One time, I kept her waiting for me in the old
Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria on Mass. Ave. three hours.
When I finally got the goddess
Into my student bed,
The beauty of her nineteen-year-old body
Practically made me deaf, so loud
I leaked. My arrogant boy burst into tears.
IV
The Golden Bough
A tiger leaps on the back
Of a boy in the Yard for the kill.
The first warm day feels hot.
That’s the Boston area’s
Idea of spring, tearing winter violently
Apart a little before Reading Period,
In other words late,
So actually it’s almost summer before it’s spring.
Tropical parrots fly into the libraries and talk.
Two beautiful girls flaunt wide-brimmed summer hats.
Phyllis Ferguson is indescribable.
Elisabeth Niebuhr is the intellectual equivalent.
Both are in summer dresses
In honor of spring.
Each gets mentioned in The Golden Bough.
One girl went to Brearley.
One went to Chapin.
Those of you who know
What I’m talking about
Can stop reading.
The daughter of Reinhold Niebuhr rooms
With the granddaughter of Learned Hand,
Two knockouts—or rather four.
If you know what I’m talking about you nevertheless
Know it was spring
And blood was all over the Yard
Where the boy had been dragged and consumed.
Here comes the tiger with what looks like conjunctivitis
And, Jesus, he licks his lips
And looks exactly like what he ate.
V
Sweet Summer
I change a twenty for three tens
Could be the story of my life.
I give my bit and get a lot.
I give one back.
The sky is blue, the street fresh tar.
Tar smell. Smells like sweet summer.
Chi ci dà la luce? Il Duce!
That is to say, God.
Joe Lelyveld told me just now that Gandhi and Mussolini
Actually met. What an extraordinary thought.
Gandhi passing through Rome
On his way home.
Who knew Mussolini spoke English?
The language they used
To agree that Europe needed to change. Meaning no doubt
Their separate different things by that.
I hear the hiss of a hose.
I smell sunstroke kiss the cooling lawn.
The huge houses on Portland Place on their small lots
Are palazzi in Florence in old St. Louis.
Then came I to the shoreless shore of silence.
I stood there in Harvard Yard.
Huck Finn on his raft.
Harvard was all around me like the Mississippi
In the wet heat.
Heat shimmers upward from the hot.
Huck ties the fishing line to his toe so he can snooze
Alertly. It can make you crazy to be so happy
And on the verge of holy dictatorship and feeling you’re a
Gandhi standing barefoot on a Mussolini balcony.
VI
Rejoice O Young Man in Thy Youth
Nelson Aldrich
Was so beautiful
He worried he was homosexual.
This was understandable.
So many men came on to him.
The Fay School, St. Paul’s School, Harvard,
And his smile,
Are a certain kind of boy.
He joins the Porcellian.
He’s not Everyman but he’s American.
Every American boy worries
He’s a fag, at least in those days
Did. I figure every boy at one
Stage or another is.
I never was,
Nor Nelson,
Even though he was called Nellie.
Not a nelly, but Nellie.
I call him Peter.
How rad is that!
BACK THEN
Negroes walking the white streets
Was how it seemed on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
One morning in 1971 it began.
I converted so to speak on the spot to the Ku Klux Klan.
My big blue heartfelt eyes hid in a hood and white sheets,
Completely ready to burn a cross and buy a gun.
A friend in the D.A.’s office said it’s a gun or run.
I had thought these particular streets belonged to rich whites,
Almost as a matter of rich whites’ civil rights.
The block on Seventieth between Park and Lexington Paul Mellon’s sister sanctified.
The always Irish doormen along Fifth Avenue nearly died—
All of a sudden blacks were crossing over the border from their Harlem home
And there were barbarians wandering the streets of Rome.
I knew the man who wrote this poem.
ANNUNCIATION
The simple water drinks from the drinking fountain in the waiting room,
And tastes happiness—tastes a sprig, a spring from the spout.
Fresh pours purely salt-free through
The sunshine pouring down on the glassy dunes
Of in vitro fertilization taking place in a clinic,
But you are also other things, O singing oasis, O oasis, O baby bird in a nest,
O innocence breast-feeding a rainbow,
Who change everything. New York is changed. Blessed art thou.
THE GREEN NECKLACE
I’m going out for a stroll and a bite and won’t take myself with me.
Look after me while I’m gone, will you.
Outside the bleary windows is my sunny city.
I have to get the window cleaner in. Things change.
A day later, it’s raining quite hard, and the dirt doesn’t show.
We were both at some huge dinner party or other—this was her dream—
And you were sitting very far away from me.
I kept wondering whether
You would look over in my direction.
I kept trying not to look at you too much.
I have your green bead necklace on my desk.
I took it out of the drawer where I kept it after you left it.
Now I have it here, next to the computer.
I look down at it while I work.
I just touched it with my left hand.
How to survive a nuclear bomb.
I look out the binary window and see in—
The blinding flash and the blast and radiation—
See being dead talking to being alive, zero and one.
Look at me as a carton of cremains hailing a cab, or a man in love.
ARABIA
I move my body meat smell next to yours,
Your spice of Zanzibar. Mine rains, yours pours—
Sex tropics as a way to not be dead.
I don’t know who we are except in bed.
I’ll tell you someone I’m not happy with—
But no I won’t. I won’t destroy the myth.
The president of the United States
Is caught between those two tectonic plates,
Republicans and Democrats, the nude
Alternatives to naked solitude.
It’s politics, it’s tropics, and it’s warm
Enough to arm the sunrise with a car alarm
That’s going off and starts the earthquake shake
And shiver, shiver, of the sobbing steak.
O sweet tectonic fault line and sweet lips
Exuding honey that the cowboy sips.
I float in fluid to the other shore.
Ninth month. I scramble up the dune. I snore
Awake at sunrise with a
snort. I turn
To touch the socket of the softest fern.
I got in line to vote and right away
I thought of you and years and yesterday
And how so much had changed and how it’s true
Things do get better when you want them to.
My face between your thighs is resting there.
I’m happy staring at what makes me stare.
I see the psalm and it’s a woman’s labia,
My pornographically all-mine Arabia.
America keeps waiting to begin.
It’s sunrise dripping from my chin.
It looks like spring out there on Broadway meant
Barack Obama to be president.
VICTORY PARADE
My girlfriend is a miracle.
She’s so young but she’s so beautiful.
So is her new bikini trim,
A waxed-to-neatness center strip of quim.
Now there’s a word you haven’t heard for a while.
It makes me smile.
It makes me think of James Joyce.
You hear his Oirish voice.
It’s spring on Broadway, and in the center-strip mall
The trees are all
Excited to be beginning.
My girlfriend’s amazing waxing keeps grinning.
It’s enough to distract
From the other drastic act
Of display today—Osama bin Laden is dead!
One shot to the chest and one to the head,
SEAL Team 6 far away from my bed
Above Broadway—in Abbottabad, Pakistan, instead.
Bullets beyond compare
Flew over there,
Flew through the air
To above and below the beard of hair,
A type of ordnance that exploded
Inside the guy and instantly downloaded
The brains out the nose. Our Vietnam
Is now radical Islam.
I tip my hat and heart to the lovely tiny lampshade
Above her parade.
POEMS 1959–2009
I turn into the man they photograph.
I think I’ll ask him for his autograph.
He’s older than I am and more distinguished.
The beauty of the boy has been extinguished.
He smiles a lot and then not.
Hauteur is the new hot.
He tilts his nose up and looks imperious.
He wants to make sure he looks serious.
He smiles at the photographer but not
The camera. He thinks cold is the look that’s hot.
You know the poems. It’s an experience.
The way Shylock is a Shakespearience.
A Jew found frozen on the mountain at the howling summit,
Immortally preserved singing to the dying planet from it.
ARNAUT DANIEL
fictio rethorica musicaque poita
—DANTE, De vulgari eloquentia
A shiver of lightning buckles the sidewalk.
Love cracks my sternum open
In order to operate,
Lays bare the heart, pours in sugar and chalk.
I open my mouth unable to talk.
I am someone having a bleed or a stroke.
I never stop talking,
Never lose consciousness,
Dying to be charming.
I stand there at liftoff
Burning lightning,
Basically blasting from the launch pad to kingdom come.
I am running in place on fire on a high wire,
Running into you in the shop,
And then outside
Can’t stop. You have just come from a spin class—
O lovely smile miles away, that doesn’t stop not
Coming closer.
Age is a factor.
A Caucasian male nine hundred years old
Is singing to an unattainable lady, fair beyond compare,
Far above his pay grade, in front of Barzini’s on Broadway,
In Provençal, or it’s called Occitan, pronounced oksitan, or it’s that
I am someone else, whoever else I am.
Ezra Pound channeling the great troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel
In St. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane
In Washington, D.C.,
Thanksgiving weekend, 1953,
I remember sounded like he
Was warbling words of birdsong.
THE STATE OF NEW YORK
I like the part I play.
They’ve cast me as Pompeii
The day before the day.
It’s my brilliant performance as a luxury man because I act that way.
They say: Just wait, you’ll see, you’ll pay,
Pompeii.
You’re a miracle in a whirlpool
In your blind date’s vagina
At your age. Nothin could be fina.
You eat off her bone china.
Don’t be a ghoul. Don’t be a fool,
You fool.
In the lifelong month of May,
Racing joyously on his moto poeta to the grave,
He’s his own fabulous slave.
He rides his superbike faster and faster to save
His master from the coming lava from China, every day,
But especially today, because it’s on its way.
Fred Astaire is about to explode
In his buff-colored kidskin gloves, revolving around
The gold knob of his walking stick, with the sound
Of Vesuvia playing,
And the slopes of Vesuvia saying
Her effluvia are in nearly overflowing mode.
Freud had predicted Fred.
In The Future of an Illusion he said:
“Movies are, in other words, the future of God.”
Nothing expresses ordinary wishes more dysplastically than current
American politics do. Breast augmentation as a deterrent
To too much government is odd.
Korean women in a shop on Madison give a pedicure to Pompeii.
Fred only knows that he’s not getting old.
Pompeii doesn’t know it’s the day before the day.
The governor of New York is legally blind, a metaphor for his state of mind.
He ought to resign, but he hasn’t resigned.
Good riddance, goodbye. The bell has tolled.
THE TERRIBLE EARTHQUAKE IN HAITI
I think the truth is I have to go to the dentist.
That’s what that quaking and shaking was all about.
God makes and breaks cheap cement! He’s a cheap Cementist.
Both black people and white people
Have white teeth and shout
When God breaks the church and topples the steeple
In a tropical black country where almost every building is white.
I have to go to my New York dentist—who’s also a guitarist—Arnie Mars, DDS,
And show him my dingy teeth are not right.
We’ll talk the usual liberal bs.
I’ll sit in his chair under the stars without electric light.
At least the air is warm.
At least I’ve been buried alive and can come to no further harm.
I’ll shout whitely without an anesthetic while they amputate my arm.
LA CIVILISATION FRANÇAISE
In walks François Ier—only female, only beautiful—
Swims into the crowded room, big head like a tadpole,
Enormous nose and grandeur, and enormous eyes that pull
You to the bottom to deconstruct your soul.
The literary mermaid swimming toward you is a pearl
Whose whipping tadpole tail can break your back.
You want to make a double-decker with this girl?
Medic! It might explode. It might attack.
It’s always somewhat Paris underneath New York.
But never mind—down there, beneath
the tail, there’s no way in.
The marvelous wine cellar of reds badly needs your cork!
Actually, not at all. There’s no entry slit in the sleek mermaid skin.
One of these two is already an Immortal,
But for now is also just a man, if even that.
King Cobra stands staring at Queen Mongoose, swaying, looking for the portal,
Ready to sink a poem into her mortal fat.
“Quel péril, ou plutôt quel chagrin vous en chasse?”
“Cet heureux temps n’est plus. Tout a changé de face,
Depuis que sur ces bords les dieux ont envoyé
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé.”
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé
Declaims from center stage in alexandrines her rouged rage
Which doesn’t make a sound because there’s nothing she can say,
And so it’s time to turn the page.
In the East Village, on a sweet late-summer night,
A goddess dressed in Dior parts the party crowd.
A mouse stands staring at the Muse, at the amazing sight
Of a completely lovely François Ier, with the band blasting really loud.
AT THE KNICK
My lining is reversible. I turn the Seidel sackcloth inside out and there’s
The city and the evening and the Knickerbocker Club,
On whose posh porch across from Central Park who really cares:
It’s summer and it’s evening and we’re smoking fine cigars!
They’re Cuban lovelies and we’ll puff them to a stub.
We’re made of smoke, we Martians, and there’s life on Mars.
I’m looking down at you from where we are,
A bit above Fifth Avenue, and you are walking by.
I see you from a distant star.
I see you in the shadows at the bus stop start to cry.
A Latin-looking woman in the outfit of a maid
Runs across the street to hand you something you
Perhaps had left behind, and runs away, as if she were afraid.
I turn that woman inside out and smell a zoo.
A TOAST TO LORIN STEIN
The butler wheeled Mrs. Waldheim out of her private elevator
And into the 1914 dining room
And a table set with goblets and massive gold flatware. I was ten.
This was St. Louis
Before the sun set on all this.
I think of Aldrich’s roommate Derrick Nicholas
Nice Weather Page 3
