Poems 1959-2009 (8 page)

I bought the racer

To replace her.

It became my slave and I its.

All it lacked was tits.

All it lacked

Between its wheels was hair.

I don't care.

We do it anyway.

The starter-caddy spins its raving little wheel

Against the Superbike's elevated fat black

Rear soft-compound tire.

Remember:
racer
—

Down for second gear instead of up!

Release the clutch—the engine fires.

I am off for my warm-up lap on a factory racer

Because I can't face her.

I ride my racer to erase her.

I ride in armor to

Three hundred nineteen kilometers an hour.

I am a mink on a mink ranch about

To die inside its valuable fur,

Inside my leathers.

She scoops me out to make a coat for her.

She buttons up a me of soft warm blur.

Is this the face that launched

A thousand slave ships?

The world is just outstanding.

My slavery never wavers.

I use the word “slavers”

To mean both “drools”

And, changing the pronunciation, “trades in slaves.”

I consider myself most of these.

Mark Peploe and I used to sit around

Cafés in Florence grading

Muses' noses.

Hers hooks like Gauguin's,

His silent huge hooked hawk prow.

I am the cactus. You are the hyena.

I am the crash, you the fireball of Jet-A …

Only to turn catastrophe into dawn.

 

My own poetry I find incomprehensible.

Actually, I have no one.

Everything in art is couplets.

Mine don't rhyme.

Everything in the heart, you meant to say.

As if I ever meant to say anything.

Don't get me wrong.

I do without.

I find the poetry I write incomprehensible,

But at least I understand it.

It opens the marble

And the uniforms of the lobby staff

Behind the doorman at 834 Fifth.

Each elevator opens

On one apartment to a floor.

The elevator opened

To the page.

The elevator opened on the little vestibule

On the verge of something.

I hope I have. I hope I don't.

The vagina-eyed Modigliani nude

Made me lewd.

I waited for my friend to descend

The inner staircase of the duplex.

Keyword: house key.

You need a danger to be safe in.

Except in the African bush where you don't,

You do.

The doorway to my childhood

Was the daytime doorman.

An enormously black giant wore an outfit

With silver piping.

He wore a visored cap

With a high Gestapo peak

On his impenetrably black marble.

Waits out there in the sun to open the car door.

My noble Negro statue's name was Heinz,

My calmly grand George Washington.

You'll find me

At my beloved Hotel Baglioni

In Bologna

Still using the word Negro.

I need a danger to be safe in,

In room 221.

George Washington was calmly kind.

The defender of my building was George Washington

With a Nazi name

In World War II St. Louis.

Heinz stood in the terrible sun after

The Middle Passage in his nearly Nazi uniform.

He was my Master Race White Knight.

I was his white minnow.

The sun roars gloriously hot today.

Piazza Santo Stefano might as well be Brazzaville.

The humidity is a divinity.

Huck is happy on the raft in the divinity!

They show movies at night on an outdoor screen

In the steam in Piazza Maggiore.

I'm about to take a taxi

To Ducati

And see Claudio Domenicali, and see Paolo Ciabatti,

To discuss the motorcycle being made for me.

One of the eight factory Superbike racers

Ducati Corse will make for the year,

Completely by hand, will be mine.

I want to run racing slicks

On the street for the look,

Their powerful fat smooth black shine.

I need them

To go nowhere fast and get there.

I need to begin to

Write the poem of Colored Only.

When Heinz took my little hand in his,

Into the little vestibule on the verge

Of learning to ride a bicycle,

I began
Bologna
.

Federico Minoli of Bologna presides

In an unair-conditioned apartment fabulously

Looking out on the seven churches

In Piazza Santo Stefano, in the town center.

The little piazza opens

A little vestibule on the verge of something.

The incredible staircase to his place opens

On seven churches at the top.

The only problem is the bongo drums at night.

Ducati's president and CEO is the intelligent Federico.

Late tonight I will run into him and his wife

At Cesarina, in the brown medieval

Piazza, a restaurant Morandi

Used to lunch at,

Bologna's saintly pure painter of stillness.

I will sit outside in the noisy heat and eat.

 

FOR PAOLO CIABATTI

I spend most of my time not dying.

That's what living is for.

I climb on a motorcycle.

I climb on a cloud and rain.

I climb on a woman I love.

I repeat my themes.

Here I am in Bologna again.

Here I go again.

Here I go again, getting happier and happier.

I climb on a log

Torpedoing toward the falls.

Basically, it sticks out of me.

The F-16s take off in a deafening flock,

Shattering the runway at the airbase at Cervia.

They roar across horizontally

And suddenly go straight up,

And then they lean backwards and level off

And are gone till lunchtime and surprisingly wine.

So funny to see the Top Guns out of their G suits get so Italian

In front of the fire crackling in the fireplace.

Toasts are drunk to their guests, much use of hands.

They are crazy about motorcycles

In the officers' mess of the 23rd Squadron.

Over a period of time, one plane in ten is lost.

I hear the man with the silent chow chow

Tooting his saxophone

Down in the street, Via dell'Indipendenza, Independence Street.

The dog chats with no one.

The man chats with everyone

With gusto and delight, and accepts contributions.

At the factory,

The racer being made for me

Is not ready, but is getting deadly.

I am here to see it being born.

It is snowing in Milan, the TV says.

They close one airport, then both.

The Lord is my shepherd and the Director of Superbike Racing.

He buzzes me through three layers of security

To the innermost secret sanctum of the racing department.

I enter the adytum.

Trains are delayed.

The Florence sky is falling snow.

The man with the silent chow chow

Is tooting in the street

Below my room at the Hotel Baglioni—the Bag in Bo—

My marble home away from home, room 221.

He buzzes me through three layers of security,

Poetry, Politics, Medicine, into the adytum.

Tonight Bologna is fog.

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 Man of La Mamma is a tenor as brave as a lion.

Everything is also its towering opposite.

Butch heterosexuals in Italy spend lavishly on fragrances.

The in thing was to shave your head, the skinhead look.

Guys spend more on beauty products here

Than in any other country in the world.

Everyone is also a boss.

The English executive assistant to the Italian CEO stays blondly exuberant

When sales to America plummet, when the dollar is weak.

Her name is Alice Coleridge. Her phone rings nonstop.
Pronto, sono Aleecheh!

The world at the other end of the phone is a charging rhinoceros.

A descendant of Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks Italian to the rhinoceros.

Poetry has power, as against the men and women actually making things

On the assembly line on the ground floor.

Someone had the brilliant idea of using

Factory workers in the ads,

And using a fashion photographer to add elegance and surprise.

They found an incredible face on the ground floor

With a nose to die for, and paid her to straddle

A motorcycle her assembly line had made and pose in profile.

So what did the Italian nose do? She ran with the money to get a nose job.

 

There wasn't anyone to thank.

Two hours from Paris in a field.

The car was burning in a ditch.

Of course, the young star of the movie can't be killed off so early.

He felt he had to get off the train when he saw the station sign
CHARLEVILLE
—

Without knowing why—but something had happened there.

Rimbaud explodes with too good,

With the terrible happiness of light.

He was driving fast through

The smell of France, the French trees

Lining the roads with metronomic to stroboscopic

Bringing-on-a-stroke whacks of joyous light.

They were drunk. It had rained.

Going around the place de la Concorde too fast

On slippery cobbles, and it happened.

Three spill off the motorcycle, two into a paddy wagon.

Eeehaw, eeehaw
, a midsummer night's dream

Down the boulevard along the Seine.

The most beautiful American girl in France

Has just stepped out of a swimming pool, even in a police van.

Eeehaw, Eeehaw
,

In a Black Maria taking them to a hospital.

The beautiful apparently thought the donkey she had just met was dying

And on the spot fell in love.

The wife of the American ambassador to France

Took her son and his roommate to Sunday lunch

At a three-star restaurant some distance from Paris.

The chauffeur drove for hours to get to the sacred place.

The roommate proudly wore the new white linen suit

His grandmother had given him for his trip to France.

At the restaurant after they ordered he felt sick and left for the loo.

He dropped his trousers and squatted on his heels over the hole.

No one heard him shouting because the loo was in a separate building.

His pal finally came to find him after half an hour.

Since it was Sunday no one could buy him new pants in a store.

No one among the restaurant staff had an extra pair.

White linen summer clouds squatted over
.

It must be 1954 because you soil yourself and give up hope but don't.

The boys are reading
L'Étranger
as summer reading.

My country, 'tis of thee, Albert Camus!

The host sprinted upstairs to grab his fellow Existentialist—

To drag him downstairs to the embassy's July Fourth garden party.

The ambassador's son died horribly the following year

In a ski lodge fire.

 

The baby born dead

Better lie down.

Better stand up.

Better get up and go out

For a walk.

He stands around in the rain

In the room.

Breathe
two three four.

And down in the rain in the drain

In the floor.

Babies born dead

Drown in the main in the more.

Better a walk.

The head on a stalk

Laughs and waves.

It is the sun with its rays.

The sun wants to talk.

If you start to be sick,

If you start to be stuck,

If you have to sit down,

If one foot starts to drop,

If hope starts to stop,

You will drown

In the drain in the main in the more.

The rain is downtown.

Up here is happy.

Get up!

Get up, get out of bed!

Wake up!

Wake up, you sleepyhead!

All right. Go ahead.

Be dead.

 

Dapper in hats,

Dapper in spats,

Espousing white tie and tails or a tailcoat and striped trousers

With dancing-backward Ginger Rogers and other espousers,

Singing with such sweet insincere

Dated charm and good cheer,

And his toupee of slicked-down dated hair;