Poems 1959-2009 (25 page)

My penis is full of blood for you

Probably won't win her hand.

But you bet

Susanna the movie has to pull in the Elders.

She has designs.

She was designed to. She is audience response questionnaire–designed to

Get them to feast their eyes.

They're sitting in the dark and certainly

They're in the dark about

The lights will go on and the vile will be caught by a questionnaire.

Jungle covers an island in the South China Sea.

The interior is the first step in.

Perpetual summer sleeps with sixteen kinds of snakes.

My penis is full of love for you starred

In a road movie with Dorothy Lamour and

The beautiful bay

Used to be a breeding ground for sharks

Where we're swimming now. The head

Of the British fleet, here for the joint

Naval exercises, told me he remembered it well, charming man.

The Steadicam glides everywhere,

Holding its head in the air like a King Cobra.

The ecology

Of the island is fragile, but the second airport will never be built.

This isn't Acapulco 1949 about to Big Bang.

You step into the jungle and it's thick.

You step into the warm water and it's thin.

But nothing jiggles the Steadicam.

The poisonous viper is authorized to use deadly force

Only on the jungle path to the waterfall above the golf course.

Someone has seen a ten-foot lizard

Near the set. Someone was seen feeding a monkey

Bananas. The set itself is a subset of itself,

A jungle set in the jungle.

Islam is aerosolized into the atmosphere,

Coating the jungle scenes with time.

St. Agatha is the martyr whose breasts got hacked off,

But in the movie they don't.

The breasts that don't get removed

Anticipate the replenishing monsoon.

God is everywhere you're not,

And you are everywhere. I wish I knew your name.

Congestion in the brain is cleared

By the tropical haze which mists the coconut palms

And by the horrible heat of heaven. Oddly sudden

Mountains rise right out of the sea, jungle-clad. Hairy

Angels are friendly, but not too friendly.

Palm trees can mean Palm Beach,

But where the monkeys are semi-tame

We are semi-saved.

I never sleep on planes, but woke

Belted in, seat upright, table stowed,

To the roar of the reverse thrust,

Semi-saved. I undressed into the ocean

Surrounded by security and businessmen talking into cellular phones.

The jungle is within. The jungle also comes down

To the heavenly warm water lapping the sand.

The jungle is the start and the jungle is the end.

The jungle is behind. The jungle is ahead.

Ahead of me is heaven.

 

The attitude of green to blue is love.

And so the day just floats itself away.

The stench of green, the drench of green, above

The ripples of sweet swimming in a bay

Of just-mowed green, intoxicates the house.

The meadow goddess squeaking like a mouse

Is stoned, inhales the grass, adores the sky.

The nostrils feed the gods until the eye

Can almost see the perfume pour the blue.

A Botticelli ladled from a well,

Your life is anything you want it to—

And loves you more than it can show or tell.

 

When civilization was European,

I knew every beautiful woman

In the Grand Hôtel et de Milan,

Which the Milanese called “The Millin,”

Where Verdi died, two blocks from La Scala,

And lived in every one of them

Twenty-some years ago while a motorcycle was being made

For me by the MV Agusta

Racing Department in Cascina Costa,

The best mechanics in the world

Moonlighting for me after racing hours.

One of the “Millin” women raced cars, a raving beauty.

She owned two Morandis, had met Montale.

She recited verses from the Koran

Over champagne in the salon and was only eighteen

And was too good to be true.

She smilingly recited Leopardi in Hebrew.

The most elegant thing in life is an Italian Jew.

The most astonishing thing in life to be is an Italian Jew.

It helps if you can be from Milan, too.

She knew every
tirade
in Racine

And was only eighteen.

They thought she was making a scene

When she started declaiming Racine.

Thunderbolts in the bar.

With the burning smell of Auschwitz in my ear.

With the gas hissing from the ceiling.

Racine raved on racing tires at the limit of adhesion.

With the gas hissing from the showers.

I remember the glamorous etching on the postcard

The hotel continued to reprint from the original 1942 plate.

The fantasy hotel and street

Had the haughty perfect ease of haute couture,

Chanel in stone. A tiny tailored doorman

Stood as in an architectural drawing in front of the façade and streamlined

Cars passed by.

The cars looked as if they had their headlights on in the rain,

In the suave, grave

Milanese sunshine.

 

This is Via Gesù.

Stone without a tree.

This is the good life.

Puritan elegance.

Severe but plentiful.

Big breasts in a business suit.

Between Via Monte Napoleone and Via della Spiga.

I draw

The bowstring of Cupid's bow,

Too powerful for anything but love to pull.

Oh the sudden green gardens glimpsed through gates and the stark

Deliciously expensive shops.

I let the pocket knives at Lorenzi,

Each a priceless jewel,

Gods of blades and hinges,

Make me late for a fitting at Caraceni.

Oh Milan, I feel myself being pulled back

To the past and released.

I hiss like an arrow

Through the air,

On my way from here to there.

I am a man I used to know.

I am the arrow and the bow.

I am a reincarnation, but

I give birth to the man

I grew out of.

I follow him down a street

Into a restaurant I don't remember

And sit and eat.

A Ducati 916 stabs through the blur.

Massimo Tamburini designed this miracle

Which ought to be in the Museum of Modern Art.

The Stradivarius

Of motorcycles lights up Via Borgospesso

As it flashes by, dumbfoundingly small.

Donatello by way of Brancusi, smoothed simplicity.

One hundred sixty-four miles an hour.

The Ducati 916 is a nightingale.

It sings to me more sweetly than Cole Porter.

Slender as a girl, aerodynamically clean.

Sudden as a shark.

The president of Cagiva Motorcycles,

Mr. Claudio Castiglioni, lifts off in his helicopter

From his ecologically sound factory by a lake.

Cagiva in Varese owns Ducati in Bologna,

Where he lands.

His instructions are Confucian:

Don't stint.

Combine a far-seeing industrialist.

With an Islamic fundamentalist.

With an Italian premier who doesn't take bribes.

With a pharmaceuticals CEO who loves to spread disease.

Put them on a 916.

And you get Fred Seidel.

 

Umber, somber, brick Bologna.

They could use some Miami Jews

In this city of sensible shoes.

In the city of Morandi,

The painter of the silence

Of groups of empty bottles,

Arcades of demure

Men dressed in brown pneumonia

Look for women in the fog.

Bare, thick, spare, pure,

Umber, somber, brick Bologna.

This year's fashion color is manure,

According to the windows

Of fogged-in manikins

In Piazza Cavour.

Reeking of allure,

Arcades of demure

Young women dressed in odorless brown pneumonia

Give off clouds of smoke,

Dry ice in the fog.

Bare, thick, spare, pure:

Shaved heads reading books flick

Their cigarettes away and cover their mouths with their scarfs,

Leaned against the radical Medical School,

Punks with stethoscopes, horoscopes.

They listen to the heart with the heart,

Students in the medieval streets.

Their tangerine fingernails heal

The Emergency Room in gloves

Till dawn, and still come out eager to Day-Glo Bologna.

The tangerine tirelessly sheds disposable latex

Gloves until the day glows.

Emergency path lighting

On the airplane floor has led me to the exits

Through the cold and the fog.

Follow the tangerine path through the dark and the smoke.

Beneath the unisex jeans

Is cunnus soft as shatoosh.

The Communist mayor who underwrites the Morandi Museum

Takes a right-wing industrialist through the silence.

And the Ducati motorcycle factory

In Via Cavalieri Ducati breathes to life

Another piece of sculpture that goes fast.

Art and engineering meet and make

A brain wave

Of beauty suitable to ride.

The advice of my physician

Is, turn sixty.

I limit lovemaking to one position,

Mounted on a Ducati, monoposto:

Equivalent to warm sand as white as snow,

And skin as brown as brandy,

And swimming in the blue of faraway.

A well-dressed man is lying on a bed

With Leopardi in his arms.

The fog outside the window is Bologna.

He does the dead man's float

Next to the sleek hull of the sloop
A Pretty Girl
,

Stuck in a sheet of glue

Which extends for a hundred miles

Without a sip of wind,

Under a sky.

The blue is infinite.

He can see three miles down.

He free-floats in glass in his body temperature.

He does not know yet that he has dived in

Forgetting to let the ladder down,

And he does not know

He cannot climb back up.

There are no handholds.

The sloping sides are smooth.

The deck too high.

She heads for the horizon under full sail

In his flash hallucination. You never

Leave no one onboard,

But he does not know yet what has happened since

A Pretty Girl
is not going anywhere.

The sailboat pond in Central Park

Is where a boy's days were a breeze.

He does the dead man's float

Next to the motionless boat,

But in art there is no hope.

Art is dope.

The fog glows,

Tangerine toward sundown.

The Communist mayor who is said

To be tough but fair

Is waiting.

Take me, silence.

 

Red

As a Ducati 916, I'm crazed, I speed,

I blaze, I bleed,

I sight-read

A Bach Invention.

I'm at the redline.

When I speak you hear

The exhaust note of a privateer.

I see an audience of applause.

Pairs of hands in rows.

Palestinian and Jew.

And black and brown and yellow and red.

Wedding rings wearing watches

Pound lifelines into foam.

Fate lines. Date lines. Date palms. Politics. Foam.

The air blurs with the clapping.

The sidewalks sizzle with mica.

The colors tremble and vibrate.

The colors in the garden start to shake apart

While the applause swells.

The four walls of the world pump,

Pump their chemicals.

When I give my lectures,

The tachometer reads at the redline.

When I speak you hear

The exhaust note of a privateer.

The flutter in my chest is extra heartbeats,

My ectopy.

And Rabin is calling Arafat.

And Arafat, Rabin.

The touch-tone beeps are rising

To the sky like the bubbles in champagne.

The chemo is killing the white cells.

The white cells are killing the red cells.

They'll have to kill me first.

They'll find me

Flying on the floor.

 

The most beautiful motorcycle ever made

Was just made.

I ride to Syria

To Assad on one.

A hundred and sixty-four miles an hour

On the 916

Makes a sound,

My friend, makes a sound.

I seek the most beautiful terror.

Massimo Tamburini designed it.

I ride to Syria

To President Assad on one.

Hafez al-Assad, a hundred and sixty-four miles an hour

On the Ducati 916

Makes a sound,

My friend, makes a certain sound.

A group that calls itself

The Other Woman,

In southern Lebanon, apparently with money

From Iran, is assembling the bomb.

It's red,

Flying through the desert

Toward the border with Israel,

As I approach my sixtieth birthday.

The school bus entering the outskirts

Of Jerusalem is full.

The motorcycle

Is screaming, God is great.

The kangaroo effect

Is boing-boing-boing as the white light bounds away,

Leaving in their blood the burning curls

Of Jewish boys and girls.