth

Above the roofs of Rome.

Venice looks like an atoll from the air.

It rises like a ring seal from the sea.

It rises like the famous
corno ducale
,

The hydrocephalic jeweled hat the doge wore.

His swelled head is a helmet made of brocade but hard as horn.

Mr. Delicious has started his descent with tray table stowed.

Seatback restored to its original upright position.

Finally he is standing again

On one of the many bridges,

On the arched back of a footbridge filigree,

After all the years away,

After all the terrible miracles

And heart attacks of joy.

The Venetian canal water

Is hydraulic-green brake fluid

That runs through the veins

And embalms this exalted dead city.

It is incredible that they have to die.

The Nazis appear to know why.

The evidence suggests that they do.

Oh the smokestacks.

Oh the smokestacks in full view.

No one knew.

Oh the chimneys spew Jew.

Let me take a moment to talk about sex sounds.

These are the sounds Germans make when they are making love

When they are about to come.

This completes, thank you very much,

This year's

Report of the Paris Cricket Club.

 

FOR IMRU' AL-QAYS

The elephant's trunk uncurling

From the lightning flashes

In the clouds was Marie Antoinette,

As usual trumpeting.

The greedy suction

Was her tornado vacuuming across the golden Kansas flatness.

Meanwhile, the count was talking to the swan.

The swan liked what he was saying and got

Right out of the pond.

Meanwhile, grown men in Afghanistan.

The count had fought in Algeria.

Meanwhile, neon in Tokyo.

Madame la Comtesse waved to us from the top step,

Waved to her count, their swan, their ornamental pond,
et moi
.

We were a towering cornucopia

Of autumn happiness

And
gourmandise
rotating counterclockwise,

Backwards toward the guillotine.

I kept a rainbow as a pet and grandly

Walked the rainbow on a leash.

I exercised it evenings together with the cheetah,

A Thorstein Veblen moment of conspicuous consumption:

A dapper dauphin in a T-shirt that said
FRED

Parading with his pets decked out in T-shirts that said
FRED'S.

I left my liver in the Cher.

I ate my heart out
en Berry
.

We drank and ate

France between the wars,

And every morning couldn't wait.

It felt sunshiny in the shadow of the château.

And when the rainbow leapt from there to here,

It landed twenty years away from the Cher.

The place it landed was the Persian Gulf.

It landed twinkling stardust where I'm standing in my life

With one-hump Marie Antoinette, my wife,

Who resembles that disarming camel yesterday.

In fact, the camel yesterday was smitten.

She left the other camels to come over.

You have a lovely liquid wraparound eye.

She stood there looking at me sideways.

They feed their racing camels caviar in Qatar.