Poems 1959-2009 Read online

I don’t have to. I won’t. You can’t make me. I’m in an absolute rage.

  I walk on stage.

  The other ELVES are Gentry Shelton,

  Raymond Sunderman, Harry Monteith, Harry Mathews, Alex Netchvolodoff,

  James Hearne, Monroe Roberts III,

  Paul Chandeysson, John Neiger III.

  BEARS are Henry Pflager, Neil Horner, John Curtis, John Sutter, John Lewis,

  Jan Bosman, Norfleet Johnston, George von Schrader.

  BUNNIES: Teddy Simmons, Billy Crowell, Walter Shipley.

  BLUEBIRDS: Nat Green, Joe Larimore.

  ROBINS: Hord Hardin, August Busch III, Ralph Sansbury.

  DANDELIONS, VIOLETS, ROSES: Little girls in various poses.

  Titless teases and their diseases.

  Boys and girls in Pakistan,

  Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan,

  Are sweeter far than marzipan,

  And that includes the Taliban.

  Sunni and Shia fulfill God’s plan.

  Afghanistan, Iraq,

  Children on timers go tock-tick, tick-tock.

  A boy is instructed by his parents, who are not peasants.

  They pray with the child and give him compliments and presents.

  Their son is sweeter to them than honey.

  The parents receive martyr money.

  We are ten thousand miles from my childhood in St. Louis.

  St. Louis didn’t do this.

  St. Louis never knew this.

  I know it was you who vomited on the chintz, Seidel.

  You will never be invited to this house again, and just as well.

  My wife and myself wish you well.

  It will not end well.

  She will follow you to hell.

  The butler has gone to answer the front doorbell.

  We are gentlemen here. No one here is a Jew or a queer.

  I value sincerity. I know you are sincere.

  Warren Beatty told Mary Kirby he liked candor.

  Mary Kirby told Warren Beatty she gave good candor.

  I remember dirt roads for the horsemen and the maroon perfume of summer roses.

  Little girls grown up, and little boys, in various poses,

  My music shows ye have your closes,

  And all must die.

  La Cina è vicina. China is near.

  The butler returns to say the hearse is here. The ushers for the groom appear.

  I give a toast, so brief that I sit down before anyone knows

  I’ve given it, to no applause. God knows

  It’s odd to cry, with no one listening, my seagull cry.

  Children wonder why one has to die.

  It doesn’t mean gulls are really crying when they cry in the sky.

  Lamar can try to live forever. It’s a poem. Why not try?

  I flip a switch. The flowers wake with a shout. The trees immediately turn green.

  Night dives like a submarine

  As day breaks through the surface with its conning tower and power to preen.

  On all sides of Sag Harbor Village is water—my little darling Doha in the desert!

  Do you Doha? Do you knowa how to Doha?

  La Cina è vicina. It is time to say Aloha.

  SUNLIGHT

  There is always hope except when there isn’t—it is everywhere.

  The pigeons above Broadway fly left to right in their underwear.

  They skydive down to the sidewalk to sup.

  They land like paratroopers, standing up,

  Hauling in their parachutes of light.

  I look down on the trees from my superior height.

  I look down at the snapshot of a friend and I think,

  This man will be dead pretty soon, and I think,

  How weird that I’m thinking that.

  My mood has made the photograph’s brain waves flat.

  I don’t really mean that the way it sounds.

  I don’t really think he ought to die because he’s put on a few pounds.

  If you consent to life, as I do, condescendingly,

  It seems you get to fuck unendingly.

  The woman in my bed plays Mozart heartrendingly.

  I drank too much last night—as usual—mind-bendingly.

  The body on the bed is all eyes as I prepare to mount it.

  There’s the body’s usual hopefulness. The thing is to surmount it.

  I’m standing at the window, after, looking out and looking back,

  Looking past my floaters, my swimming specks of black.

  I’m shitting on the ledge outside, moaning in my awful way.

  I rap on the window to make myself fly away.

  The body on the bed gets up, smiling at the gorgeous day.

  The winter sunlight sparkles diamonds down on Broadway.

  IN A PREVIOUS LIFE

  The smell of rain about to fall,

  A sudden coolness in the air,

  Sweetness wider than the Mississippi at its muddy brownest.

  I didn’t steal his pencil, Mrs. Marshall, honest!

  It’s CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT … brought to you by OVALTINE!

  I travel backwards in a time machine

  And step inside a boy who’s four feet tall.

  How dare he have such curly hair!

  Now that’s a happy dog as boy and dog go rafting down the river!

  They have a message to deliver

  To the gold-toothed king.

  Sire, we have a message that we bring.

  Little boy, approach the throne.

  Ow! I hit my funny bone.

  The thing to do at night in the heat was drive to Peveley Dairy

  And park and watch the fountain changing colors.

  The child sat in the back, slurping the last drops of an ice cream soda,

  Sucking the straw in the empty glass as the noisy coda.

  Sometimes on Sunday they drove to the Green Parrot.

  There was the sideways-staring parrot to stare at.

  The chickens running around were delicious fried, but nothing was sanitary.

  BO was the scourge of the age—and polio—and bathroom odors.

  If you forgot to wash your hands,

  It contributed—as did your glands.

  His father always had gas for their cars from his royal rationing cards.

  The little boy went to see the king at one of the king’s coal yards.

  The two of them took a train trip to tour the dad’s wartime coal mine.

  It was fun. It was fine.

  The sweetness of the freshness of the breeze!

  The wind is wiggling the trees.

  The sky is black. The limousine 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.

  EVENING MAN

  The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me,

  The sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows.

  Both men believe in infidelity.

  Both wish they could annul their marriage vows.

  This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,

  Who does the things most people only dream about.

  He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.

  You can’t drink that much port and not have gout.

  In point of fact, it is arthritis.

  His drinking elbow aches, and he admits to this. />
  To be a candidate for higher office,

  You have to practice drastic openness.

  You have to practice looking like thin air

  When you become the way you do not want to be,

  An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair

  That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.

  Of course, the real vacation we will take is where we’re always headed.

  Presidents have Air Force One to fly them there.

  I run for office just to get my dark brown hair beheaded.

  I wake up on a slab, beheaded, in a White House somewhere.

  Evening Man sits signing bills in the Oval Office headless—

  Every poem I write starts or ends like this.

  His hands have been chopped off. He signs bills with the mess.

  The country is in good hands. It ends like this.

  MY POETRY

  I sat in my usual place with my back to the corner, at the precious corner table,

  Where everyone wanted to sit, to see and be seen.

  Even the celebretariat were not automatically able

  To sit at that particular table, never mind how desperately keen.

  I sat in my solitude, a songbird that can’t be bought.

  Look at my solitude, white meat deep in thought.

  This was the look of fat dressed slenderly by Savile Row,

  My tailor in those days being Huntsman, in those days long ago.

  But can Mr. Rilke be alone if there are always servants in the castle? Not really. No.

  In a minute, I would be visited by the restaurant owner, the superb madman Elio,

  Who’d been a Marxist once: “Shit, at the five other front tables tonight sit

  A billion dollars! And then there’s you. I just noticed it.”

  I sit at my regular table in a restaurant I favor,

  Napkin tucked into my collar, eating dirt and a stone,

  Stooped over in a La Tache stupor. I know it’s disgusting but I savor

  My African-American antipode with her hand out outside the window, my clone,

  Begging just outside on the sidewalk. I’ll buy her and take her home. We’ll eat dirt.

  We’ll grovel in the grass and bat our eyes and flirt.

  Look at this poem, a set of dingy teeth hailing a cab.

  Look at this poem, kissing the hand of that woman’s brown frown.

  I’m always ready to use my mouth, though my teeth may be drab.

  Lord Above—starless sky above the high-rise—here I am, look down.

  But first open your eyes. The cruel overseer is brutally whipping a slave

  While the slave yawns over an after-dinner poire. Don’t behave. Be brave.

  POEM BY THE BRIDGE AT TEN-SHIN

  This jungle poem is going to be my last.

  This space walk is.

  Racing in a cab through springtime Central Park,

  I kept my nose outside the window like a dog.

  The stars above my bed at night are vast.

  I think it is uncool to call young women Ms.

  My darling is a platform I see stars from in the dark,

  And all the dogs begin to bark.

  My grunting gun brings down her charging warthog,

  And she is frying on white water, clinging to a log,

  And all the foam and fevers shiver.

  And drink has made chopped liver of my liver!

  Between my legs it’s Baudelaire.

  He wrote about her Central Park of hair.

  I look for the minuterie as if I were in France,

  In darkness, in the downstairs entrance, looking for the light.

  I’m on a timer that will give me time

  To see the way and up the stairs before the lights go out.

  The so delicious Busby Berkeley dancers dance

  A movie musical extravaganza on the staircase with me every night.

  Such fun! We dance. We climb. We slip in slime.

  We’re squirting squeezes like a wedge of lime!

  It’s like a shout.

  It’s what minuterie is all about.

  Just getting to the landing through the dark

  That has been interrupted for a minute is a lark.

  And she’s so happy. It is grand!

  I put my mobile in her ampersand.

  The fireworks are a fleeting puff of sadness.

  The flowers when they reach the stars are tears.

  I don’t remember poems I write.

  I turn around and they are gone.

  I do remember poor King Richard Nixon’s madness.

  Pierre Leval, we loved those years!

  We knocked back shots of single malt all night.

  Beer chasers gave dos caballeros double vision, second sight—

  Twin putti pissing out the hotel window on the Scottish dawn.

  A crocodile has fallen for a fawn.

  I live flap copy for a children’s book.

  He wants to lick. He wants to look.

  A tiny goldfinch is his Cupid.

  Love of cuntry makes men stupid.

  It makes men miss Saddam Hussein!

  Democracy in Baghdad makes men think

  Monstrosity was not so bad.

  I followed Gandhi barefoot to

  Remind me there is something else till it began to rain.

  The hurricane undressing of democracy in Baghdad starts to sink

  The shrunken page size of The New York Times, and yet we had

  A newspaper that mattered once, and that is sad,

  But that was when it mattered. Do

  I matter? That is true.

  I don’t matter but I do. I lust for fame,

  And after never finding it I never was the same.

  I roared into the heavens and I soared,

  And landed where I started on a flexing diving board.

  I knew a beauty named Dawn Green.

  I used to wake at the crack of Dawn.

  I wish I were about to land on Plymouth Rock,

  And had a chance to do it all again but do it right.

  It was green dawn in pre-America. I mean

  Great scented forests all along the shore, which now are gone.

  I’ve had advantages in life and I pronounce Iraq “Irrock.”

  The right schools taught me how to tock.

  I’m tocking Turkey to the Kurds but with no end in sight.

  These peace tocks are my last. Goodbye, Iran. Iran, good night.

  They burned the undergrowth so they could see the game they hunt.

  That made the forest a cathedral clear as crystal like a cunt.

  Their arrows entered red meat in the glory

  Streaming down from the clerestory.

  Carine Rueff, I was obsessed—I was possessed! I liked your name.

  I liked the fact Marie Christine Carine Rue F was Jewish.

  It emphasized your elegance in Paris and in Florence.

  You were so blond in rue de l’Université!

  The dazzling daughter of de Gaulle’s adviser Jacques Rueff was game

  For anything. I’m lolling here in Mayfair under bluish

  Clouds above a bench in Mount Street Gardens, thinking torrents.

  Purdey used to make a gun for shooting elephants.

  One cannot be the way one was back then today.

  It went away.

  I go from Claridge’s to Brands Hatch racing circuit and come back

  To Claridge’s, and out and eat and drink and bed, and fade to black.

  The elephants were old enough to die but were aghast.

  The stars above this jungle poem are vast.

  To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.

  Outside the windows is New York.

  I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland

  Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.

  And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some

  I s
till remember when I lift my knife and fork.

  The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned

  Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.

  The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound

  That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.

  The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.

  They’re watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.

  The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.

  The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that’s missing.

  OOGA-BOOGA (2006)

  KILL POEM

  Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,

  And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.

  The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter

  Red melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so.

  One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer—what a show!—

  Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets.

  London once seemed the epitome of no regrets

  And the old excellence one used to know

  Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.

  We follow blindly, clad in coats of pink,

  A beast whose nature is to run and stink.

  I am civilized in my pink but

  Civilized is about having stuff.

  The red coats are called “pinks.” Too much is almost enough.

  No one knows why they are. I parade in the air

  With my stuff and watch the disappearing scut

  Of a deer. I am civilized but

  Civilized life is actually about too much.

  I parade in the air

  And wait for the New Year

  That then will, then will disappear.

  I am trying not to care.

  I am not able not to.

  A short erect tail

  Winks across the winter field.

  All will be revealed.

  I am in a winter field.

  They really are everywhere.

  They crawl around in one’s intimate hair.

  They spread disease and despair.

  They rape and pillage

  In the middle of Sag Harbor Village.

  They ferry Lyme disease.

  The hunters’ guns bring them to their knees.

  In Paris I used to call the Sri Lankan servants “Shrees.”

  I am not able not to.

  Winter, spring, Baghdad, fall,

  Venery is written all

  Over me like a rash,

  Hair and the gash,