Poems 1959-2009 (35 page)

Though I still couldn't tell

Who she was, whose friend she was, if she was anyone's;

Whose girl, the one woman in the room.

The meaning of the enormous quiet split

Into men and woman around the motorcycle.

I thought of Sandy Moon,

Advancing toward me through the years to find me there,

Moving toward me through the years across the room

I'd rented, to hide and work,

Near Foley Square; where I wrote, and didn't write—

Through the sky-filled tall windows

Staring out for hours

At the State Supreme Court building with its steps

And columns, and the Federal Courthouse with its,

And that implacably unadorned low solid, the Department

Of Motor Vehicles. I'd leaf

Through one of my old motorcycle mags

And think of Sandy Moon—and here she was,

Naked and without a word walking slowly toward me.

Women have won. The theme is

Only for a cello, is the lurking glow

Pooled in the folds of a rich velvet, darkly phosphorescent.

Summer thunder rumbled over Brooklyn, a far-off sadness.

Naked power and a mane of glory

Shall inherit the earth. Outside the garage,

The engine caught and roared—time to go.

 

I wake because the phone is really ringing.

A singsong West Indian voice

In the dark, possibly a man's,

Blandly says, “Good morning, Mr. Seidel;

How are you feeling, God?”

And hangs up after my silence.

This is New York—

Some mornings five women call within a half hour.

In a restaurant, a woman I had just met, a Swede,

Three inches taller

Than I was among other things, and immensely

Impassive, cold,

Started to groan, very softly and husky voiced.

She said,

“You have utter control over me, and you know it.

I can't do anything about it.”

I had been asking her about her job.

One can spend a lifetime trying to believe

These things.

I think of A.,

Before she became Lady Q.,

Of her lovely voice, and her lovely name.

What an extraordinary new one she took

With her marriage vows,

Even as titles go, extra fictitious. And ah—

And years later, at her request, paying a call on the husband

To ask if I could take her out

Once more, once, m'lord, for auld lang syne. She still wanted

To run away;

And had,

Our snowed-in week in the Chelsea

Years before.

How had her plane managed to land?

How will my plane manage to land?

How wilt thy plane manage to land?

Our room went out sledding for hours

And only returned when we slept,

Finally, with it still snowing, near dawn.

I can remember her sex,

And how the clitoris was set.

Now on to London where the play resumes—

The scene when I call on the husband. But first,

In Francis Bacon's queer after-hours club,

Which one went to after

An Old Compton Street Wheeler's lunch,

A gentleman at the bar, while Francis was off pissing,

Looking straight at me, shouted

“Champagne for the Norm'!”

Meaning normal, heterosexual.

The place where I stayed,

The genteel crowded gloom of Jimmy's place,

Was England—coiled in the bars of an electric fire

In Edith Grove.

Piece by piece Jimmy sold off the Georgian silver.

Three pretty working girls were his lodgers.

Walking out in one direction, you were in

Brick and brown oppidan Fulham.

Walking a few steps the other way, you heard

Augustus John's many mistresses

Twittering in the local Finch's,

And a few steps further on, in the smart restaurants,

The young grandees who still said “gels.”

There was a man named Pericles Belleville,

There is a man named Pericles Belleville,

Half American.

At a very formal dinner party,

At which I met the woman I have loved the most

In my life, Belleville

Pulled out a sterling silver–plated revolver

And waved it around, pointing it at people, who smiled.

One didn't know if the thing could be fired.

That is the poem.

 

Caneton à la presse at the now extinct Café Chauveron.

Chauveron himself cooking, fussed

And approved

Behind Elaine, whose party it was;

Whose own restaurant would be famous soon.

Poised and hard, but dreaming and innocent—

Like the last Romanovs—spring buds at thirty, at thirty-two,

We were green as grapes,

A cluster of February birthdays,

All “Elaine's” regulars.

Donald, Elaine's then-partner,

His then-wife, a lovely girl; Johnny

Greco, Richardson, Elaine, my former wife, myself:

With one exception, born within a few days and years

Of one another.

Not too long before thirty had been old,

But we were young—still slender, with one exception,

Heads and necks delicate

As a sea horse,

Elegant and guileless

Above our English clothes

And Cartier watches, which ten years later shopgirls

And Bloomingdale's fairies would wear,

And the people who pronounce chic
chick
.

Chauveron cut

The wine-red meat off the carcasses.

His duck press was the only one in New York.

He stirred brandy into the blood

While we watched. Elaine said, “Why do we need anybody else?

We're the world.”

 

There was a man without ability.

He talked arrogance, secretly sick at heart.

Imagine law school with his terrible stutter!—

He gagged to be smooth. But it wasn't good.

Hadn't he always planned to move on to writing?

Which of course failed, how would it not? He called

Himself a writer but it didn't work,

He chose middling friends he could rise above

But it made no difference, with no ability.

He talked grand, the terrible endearing stutter.

Batting his eyes as if it felt lovely.

He batted and winced his self-hate, like near a sneeze.

He wrote and wrote, still he could not write,

He even published, but he could not write:

The stories one story of honey and abuse—

Love and the law—he was the boy … de Sade

Scratching his quill raw just once to get it off.

His pen leaked in
Redbook
the preseminal drool.

He must do something, do
something
. Boy you can

Reminisce forever about Harvard,

The motorboat won't run on your perfume,

Endless warm anecdotes about past girls

Aren't a wax your cross-country skis will ride on.

He took an office just like Norman Mailer.

He married a writer just like—yes exactly.

He shaved his beard off just like—et cetera.

It is a problem in America.

You never know who's dreaming about you.

They must do
something
to try to shift the weight

They wear—painted and smiling like gold the lead!

No wonder he walked staidly. They've time to dream.

Oh hypocrites in hell dying to catch up!

Oh in etterno faticoso manto!

And if you hail one and stop—he's coming—he'll stutter,

“Costui par vivo all'atto della gola,”

“This man seems alive, by the working of his throat.”

The dreaming envying third-rate writhe in America.

He sucked his pipe. He skied he fished he published.

He fucked his wife's friends. Touching himself he murmured

He was not fit to touch his wife's hem.

He dreamed of running away with his sister-in-law!

Of doing a screenplay. Him the guest on a talk show—

Wonderful—who has read and vilifies Freud!

How he'd have liked to put Freud in his place,

So really clever Freud was, but he was lies.

It was autumn. It rained.
His
lies drooped down.

It was a Year of the Pig in Vietnam,

In Vietnam our year the nth, the Nixonth,

Sometimes one wants to cut oneself in two

At the neck. The smell. The gore. To kill! There was

The child batting her head against the wall,

Beating back and forth like a gaffed fish.

There was the wife who suspected they were nothing.

There's the head face-up in the glabrous slop.

You feel for him, the man was miserable.

It's mad t-
tooh
be so ad hominem!

And
avid
, when the fellow was in Vermont,

For Southeast Asia. Was he miserable?

Another creative couple in Vermont,

The wife toasts the husband's trip to New York,

The little evening he's planning. In less than a day

He will enter my poem. He picks at her daube.

There's the head face-up in the glabrous slop.

Voilà donc quelqu'un de bien quelconque!

Ah Vermont! The artists aggregate,

A suburb of the Iowa Writers' Workshop

Except no blacks with no ability.

I am looking down at you, at you and yours,

Your stories and friends, your banal ludicrous dreams,

Dear boy, the horror, mouth uncreating,

Horror, horror, I hear it, head chopped off,

The stuttering head face-up in a pile of slop.

Just stay down there dear boy it is your home.

The unsharpened knives stuck to the wall

Magnet-bar dully. The rain let off the hush

Of a kettle that doesn't sing. Each leaf was touched,

Each leaf drooped down, a dry palm and thin wrist.

His beautifully battered sweet schoolboy satchel walked

With him out the door into scrutiny,

The ears for eyes of a bat on the wings of a dove.

Art won't forgive life, no more than life will.

 

Anything and everyone is life when two

Radios tune to the news on different stations while

A bass recorder pulses familiar sequences of sound waves,

An old sad sweet song, live. A computer

On stage listens to it all and does a printout

Of it in Fortran, after a microsecond lag, and adds its own

Noise. The printout piles up in folds

On the stage, in a not quite random way.

“Plaisir d'Amour” was the song.

Balls of cement shaped by a Vassar

Person, “majored in art at Vassar,”

Each must weigh a hundred pounds, fill a gallery.

They are enough alike to be perhaps

The look of what? The weight the person was

When she first was no longer a child—

Her planet lifeless after the Bomb—an anorexic image.

The hideous and ridiculous are obsessed

By the beautiful which they replace.

It is an age we may not survive.

The sciences know. We do believe in art

But ask the computer to hear and preserve our cry.

O computer, hear and preserve our cry.

Mortem mihi cur consciscerem

Causa non visa est, cur optarem multae causae.

Vetus est enim, “ubi non sis qui fueris,

Non esse cur velis vivere.” Or, in English:

We are no longer what we were.

 

A woman watches the sunrise in her martini,

And drinks—and drinks darkness.

She is in a dark room,

Tubes in her nostrils and arms.

She is in her childhood bed.

Suddenly she is awake. Orpheus,

A big person, is about to do

Something to a little.

Floating in darkness, connected

To tubes like a diver … Eurydice.

Her breath-bubbles rise. Backing out of her throat

One by one, the Valiums rise.

Sweets to the sweet, yellow pills for a princess—

Orpheus holds out a bouquet

Of yellow tulips like a torch,

And shines it on her, and stares down at her.

She drinks his syrup, drooling in her sleep.

She lisps in a happy little girl's voice:

“The man is bad—I hate him.

The little girl is bad. She loves him.”

 

I still lived, and sat there in the sun,

Too depressed to savor my melancholia.

I wore a cardboard crown. I held

A sceptre with a star on top.

I was on a hill, looking over at a mountain.

The sky was bald blue above.

Pine needles made

Something softer than a breast beneath the fits-all royal hose.

I was like an inmate of Charenton

Dully propped up on a throne outdoors, playing

“Fatigue of the Brave”—fatigue such as of a fireman holding

A still warm baby, waiting for the body bag.

Professional depression,

In an age of revolutionary fire

And having to grow up. This king did not wish to—

Still declined to be beheaded at forty-three.

But that I was depressed,

I had diagnosed the depression thus:

Ambivalence at a standstill—

Party-favor crown, real-life guillotine.

I still lived. I sat there in the sun:

Just water and salt conducting a weak current

Between the scent of pine and the foot smell

Of weeds reeking in the hot sun.

The children's party crown I wore

Dazzled my thinning hair like a halo.

The crown was crenellated like a castle wall.

A leper begged outside the wall.