unworthy somehow of such a gift as a free flat in St. Tropez, or her, or both,
or perhaps a general peevishness had seeped in during the long journey down.
Famous now, a matron, whose name conjures hopes or fears, buoys
or stifles careers, but then not much more than a child, one who already knew
large success awaited, or what she counted success, and had abandoned him,
not recently, if it had ever really taken notice. Still, she loved him,
in her own fashion, if often querulously or diluted by suspicion.
But her French was perfection, thus bestowing on him a kind of invisibility,
his preferred mode. It would remain so and over time only intensify
until he came to resemble a decommissioned spy or some Burroughs character,
one of his old gray junkies in rumpled gabardine and wearing a fedora.
There was little to occupy the two of them, really: read, stroll, make love,
shop at the little open market below their balcony in the old quarter
where a tolerable bleu Auvergne could be found dirt-cheap and made
for a lovely sauce or dressing. Their Baedeker was that torrid Salter novel
with Philip and Anne-Marie whipping up a froth in Burgundy’s grand old hotels,
roaring down two-lane country roads in a vintage Delage, top down,
café to café, bar to bar, meal to meal, bed to bed, hurtling aimlessly
through a spring and summer at speed under canopies of plane trees
until … well … One knew it was destined to end, and very badly.
He, for his part, mostly hid in the old chapel-turned-museum, L’Annunciade,
beholding what Dufy, especially Dufy, Camoin, Monguin, Marquet, and that
crowd, did with the light, just after dawn and at end of day, sea light, and had
been, after Signac led the way. —When I realized each morning I would see this
light again I could not believe my luck, wrote Matisse. Though Mlle. couldn’t be
bothered, with that light or any particular light to speak of or any artist’s
rendering.
Am I being unkind? Surely. Please forgive me. Whither Colette? With her cats
in that secluded garden, the great lady, no longer young (his age) suffering still
through those overmastering bouts of passion … —The cats will spring sideways at the moths when by ten the air is blue as a morning glory. —After dinner, Sidonie-
Gabrielle wrote—I mustn’t forget to irrigate the little runnels that surround the
melons, and to water by hand the balsam, phlox and dahlias and the young
tangerine trees, which haven’t got roots yet long enough to drink …
Then we have the youthful Agnelli, only recently back from the Front
(Can you imagine: spoiled, pretty Gianni on the Eastern Front?), vibrating
like a tuning fork from all the cocaine, while he snorkeled his heart away offshore,
sending up a multitude of bubbles between the legs of all those Ginas,
Moniques and Yvettes. Of course, these were the early days, before the big crash
along the corniche, the long convalescence and then the triumphs:
Fiat’s Avvocado, the “King of Italy,” his Patek Phillipe worn halfway up his sleeve
and his dick up Jackie O below deck. How she thrived on the open sea, that one.
And then, in their wake: hustlers, deadbeats, remittance men, le couple coiffure,
tyro cineastes, package tours from Sheffield and Dusseldorf, 374 bad novelists
and, bringing up the rear, our two curiously feathered American lovebirds,
out of tune, out of sorts, out of place, and 50 years late.
DANCE, DANCE, DANCE
The four of us would make that little house shake, dancing the night away,
perched there at the foot of the block, right above the cove,
wind blowing at 30 knots, rain peppering the windows like BB pellets.
It’s a wonder we didn’t tip, the house and us with it, onto the rocky strand below.
Stax/Volt, King Records’ R&B stalwarts: “Finger Poppin’ Time,” “Chain of Fools,”
you taking a solo turn on “Poppa’s Got a Brand-New Bag,” twitching
to beat the band in your Isadora-gone-spastic-with rabies mode,
drunkenly crashing into walls, knocking the furniture every which way.
I still can’t figure out how your wee John slept through it all, if he really did.
He somehow made it to Yale, I heard, then studied law. No fault of yours …
His mother found a proper gent once she managed to unload you, that’s how.
You dear, impossible, most thoughtless of men. —What did the doctor tell you?
“He told me I was in perfect health—for a 60-year-old.” You were then 25.
But somehow lasted another 50, which would have made you 110, in dog years,
an image to conjure with, those tight black curls gone white, the same mad glare.
If only you’d been with it near the end, able to see on television the apotheosis
of your contempt for nearly everything take over center stage and set up shop.
You taught me most everything I know about music, at least the raw stuff:
The Dixie Hummingbirds, the Louvin Brothers, Ralph Stanley singing
“I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow” you claimed made the paint peel off your walls.
We’d always finish off the evening with Séamus Ennis of County Ennis
skirling his way through “Kiss the Maid Behind the Barrel” on his uilleann pipes,
the only sound that could bore its way through that amber veil of Bushmills.
You’d have made the best DJ ever to be found in this sad old world, ever, ever,
if only you weren’t such a hopeless shambles, and a station might be found
to accommodate your lurchings: Furtwängler on the heels of Guitar Shorty.
I remember one night we all danced so hard the house seemed to shift,
if only a bit. It wasn’t much of a house, I suppose. Still, the landlord wasn’t happy.
We danced and danced the nights away on that green, wet, sleepy, nowhere isle.
I recall no better or harder dancing, you wobbling, but in command, at the helm.
DREAM MACHINE: EPISODE 22, TAKE #3
I had arrived here as a somewhat aged exchange student,
although I would certainly never have described myself thus,
youthful and curious still as to my appetites,
not to mention expectations, vague as the latter may have been,
if to the locals I may well have seemed otherwise,
a somewhat hobbled, little geezer,
an appearance offset by a brightly colored, not inexpensive neck scarf.
I have long and repeatedly been reminded
that my self-image does not square with the actual,
by actual one, of course, means in the eyes of obtuse strangers.
But which bus and in which direction?
You see, I no longer had any address in hand.
There most certainly had been one, written down
and, per usual, left under a pile on my night table.
I might have inquired
but the language spoken around me was impenetrable,
chockablock with untamed gutturals and rhotic consonants.
I did make it there in the end. I always do.
Down corridors I recalled from elsewhere,
Wrocław, Passaic, Esquimalt …
the graveyard, convenience store, shuttered garage.
Put it down to my capacity for visualization.
I remember in London once, dead drunk,
guiding a minicab driver clueless as a blind cockatoo
from a pub in Hackney all the way to my flop in South Ken.
It involves a k
ind of trance I get on.
And when I finally arrived at what was to be my residence for the term
there to greet me was a roomful of boisterous, clearly homosexual men,
mustachioed and in the livery of Prussian cavalry officers,
clinking glasses, much excited by my arrival.
They seemed to know things about me that I barely remembered myself.
You might credit it to the modern search engine,
or, if you prefer, something entirely otherworldly.
LOVE CHANT
You can see that big ol’ Kwakiutl in the birdsuit
flapping away, swaying right then left
in the bow of a 50-foot war canoe,
his sidekicks banging the handles of their oars in time:
whack whackwhackwhack whack whack?
Well, honey, that’s about how I feel around you.
Sure, it was all staged, an ethno-spectacular
for Curtis and his actuality film crew;
blow their minds back in New York along the Great White Way,
King Kong before King Kong.
But that’s not how I like to see it,
and I’ve watched this clip plenty at the museum rainy days like this.
How I like to see it, these boys are getting in the mood,
whipping themselves up for a full-on, all-hands, slave raid south,
and that would be in our direction.
Look at all those sun-worshippers out there on Ocean Beach,
matrons, truants, ice cream and cotton candy vendors,
doing their thing, checking out the kites and cormorants,
listening to Kruk & Kuip call the game over the radio,
slapping on the cocoa butter.
Out of nowhere they’ll come swooping in like pelicans
dive-bombing sardines, gathering up
pink-splotched fatties in Speedos, dogs too,
and tossing them in back of the canoe.
Then, of course, the ceremonial feast:
hormone- and nitrate-free wieners,
little tubs of hummus, rice cakes, PowerBars,
and after that a proper nap, waves gently rocking;
and, first thing on waking, do that dance of theirs they do:
whack whackwhackwhack whack whack?
turn that ginormous cedar dugout around
and paddle back the 1000 miles or so to Quatsino Sound,
off-load their haul, hose ’em down,
and get the lot started on polishing the silver, ironing,
picking lice off the kiddies’ heads, like that.
As for the more unfortunate adult male slaves, well …
Let’s just say next harvest moon when the fright masks come out
and teeth get to gnashin’ & aflashin’ in the longhouse,
warriors gathered round the fire crying
whoop-whoop-dee—whoop …
Hey now, my little pullet, that, that’s how …
REVENUE STREAM
He was a not at all unfriendly interlocutor,
aggressive, to be sure, combative even, but an admirer,
clearly, not only of my oeuvre but, curiously, of me,
about whom he could’ve known next to nothing,
except hearsay and what one might pull off the net,
should one care to pursue such a search. A “stalker,” then?
Hardly, but with something about me clearly nagging him,
an itch of sorts that needed to be scratched.
In fact, it became ever clearer over the course of our visit
that instead of a conversation I was being interviewed,
perhaps with a small digital recorder hidden in a pocket
or clipped behind one of the car’s overhead sun visors.
We were driving, I should have mentioned, up and down
the West Side Highway, taking this exit or that, doubling back,
aimlessly so far as I could tell, or if by design
certainly none I could determine. But he was determined, all right,
to find out what, I could not begin to surmise. About how
I went about stringing these words together, as I do,
or some clue to be found in my speech patterns or facial gestures?
—Do you regard yourself as corporate? he asked.
Like Pfizer or Sun Chemicals of Parsippany, 3.5 billion revenue,
board of directors, management team, shareholders?
My drifty, “misguided,” career counting stresses and syllables?
How bewildering, even provocative, I thought to myself.
Is this ardent, inquisitive young man making sport of me?
Something in his manner and enthusiasm led me to doubt it.
But I did turn the notion over and over again in my mind
as we cruised along in the slow lane: I, the CEO
of a crisply efficient operation, by some manner of alchemy
transmuting my imaginative life into something like a revenue stream?
And I did like his car, an ’87 Signature Series Lincoln Town Car,
6-way power seats and blue carriage roof. It handled like a dream …
MRS. SINATRA
So, there I was—again—right in the middle of Abbott Blvd.
as if I’d just parachuted in from the Carpathian highlands,
and still without my college degree—
the phantom zoo course, the one I bailed on: vestigial gills,
bat sonar, marsupials … plaguing me, for what, nearly 50 years now
(the folks still hadn’t caught on to that one, not yet,
but they would, oh, my gracious, would they ever …)
on a sodded-over island of trolley track in front of God and everyone,
Joe, the old Serb, mowing away in the heat, slugging down beers,
Mrs. Sinatra’s house directly across the way, panel trucks unloading
boxes of Italian cookies, trays of cold cuts, rose and teal icing,
prosciutto around the clock: “only the best for the best, Love, Frankie”—
there I was, rifling through the toiletry bags I kept in my carry-on.
For what? Never you mind. Nor had I bothered with breakfast …
How someone should have managed to remain unsettled like this
for decades now, such a case as would delight
the student of metempsychosis or literary biographer with a bent
for the pathological … I had had a home once, to be sure:
—Aug, go and help Mom with groceries,
not unlike you …
SEMINAL VESTIBULE
I, too, found myself to be most at home there,
in this passageway between the street and … well,
let us say, the staircase and kingdom beyond
along with our Rottweiler pup Ondeen,
sprawled diagonally across the Afshar throw rug,
her belly rising and subsiding in wheezing, susurrant repose.
She might just as well have been a museum exhibit,
so nearly constant was her presence there
with me spread out on the little loveseat beside her,
stroking her ear between my fingers, teething on a stick of jerky
as was my custom in those days and sometimes even now
when circumstances and respite from society allow,
for it encourages, this chewing, deep memory to run off-leash,
sending me back once again to that antechamber
with its subaqueous lighting, yellow ochre walls, and doggie smell,
the old-fashioned tilted glass apothecary jars,
three each atop the twin console tables, Mother,
poor thing, between loads of wash, baking and polishing,
forever fussing to keep them aligned just so,
filled, as they were always kept, with jelly beans and candied fruit slices,
red, green, blue, black, and orange,
Poppa fill
ed his pockets with, the fat fuck,
each time he wandered through between the one realm and t’other,
stepping over Ondeen, or not quite,
raising thus a grunt or high-pitched yelp of vivid pain.
How like a Kaiser Poppa could seem to be sometimes,
but gentle and loving, as well, pinching my cheek:
—Now, don’t be letting the world pass you by, sonny.
A HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC: CHAPTER 42
(Caspian Lake, Vermont)
Those French boys in the engine room aren’t giving him much,
but he doesn’t need much, does Carlos Wesley Byas of Muskogee, Oklahoma,
elbows on the bar at the Beaulieu, circa ’47: —I was born under the sign of music,
he tells whoever’s listening. That feathery tone of his by way of Hawk
but something else entirely, running through this set of ballads: “Laura,”
“Where or When,” “Flamingo,” unmistakable, no one played ballads like him.
Can’t recall just where, Club Mephisto maybe, or the Vieux Colombier.
I’ve never seen the lake this still, Mt. Stannard across the way dissolving into mist,
then gone completely as night settles in, just as he’s finishing up with “Stardust.”
You can begin to make out a hint of bite in the air now, a couple of weeks
before you close the place down for the summer and head back to Boston,
or was it Brooklyn by then? I can’t remember just when except it was delicious,
sitting there in the dark beside you, saying nothing, no need for old friends
to say much of anything at all by this point, staring out into the darkness,
finishing our drinks before heading back to the house for dinner,
surely something wonderful, Beverly always had something wonderful going.
Forgive me all this sentiment, but you were never one to shy from sentiment
in your poems, the refined T’ang and Sung poets: In my younger days I
never / Tasted sorrow. I wanted / To become a famous poet. / I wanted to get ahead /
Snow Approaching on the Hudson Page 4
