To find, without success. Jews grab
The thing they love unless it’s ham,
And hold it tightly to them lest it die—
Or like my mother try
To find the ham they couldn’t hold.
A hot ham does get cold.
Grampa, monster of malevolence,
I’m told was actually a rare old-fashioned gentleman of courtly benevolence.
At night the thing to do was drive to Pevely Dairy
And park and watch the fountain shooting up and changing colors.
The child sat in the back, finishing his ice-cream soda,
Sucking the straw in the empty glass as a noisy coda.
Sometimes on Sunday they drove to the Green Parrot.
There was the sideways-staring parrot to stare at.
The chickens running around were delicious fried, but nothing was sanitary.
B.O. was the scourge of the age—and polio—and bathroom odors.
If you didn’t wash your hands,
It contributed—as did your glands!
His father always had gas for their cars from his royal rationing cards.
The little boy went to see the king at one of the king’s coal yards.
The two of them took a trip and toured the dad’s wartime coal mine.
It was fun. It was fine.
The smell of rain about to fall,
A sudden coolness in the air,
Sweetness wider than the Mississippi at its muddy brownest.
I didn’t steal his crayon, Mrs. Marshall, honest!
It’s CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT … brought to you by OVALTINE!
I travel backwards in a time machine
And step inside a boy who’s three feet tall.
How dare he have such curly hair!
A boy and his dog go rafting down the Mississippi River.
They have a message to deliver
To the gold-toothed king.
Sire, we have a message that we bring.
Little boy, approach the throne.
Ow! I hit my funny bone.
The British consul was paid extra because it was a hardship post.
The weather was Antarctica/equatorial extreme.
Surely summer was in error.
Winter was terror.
White snowflakes the size of dinosaur eggs
Versus humidity that walked across your face on housefly legs.
I loved both the most.
Radio made women dream
Of freedom from oppression and the daily nonsense.
Hairy tarantulas in boatloads of bananas made the lazy heat immense
In the heart. Blizzards didn’t stop my father’s big blue coal trucks so why bother.
Why bother, father?
Billie Holiday was inside.
I thought I had gone to heaven and died.
NEWS FROM THE MUSE
This is what it’s like at the end of the day.
At the end of the day, homosexuals are gay.
Pundits love to say, “at the end of the day.”
“Bottom line” is their other cliché.
The end of the day will go away,
But we heterosexuals are here to stay.
Sunlight preoccupies the cross street.
It and night soon will meet.
Meanwhile, there is Central Park.
Now the park is getting dark.
I said to my own personal, private Central Park last week,
I said to her: Look at me, just take a little peek.
I said it’s the difference between day and night,
That’s what’s exciting, because it’s so right.
I’m remembering with amusement how she treated me
At the state dinner, how she greeted me
With incredible coldness, which was a trick,
Since she was so excited she was almost sick,
So excited she let loose a lake
And rowboats you can rent for a trip you can take.
I’ll walk around the Reservoir with you
And then walk down Fifth Avenue
To the Met to the show just opened of Samurai arms and armor.
I’m an armored charmer.
I’m room after room of gleaming display
Of blade after blade and by the way
This is what it’s like at the end of the day
When the sword of art has its say.
Fifth at Eighty-second
On the edge of the park has beckoned.
The American Museum of Natural History, on Central Park West,
On the other side of the park from the art, offers its breast.
Art after all is lies.
Art is tadpoles that think they have a right to grow up to be butterflies
And croak and flutter among flowers.
Seriously, why not do away with set museum hours
And let the killers come and go among the exhibits at dawn if they want,
Without adult supervision? Dripping blood, they’ll hunt
The mounted specimens in the wildlife dioramas,
But grow up to be sweetly smiling Dalai Lamas.
I’m the Art of the Samurai. I have nothing to fear.
I have a sword and the way is clear.
I have the weapon to love anyone who comes near.
I always walk back across the park from the Met at this time of year.
I walk back and forth in my study till I hear
The words pour into the computer like sunlight, in my ear.
The computer splits a brick with one chop of my hand and sheds a tear
For the brick, but, my dear,
They are crocodile tears, and completely insincere.
The poem you’re reading now will eventually appear.
A filthy city pigeon has landed on my desk to say
It will wait for me on the ledge outside the window while I pray.
It’s got to be the Annunciating Angel from the way it moans and coos
That it expects the poem that’s coming to bring good news.
Now we’re flying above Central Park,
And there I am down there looking up at me and shouting, Hark!
I flirt across Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn,
A little brief thing shyer than a fawn,
But shouting with everything it has, It’s true!
At the end of the day, it’s you.
SWEET DAY, SO COOL, SO CALM, SO BRIGHT
Give me Gandhi telling the poet Tagore, in a feisty mood:
“The hungry millions ask for one poem—invigorating food.”
I’m crossing a desert looking for a dessert.
I lick the dirt.
I am hungry and unhappy and look and see
It looking at me
From under her skirt.
I see a delightful little hair shirt.
I see a valley of moist Montale plus myself plus George Herbert.
Wait here. Stay alert.
When the red apples are ready on the trees,
Don’t you feel like saying, “Apples, please,
Instead of providing cider,
You could be a better provider
If you gave us summer back.”
I would instantly trade apple flesh and crunch for a black
Atlantic of yellow waves under a warm moon in August.
Give me back the Harley-Davidson hog of lust
I rode when I was July and rutting,
When I was in rut, instead of being in a rut putt-putting.
The Sunday-morning TV talk shows by Sunday noon are yesterday.
They had their say. They’ve gone away.
Now it’s noon.
I’m standing on a dune
Listening to the sound the waves make,
Which is the hiss of a bandage being pulled off, Ow, for Christ’s sake!
Only it feels good, the extreme opposite of hurt.
Waves and gulls will always flirt.
; Reaches up under her skirt.
Ow! rips off his shirt.
O black-and-yellow moonlit sea,
O fattest black-and-yellow August bumblebee,
I struggle to shut my snout.
I burst out in the street like someone just let out.
The big movie screen in the sky
Is covered with stars, who wave Hi.
It’s Iran, or it’s Afghanistan
And the Taliban.
Bad apples fall and rot,
Or not.
Stay with me a few more minutes and give me Gandhi.
Give me the great Bolognese painter Morandi.
Give me stout-hearted men of their severe purity,
Saints who don’t have sex who constitute a threat to Homeland Security.
Her posterior is superior. I thank it. I spank it.
Her hair down there is my bib, my crib, my security blanket.
When there’s this much chiming rhyming, check around you, look behind you.
Behind you—and it defined you—
You sat in the corner eating hair pie,
And you lifted your head and said, What a good boy am I.
CUNNILINGUS
The recently reopened Great Lawn seemed
Too green to use and was.
They roped it off again.
It was too young.
The grass was greener on the other side.
Not ready to be eight baseball fields.
I wanted to get down on my hands and knees and eat grass
Like a beast.
Not ready to have the pope
Pray in front of five hundred thousand.
Out of respect
For Her Holiness, I took my shoes off.
You were my outlook and my prosody.
You were the call to prayer five times a day.
You were the be-all and end-all of a forehead pressed to the floor.
You made me take my shoes off to protect your new floors.
Five hundred thousand tuchuses
With faces, with tongues out
To receive communion, were your humble servant me
Swaying in your palm-tree breeze.
You were my sound track.
You were my sound check.
I heard the muezzin summoning my forehead callus
To the mosque.
Obama is my president.
Too much is almost enough at the end of a life.
I am aware that my dark hair could be dyed.
My face is falling off my face.
POINTER IN THE FIELD
A hunting dog freezes in the pose
And points his muzzle at the bird.
The dog’s heart has a hard-on.
The implied gun goes off.
The bird bursts into flames.
The bird bursts into song.
The woman flies away
To come again another day.
PALM SUNDAY
Manhattan shrinks to a tiny tooth
Of towers far below as we accelerate violently into verse and space
And leave the road behind.
Congress is having a stroke, and it’s a heart attack, and it can’t face
China and the truth
Fulminating from Duluth.
Everest is the penthouse of the Earth and God is on my mind,
But I’m more interested in getting off the Earth to your Down Under.
My spirituality is to go hypersonic—
And fly hypersonically out of New York on the Hampton Jitney to Sagaponack,
Where the grass is green as the green of a Memling and the sky is you,
Where the gulls cry with white wings and the waves gush fresh as dew.
The time has come for magnitudes of thunder
To split the vast nonsense of death asunder.
My subject is New York outside my window where
The world is a mirage in the nude.
My subject is the Sunday-morning TV talk shows, which I,
Loving politics, eat like food.
I must say, Palm Sunday means nothing to me. I don’t care.
It’s almost time to nail Christ to the air.
It’s almost Easter and the pundit in the sky.
I hope there really is another universe—
New evidence says there must be—where Jesus isn’t born,
Nor the Buddha, nor Muhammad, all that porn.
Evidence indeed suggests other universes, nursed by the universe breast,
The Big Bang being the breast, the first suck being the best,
Because that suck is the void in reverse.
Then came the Pharisees, Pontius Pilate, six million Jews killed, and worse.
Close your eyes while you read this
Default setting for the Divinity.
It’s Muhammad in the cave and the angel commanding: Recite!
Close your eyes to see infinity.
God bless the bliss
Of the kiss
Of Judas Iscariot that won’t come out right,
But comes out right. It’s in 3-D. It’s an illusion.
Mecca today in the Arab sunlight is a white bridal gown.
The Buddha smiling at a stoplight sees the red nose of a clown.
The Central Park Zoo barking seals that you love, darling,
Sun themselves in the same sunlight as the talkative starling
Who imitates a car alarm, saying thereby that the world is delusion
And the Holocaust merely a contusion.
Broadway is kneeling next to my building. Christ
Mounts the ass to go into town.
Gautama is teaching on Seventy-ninth at the corner.
Muhammad rides through Harlem in a white convertible with the top down.
God the stallion and God the gelding is sliced
Into bite-sized portions, they put out a contract on him, iced,
Into the river in cement shoes, ends up at the coroner
Astronomer who is looking for complicity,
For sympathetic understanding from a universe
Turning violently into verse.
A poem should not mean but be.
Oh really?
My poems have the cedar simplicity
Of a shoe tree.
Picture me in front of the TV
Staring at a mirage.
The events of the week in the world break the flat-screen surface like fish.
They are caught and cleaned and cooked and given a massage.
I’m climbing the dunes of the Sahara with a mermaid swimming toward me
Talking away, as if she were afraid she’d already bored me.
I hear her emphatic politics, spoken in English English,
Part of the TV panel of pundits in Washington, D.C., on this Palm Sunday.
When I escape to the window for a moment to breathe New York,
Something white is flying through the sky that is not a stork.
I think about people who have died and are dead.
I don’t think they have gone somewhere else instead.
I don’t think I will see them again one day.
I don’t think China will overtake the U.S. before Monday.
THEY’RE THERE
IN MEMORY OF FRANK KERMODE (1919–2010)
At least the dead don’t have to die.
Everyone you see is dead, but it’s the Hamptons, so get over it.
Edward, and next Dick—and now Frank—all dead. Boys, goodbye.
Frank, at ninety, said on the phone he didn’t particularly want to die.
Don’t try to tell Frank that his charming work won’t die.
The dead don’t give a shit
About their work once they die. Frank is the newcomer:
I look around the lawn and there is everyone.
Poirier and Said and Kermode are sipping white wine and it is summer.
The fancy world of dead is having fun.
Everyone is wearing summer
light.
They can’t tell wrong from right.
ONE LAST KICK FOR DICK
IN MEMORY OF RICHARD POIRIER (1925–2009)
Old age is not for sissies but death is just disgusting.
It’s a dog covering a bitch, looking so serious, looking ridiculous, thrusting.
The EMS team forces a tube down your airway where blood is crusting.
Imagine internal organs full of gravel oozing and rusting.
An ancient vase crossing the street on a walker, trudgingly trusting
The red light won’t turn green, falls right at the cut in the curb, bursting, busting.
You’re your ass covered with dust that your dust mop was sick of dusting.
The windshield wipers can’t keep up. The wind is gusting.
A massive hemorrhagic bleed in the brain stem is Emerson readjusting.
Why did the fucker keep falling?
I’m calling you. Why don’t you hear me calling?
Why did his faculties keep failing?
I’m doing my usual shtick with him and ranting and railing.
You finally knocked yourself unconscious and into the next world
Where Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the ballroom of the mind, whirled and twirled.
Fifty-three years ago, at the Ritz in Boston, we tried one tutorial session in the bar.
You got so angry you kicked me under the table. Our martinis turned black as tar.
And all because your tutee told you Shakespeare was overrated. I went too far.
WHAT NEXT
So the sun is shining blindingly but I can sort of see.
It’s like looking at Mandela’s moral beauty.
The dying leaves are sizzling on the trees
In a shirtsleeves summer breeze.
But daylight saving is over.
And gaveling the courtroom to order with a four-leaf clover
Is over. And it’s altogether November.
And the Pellegrino bubbles rise to the surface and dismember.
RAIN
Rain falls on the Western world,
The coldest spring in living memory everywhere.
Winter in mid-May means the darling buds of May uncurled
On an ice-cold morgue slab, smilingly shaking loose their beautiful hair.
London rains every day anyway.
Paris is freezing. It’s May, but Rome is cold.
Motorcycles being tested at the factory in Varese north of Milan are gray
Victims screaming in place and can’t get out and won’t get sold.
It’s the recession.
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