Poems 1959-2009 (17 page)

Horse carriages slowly carry

Honeymooners through a fog of love as thick as snow.

A slave to love

Kisses a real slave she bought to free.

The dominatrix is whipped by her slave—

Who has made a mistake on the new rug and wags.

 

Kitsy and Bitsy and Frisky and Boo

Stream by, memories of moist

Moss—green morphine—

On each bank of a stream.

Fronds as delicate

As my feelings present

Those summers.

You could drink the water you swam

In, clear, cold, sweet, but August,

But August in St. Louis,

But August and the heat

That slows the green smell of the lawns

To tar, lyric

Of humidity

That thickens to a halt, but sweet, that swells

Up, that you escaped to dreams

From. In one,

Beauty and kindness combined

To walk across a room.

The daughter of Colonel Borders, Kitsy,

Means God has found a way, walks in through a door.

The universe begins at once.

The stars erupt a sky

They can be stars in, that they can be

Unicorns in a pen in.

The perfect knight in armor to slay the fiery dragon

Has sex with it instead.

I wake from the dream in the dark.

I barely see above

The steering wheel at twelve years old.

The park at night is warm.

The air is sweet and moist and cool.

 

The book of nothingness begins

At birth.

The pages turn and there

Is far.

There is far from where

They start.

The pages turn into

The book.

And everything and everyone and

What is happening

Is blood in urine.

Ask the trees

The leaves leave.

They are left.

They remove their wigs.

They turn themselves in.

They stand there blank.

The now falls

On the fields white.

The smell of wood smoke stares and

The no falls,

Radios

Of blank now

On the fields.

A black crow shakes the no off.

Merrily we

Go around circling

The drain, life is but a dream.

The doctors in their white

No

Fall

On the fields.

 

My Christmas is covered

With goosepimples in the cold.

Her arms are raised straight

Above her head.

She turns around slowly in nothing but a

Garter belt and stockings outdoors.

She has the powerful

Buttocks of a Percheron.

My beautiful with goosepimples

Climbs the ladder to the high diving board

In her high heels

And ideals.

The mirror of the swimming pool is looking up at her

Round breasts.

She bounces up and down

As if about to dive.

In her ideals, in her high heels,

The palm trees go up and down.

The mirror of the swimming pool is looking up at her

Bikini trim.

The heated swimming pool mirror is steaming

In the cold.

The Christmas tree is on.

A cigarette speedboat cuts the bay in two.

It rears up on its white wake.

Ay, Miami!

Ninety miles away

Is Mars.

The cigarette smokes fine cigars,

Rolls hundred-dollar bills into straws.

My Christmas

Is in his arms.

 

Cosmopolitans at the Paradise.

Heavenly Kelly's cosmopolitans make the sun rise.

They make the sun rise in my blood

Under the stars in my brow.

Tonight a perfect cosmopolitan sets sail for paradise.

Johnny's cosmopolitans start the countdown on the launch pad.

My Paradise is a diner. Nothing could be finer.

There was a lovely man in this town named Harry Diner.

Lighter than zero

Gravity, a rinse of lift, the cosmopolitan cocktail

They mix here at the Paradise is the best

In the United States—pink as a flamingo and life-announcing

As a leaping salmon. The space suit I will squeeze into arrives

In a martini glass,

Poured from a chilled silver shaker beaded with frost sweat.

Finally I go

Back to where the only place to go is far.

Ahab on the launch pad—I'm the roar

Wearing the wild blazer, black stripes and red,

And a yarmulke with a propeller on my missile head.

There she blows! Row harder, my hearties!—

My United Nations of liftoff!

I targeted the great white whale black hole.

On impact I burst into stars.

I am the caliph of paradise,

Hip-deep in a waterbed of wives.

I am the Ducati of desire,

144.1 horsepower at the rear wheel.

Nights and days, black stripes and red,

I orbit Sag Harbor and the big blue ball.

I pursue Moby-Dick to the end of the book.

I raise the pink flamingos to my lips and drink.

 

The woman in the boat you shiver with

The sky is coming through the window at.

We will see.

Keep rowing.

You have

An ocean all around.

You are rowing on bare ground.

The greasy grassless clay is dead calm.

You love your life.

You love the way you look.

You watch a woman posing for you.

How awful for you. There's no one there.

Inside the perfume bottle life is sweet.

The glass stopper above you is the stars.

You smell the flowers,

Some far-off shore.

The slaves are chained in rows rowing.

The motion back and forth

Is the same as making love.

You fuck infinity and that takes time.

It's a certain way of talking to arthritis

That isn't heart disease or trust.

You can't remember why

Your hands are bleeding back and forth.

The thing about a man is that—

Is what?

One hand reaches for the other.

The other has a knife in it to cut the head off.

The fish flops back and forth

In the bottom of the boat.

The woman pulls the boat along

By its painter that the king slash slave is rowing.

 

How small your part

Of the world is when

You are a girl.

The forests and deserts are full

Of the animals

We ride and eat

And the wind and the light

And the night,

But if you are

A girl you may

As well live in Boston

Or be a grain of white rice

Or be a fleck

Of mica in a sidewalk.

I wanted to have

A monocle and stick—

Put on my top hat,

And be a grain

Of radium,

And radiate a stadium with my act.

It's about holding

The wide-eyed bearded head of

Holofernes

Aloft. From the carrier deck

We climb to altitude

With an attitude, with

Our laser-guided bombs targeting

The white enormous whale.

We need the sperm oil to light

Our lamps, have to stop

The huge white life for whalebone stays to cage

Our corsets.

 

What did the vomit of a god

Smell like? Like no one else

And there were clouds of it

In the White House.

It was an impeachable

U.S. bald eagle

Because it was barking and sporting

In the moisture like a seal.

Tubby smooth

Energy tube of seal seeks tender veal

For the White House mess and in a zoo

It smells like that.

To be slick

And sleek and swim

And in yours have hers,

Her hand, her heart.

Once it was a god,

Now they toss it fish

And watch it leap

And make it beg.

They're looking

At TV and look

It doesn't look that bad.

The ones from outer space are landing now.

A seal went out to play

In the middle of an enormous bay

All the cities surrounded,

The size of the Dust Bowl, as brown,

And sang of a 21st century that was lyrical

About effluents and landfill,

And set the presidential seal

On doing something about race and ass.

 

I am presenting

Myself to

You for the punishment

I preserve.

Sometimes you seem to

Understand I am

Banished.

I am the emptiness of

Bandages

That wrap

The mummy. My heart

I preserve in a dish—

It is a dog collar on all fours.

Inside is the

Eloquence

Emptied out.

Your hand

Starts to thunder,

Starts to rain much

Harder.

You raised your hand

To touch my cheek.

You saw my eyes

Go berserk.

It is the terror.

It asks you

To make it more.

Don't fall

In love

With me and I won't either.

Don't stop when

I say stop.

 

You want

To change your name to be new

For the

Millennium so do.

The trumpet sounds

Your smile.

You soar just

Sitting still.

Flapping wings of a

Flamingo, clouds

Of my angina

Blossom darkly into dawn.

Sunset follows

While they play

The songs one wants

To hear. Your

Legs made of eleven

Kinds of heaven

Leap to

Where they want to go.

But I don't know

How long I have the

Future for.

In the jungle of

The body is the beating of the

Tom-tom.

Living dot com—

How many hits on your site?

If dance is what you do, the bar

Is where you go to

Work. If what you do is drink,

You also hit the heart.

 

I'm seeing someone and

I really want to,

But I

Am stuck in glue.

I would go anywhere

To be near

The sky above

And smell the iodine

Wine of the port of Algiers,

Or for that matter the freezing

Nights on the dunes

Of the Sahara are blood

That you can drink till dawn

Under the terror of

Stars to

Make you blind.

I am drinking gasoline

To stay awake

In the midst of so much

Murder.

My daughter squeaks and squeaks

Like a mouse screaming in a trap,

Dangling from the cat who makes her come

When he does it to her.

Her killer goes out into

The streets to join his brothers

In the revolution

Who don't have jobs.

The
plastic
packed beautifully

Inside a tampons box that I carefully leave in the loo

At Café Oasis goes rigid and the

Unveiled meet God.

 

The leopard attacks the trainer it

Loves, over and over, on every

Page, loves and devours the only one it allows to feed

It.

How lonely to be understood

And have to kill, how lovely.

It does make you want to starve. It makes an animal kill

All the caring-and-sharing in the cage.

Start with the trainer who keeps you alive

In another language,

The breasts of milk

That speak non-leopard. Slaughter them.

What lives below

The surface in a leopard will have to live above

In words. I go to sleep

And dream in meat and wake

In wonder,

And find the poems in

The milk

All over the page.

Lute strings of summer thunder, rats hurrying

Away, sunshine behind

Lightning on a shield of

Pain painting out happiness, equals life

That will have to be extinguished

To make way. The sound trucks getting out the vote

Drive the campaign song down every street.

Hitler is coming to Harlem.

Hitler is coming to Harlem!/There will be ethnic cleansing./

A muddy river of Brown Shirts/Will march to the Blacks.

Happiness will start to deface

Pain on the planet.

 

You wait forever till you can't wait any longer—

And then you're born.

Somebody is pointing something out.

You see what I'm saying, boy!

Can't find a single egg at his debutant

Easter egg hunt and has to be helped.

Jewish wears a little suit with a shirt with an Eton collar.

Blood cakes on the scratch on your little knee.

Excuse me a minute.

The angel is black as a crow.

The nurse comes back in the room.

It shakes the snow from its wings.

The waterfall hangs

Down panting in the humidity.

The roar at the top of the world

Is the icebergs melting in pain.

Don't play on the railroad tracks.

It is so hot.

The tracks click before you hear the train

Which the clicks mean is coming.

British consuls posted to St. Louis in those days

Before air-conditioning had to receive extra pay.

The congressman with a bad limp was bitter.