Nice Weather (4 page)

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

And dinner at Derrick's grandparents' in New York

Who dwelled in a mansion on Madison

Which took up much of the block,

Ancient and magnificent Dr. and Mrs. Seth Milliken.

I was talking about the early aviator Louis Blériot

When all of a sudden Dr. Milliken—who hadn't spoken in years—

Gasped:
I ADORED the fellow!

We were terrified.

His nurse rose from her chair next to his and started to cry.

And apparently he never spoke again.

Aldrich became Paris editor of
The Paris Review.

I followed him and Blair Fuller in the job. Youth!
Paris des rêves!

Fifty years later, Barack Obama rules.

Lady Gaga reigns.

Lorin Stein seizes the
Paris Review
reins.

The joy or whatever

Of being the new editor begins, as it happens, April Fool's Day.

You know what I'm going to say.

I lift my glass to my friend.

RAINY DAY KABOOM

I get young when I'm not looking.

Or it happens when I turn out the light.

Sometimes I hear Indians

When I need to be scalped

And need to be helped.

How did it happen?

It happened overnight.

How come you got young?

They put my body in a pot.

They cut my feet off so I would fit.

They put my face in a fishbowl

So everybody could see it.

It floated around,

Looking for food.

Looking for a smile.

Then I saw you.

I saw you opening a black umbrella.

I saw you checking yourself in a lobby mirror.

I saw the flames leap like a cheerleader.

Sis boom bah.

I take the microphone and read

My poem “My Poetry”

For the podcast, at your request.

I doff my yarmulke.

My scalp, actually.

Welcome to South Waziristan.

I'm the Taliban.

I wrote their poem “My Poetry.”

I meant it as an IED.

O say can you see me driving over it up-armored?

I ask to see the desk where you work so I can see.

Already at your request I've

Recorded Al Qaeda's poem “Death”

And the Taliban's “My Poetry.”

I'm a roadside bomb singin' in the rain.

LISBON

Quite frankly,
nothing much happens.

You walk downhill all day

From the fascistically monumental Four Seasons Hotel Ritz.

I have to say,

I've had a pleasant stay.

My Junior Suite makes me feel like Mussolini, it is huge.