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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Night

  Store Windows

  The Yellow Cab

  Downtown

  Before Air-Conditioning

  Midterm Election Results, 2010

  Midwinter

  Snow

  Charlie

  Arnold Toynbee, Mac Bundy, Hercules Bellville

  Nice Weather

  London

  Dinner with Holly Andersen

  Baudelaire

  iPhoto

  A Friend of Mine

  Do Not Resuscitate

  Cimetière du Montparnasse, 12ème Division

  Rome

  A History of Modern Italy

  Mount Street Gardens

  Moto Poeta

  School Days

  Back Then

  Annunciation

  The Green Necklace

  Arabia

  Victory Parade

  Poems 1959–2009

  Arnaut Daniel

  The State of New York

  The Terrible Earthquake in Haiti

  La civilisation française

  At the Knick

  A Toast to Lorin Stein

  Rainy Day Kaboom

  Lisbon

  Then All the Empty Shall Be Full

  They Show You the Harp

  Istanbul

  Transport

  Oedipal Strivings

  News from the Muse

  Sweet Day, So Cool, So Calm, So Bright

  Cunnilingus

  Pointer in the Field

  Palm Sunday

  They’re There

  One Last Kick for Dick

  What Next

  Rain

  Egypt Angel

  Track Bike

  Also by Frederick Seidel

  Copyright

  TO KARL MILLER

  NIGHT

  The city sleeps with the lights on.

  The insomniac wants it to be morning.

  The quadruple amputee asks the night nurse what time it is.

  The woman is asking for her mother,

  But the mother is exhausted and asleep and long since dead.

  The nun screams to stop the charging rhino

  And sits bolt upright in bed

  Attached to a catheter.

  If a mole were afraid of the dark

  Underground, its home, afraid of the dark,

  And climbed out into the light of day, utterly blind,

  Destroying the lawn, it would probably be caught and shot,

  But not in the recovery room after a craniotomy.

  The prostitute suspects what her client might want her to do.

  Something is going on. Something is wrong.

  Meanwhile, the customer is frightened, too.

  The city sleeps with the lights on.

  The garbage trucks come in the night and make noise and are gone.

  Two angelfish swim around the room and out the window.

  Laundry suns on a line beneath white summer cumulus.

  Summer thunder bumbles in the distance.

  The prostitute—whose name is Dawn—

  Takes the man in her mouth and spits out blood,

  Rosy-fingered Dawn.

  STORE WINDOWS

  I smile in the mirror at my teeth—

  Which are their usual brown.

  My smile is wearing a wreath.

  I walk wreathed in brown around town.

  I smile and rarely frown.

  I find perfection in

  The passing store windows

  I glance at my reflection in.

  It’s citywide narcissism. Citizens steal a little peek, and what it shows

  Is that every ugly lightbulb in that one moment glows.

  A preposterous example: I’m getting an ultrasound

  Of my carotid artery,

  And the woman doing it, a tough transplanted Israeli, bends around

  And says huskily, “Don’t tell anybody

  I said that your carotid is extraordinary.”

  I’m so proud!

  It’s so ridiculous I have to laugh.

  The technician is very well endowed.

  I’m a collapsible top hat—a chapeau claque—that half

  The time struts around at Ascot but can be collapsed flat just like that. Baff!

  Till it pops back. Paff! Oh yes,

  I find myself superb

  When I undress.

  A lovely lightbulb is my suburb,

  And my flower, and my verb.

  The naked man, after climbing the steps out of the subway,

  Has moderate dyspnea, and is seventy-four.

  He was walking down the street in Milan one day.

  This was long ago. He began to snore.

  He saw a sleeping man reflected in the window of a store.

  THE YELLOW CAB

  Tree-lined side streets make me lonely.

  Many-windowed town houses make me sad.

  The nicest possible spring day, like today, only

  Ignites my inner suicide-bomber jihad.

  I’m high on the fumes of my smokin’ sunglasses,

  But my exhaust pipe has a leak, which smells bad.

  Take away my hack license. Open the windows. I’m passing gases.

  A driver of a medallion taxi has gone completely mad.

  Yellow cab, yellow cab, where have you been?

  I’ve been to the mirror to try to look in.

  Yellow cab, yellow cab, what found you there?

  Soft contact lenses on four wheels and a fare.

  The million leaves on the Central Park trees are popping

  Open the champagne.

  There’s too much joy. There’s no stopping.

  Love is on top, fucking pain.

  DOWNTOWN

  July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.

  It is beautiful that they have to disappear.

  It’s like the time you said I love you madly.

  That was an hour ago. It’s been a fervent year.

  I don’t really love fireworks, not really, the flavorful floating shroud

  In the nighttime sky above the river and the crowd.

  This time, because of the distance upriver perhaps, they’re not loud,

  Even the colors aren’t, the patterns getting pregnant and popping.

  They get bigger and louder when they start stopping.

  They try to rally

  At the finale.

  It’s the four-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery—

  Which is why the fireworks happen on this side of the island this year.

  Shad are back, and we celebrate the Hudson’s Clean Water Act recovery.

  What a joy to eat the unborn. We’re monsters, I fear. What monsters we’re.

  We’ll binge on shad roe next spring in the delicious few minutes it’s here.

  BEFORE AIR-CONDITIONING

  The sweetness of the freshness of the breeze!

  The wind is wiggling the trees.

  The sky is black. The trees deep green.

  The man mowing the enormous lawn before it rains makes goodness clean.

  It’s the smell of laundry on the line

  And the smell of the sea, brisk iodine,

  Nine hundred miles inland from the ocean, it’s that smell.

  It makes someone little who has a fever
feel almost well.

  It’s exactly what a sick person needs to eat.

  Maybe it’s coming from Illinois in the heat.

  Watch out for the crows, though.

  With them around, caw, caw, it’s going to snow.

  I think I’m still asleep. I hope I said my prayers before I died.

  I hear the milkman setting the clinking bottles down outside.

  MIDTERM ELECTION RESULTS, 2010

  My old buddy, my body!

  What happened to drive us apart?

  Think of our trips to Bologna.

  Think of our Ducati racebikes screaming.

  We drank hypersonic grappa.

  We got near the screaming Goyas.

  What’s blinding is Velázquez.

  We never left the Prado—

  And never saw Madrid!

  That’s what we did.

  We met for lunch at the Paris Ritz.

  We walked arm in arm

  Through Place Vendôme.

  Each put out a wrist

  To try on a watch at Patek Philippe.

  Unseparated Siamese twins,

  We had to have the same girlfriend

  And slept with her together.

  We hopped on the Concorde,

  Front cabin, seat 1.

  Oh not to be meek and ache

  And drop dead straining on the toilet seat.

  Everyone on the sidewalk walks faster—

  And didn’t you use to walk

  Springing up on the balls of your feet!

  A single-engine light airplane

  Snores in the slow blue dreamy afternoon.

  This is our breakup.

  We are down here falling apart.

  The ocean crashes and crashes.

  I put my arms around you—

  But it’s no good.

  I climb the stairs—

  It’s not the same.

  It’s a flameout and windmill restart!

  MIDWINTER

  Midwinter murder is in my heart

  As I stand there on the curb in my opera pumps,

  Waiting for the car to come and the opera to start,

  Amid the Broadway homeless frozen clumps.

  Patent leather makes my shoes

  Easter eggs by Fabergé.

  The shoes say New York is still run by the Jews,

  Who glitter when they walk, and aren’t going away.

  The morning after the Mozart, when I take my morning stroll, I feel

  Removed all over again from the freezing suffering I see.

  Someone has designed a beautiful, fully automatic, stainless steel,

  Recoilless assault shotgun down in Tennessee.

  The dogs tied up outside the Broadway stores

  In the cold look with such touching expectancy inside.

  A dog needs to adore. A dog adores.

  A dog waiting for an owner is hot with identity and pride.

  I’d like to meet the genius in Tennessee, or at least speak

  To the gun on the phone.

  I’d like to be both the dog owner and the dog. I’d leak

  Love after I’d shot myself to shit. I’d write myself a bone.

  SNOW

  Snow is what it does.

  It falls and it stays and it goes.

  It melts and it is here somewhere.

  We all will get there.

  CHARLIE

  IN MEMORY OF CHARLES P. SIFTON (1935–2009)

  I remember the judge in a particular

  Light brown chalk-stripe suit

  In which he looked like a boy,

  Half hayseed, half long face, half wild horse on the plains,

  Half the poet Boris Pasternak with a banjo pick,

  Plucking a twanging banjo and singing Pete Seeger labor songs.

  I remember a particular color of

  American hair,

  A kind of American original orange,

  Except it was rather red, the dark colors of fire,

  In a Tom Sawyer hairstyle,

  Which I guess means naturally

  Unjudicial and in a boyish

  Will Rogers waterfall

  Over the forehead,

  And then we both got bald …

  My Harvard roommate, part of my heart,

  The Honorable Charles Proctor Sifton of the Eastern District.

  Charlie,

  Harvard sweet-talked you and me into living in Claverly

  Sophomore year, where no one wanted to be.

  We were the elect, stars in our class selected

  To try to make this palace for losers respected.

  The privileged would light the working fireplaces of the rejected.

  Everyone called you Tony except me, and finally—

  After years—you told me you had put up with years of “Charlie”

  From me, but it had been hard!

  Yes, but when now

  I made an effort to call you Tony, it sounded so odd to you,

  You begged me to come back home. Your Honor,

  The women firefighters you ruled in favor of lift their hoses high,

  Lift their hoses high,

  Like elephants raising their trunks trumpeting.

  Flame will never be the same. Sifton, row the boat ashore.

  Then you’ll hear the trumpet blow.

  Hallelujah!

  Then you’ll hear the trumpet sound.

  Trumpet sound

  The world around.

  Flame will never be the same!

  Sifton, row the boat ashore.

  Tony and Charlie is walking through that door.

  ARNOLD TOYNBEE, MAC BUNDY, HERCULES BELLVILLE

  Seventy-two hours literally without sleep.

  Don’t ask.

  I found myself standing at the back

  Of Sanders Theatre

  For a lecture by Arnold Toynbee.

  Standing room only.

  Oxford had just published

  With great fanfare Volume X of his interminable

  Magnum opus, A Study of History.

  McGeorge Bundy, the dean of the faculty,

  Later JFK’s

  National Security Adviser, then LBJ’s, came out onstage

  To invite all those standing in the back

  To come up onstage and use

  The dozen rows of folding chairs already

  Set out for the Harvard Choral Society

  Performance the next day.

  Bundy was the extreme of Brahmin excellence.

  I floated up there in a trance.

  His penis was a frosted cocktail shaker pouring out a cocktail,

  But out came jellied napalm.

  The best and the brightest

  Drank the fairy tale.

  The Groton School and Skull and Bones plucked his lyre.

  Hercules Bellville died today.

  He apparently said to friends:

  “Tut, tut, no long faces now.”

  He got married on his deathbed,

  Having set one condition for the little ceremony: no hats.

  I knew I would lapse

  Into a coma in full view of the Harvard audience.

  I would struggle to stay awake

  And start to fall asleep.

  I would jerk awake in my chair

  And almost fall on the floor. I put Hercky

  In a poem of mine called “Fucking” thirty-one years ago, only

  I called him Pericles in my poem.

  At the end of “Fucking,” as he had in life,

  Hercules pulled out a sterling-silver-plated revolver

  At a dinner party in London,

  And pointed it at people, who smiled.

  I had fallen in love at first sight

  With a woman there I was about to meet.

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

  That was the poem.

  NICE WEATHER

  This is what it’s like at the end of the day.

  But soon th
e day will go away.

  Sunlight preoccupies the cross street.

  It and night soon will meet.

  Meanwhile, there is Central Park.

  Now the park is getting dark.

  LONDON

  The woman who’s dying is trying to lose her life.

  It’s a great adventure

  For everyone trying to help her.

  Actually, death avoids her, doesn’t want to hurt her.

  So to speak, opens her hand and gently takes away the knife

  Everyone well-meaning wants her to use on herself.

  There is no knife, of course.

  And she’s too weak.

  If you’re too ill, the clinic near Zurich that helps

  People leave this world won’t.

  If you’re that medicated and out of it and desperate,

  You may not be thinking right about wanting to end your life.

  If you’re near death, you may be too near

  For the clinic to help you over the barrier.

  She weakly screams she wants to die.

  Hard to believe her pain is beyond the reach of drugs.

  Please die. Please do. Her daughters don’t want her to die and do.

  The world of dew is a world of dew and yet

  What airline will fly someone this sick?

  They can afford a hospital plane but

  Can she still swallow? The famous barbiturate cocktail

  The clinic is licensed to administer isn’t the Fountain of Youth.

  But what if she gets there and drinks it and it only makes her ill?

  And she vomits? It’s unreal.

  DINNER WITH HOLLY ANDERSEN

  My fourteen books of poems

  Tie a tin can to my tail.

  You hear me fleeing myself.

  I won’t get away.

  I went to Washington, D.C.

  My agent hired a plane to tow the tail

  Through the restricted airspace

  Above the White House.

  The tin can makes a noise,

  As if I were in chains.

  RUNAWAY SLAVE

  VIOLATES AIRSPACE OVER NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM!

  Fighter jets

  From Andrews Air Force Base scramble

  To intercept my fourteen books

  And enter the East Wing

  Of the National Gallery and the astonishment

  Of the Vuillards,

  Banking hard to lock in on the happy

  Honking getaway convertible

  Dragging sparks and tin cans as it musically pulls away,