Poems 1959-2009 Read online

  Also by Frederick Seidel

  EVENING MAN

  OOGA-BOOGA

  THE COSMOS TRILOGY

  BARBADOS

  AREA CODE 212

  LIFE ON EARTH

  THE COSMOS POEMS

  GOING FAST

  MY TOKYO

  THESE DAYS

  POEMS, 1959–1979

  SUNRISE

  FINAL SOLUTIONS

  POEMS

  1959–2009

  Frederick Seidel

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2009 by Frederick Seidel

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 2009

  Evening Man originally appeared as a limited-edition chapbook.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Seidel, Frederick, 1936–

  [Poems. Selections]

  Poems 1959–2009 / Frederick Seidel.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-12655-1 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-374-12655-0 (alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3569.E5 P64 2009

  811’.54—dc22

  2008047161

  Designed by Peter A. Andersen

  www.fsgbooks.com

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  Copyright Notice

  EVENING MAN (2008)

  Boys

  American

  In the Mirror

  Portia Dew

  A Song for Cole Porter

  “Sii romantico, Seidel, tanto per cambiare”

  Bipolar November

  Miami in the Arctic Circle

  Coconut

  Marriage

  Ode to Spring

  Home

  I Own Nothing

  I’m Here This

  Italy

  Mr. Delicious

  Mu’allaqa

  Darkening in the Dark

  The Death of Anton Webern

  Weirdly Warm Day in January

  Pain Management

  Do You Doha?

  Sunlight

  In a Previous Life

  Evening Man

  My Poetry

  Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin

  OOGA-BOOGA (2006)

  Kill Poem

  From Nijinsky’s Diary

  Violin

  Nectar

  On Being Debonair

  Homage to Pessoa

  For Holly Andersen

  Fog

  A Red Flower

  Dick and Fred

  New Year’s Day, 2004

  The Italian Girl

  The Big Golconda Diamond

  What Are Movies For?

  The Owl You Heard

  E-mail from an Owl

  White Butterflies

  The Castle in the Mountains

  A Fresh Stick of Chewing Gum

  Dante’s Beatrice

  Bologna

  Racer

  At a Factory in Italy

  France for Boys

  Grandson Born Dead

  Death

  East Hampton Airport

  A White Tiger

  Cloclo

  Laudatio

  To Die For

  Barbados

  Climbing Everest

  Organized Religion

  Mother Nature

  Broadway Melody

  Love Song

  Breast Cancer

  Rilke

  Casanova Getting Older

  Il Duce

  I Am Siam

  The Big Jet

  The Black-Eyed Virgins

  Eurostar

  Song: “The Swollen River Overthrows Its Banks”

  Drinking in the Daytime

  The Bush Administration

  The Death of the Shah

  THE COSMOS TRILOGY (2003)

  The Cosmos Poems (2000)

  1. Into the Emptiness

  2. Mirror Full of Stars

  3. Who the Universe Is

  4. Universes

  5. Black Stovepipe Hat

  6. The Childhood Sunlight

  7. Beyond the Event Horizon

  8. Blue and Pink

  9. Galaxies

  10. Feminists in Space

  11. This New Planetarium

  12. Invisible Dark Matter

  13. A Twittering Ball

  14. The Star

  15. Special Relativity

  16. Take Me to Infinity

  17. Poem

  18. Supersymmetry

  19. Everything

  20. Happiness

  21. The Eleven Dimensions

  22. The Royal Palm

  23. Faint Galaxy

  24. Edward Witten

  25. The Birth of the Universe

  26. Starlight

  27. Quantum Mechanics

  28. It Is the Morning of the Universe

  29. Forever

  30. Forever

  31. Forever

  32. The Last Remaining Angel

  33. In the Green Mountains

  Life on Earth (2001)

  34. Bali

  35. French Polynesia

  36. The Opposite of a Dark Dungeon

  37. Star Bright

  38. Goodness

  39. Joan of Arc

  40. Doctor Love

  41. Fever

  42. Blood

  43. Holly Andersen

  44. At New York Hospital

  45. Drinks at the Carlyle

  46. Chiquita Gregory

  47. To Start at End

  48. We Have Ignition

  49. Eternity

  50. The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal

  51. In Spite of Everything

  52. Springtime

  53. Summer

  54. Fall Snowfall

  55. Christmas

  56. Cosmopolitans at the Paradise

  57. Sex

  58. Song

  59. The Seal

  60. Her Song

  61. Green Dress, 1999

  62. Letter to the Editors of Vogue

  63. James Baldwin in Paris

  64. St. Louis, Missouri

  65. Hamlet

  66. Frederick Seidel

  Area Code 212 (2002)

  67. I Do

  68. The Bathroom Door

  69. Downtown

  70. The Serpent

  71. Getaway

  72. Nothing Will

  73. pH

  74. Venus

  75. Nigra Sum

  76. Rain in Hell

  77. Dido with Dildo

  78. January

  79. February

  80. In Cap Ferrat

  81. March

  82. Easter

  83. April

  84. May

  85. Venus Wants Jesus

  86. MV Agusta Rally, Cascina Costa, Italy

  87. June

  88. June Allyson and Mae West

  89. July

  90. Hugh Jeremy Chisholm

  91. August

  92. September

  93. The Tenth Month

  94. Fall

  95. October

  96. November

  97. God Exploding

  98. The Wa
r of the Worlds

  99. December

  100. One Hundred

  GOING FAST (1998)

  For a New Planetarium

  Midnight

  Prayer

  The Night Sky

  Stars

  The Stars Above the Empty Quarter

  Contents Under Pressure

  New York

  At Gracie Mansion

  The Pierre Hotel, New York, 1946

  Hotel Carlyle, New York

  Das Kapital

  Christmas

  Mood Indigo

  Noon

  Spring

  Dune Road, Southampton

  London

  In Memoriam

  The Great Depression

  Paris & Tahiti

  The Ballad of La Palette

  Anyone with the Wish

  The Resumption of Nuclear Testing in the South Pacific

  Faster

  A Gallop to Farewell

  A Vampire in the Age of AIDS

  Another Muse

  Red Guards of Love

  Yankee Doodle

  Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 298–518

  Heart Art

  Spin

  Puberty

  The Infinite

  True Story

  Hot Night, Lightning

  The Storm

  Little Song

  Eisenhower Years

  Victory

  Vermont

  Milan

  Racine

  Milan

  Bologna

  A Pretty Girl

  Going Fast

  Going Fast

  MY TOKYO (1993)

  To the Muse

  From a High Floor

  The Hour

  Hair in a Net

  Rackets

  The Complete Works of Anton Webern

  The Ritz, Paris

  Untitled

  Glory

  The Empress Rialto

  Lorraine Motel, Memphis

  The New Woman

  The Former Governor of California

  Life After Death

  Sonnet

  Burkina Faso

  Pol Pot

  Stroke

  Chartres

  Autumn

  The Lighting of the Candles

  The Lover

  The

  The Death of Meta Burden in an Avalanche

  The Second Coming

  My Tokyo

  Recessional

  THESE DAYS (1989)

  Scotland

  Flame

  Our Gods

  Empire

  The New Cosmology

  A Row of Federal Houses

  That Fall

  A Dimpled Cloud

  The Blue-Eyed Doe

  On Wings of Song

  Morphine

  Elms

  The Final Hour

  Jane Canfield (1897–1984)

  The Little White Dog

  AIDS Days

  Gethsemane

  Stanzas

  Early Sunday Morning in the Cher

  The Last Poem in the Book

  SUNRISE (1980)

  1968

  Death Valley

  The Trip

  The Room and the Cloud

  The Soul Mate

  Sunrise

  “Not to Be Born Is Obviously Best of All”

  To Robert Lowell and Osip Mandelstam

  Finals

  Men and Woman

  Fucking

  Pressed Duck

  What One Must Contend With

  Homage to Cicero

  Descent into the Underworld

  A Beautiful Day Outside

  Years Have Passed

  The Girl in the Mirror

  Fever

  Erato

  De Sade

  The New Frontier

  November 24, 1963

  Freedom Bombs for Vietnam (1967)

  Robert Kennedy

  The Drill

  Hamlet

  The Future

  Wanting to Live in Harlem

  The Last Entries in Mayakovsky’s Notebook

  Hart Crane Near the End

  FINAL SOLUTIONS (1963)

  Wanting to Live in Harlem

  A Widower

  The Coalman

  A Negro Judge

  The Heart Attack

  Dayley Island

  Thanksgiving Day

  A Year Abroad

  “The Beast Is in Chains”

  Spring

  Americans in Rome

  The Walk There

  To My Friend Anne Hutchinson

  After the Party

  The Sickness

  Index of Titles

  Index of First Lines

  EVENING MAN (2008)

  BOYS

  Sixty years after, I can see their smiles,

  White with Negro teeth, and big with good,

  When one or the other brought my father’s Cadillac out

  For us at the Gatesworth Garage.

  RG and MC were the godhead,

  The older brothers I dreamed I had.

  I didn’t notice they were colored,

  Because older boys capable of being kind

  To a younger boy are God.

  It is absolutely odd

  To be able to be with God.

  I can almost see their faces, but can’t quite.

  I remember how blazingly graceful they were,

  And that they offered to get me a girl so I could meet God.

  I have an early memory of a black chauffeur,

  Out of his livery,

  Hosing down a long black Packard sedan, sobbing.

  Did it happen? It took place

  In Portland Place.

  I remember the pink-soled gum boots

  That went with the fellow’s very pink gums

  And very white teeth, while he washed

  The Packard’s whitewalls white

  And let them dry, sobbing,

  Painting on liquid white with an applicator afterward.

  Later that afternoon he resumed his chauffeur costume,

  A darky clad in black under the staring sun.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died.

  On the other hand, Ronny Banks was light-skinned.

  He worked as a carhop at Medart’s drive-in.

  He was well-spoken, gently friendly.

  He was giving a party, but I didn’t go.

  I actually drove there, but something told me no.

  I suddenly thought he was probably a homo.

  I drank my face off, age fifteen.

  I hit the bars

  In the colored section to hear jazz.

  I raved around the city in my father’s cars,

  A straight razor who, wherever he kissed, left scars.

  I was violently heterosexual and bad.

  I used every bit of energy I had.

  Where, I wonder, is Ronny Banks now?

  I remember a young man, whose name I have forgotten,

  Who was exceedingly neat,

  Always wearing a white shirt,

  Always standing there jet-black in our living room.

  How had this been allowed to happen?

  Who doesn’t hate a goody-goody young Christian?

  My father and uncle underwrote the boy’s education.

  He was the orphaned son of a minister.

  He sang in the church choir.

  He was exemplary, an exemplar.

  But justice was far away, very far.

  Justice was really an ashtray to display

  The lynched carcass of a stubbed-out cigar,

  Part brown, part black, part stink, part ash.

  When I was a little boy,

  My father had beautiful manners,

  A perfect haughty gentleman,

  Impeccable with everyone.

  In labor relations with the various unions,

  For example, he apparently had no peer.

  It was not so much that he w
as generous,

  I gather, but rather that he was fair.

  So it was a jolt, a jolt of joy,

  To hear him cut the shit

  And call a black man Boy.

  The white-haired old Negro was a shoeshine boy.

  One of the sovereign experiences of my life was my joy

  Hearing my father in a fury call the man Boy.

  Ronny Banks, faggot prince, where are you now?

  RG and MC, are you already under headstones

  That will finally reveal your full

  Names, whatever they were?

  RG, the younger brother, was my hero who was my friend.

  I remember our playing

  Catch in the rain for hours on a rainy weekend.

  It is a question

  Of when, not a question of whether,

  The glory of the Lord shall be revealed

  And all flesh shall cease together.

  A black woman came up to my father.

  All the colored people in this city know who you are.

  God sent you to us. Thank God for your daddy, boy.

  AMERICAN

  My face had been sliced off

  And lay there on the ground like a washcloth

  With my testicles and penis

  Next to it.

  The car had Wyoming plates.

  I’d been to Colorado but not Wyoming,

  Which I gather is beautiful.

  The other one I hadn’t seen was Utah.

  Someone had carefully cut under it and lifted it off,

  I suppose to obliterate the identity,

  Except had left it out in the open.

  It looked like a latex glove but also someone’s face.

  She told me she had always loved me.

  I was the happy ending of a fairy tale.

  She would recognize my penis anywhere,

  Even on the ground.

  IN THE MIRROR

  I’m back at Claridge’s, room 427,

  And in the mirror find a bit of heaven.

  It isn’t plastic surgery that makes

  Me look like you—two heartless dashing rakes!

  You’re me, not you—you’re me but modified

  To look like you and in the throes of. Why’d

  I ever think that we were ocean waves?

  We’re stingrays winging through the warmth with raves

  From every mermaid who reviews us. Hush!

  There’s someone coming! Hamlet talking lush

  Escape routes to the upper world. The ray,

  Whose stinger walks behind, doth kneel and pray.

  Art deco Claridge’s is Fred Astaire’s

  Lighthearted bee sting love affairs. She cares!

  The stinger sticking out from Baudelaire’s

  Check trousers is a poem that despairs.

  His pain is palpable. It can’t be pain,

  This gentle sound of sweetly London rain.

  I wouldn’t dream of plastic surgery

  Unless it somehow helped the poetry.

  Prince Hamlet’s dressed in flowing black. The black