Poems 1959-2009 (7 page)

This afternoon, there it was,

With all the mechanics who are making it around it.

It stood on a sort of altar.

I stood in a sort of fog,

Taking digital photographs of my death.

 

The poet stands on blue-veined legs, waiting for his birthday to be over.

He dangles from a muse who works the wires

That make a puppet move in lifelike ways onstage.

Happy birthday to a
semper paratus
penis!

His tiny Cartier wristwatch trumpets it!

He dares to wear a tiny thing that French and feminine.

Nose tilted up, arrogance, blue eyes.

He can smell the ocean this far inland.

We are in France. We are in Italy. We are in England. We are in heaven.

Lightning with a noose around its neck, feet on a cloud,

Drops into space, feet kicking, neck broken.

The parachute pops open … a red flower:

Plus ne suis ce que j'ai été,

Et plus ne saurais jamais l'être.

Mon beau printemps et mon été

Ont fait le saut par la fenêtre.

 

His dick is ticking …

Tick tick tick tick …

The bomb looks for blonde.

It smiles like a dog.

Werner Muensterberger liked to say to his patients

A stiff prick has no conscience …

Tick tick tick tick …

Fred Astaire in a tuxedo is doing a blind man with a white cane.

He is looking for blonde.

He looks for brunette.

He licks to play golf.

A bomb is blind.

There was a king.

His name was King Wow.

Anyhow,

In the kingdom of Ebola,

It was on his mind

Constantly. Be kind,

King, be a kind king.

The oceans rose.

About the queen his mother, Gertrude.

Shit with a cunt!

The prince was blunt.

Shit with a cunt.

Cunt with a dick!

Judith slew Holofernes.

Cut his head off.

Slew slime.

Cunt with a dick

Cut the monster's head off.

Holofernes' startled head farts blood

And falls off.

Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.

Viagra has caused blindness

In thirty-eight impotent men

Who paid for their erections with their eyes.

One man in his eighties took the pill

For the first time and went blind

When his penis started to rise

For the first time in years.

Imagine his double surprise!

The joyous, fastidious, perfectionist

Fred Astaire flies!

Astaire,

Debonair,

Tap-dances the monomania and mania

Of Napoleon Bonaparte's tiny penis, the up.

Fred flies, fappingly, bappingly,

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tappingly,

That athletic nonchalance that Fred Astaire defined.

A penis in a tuxedo is flying all over the place

With the white cane of the blind!

Fred is dancing on a tilting dance floor on the ocean floor

In a sunken ocean liner

In 1934—lighter than air!—Fred Astaire!—

In the depths of the Great Depression.

White people froze the world markets to a great whiteness.

The world will end tomorrow.

They walk around like penguins in their tuxedos.

The planet is frozen.

 

It used to be called the Mayfair.

Leonardo Mondadori used to stay there.

The lobby was the bar.

Fancy Italians were on display.

They sat in the lobby for years.

They seduced from the lavish armchairs.

They told their driver and car to be waiting outside

On their European cell phones.

I was a Traveller then upon the moor.

I walked directly through and down the three stairs.

Their women were theirs.

The Milanese women wore couture.

They smoked cigarettes and smiled and did not blink.

They were going to eat at Le Cirque.

Who could have been kinder than Leonardo?

It was a long time ago.

 

Monsoon is over but it's raining.

The rain keeps coming down. It gets you down. It's draining.

The sticky heat in Singapore is really not that entertaining.

The boutique hotel air-conditioning is aquaplaning.

The rain stops just inside the door and the fashion show goes on.

So they board the little tram at the zoo to do the “Night Safari”

To experience wild animals who are separate but equal.

The Chinese tour guide puts her finger to her lips: “Let us be quiet.”

They hear the silence roar

In humid Singapore.

Nobody has hair like this Italian girl, in this humidity!

She came three days ago to do the fashion show.

She hadn't cut her mane in weeks.

She loves the hippos bathing in the perspiring water.

Her curls are African lions exploding from a thicket.

 

The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal, of the Bronx and Harvard,

Is Joel Arthur Rosenthal of JAR, place Vendôme.

The greatest jeweler of our time

Has brought to Florida from his safe

A big Golconda diamond that is matchless,

So purely truthful it is not for sale, Joel's favorite, his Cordelia.

His mother in Florida can keep it

If she wants, and she doesn't want.

Love is mounted on a fragile platinum wire

To make a ring not really suitable for daily wear.

I wore the bonfire on a wire, on loan from Joel,

One sparkling morning long ago in Paris.

I followed it on my hand across the pont des Arts

Like Shakespeare in a trance starting the sonnet sequence.

 

Razzle-dazzle on the surface, wobbled–Jell-O sunlight,

A goddess and her buttocks walk across a bridge,

Electrocute the dazed, people can't believe it's her.

The Seine sends waves toward Notre Dame.

She's here without an entourage, she stands there all alone.

A woman standing at the rail is jumping in broad daylight

From the pont des Arts, and thinks of jumping.

Her flames almost reach the Institut de France.

It bursts into flame.

A tenement suddenly collapsing vomits fireworks.

A soda jerk pulls the lever

That squirts the soda

That makes an old-time ice cream soda of flames.

A Pullman porter turns down the stateroom bed, white crisp sheets,

Clean as ice,

The clickety-click American night outside,

A Thousand and One Nights inside the star's head.

Miles of antebellum slums, old St. Louis hot at night,

Rows of antebellum houses of white trash in the Southern moonlight:

Developers took advantage of Title 1 funds to pulverize

The picturesque so they could put up miles of projects,

The largest undertaking of its kind in the United States,

So poorly constructed that a few years later

The whole hideous thing would have to be leveled.

I feel such joy.

I stare at sparkles. I don't care.

The carbonated bubbled bloodstream gushes out.

Kiss me here.
Ouf!
Kiss me there.

The crocodile of joy lifts the nostrils of his snout.

His eyes of joy stare at her eyes.

I want to eat between your eyes and hear your cries.

I don't care who lives or dies.

I am the crocodile of joy, who never lies.

 

The owl you heard hooting

In the middle of the night wasn't me.

It was an owl.

Or maybe you were

So asleep you didn't even hear it.

The sprinklers on their timer, programmed to come on

At such a strangely late hour in life

For watering a garden,

Refreshed your sleep four thousand miles away by

Hissing sweetly,

Deepening the smell of green in Eden.

You heard the summer chirr of insects.

You heard a sky of stars.

You didn't know it, fast asleep at dawn in Paris.

You didn't hear a thing.

You heard me calling.

I am no longer human.

 

The irrigation system wants it to be known it
irrigates

The garden,

It doesn't water it.

It is a stickler about this!

Watering is something done by hand.

Automated catering naturally

Does a better job than a hand with a watering can can.

Devised in Israel to irrigate their orange groves,

It gives life everywhere in the desert of life it goes.

It drips water to the chosen, one zone at a time.

Drip us this day our daily bread, or, rather, this night,

Since a drop on a leaf in direct sunlight can make

A magnifying glass that burns an innocent at the stake.

The sprinkler system hisses kisses on a timer

Under an exophthalmic sky of stars.

Tonight my voice will stare at you forever.

I click on Send,

And send you this perfumed magic hour.

 

Clematis paniculata
sweetens one side of Howard Street.

White butterflies in pairs flutter over the white flowers.

In white kimonos, giggling and whispering,

The butterflies titter and flutter their silk fans,

End-of-summer cabbage butterflies, in white pairs.

Sweet autumn clematis feeds these delicate souls perfume.

I remember how we met, how shyly.

Four months of drought on the East End ends.

Ten thousand windshield wipers wiping the tears away.

The back roads are black.

The ocean runs around barking under the delicious rain, so happy.

Traditional household cleaners polish the imperial palace floors

Of heaven spotless. THUNDER. Cleanliness and order

Bring universal freshness and good sense to the Empire. LIGHTNING.

I have never had a serious thought in my life on Gibson Lane.

A man turning into cremains is standing on the beach.

I used to walk my dog along the beach.

This afternoon I had to put him down.

Jimmy my boy, my sweetyboy, my Jimmy.

It is night, and outside the house, at eleven o'clock,

The lawn sprinklers come on in the rain.

 

I brought a stomach flu with me on the train.

I spent the night curled up in pain,

Agonizingly cold and rather miserable.

I went out for a walk earlier today:

Snow started falling

Like big cotton balls this morning

And the park looks beautiful.

I will try to eat tonight: steamed cauliflower.

You would love it here.

It is still quite nice somehow.

You would like the emperor.

Some days the joy is overpowering.

The last time I was here,

He told a story.

It was Christmas.

Snow kept falling.

The emperor held his hand up for silence and began.

His fingernails have perfect moons, which is quite rare.

You hardly see it anymore, I wonder why.

The emperor began:

“Prehistoric insects were

Flying around brainless

To add more glory to the infant Earth.

Instead of horrible they were huge and beautiful,

And, being angels, were invincible.

Say the Name, and the angel begging with its hand out would

Instantly expand upward

To be as tall as the building …”

The ruthless raw odor of filth in an enclosed space,

And the slime tentacles with religious suckers,

And the four heads on one neck like the four heads carved on Mount Rushmore,

Hold out a single hand.

Hold out your hand.

Take my hand.

 

A pink stick of gum unwrapped from the foil,

That you hold between your fingers on the way home from dance class,

And you look at its pink. But you know what.

I like your brain. Your pink. It's sweet.

My brain is the wrinkles of the ocean on a ball of tar

Instead of being sweet pink like yours.

It could be the nicotine. It could be the Johnnie Walker Black.

Mine thought too many cigarettes for too many years.

My brain is the size of the largest living thing,
mais oui
, a blue whale,

Blue instead of pink like yours.

It's what I've done

To make it huge that made it huge.

The violent sweetness in the air is the pink rain

Which continues achingly almost to fall.

This is the closest it has come.

This can't go on.

Twenty-six years old is not childhood.

You are not trying to stop smoking.

You smoke and drink

And
still
it is pink.

The answer is you can drink and smoke

Too much at twenty-six,

And stink of cigarettes,

And stand outside on the sidewalk outside the bar to have a cigarette,

As the law now requires, and it is paradise,

And be the most beautiful girl in the world,

And be moral,

And vibrate into blank.

 

I ride a racer to erase her.

Bent over like a hunchback.

Racing leathers now include a hump

That protects the poet's spine and neck.

I wring the thing out, two hundred miles an hour.

I am a mink on a mink ranch determined not

To die inside its valuable fur, inside my racesuit.