It makes me think of Gerald Stern’s poem where he talks about swimming off the coast of Babylon, and stretching out his hand to someone who knows a lot about the desert. The desert is very beautiful, all that sand. We’re both serious basketball fans, so I’m not sure which one of us does/does know/does know a lot about the desert. But what did Zane Grey know about the desert? He was a fairly sensitive guy, and intelligent, and he made it up as he went along.
PALE BLUE SHIRT, WHITE SLACKS
We sit in a large open bay window
in a summer living room on Indian Grove
drinking chilled white wine
in the middle of about 40 people we know vaguely.
I watch John acting like a Hathaway ad
for What kind of man would buy The New Yorker?
Welcoming guests & introducing people,
saying, Come and eat my chicken salad,
drink of me,
in his light blue shirt & pleated white slacks.
“Look at John acting like Harry Christ,
now that he’s got the assistant’s promotion,”
I say to my friend Bill,
“they don’t realize that he’s just a Xerox salesman.”
You look at me & raise one blond eyebrow,
“Yes, but it’s definitely a fucking colour Xerox.”
And we both start laughing until our faces turn red.
Life is easy.
Tanned & athletic & young
slapping our thighs our legs spread like cowboys,
I have $3.45 in my pocket but the B&G tastes good,
you have a new Jeep outside but it’s not paid for yet.
We laugh until our ears burn.
Our eyes almost burst with bizarre tears.
“Jesus,” we say simultaneously,
“he does look just like Christ, doesn’t he?”
Until our hearts flutter like turnips.
Neither of us is the new 4800 computer of sincerity,
but these people are all like automatons.
They all say – Really;
the girl can’t help it;
the opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings;
never give a sucker a Perry Ellis suit;
that’s too bad, darling;
why don’t we just go home and take a shower?
But they don’t do anything except model expressions
& flaunt their 5 sentences about the weather.
Maybe we’re buddhists & we don’t know it
but our big hands show it.
We just want to go to Tom’s, put on some pasta,
smoke some dope,
& watch Saturday Night Live.
It’s an institution because Lorne Michaels
is from Ontario.
John comes over with a large
bottle of red & fills our glasses, “What are you two
clowns laughing about this time?”
I shrug & he leaves for more wine. All I can
think of to say is, “Nobody here has any real ideas,
but John does look good in those white slacks,
just like a straight guy pretending
to be Perry Ellis.”
CALL IT A DAY
My friend Moira
is tall & thin & with small breasts & a beautiful
excitable face.
We get up around 7:00
& go to Andrew’s house on Indian Road for breakfast.
This is Saturday morning before the ball game.
& Phillip says,
“O you must try these waffles, Queen
Victoria would have gained 100 lbs on these
but they’re wonderful.”
So we have waffles
with chocolate ice cream & champagne. It’s a
celebration
of something, & it’s a great combination.
At the ball game Moira is all over me,
she likes French kissing in the periods
where there are no runners on base,
Tony F isn’t stealing
2nd with one hand in his pocket,
& the batting is a bit
slow. Moira is a computer engineer & knows her stations
& her stops. She would be a big Jays fan but she’s
from Seattle
plus she can’t help cheering for Boston
because that Roger Clemens is so ooo good-looking.
Baseball is a way of relaxing. It’s great being down here
with 46,572 fans & lots of sunshine.
Slow 5th inning.
Boston 3, Toronto 0.
I love Boston so much I even like the word. Bah sten.
Toronto breaks the rule for well-formed names,
names
should begin with a clear consonant,
then a good vowel,
then another clear consonant. Listowel
is good. Penetanguishene is great. Los
Angeles
breaks the rule a bit but it survives. New York is
good.
Bath, where Chaucer rolled in the hay with merry
women of the church, is a great word. Florida breaks
the rule but it has that terrific D in the middle.
Bell
hits a nice pop-up fly about 415 feet. They don’t have
waffles with chocolate ice cream at the Sky Dome
but they do have a great restaurant called The Founder’s
Club, it’s about $150.00 for 2,
& they have truffled steaks
& foie gras with brilliant
green asparagus that makes your pee bright yellow.
We leave in the middle of the 7th. Hot sun,
not much action,
& walk up to Queen Street. The
Horseshoe Tavern has great BBQ wings. Moira drapes
gracefully at the bar. Too much sun. Here in the cool dark
of the old Triangle where so many greats
have belted out the hits of our childhood,
my wild
Seattle girl seems
almost shy,
or tired, or tacit. I lean over & say,
Dessert?
“Yeah,” she says, swings one tight jean leg
over the bar stool. We drink 1 beer each,
sipping it slowly & noticing how much better it tastes
here in the cool dark than the Labatt’s tastes
at the Dome.
Then I pay the bill & we drive up to
Bloor Street for some fresh peaches
& take-out chicken.
CLARITIES
Nothing could be much simpler than this blue and clear white
nozzled bottle for misting plants
ficus bengamina elephant umbrella or avocado
sitting like a vase or a salad bowl at the centre of a plain
table supported by orange-
crates against the bright sunny red brick wall of our second-
floor sun deck.
I could go to the museum this afternoon or
the new show at the art gallery
but this simple industrial misting bottle holds my attention:
the sunlight frames it
illuminates it
fills the clear blue & white half-full bottle with light,
although it would somehow contain light even in a dark room
sitting on the pine floor beside the bengamina
or on a shelf in the bathroom beside some clean towels.
Part of this may be phallic and another part may be the
classic Bauhaus argument for functional form.
Phallic is possible.
I muse over this sitting sprawled in my khaki shorts on a
square cloth chair in the bright sun on the deck
looking from a distance like a clear object in space myself.
My left arm photographs the waters of my heart.
My right lobe is full of tobacco and peach trees.
The d
eep blue & white nozzle of the bottle is attractive
but the nozzle doesn’t spurt water
it sprays, it mists
and is inexhaustible;
North America is full of phallic-shaped tins and bottles:
wine bottles
beer tins
bottled beer
most olive oil bottles and vinegar containers
even a tin of fava beans could be called phallic.
Dark blue is one of my favourite colours,
Galt night skies and union jacks and stars & stripes.
The bottle doesn’t rival Rembrandt’s The Old Warrior or
Vermeer’s Head of a Young Girl, but it makes short work of
bad painting and schlock television alike.
Whatever it is sits honest as a piece of limestone
or a loaf of fresh bread.
Limestone and bread aren’t phallic. I muse on the da/dunh dunh
dunh with which Beethoven begins moving to climax in his ninth
symphony and on the tragedy of Mark Rothko’s butchered
throat.
Crane died young.
The human body is composed of one functional
shape after another. Stones down a hill. I am grateful for this
mass-produced $1.79 bottle: it is both pleasant to look at
and a perfect simple stimulus. It is clear the way I want to be
clear myself, although some parts of my mind are like the dark
water under a bridge.
My shoulders are red. The sun on the brick
wall and the orange-crate are also parts of this picture.
MASSAGE
She kneels over me and massages my neck
the thick red curls of her sex brushing against my back.
I don’t feel like telling you how beautiful her face is
her thighs against my sides are as smooth as butter.
I lie on my elbows on Carol’s bed with my head bent
calm but tired of being erect all the time.
Horses, an old girlfriend told me, can’t last more
than 2 minutes; I told her I can do it for 2 hours
but I get tired after a while.
She massages my traps like a baker kneading dough
or the way you might play with a greyhound puppy.
There are myths all over America like sprawling farms
separated by highways and rows of trucks.
Plus I saw Phantom of the Opera last night at Pantages
and after the play we went for pizza and a 260zer.
I am boyish she says and as irresponsible as a dog.
She strokes my bruised shoulder where I smashed
into the glass door throwing the fat bouncer
out of his own bar;
and I walk onto the moon
yellow Edam with white paper plane messages,
rich friable black earth west of Stratford
effulgent with corn, cattle and wild flowers
burning like fire along the edge of fences.
Our flesh is the light of this world
and I am bathed and healed by that flesh.
But I think now I will go back and plank my bahoola
in the steel seat of the John Deere tractor,
violets in my beard & a six-pack of cold Blue
under the wheel with the bright yellow corn
all around me
& almost up to my head. Her hands move
& darkness floats in dark water. For this moment
the white pillows and her touch are endless.
BORDERS
Board is one of the oldest words. Pale natural brown with a hint of pale green or yellow before they are seasoned. Sweet, they have a sweet fresh smell stacked in piles of 100s. The Romans made boards with axes & saws, stone ground axe heads, not the axis on which the green & blue world rotates. Boards are clean, rough & evenly splintered around the edge, and precise. Draw a line with a piece of lead. Cut along the dotted line. From Julius to “Little Boots” they had very vague concepts of borders. Gaul looked a lot like England, there was a Bay of Naples but Sophia Loren wasn’t there.
The Romans knew nothing about America, or Norway, for that matter. America wasn’t even on their maps.
TANGERINES
THEY WERE MAKING LOVE. BUT THEY HADN’T QUITE STARTED YET. She was being a little cool. Not cold or rigid, or playing rigid like the other one, the snoot, but just cool, almost absent-minded, as if her mind was temporarily at a distance. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her long legs spread out in a V, like one of the back-up singers for Billy Joel, and he was kissing her shoulders. But he relaxed. She had great shoulders, feminine, sloping, but not too diminutive.
“You would just as soon not make love right now?” he asked her, not with his mouth against her ear, she had great ears too, but standing. The little girl was swinging in his pants. He stretched his back, shaking his head, and ran one hand lazily across his chest. He didn’t want to get upset about nothing.
“No, of course I do, stupid,” she said. With affection to him. “I’m just not clicking for a minute.”
He told her he was sorry, that he shouldn’t have put it in the negative like that. Then he said, “Is it okay if I go to the kitchen for something? I just feel right now like something wet and sweet.”
She had nothing on except blue jeans. She was sitting on the edge of his bed with all this gorgeous black hair in corn braids and these long soft sloping shoulders catching the afternoon light from his bedroom window. She said, “Sure that’s okay.”
“Can I get you something?” The glossy hardwood floor in his bedroom looked as if it had been created, sometime way back in 1910 or so, what people referred to as 1st World War years, just for the purpose, or could you perhaps say the honour, of framing her long slender feet. She was barefoot, and she had dark hunter-green polish on her nails. The same colour as the Jag that he liked.
He went out to the kitchen in his briefs. That’s all he had on, white, those ribbed cotton briefs that HOM make. The apartment was cluttered. He was living by himself for the moment. The kitchen was full of light, the geraniums out on the back deck looked like gobs of bright perfect China-red paint. He got a tangerine from the kitchen table. There was always a small row or sometimes a pile on the table, off to one side of the middle. Of tangerines, maybe one big fat lemon, 2 or 3 limes perhaps. So he picked up one of the tangerines, juicy and sweet, it was a big one. That gorgeous faintly-weathered, fine brown lines deep orange just a bit, a splash of pale green. He liked the shape of the tangerines, they were round and sort of elliptical at the same time. And they were juicy and sweet.
When he went back to the bedroom she was sitting almost exactly as she had been when he left. Her hands were clasped and relaxed and resting between her knees. She was looking at the floor. She glanced up as he walked into the room and smiled at him, a lovely slow lazy smile. The bulge in his cotton briefs had diminished a bit, so he looked respectable. He had the tangerine in one hand, half-peeled, 2 or 3 sections sweet in his mouth.
“Sure you don’t want some?” He proffered the half-eaten tangerine.
“No. I want your tongue in my mouth. I’m just not quite ready yet.”
She put her hand palm flat against his chest, it felt very warm and smooth to her, in such a way that her elbow was brushing slightly against the bulge in his cotton briefs, the kind that HOM make. The bulge increased. It felt good, he was in love with her, not always sure of exactly what she thought, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“What do you believe?” she said. She took a small piece of the tangerine peel, playing with it with her thumb and 2 fingers.
“About what? About women?” He thought maybe she was talking about love, or the destinies of 2 people, or something like that. It was natural for him to say that. He was always thinking about women. His friend Jack understood that about Tom. He said to their mutual friend Henry one night sitting around at Paupe
r’s, “Tom’s a terrific guy. I like Tom. But he’s just the way some guys are about alcohol or being busy all the time. He’s no good without a woman.”
“No, silly,” she said. “We’re not the only thing that’s happening in our lives. I mean,” she said, drawing herself up, pulling one foot up on the bed and resting her head against her knee, “what do you believe about things in general?” She studied him. She said, “You know, you read a lot more than I do. I know a lot about music. I read magazines because I’m interested in clothes. I don’t read books very much. But I have beliefs,” she said.
“Yeah.” He rested one arm against her shoulder. He could feel the soft heat, subtler than the quick yellow Toronto summer heat outside, pulsing against his arm. “Like right and wrong. Basic stuff.”
“Umhuh,” she said slowly, “okay, sort of.” She ran her hand up and down his thigh. Her hand was the colour of pale chocolate. It stood out against his hand the way an image you might see on a computer colour-modelling screen might stand out against some other slightly more industrial colour.
“You have terrific legs,” she said, “strong.”
“Not half as great as yours. Nobody would pay very much attention to me if we were at the beach,” he laughed, he thought it was vaguely funny. “I have to put things between myself and the world, like books.”
“O yeah,” she said, drawing it out with her mouth, she was in love with him, no two ways about that, he was so bright and so dumb at the same time, how could you help loving him, she had said to her friend Susan at a place called Woodlands, a restaurant which is just down the street from Pauper’s, but on the north side. “You just pick it up and do it. I guess that’s how simple it is with us,” she had said. She lay back on the bed very long and perfect and amused and wrapped her legs around him at the ankles, with her hands under her head, and studied him.
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