Nice Weather (7 page)

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.

It's very weird in New York.

Teen vampires are the teen obsession,

Rosebud mouths who don't use a knife and fork.

Germany at first won't save Greece, but really has to.

It's hot hot in parts of Texas, but rain drowns Tennessee, people die.

It's the euro. It's the Greek debt. Greece knew

It had to stop lying, but
timeo Danaos,
they're Greeks, Greeks lie.

Canoeing in the Ozarks with Pierre Leval: the rain came down so hard

The river rose twenty-three feet in the predawn hours and roared.

Came the dawn, there was improbably a lifeguard,

There was a three-legged dog, the jobless numbers soared.

Dreamers woke in the dark and drowned, with time to think this can't be true.

Incomprehensible is something these things do.

They bring the Dow Jones into the Ozarks and the Ozarks into the EU.

A raving flash flood vomits out of a raindrop. The Western world is in the ICU.

Entire trees rocket past. One wouldn't stand a chance in the canoe.

A three-legged dog appears, then the guy it belongs to.

You instantly knew

You'd run into a hillbilly backwoods crazy, itching to kill you.

Berlin and Athens, as the Western world flickers,

Look up blinking in the rain and lick the rain and shiver and freeze.

They open black umbrellas and put on yellow slickers

And weep sugar like honeybees dying of the bee disease.

EGYPT ANGEL

I'm not on your side, whichever side you're on.

My enthusiasm for Nasser is long gone.

Hail, Hosni Mubarak, and farewell!

There's the old dictator dolt

On TV, a contraption of dyed hair and hair gel.

Angels in revolt

Fill Tahrir Square. The angel Gabriel blows his horn

To announce to the reborn:
You've been born!

And Koranically commands:
Recite!

Here are the things that are right!

Day after day of secular celebration turns into night.

Not too many people are killed.

People are thrilled.

I'm your fat King Farouk,

Quacking poetry till I puke.

I'm president and premier and sultan and emir—

Prime minister and Sadat—

And oh my God he's been shot!

I do nothing but think about you, dear.

I think about you a lot.

I revere

The crypto-philo-Semite Anwar Sadat,

And what he did, and in consequence the death he got.

The third president of Egypt agreed to put up with Israel.

He slithered through the Arabs like an eel.

It did not go down well.

The West oinked for oil and said please.

The Western nations hung out backstage like groupies.

They barked to be fed, like a seal.

They stole anything they could steal.

Anwar Sadat screwed the lightbulb of love into the socket

Out loud in the dark in the middle of the night.

Floaters swim by in my eye in the light.

Darling, don't doubt me, don't knock it.

I fold a linen handkerchief to make three points

To fountain whitely toward you from my breast pocket.

Point 1. My cornea detaches.

Point 2. I have galloping myopia.

Point 3. My cataracts won't let me look at you.

It's lenticular astigmatism.

It's macular degeneration.

A rainbow coalition of coition ejaculates

A colorblind wine jelly of jism

And every radical ism.

White Europeans conceived these wretched Arab states,

Now fictively becoming democrats.

The breeze blows the blue of the sea

Inland from Tripoli.

Meet me in Tahrir Square.

Righty-o, I'll meet you there.

Your Nile-green eyes gaze up at me from the pillow.

Baby, you're my crocodile Nile. You're my Cairo.

Tahrir Square is twirling like a dervish, spinning like a top.

In Tahrir Square tear-gas canisters pop.

My crocodile angel joins the demonstrators outside her shop.

The tornado funnels into focus from a censored blur.

The military clears a path for her.

Democracy is in the vicinity

Of Nefertiti.

We'll meet in Tahrir Square.

Every angel has gathered there,

Including my own angel, wings of Isis flapping.

Bandages are unwrapping

The royal mummy, who's been napping, but opens her charms.

My Egypt angel wraps me in her arms.

TRACK BIKE

The bicycle messenger who nearly knocked you over

Was me trying to.

That was me circling Columbus Circle

On a track bike, the kind with one gear and no brakes.

Look out!
No brakes with a message!

I flashed around the velodrome

Of my life, clinging to your steeply banked curves,

And discovered the New World.

It's as if your body were itself a person

And the person wasn't you.

It's as if I were a flesh-eating flower,

Whereas actually I'm originally from St. Louis.

The performing self opens the stage door.

I start my act.

I feel like running for office.

I feel like riding a fixed-wheel track bike for the simplicity.

You'll play the viola

And I'll play myself.

Komm, süsser Tod

Comes out of my mouth

Like a tail coming out of a dog.

Take my hand and we'll wag down Fifth Avenue.

We'll walk into the first church we see,

Which is to say the Apple Store.

I'm walking west on Central Park South

With my iPhone out.

I am calling you, oo oo oo, oo oo oo,

With a love that's true, oo oo oo, oo oo oo.

We take the Time Warner Building

Escalators up the four floors to the top.

Something about how incredible it all is

Tells me to stand back from the edge of the vertiginous view.

I get dizzy imagining I'm on the balcony

That runs around the torch of the Statue of Liberty

Looking down on Columbus Circle.

The handlebars are in my hands.

I ride without brakes around and around.

I walk around the torch blazing.

I see you thirty blocks uptown

In my bed, light pouring in.

And we have tickets for the Bach at Lincoln Center.

And let's check out

The Upper West Side Apple Store next door.

It's one more crystal-clear Apple cathedral

For Saint Steve Jobs, who discovered America,

Where the deer and the antelope play

With the herds of touch screens on display,

Not far from Columbus Circle and pancreatic cancer.

Also by Frederick Seidel

POEMS
1959–2009

EVENING MAN

OOGA-BOOGA

THE COSMOS TRILOGY

BARBADOS

AREA CODE
212

LIFE ON EARTH

THE COSMOS POEMS

GOING FAST

MY TOKYO

THESE DAYS

POEMS
, 1959–1979

SUNRISE

FINAL SOLUTIONS

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2012 by Frederick Seidel

All rights reserved

First edition, 2012

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eISBN 9781466879775

First eBook edition: August 2014