Nice Weather

by Frederick Seidel

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