Poems 1959-2009 (23 page)

In evening clothes, London.

Spotting the other divinity

In the room, twenty-year-old Tallulah Bankhead standing on her head,

Her dress down over her head,

No underpants, no face,

Too lovely, her whole life ahead of her—

Time for a Coward mot.

Hair slick, svelte in black and white, in tails,

Coward sublimely drawls,

Ah, Tallulah—

Always standing there with her mouth hanging open.

 

I fly to Paris with the English language

To write a script set in Tahiti.

This will be translated into French for the cast

By a son of the Hollywood blacklist.

The wife of the Hollywood blacklist son has cancer,

Only it will turn out she doesn't.

The Cajun singer on a CD

The movie director plays for me

We meet with an hour later

Outside in the light at La Palette.

We discuss a score,

A young Rimbaud good ole boy.

His week of concerts has sold out.

He brings the bayou to the Seine.

The overloaded sound system howls.

Testing, un, deux, trois.

With kids, has cancer,

Only doesn't.

Down in the bayou,

They hunt in the middle of the night with flashlights.

The spotted Catahoula hound, pink as a pig,

With the strangest voice you ever heard,

Trees the trembling prey

Without a word.

 

The lagoon of the biggest atoll in the world,

So wide across you can't see the other shore,

Is soft as dew.

Water is love

In Rangiroa.

Fish move away from you without fear,

Like buffalo on the plains before they disappeared.

The boat far above you on the surface waits,

The pale hull,

The motor as gonads.

You haven't come here only for the shark show.

Their fixed smiles glide.

Their blank eyes go along for the ride.

They bury their face in life explosively,

And shake their head back and forth to tear some off.

Every day a guide sets out a bait

So anyone with the wish can swim with the sharks,

And circle the meat,

And feel close to the teeth.

Sharks swim in the love.

 

People in their love affairs.

People in their loneliness.

People in their beds alone.

People in each other's arms.

I woke up this morning.

I went to sleep last night.

I woke up this morning.

I went to sleep last night.

The beauty of Tahiti.

That lagoon in Huahiné.

Manta rays were mating.

One on top the other.

Venus, with Chinese eyes,

On the motu at Maupiti.

I wish I was a head of state.

I'd wave away my bodyguards.

I'd never been unhappy.

Now, I would never be.

A
force de frappe
is Gaston Flosse.

Tahitians always call him Gaston.

Gaston did this. Gaston said that.

Nobody better mess with Gaston!

The president of French Polynesia,

Gaston Flosse, has flown in to Paris.

Their Kingfish, their Huey Long,

Is very close to Jacques Chirac.

They're strolling down the rue de Seine.

Chirac is France's president.

 

Three unrelated establishments named Caraceni in Milan

On streets not far apart make custom suits for men.

They are the best,

Autistically isolated in the pure,

Some might say in the pure

Pursuit of gracefully clothing manure.

Superb, discreet, threading their way to God,

The suits curve with beauty and precision,

Perfection on the order of Huntsman in Savile Row

And their jacket cutter, Mr. Hall.

The attitude to take to shoes is there is Lobb.

The one in Paris, not the one in London.

No one has surpassed

The late George Cleverley's lasts,

The angle in of the heel, the slightly squared-off toe, the line,

Though Suire at Lobb is getting there.

His shoes fit like paradise by the third pair.

Like they were Eve. The well-dressed man,

The vein of gold that seems inexhaustible,

Is a sunstream of urine on its way to the toilet bowl.

A rich American sadist had handcuffs made at Hermès

To torture with beauty the duchesse d'Uzès.

A cow looking at the understated elegance would know

Simplicity as calm as this was art.

A briefcase from Hermès

Is ravishing and stark.

Flawless leather luxury made for horses out of cows

Is what the horsy cows grazing daily in the Faubourg St-Honoré store

Want to buy. Tour group cows in a feeding frenzy

Devour everything like locusts.

There are travelers who prefer the British Concorde to the French

For the interior in beige and gray.

Hermès has created a carry-on in water buffalo

For them called the Gallop.

Their seat is in the first cabin.

Three kinds of Caraceni suits chose the aisle.

The most underrated pleasure in the world is the takeoff

Of the Concorde and putting off the crash

Of the world's most beautiful old supersonic plane, with no survivors,

In an explosion of champagne.

 

He moves carefully away from the extremely small pieces

Of human beings spread around for miles, still in his leather seat.

He looks like a hunchback walking in the Concorde chair,

Bent over, strapped in, eyes on the ground

To avoid stepping on the soft.

He will use his influence to get

The cockpit voice recorder when it is recovered copied.

He loves the pilot in the last ninety seconds'

Matter-of-factness turning into weeping screams,

Undead in the double-breasted red velvet smoking jacket Huntsman made.

 

Another muse appeared, but dressed in black,

Which turned to skin the minute the light was out.

He had become a front without a back.

Arousal was a desert with a spout.

A string of women like a string of fish

Kept dangling in the water to keep them alive.

Washed down with Lynch-Bages to assuage the anguish

Of eating red meat during a muff dive.

One woman, then another, then another.

Drops of dew dropped into a flat green ocean.

They leaked purity and freshness, and mother.

The glass eye of each dewdrop magnified his lack of emotion.

You get a visa and some shots and buy

Provisions for the Amazon and fly

Instead to Africa and tell them I

Will always be your friend and then you try.

He was too busy musing to unchain them,

The women on a string inside the slave pen.

Feminists in nylons in his brain stem.

Escaped slaves recaptured. They crave men.

Women with shaved legs. Women in bondage.

Come out of the closet in their leg irons.

Hooded and gagged and garter-belted Lynch-Bages.

He hears the distant screaming of the sirens.

He lifts his glass. He bows. Testosterone,

The aviation fuel that gives him wings,

Drinks to the gods. His kamikaze starts its flight from his zone

For her zone. Redlined, on full honk, he sings.

 

The Red Guards of love rhythmically stomp their feet

In the stands as their leaders denounce themselves and beg to be retrained.

Venus is dancing a tango called
Banco!
(as in baccarat).

She's wearing donkey's ears. She's wearing an amazing necklace

Of fetus heads.

The Guards rove through the modern cities,

Stoning to death the busts they don't like in the libraries.

The hypnotic suit of rights very slowly struts.

 

Hart Crane wrote
The Bridge
—

The Great American Hart Attack stampedes

Rush hour to a standstill in every stanza.

The John Philip Sousa outburst of trombones,

And fireworks powdering the summer night,

Are very American Charles Ives. Nowadays,

When an earring in one ear makes a pioneer,

Gender Studies find
Tender Buttons

Is all about the sacred body

Of the rhino and author, Miss Stein,

And parts of her companion, Miss Toklas.

Leonard Bernstein pounces on the piano

To illustrate the point literally with his dick.

Now, Robert Frost is different.

Someone saw Frost

Whipping a tree. I would like to strip

You and whip you till I see Stars and Bars,

O big American Beauty.

 

A daughter loved her father so much

She accused him of sexual abuse.

But I am getting ahead of my story.

Ten years after

He had simply been being a good father

She made the charge.

But I am ruining it.

Not that the man was ever told.

And when the accused is not even advised

He has been accused,

And is therefore deprived of a chance to defend himself, society—

Shit! the teleprompter stopped—

Which camera is on?

So it goes these days

With the help of radical feminist therapy

Redressing so many obvious wrongs.

Also because the specialists

Advise against confronting the incestuous rapist

Who may of course have done nothing and be innocent,

But who if he has will deny it to the grave.

One slightly feels he must have done something for the charge

In the first place to have been made.

Muse, put your breast in my mouth

If you want me to sing.

(Fuck the muse.)

Sunlight yellow as a canary.

Perfume from the garden made the room tropical.

The maid in her uniform struggles to draw the heavy curtains.

Darkness in spasms spreads as she tugs.

Light covers the hot and humid girl on the bed

And then is yanked away

By the maid. The last light the maid sees slants across

The girl's eyes and nose like a blindfold.

One of the eyes is green as an emerald.

The fourteen-year-old nose is classical.

The eyes are open in the darkness.

Darkness shrink-wraps her

And where her hands are.

The maid leaves the room adjusting herself.

Please,

The girl says to her father, Please

Let me go to Harvard, Daddy.

They are on a cruise.

The water the white ship cuts through is flowers.

The tube they lean their elbows on is warm.

The sky is black. The stars are out.

White birds fly overhead in the middle of the ocean.

Bam bam

Men are shooting skeet on a higher deck.

Her mother is up there shooting.

The girl is in the stateroom with her father

Who is panting as if he were

Having a heart attack while she undresses.

She can't stop herself.

They are doing it.

The maid comes in the room without knocking.

It is time to wake the princess from her nap.

She pulls the curtains back

And finds the girl

Standing naked on a chair.

She has a noose around

Her neck attached to nothing,

Which is a metaphor for love.

If you really love your father that much,

The maid says an hour later

To the naked girl in her arms,

I will have to do something.

It happens that

The girl's mother is off at Canyon Ranch,

Best of the Fat Farms, getting in shape.

She has been there already a week,

And the king is extremely interested when he is told

One of the women in the palace

Is obsessed with His Highness.

Oh, really, how old?

Oh, young, about your daughter's age.

The girl walks into her dream

Late that night when the maid arrives to take her

To her father.

A bird throbbily coos in the warm darkness outside.

The night air smells so sweet.

She immediately trips and knows perfectly well

What that means, but can't, won't, not.

The maid is sexually excited.

The virgin is in a delirium.

It's the familiar fear-of-heights terror

Of being irresistibly drawn

To the edge. You fall

From the other side of the edge toward the street

To get to Mars.

She feels the moisture of desire.

The man is fast asleep after a lot of drinking

So when the maid says, This is the one,

In the dark room he at first grabs the maid

Who redirects his hands and he is immediately

Inside the girl.

For the next two nights the maid

Stands outside in the corridor perspiring,

With her eyes tightly shut, clenching and unclenching her fists.

The father has hidden a flashlight next to his penis in the darkness

In the bed so he can see

Who it is the next night,

When it dawns on him he can simply turn the light on.

He does and tries to kill her,

But she is too fast.

The next thing he hears she is in Sagaponack.

She backtracks to Islip and flies

Out West and keeps going to Hawaii and Bali and on.

She sees the Komodo dragons twenty feet long