Poems 1959-2009 (41 page)

Each other's hands with all their love.

The huge scarred Chinaman, a yellow boxing glove

(His neck and head), spreads out his wife's left hand

Just so, and strokes her wedding band,

A lion lapping at a thorn

In his own paw. Alone, I stand

By the wall scribbling with my finger Pound's forlorn

Hymn, “What thou lovest well remains …

What thou lov'st well …” They don't allow us pens. Bleak grains

Of sunlight cross the floor, as the sun leans

Inside the tall barred windowscreens,

While the river escalates downtown

On flattening steps of foam. “I cleans

Yo hans, I cleans you fresh blue sunshine,” Chas, his brown

And blue eyes tilting madly, sings.

The gulls, their own white tracers, dip through spumy rings

For rubbers, fish, and rubbish. Pudgy squabs

Peck the yard's pebbles. Each head bobs

Like a cork floater.
From these stones

Give us our bread, Lord
, each craw sobs.

“Shall not be reft from thee”—rose lips and flinty crones'

Lips peck their husbands' lips, the priest

Who came is going. Eyes and tongues and ears, like yeast,

Swell through their sockets as the studded door

Opens and buzzes closed for more

Long hours. When washday's down the drain,

Comes Tuesday, two o'clock to four,

Though some of them won't come if there's a washday rain.

Priests, girls run down—the hours just run.

No heliotrope, I watch that dead gray door. The sun,

The flexed life-dealing sun's too strong, the sun.

Bottlegreen grass in Central Park,

The early light streams. Lying like

A lover near her boy, a girl,

Pre-Raphaelite in profile, pearl-

Smooth lips, nose and brow, and the passive

Long eyelids and lashes of Melancholy pensive—

And when she rises and walks away

A borzoi and its soft sashay

On slender white paws comes to mind.

We lay there like a heart, our mind

Off to our right the blue lagoon,

Free still of sailboats, just free of the moon,

Our south, the red and brown brick zoo.

But that was then. This now is Bellevue,

And God knows where the girl is, a ruined

Wax mask, waist-down a shiftless hot wind.

Dear heart, those times that were sweet milk

For our pale bones, and in the clock spun silk

For our chapped skin, like dice have scattered.

I'm like that lady-killer Bluebeard,

Dead, but to my last wife's dust,

All Bellevue-blue obsessive trust,

Repeating like an old blind cock,

“Dear heart, the light streams down on Central Park.”

It's not my mind. Shouldn't that show

Have gorgeous Desdemona snow

Othello, ax him and then fly,

Black circles under each blue eye,

My dear? And our Miss Liberty,

Lounging beside the door, our trusty p.t.,

Will she be had, will she give in

To the Red Bear and live in sin,

And then Red China break the door?

Divorce, adultery, and war

Thrive. “Let live, sleep late, leave the lark

To cry, The light streams down on Central Park,”

You'd say—but some say, “Miss the slut

A little while, poor soiled girl.” What

Else is there but—to live—to care

For something flashy made of air

And lose it to the wind, and sue

For breach of promise with faked death in Bellevue

Or the sex pen? But I don't know.

The smile that builds the cretin's brow,

The tenderness one gives and gets,

And lives off, with stale cigarettes,

And what old people keep of fleece

And breath, aren't they some help? They give some peace.

One man here said, “Don't play dead—die!”

But others try life, try dope, try

The fairy bars, join the Reserves,

Or take the wife their life deserves.

He said we're locked together like rhymes,

Us and our loved-ones, in bad times,

And the live whole halves of our heart

Shall, wind or bomb, be smithereened apart.

Like a gray cat tied to the tarred stump of a tree

At night, the hall hides, tries its length, slinks back. It climbs

Piles of back stairs down from the dark street. Finally

The kitchen. Just to waste the steak here would take lifetimes!

There's that much, and all much too gamy to be good—

Blue tons braised, baked, broiled, or basted violet. Pie-eyed

Waiters dump it on castered slabs they wheel inside

The banquet room. They breathe here. No one else could.

The air's close as wet wool. On the last door's a hide,

White once, now orange, lettered
GRAEFIN SEIDE'S PRIDE
.

In the room, jet columns lace the floor and balcony

From which low music flickers on the parquet wood

Through massive fuming candelabra. Easily

A dozen colored footmen hum along the walls,

Among them grown men dressed like Philip Morris boys,

Smooth moon-faced fairies, serving trays to him. He stalls

Over each choice until—this the fat king enjoys—

Their hands start shaking, picks some favorite
saignant
dish

He's had prepared, and motioning away the rest,

Pokes it, and slurps his fingertip, and smiles—“Deeelish …

Deeelicious!” Sweating, finished, he sheds his green vest

And rolls his saffron blouse's sleeves up to his armpits—

Slowly, because of the stiff spangles—even so,

They slip out of his fat gold fingers—and just sits,

Just strokes his lapdog, slowly—no hour hand's so slow.

The candles huddle, soughing, in the brain-gray gloom,

In their pale light. His gold knuckles gleam. Not a sound.

   Don't make a sound, here's your last chance. Take it

   And run for it down the wrong hallway, the one

   That's never used, and don't look back. You've missed

   The worst of it just barely. You
have
to know!

   Is what you're going to say. Well, things like a girl

   Exposing herself in various poses to

   A vast steel machine and its little red eye

   Which stares and stares and never goes off. Enough?

   Behind her, behind where she spreads herself out

   Nude in her stockings and black garter belt

   On the Persian carpet, its pile the silencer,

   Is another huge heavy machine, this one

   Entirely hooded in black leather except for

   Its appendages, mantis-like chrome arms

   Which operate on her face with silver knives,

   Finally leaving only her eyes. Enough?

   Well, like the room where priests walk on the ceiling,

   Nuns on the floor, looking for each other

   In pitch-darkness with great blind eyes on stalks,

   Like dandelions. With their charcoals they scrawl

   Messages they of course can't know the others

   Can't see, all being deaf-mutes, on the damp walls.

   Enough? One last thing, then, and the worst.

   In about an hour the Royal Servitors

   Of the Commode come in and fold a silk screen,

   
Tall and lavender, with various seals

   And names sewn into it, like Eurydice, Gandhi,

   Nietzsche, Troilus, Dulles, Pola Negri,

   And others—they fold this screen around the fat king,

   Who is seated. Under it you can see

   The pairs of slippers, the Servitors at attention

   On triangle bases. Then they emerge, the screen

   Is folded back, and in the pot are gold bees,

   Honeybees, millions of them, which rise and join

   The millions and millions of them on the ceiling

   That you thought were highly overwrought

   Gold work. They made the low music that you heard.

   No one eats honey here—it drips down the walls

   And columns, it hangs in the air—so it happens

   Sometimes that a live man is selected

   For his weakness to come and gorge, to swell up

   Half dead on the sweetness that famishes,

   And all the while he dies the honeybees feed

   On him with their stingers, until in ecstasy

   He does die. You were lured here for this purpose.

   Get outside. It is morning on Eighty-sixth Street

   Where you live. The painted clock outside

   The jeweler's window happens to have the right time,

   Six o'clock. A girl with crooked stockings

   Walks on the feet of a goddess to the bus stop.

   An opening window flashes light out over

   The street like a big white bird. Coming home,

   After a rainy night in Central Park,

   Behind his old friend, his old suffering mare,

   A horse-cab driver, looking straight ahead,

   Smiles quietly, just because it is morning.

After the Party

AIDS Days

American

Americans in Rome

Another Muse

Anyone with the Wish

April

At a Factory in Italy

At Gracie Mansion

At New York Hospital

August

Autumn

Bali

Ballad of La Palette, The

Barbados

Bathroom Door, The

“Beast Is in Chains, The,”

Beautiful Day Outside, A

Beyond the Event Horizon

Big Golconda Diamond, The

Big Jet, The

Bipolar November

Birth of the Universe, The

Black-Eyed Virgins, The

Black Stovepipe Hat

Blood

Blue and Pink

Blue-Eyed Doe, The

Bologna

Boys

Breast Cancer

Broadway Melody

Burkina Faso

Bush Administration, The

Casanova Getting Older

Castle in the Mountains, The

Chartres

Childhood Sunlight, The

Chiquita Gregory

Christmas

Christmas

Climbing Everest

Cloclo

Coalman, The

Coconut

Complete Works of Anton Webern, The

Contents Under Pressure

Cosmopolitans at the Paradise

Dante's Beatrice

Darkening in the Dark

Das Kapital

Dayley Island

Death

Death of Anton Webern, The

Death of Meta Burden in an Avalanche, The

Death of the Shah, The

Death Valley

December

De Sade

Descent into the Underworld

Dick and Fred

Dido with Dildo

Dimpled Cloud, A

Doctor Love

Downtown

Do You Doha?

Drill, The

Drinking in the Daytime

Drinks at the Carlyle

Dune Road, Southampton

Early Sunday Morning in the Cher

Easter

East Hampton Airport

Edward Witten

Eisenhower Years

Eleven Dimensions, The

Elms

E-mail from an Owl

Empire

Empress Rialto, The

Erato

Eternity

Eurostar

Evening Man

Everything

Faint Galaxy

Fall Snowfall

Fall

February

Feminists in Space

Fever

Fever

Final Hour, The

Finals

Flame

Fog

Forever

Forever

Forever

For Holly Andersen

Former Governor of California, The

France for Boys

Frederick Seidel

Freedom Bombs for Vietnam (1967)

French Polynesia

Fresh Stick of Chewing Gum, A

From a High Floor

From Nijinsky's Diary

Fucking

Future, The

Galaxies

Gallop to Farewell, A

Getaway

Gethsemane

Girl in the Mirror, The

Glory

God Exploding

Going Fast

Goodness

Grandson Born Dead

Great Depression, The

Green Dress, 1999

Hair in a Net

Hamlet

Hamlet

Happiness

Hart Crane Near the End

Heart Art

Heart Attack, The

Her Song

Holly Andersen

Homage to Cicero

Homage to Pessoa

Home

Hotel Carlyle, New York

Hot Night, Lightning

Hour, The

Hugh Jeremy Chisholm

I Am Siam

I Do

Il Duce

I'm Here This

In a Previous Life

In Cap Ferrat

Infinite, The

In Memoriam

In Spite of Everything

In the Green Mountains

In the Mirror

Into the Emptiness

Invisible Dark Matter

I Own Nothing

Italian Girl, The

Italy

It Is the Morning of the Universe

James Baldwin in Paris

Jane Canfield (1897–1984)

January

Joan of Arc

July

June

June Allyson and Mae West

Kill Poem

Last Entries in Mayakovsky's Notebook, The

Last Poem in the Book, The

Last Remaining Angel, The

Laudatio

Letter to the Editors of
Vogue

Life After Death

Lighting of the Candles, The

Little Song

Little White Dog, The

Lorraine Motel, Memphis

Lover, The

Love Song

March

Marriage

Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal, The

May

Men and Woman

Miami in the Arctic Circle