Authors: Frederick Seidel
Nice Weather
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CONTENTS
Midterm Election Results, 2010
Arnold Toynbee, Mac Bundy, Hercules Bellville
Cimetière du Montparnasse, 12ème Division
The Terrible Earthquake in Haiti
Then All the Empty Shall Be Full
Sweet Day, So Cool, So Calm, So Bright
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TO KARL MILLER
NIGHT
The city sleeps with the lights on.
The insomniac wants it to be morning.
The quadruple amputee asks the night nurse what time it is.
The woman is asking for her mother,
But the mother is exhausted and asleep and long since dead.
The nun screams to stop the charging rhino
And sits bolt upright in bed
Attached to a catheter.
If a mole were afraid of the dark
Underground, its home, afraid of the dark,
And climbed out into the light of day, utterly blind,
Destroying the lawn, it would probably be caught and shot,
But not in the recovery room after a craniotomy.
The prostitute suspects what her client might want her to do.
Something is going on. Something is wrong.
Meanwhile, the customer is frightened, too.
The city sleeps with the lights on.
The garbage trucks come in the night and make noise and are gone.
Two angelfish swim around the room and out the window.
Laundry suns on a line beneath white summer cumulus.
Summer thunder bumbles in the distance.
The prostituteâwhose name is Dawnâ
Takes the man in her mouth and spits out blood,
Rosy-fingered Dawn.
STORE WINDOWS
I smile in the mirror at my teethâ
Which are their usual brown.
My smile is wearing a wreath.
I walk wreathed in brown around town.
I smile and rarely frown.
I find perfection in
The passing store windows
I glance at my reflection in.
It's citywide narcissism. Citizens steal a little peek, and what it shows
Is that every ugly lightbulb in that one moment glows.
A preposterous example: I'm getting an ultrasound
Of my carotid artery,
And the woman doing it, a tough transplanted Israeli, bends around
And says huskily, “Don't tell anybody
I said that your carotid is extraordinary.”
I'm so proud!
It's so ridiculous I have to laugh.
The technician is very well endowed.
I'm a collapsible top hatâa
chapeau claque
âthat half
The time struts around at Ascot but can be collapsed flat just like that.
Baff!
Till it pops back.
Paff!
Oh yes,
I find myself superb
When I undress.
A lovely lightbulb is my suburb,
And my flower, and my verb.
The naked man, after climbing the steps out of the subway,
Has moderate dyspnea, and is seventy-four.
He was walking down the street in Milan one day.
This was long ago. He began to snore.
He saw a sleeping man reflected in the window of a store.
THE YELLOW CAB
Tree-lined side streets make me lonely.
Many-windowed town houses make me sad.
The nicest possible spring day, like today, only
Ignites my inner suicide-bomber jihad.
I'm high on the fumes of my smokin' sunglasses,
But my exhaust pipe has a leak, which smells bad.
Take away my hack license. Open the windows. I'm passing gases.
A driver of a medallion taxi has gone completely mad.
Yellow cab, yellow cab, where have you been?
I've been to the mirror to try to look in.
Yellow cab, yellow cab, what found you there?
Soft contact lenses on four wheels and a fare.
The million leaves on the Central Park trees are popping
Open the champagne.
There's too much joy. There's no stopping.
Love is on top, fucking pain.
DOWNTOWN
July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.
It is beautiful that they have to disappear.
It's like the time you said I love you madly.
That was an hour ago. It's been a fervent year.
I don't really love fireworks, not really, the flavorful floating shroud
In the nighttime sky above the river and the crowd.
This time, because of the distance upriver perhaps, they're not loud,
Even the colors aren't, the patterns getting pregnant and popping.
They get bigger and louder when they start stopping.
They try to rally
At the finale.
It's the four-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson's discoveryâ
Which is why the fireworks happen on this side of the island this year.
Shad are back, and we celebrate the Hudson's Clean Water Act recovery.
What a joy to eat the unborn. We're monsters, I fear. What monsters we're.
We'll binge on shad roe next spring in the delicious few minutes it's here.
BEFORE AIR-CONDITIONING
The sweetness of the freshness of the breeze!
The wind is wiggling the trees.
The sky is black. The trees deep green.
The man mowing the enormous lawn before it rains makes goodness clean.
It's the smell of laundry on the line
And the smell of the sea, brisk iodine,
Nine hundred miles inland from the ocean, it's that smell.
It makes someone little who has a fever feel almost well.
It's exactly what a sick person needs to eat.
Maybe it's coming from Illinois in the heat.
Watch out for the crows, though.
With them around, caw, caw, it's going to snow.
I think I'm still asleep. I hope I said my prayers before I died.
I hear the milkman setting the clinking bottles down outside.
MIDTERM ELECTION RESULTS, 2010
My old buddy, my body!
What happened to drive us apart?
Think of our trips to Bologna.
Think of our Ducati racebikes screaming.
We drank hypersonic grappa.
We got near the screaming Goyas.
What's blinding is Velázquez.
We never left the Pradoâ
And never saw Madrid!
That's what we did.
We met for lunch at the Paris Ritz.
We walked arm in arm
Through Place Vendôme.
Each put out a wrist
To try on a watch at Patek Philippe.
Unseparated Siamese twins,
We had to have the same girlfriend
And slept with her together.
We hopped on the Concorde,
Front cabin, seat 1.
Oh not to be meek and ache
And drop dead straining on the toilet seat.
Everyone on the sidewalk walks fasterâ
And didn't you use to walk
Springing up on the balls of your feet!
A single-engine light airplane
Snores in the slow blue dreamy afternoon.
This is our breakup.
We are down here falling apart.
The ocean crashes and crashes.
I put my arms around youâ
But it's no good.
I climb the stairsâ
It's not the same.
It's a flameout and windmill restart!
MIDWINTER
Midwinter murder is in my heart
As I stand there on the curb in my opera pumps,
Waiting for the car to come and the opera to start,
Amid the Broadway homeless frozen clumps.
Patent leather makes my shoes
Easter eggs by Fabergé.
The shoes say New York is still run by the Jews,
Who glitter when they walk, and aren't going away.
The morning after the Mozart, when I take my morning stroll, I feel
Removed all over again from the freezing suffering I see.
Someone has designed a beautiful, fully automatic, stainless steel,
Recoilless assault shotgun down in Tennessee.
The dogs tied up outside the Broadway stores
In the cold look with such touching expectancy inside.
A dog needs to adore. A dog adores.
A dog waiting for an owner is hot with identity and pride.
I'd like to meet the genius in Tennessee, or at least speak
To the gun on the phone.
I'd like to be both the dog owner and the dog. I'd leak
Love after I'd shot myself to shit. I'd write myself a bone.
SNOW
Snow is what it does.
It falls and it stays and it goes.
It melts and it is here somewhere.
We all will get there.
CHARLIE
IN MEMORY OF CHARLES P. SIFTON (1935â2009)
I remember the judge in a particular
Light brown chalk-stripe suit
In which he looked like a boy,
Half hayseed, half long face, half wild horse on the plains,
Half the poet Boris Pasternak with a banjo pick,
Plucking a twanging banjo and singing Pete Seeger labor songs.
I remember a particular color of
American hair,
A kind of American original orange,
Except it was rather red, the dark colors of fire,
In a Tom Sawyer hairstyle,
Which I guess means naturally
Unjudicial and in a boyish
Will Rogers waterfall
Over the forehead,
And then we both got bald â¦
My Harvard roommate, part of my heart,
The Honorable Charles Proctor Sifton of the Eastern District.
Charlie,
Harvard sweet-talked you and me into living in Claverly
Sophomore year, where no one wanted to be.
We were the elect, stars in our class selected
To try to make this palace for losers respected.
The privileged would light the working fireplaces of the rejected.
Everyone called you Tony except me, and finallyâ
After yearsâyou told me you had put up with years of “Charlie”
From me, but it had been hard!
Yes, but when now
I made an effort to call you Tony, it sounded so odd to you,
You begged me to come back home. Your Honor,
The women firefighters you ruled in favor of lift their hoses high,