Poems 1959-2009 (9 page)

Immortal date-stamped Fred Astaire!

 

East Hampton Airport is my shepherd.

It was smaller when I took lessons.

The shepherd's crook has high-tech runway lights now.

The shack became a terminal.

The private jets drop by to sleep.

I stand in the afternoon in the open field across the road.

The light planes come in low.

The dog doesn't even look up.

Their wings wave around frantically

Through the valley of the shadow of death.

They touch down calmly and taxi to a stop.

East Hampton Airport is my harbor.

I shall not want.

The harbormaster maketh me to lie down

In green pastures he has paved over.

He leadeth me beside the runway's still waters.

He keeps me in the air so I can land.

I stand in the open field on the far side of Wainscott Road

And watch the summer, autumn, winter sky.

It was my idea to take up flying,

To die doing something safer than motorcycling.

I went up with my instructor not to learn, just to fly.

I stand in the field opposite the airport.

I watch the planes flying in and the planes flying out.

My proud Irish terrier takes pills for his cardiomyopathy.

Before we bark our last,

Our hearts enlarge and burst.

George Plimpton went to bed

And woke up dead.

I write this poem thinking of the painter David Salle

Who wants to make a movie

About the poet Frank O'Hara.

A beach taxi on Fire Island hit Frank and he burst, roll credits.

I remember flying back from Montauk.

I was flying the plane.

The instructor asked me, “Notice anything?”

Yes. The plane was absolutely stuck—

Speechless—ecstatically still.

The headwinds were holding us in place in space.

We were flying, but not moving, visibility forever.

The ocean was down there waving.

The engine purred contentment.

I am flying, but not moving.

I stand in a field and stare at the air.

 

The golden light is white.

It is the color of moonlight in the middle of the night

If you suddenly wake and you are a child

In the forest and the wild

Animals all around you are sleeping.

You are in your bed and you are weeping

For no reason.

It is because it is tiger season.

The big-game hunters' guns are banging.

The corpse of a real beauty is hanging

From a tree in the darkness, waiting.

Of
course
, the Palestinians and the Jews are exaggerating!

The building is not a million stories high.

The moonlight is not going to die.

The Israelis and the Palestinians are by no means exaggerating.

The carcass is hanging from the darkness, waiting.

The building is a million human stories high.

The moonlight is going to die.

In the corners of your little room,

The large-bore guns go
boom boom
.

The tigers are field dressed where they fall, who used to roar.

The stomach and lungs are removed with the gore.

Tiger incisors get sold at the store.

Tiger canines ground into powder get sold at the store.

Tiger heart will also restore.

The tigers will end up a tiger skin on the floor.

Especially a rare white tiger is not safe anywhere anymore.

One escaped from the cage when they opened the door.

Rest in fierce peace, Edward, on the far shore.

 

The golden person curled up on my doormat,

Using her mink coat as a blanket,

Blondly asleep, a smile on her face, was my houseguest

The Goat who couldn't get her set of keys to work, so blithely

Bedded down to wait in the apartment outside hall.

A natural animal elegance physically

Released a winged ethereal exuberance,

Pulling g's, then weightlessness, the charm of the divine,

Luxuriously asleep in front of the front door like a dog.

Dear polymorphous goddess who past sixty

Could still instantly climb a tree,

But couldn't get the metal key

To turn in any residence

In London or New York or Calabria or Greece or Florence.

Always climbing anything (why

Someone had dubbed her the Goat when she was young),

Climbing everywhere in a conversation,

Up the Nile, up the World Trade Center Twin Towers,

Upbeat, up late, up at dawn, up for anything,

Up the ladder to the bells.

A goat saint lived ravishingly on a rock,

Surrounded by light, dressed in a simple frock,

The last great puritan aesthete

In the Cyclades.

She painted away

Above the Greek blue sea.

She chatted away

Beneath the Greek blue sky.

Every year returned to London.

So European. So Jamesian.

Every year went back

To Florence, her first home.

To the thirty-foot-high stone room in Bellosguardo.

To paint in the pearl light the stone gave off.

Ten generations after Leonardo had painted on the same property.

She worked hard as a nun

On her nude landscapes of the south,

With their occasional patio or dovecote and even green bits,

But never people or doves, basking in the sun.

Believed only in art.

Believed in tête-à-têtes.

Believed in walks to the top of the hill.

Knew all the simple people, and was loved.

It comes through the telephone

From Florence when I call that she has died quietly a minute ago,

Like a tear falling in a field of snow,

Climbing up the ladder to the bells out of Alzheimer's total whiteout,

Heavenly Clotilde Peploe called by us all Cloclo.

 

A young aristocrat and Jew and German

The rise of Hitler sent to school in London.

St. Paul's School made a man a gentleman.

The gentleman grew up to be a boy.

The boy came to America to become a dashing OSS officer.

The boy slipped into Germany to meet the schoolboys plotting to kill Hitler.

The boy became a not bad postwar racecar driver.

The boy became a heterosexual clothes designer.

A Jewish boy donned the uniform of an SS officer,

Cross-dressing across Deathland in the final months of the war,

Urbane inside his skull-and-crossbones attire—

The first John Weitz fashion show, my dear!

When Weitz wanted to obliterate his SS tattoo,

He burned it off with a cigarette just like the real SS.

The underground network he would infiltrate had removed theirs.

A mysterious beautiful woman was involved. It gets better.

There is the story of how he needed publicity

For his fashion line and couldn't spend much money.

No one had thought of putting advertisements on the back

Of New York City buses back then.

Weitz wrote koans for the age of Warhol.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND JOHN WEITZ ADVERTISING

Went rolling down Fifth Avenue behind a bus.

He looked like a distinguished diplomat when he ate a wurst.

Weitz had the lofty friendliness of a duke.

He was full of goy.

He was not discreet.

He admired the great.

He could operate on automatic pilot

With his beautiful manners.

He had unreal good looks.

He used his mellifluous voice.

John Weitz belonged to clubs, loved boats,

Told lovely anecdotes, bad jokes, wrote cordial biographies

Of colorless Third Reich personalities.

He loved honors and he loved glory.

He kept the Iron Cross

Of his father from the First World War framed on the wall.

He denied that he was dying.

He never sighed until the moment after he died.

 

The ants on the kitchen counter stampede toward ecstasy.

The finger chases them down while the herd runs this way and that way.

They are alive while they are alive in their little way.

They burst through their little ant outfits, which tear apart rather easily.

The little black specks were shipped to Brazil in ships.

The Portuguese whipped the little black specks to bits.

The sugar plantations on the horrible tropical coast where the soil was rich

Were a most productive ant Auschwitz.

The sugar bowl on the counter is a D-cup, containing one large white breast.

The breast in the bowl is covered by excited specks

That are so beyond, and running around, they are wrecks.

They like things that are sweet. That's what they like to eat.

The day outside is blue and good.

God is in the neighborhood.

The nearby ocean puts liquid lure in each trap in the set of six,

Paving the way to the new world with salt and sweet.

They sell them at the hardware store on Main Street.

Inside each trap is a tray that gives them a little to eat

And sends them back.

There is light in Africa, and it is black.

I was looking for something to try for.

I was looking for someone to cry for.

I was looking for something to die for.

There isn't.

 

Literally the most expensive hotel in the world

Is the smell of rain about to fall.

It does the opposite, a grove of lemon trees.

I
isn't anything.

It is the hooks of rain

Hovering with their sweets inches off the ground.

I
is the spiders marching through the air.

The lines dangle the bait

The ground will bite.

Your wife is as white as vinegar, pure aristo privilege.

The excellent smell of rain before it falls overpowers

The last aristocrats on earth before the asteroid.

I sense your disdain, darling.

I share it.

The most expensive hotel in the world

Is the slave ship unloading Africans on the moon.

They wear the opposite of space suits floating off the dock

To a sugar mill on a hilltop.

They float into the machinery.

The machine inside the windmill isn't vegetarian.

A “lopper” lops off a limb caught

In the rollers and the machine never has to stop.

A black arm turns into brown sugar,

And the screaming rest of the slave keeps the other.

His African screams can't be heard above the roar.

A spaceship near the end of a voyage was becalmed.

Two astronauts floated weightlessly off the deck

Overboard into the equator in their chains and
splash
and drowned.

A cane toad came up to them.

They'd never seen anything so remarkable.

Now they could see the field was full of them.

Suddenly the field is filled with ancestors.

The hippopotamuses became friendly with the villagers.

Along came white hunters who shot the friendly hippos dead.

If they had known that friendship would end like that,

They never would have entered into it.

Suddenly the field is filled with souls.

The field of sugarcane is filled with hippopotamus cane toads.

They always complained

Our xylophones were too loud.

The Crocodile King is dead.

The world has no end.

The crocodile explodes out of the water and screams at the crowd

That one of them has stolen his mobile phone.

On the banks of the muddy Waddo,
ooga-booga!

What about a Christmas tree in a steamy lobby on the Gulf of Guinea!

Because in Africa there are Africans

And they are Africans and are in charge.

Even obstipation

Can't stop a mighty nation.

The tragic magic makes lightning.

Some of the young captives are unspeakable

In their beauty, and their urine makes lightning, black and gold.

The heat is so hot

It will boil you in a pot.

Diarrhea in a condom is the outcome.

The former president completely loses it and screams from the stage

That someone fucking stole his fucking phone.

The audience of party faithful is terrified and giggles.

This was their man who brought the crime rate down

By executing everyone.

The crocodile staged a coup

And ended up in prison himself

And then became the president.

He stood for quality of life and clitorectomy.

But in his second term, in order to secure those international loans,

The crocodile changed his spots to free speech.

Lightning sentences them at birth to life without parole

With no time off for good behavior.

At that point in the voyage the ocean turns deeper.

People actually suffered severe optical damage from the blinding effects

Of the white roads in full sunlight.

It is the island roads so white you can't see,

Made of crushed limestone snow.

It is the tropical rain the color of grapefruit

Hovering in the figure of the goddess Niscah

Above the tile roof of the plantation house.

She dangles her baited lines.

It is the black of the orchids in a vase.

The goddess overpowers the uprising

And
I
is the first one hacked to pieces.

The asteroid is coming to the local cinema.

It is a moonlit night with the smell of rain in the air.

Thump thump
, speed bump.

The most expensive hotel in the world ignites

As many orgasms as there are virgins in paradise.