Poems 1959-2009 (16 page)

Sharif-Imami, the loathed Shah

Loved. The fever breaks.

 

The yellow sunlight with

The milky moonlight makes

An egg without cholesterol

And I will live.

O tree of brains

And sound of leaves.

The day is green.

And now I pray.

I thank the cotton

For the shirt.

I thank the glass that holds me

In, that I see through into out there.

I'm driving to the car wash

And the dogs are getting haircuts

And the motorcycles drive by

And I ask for mine,

My body in your hands

To live.

The bay is blue

To me means that.

The saline breeze says that

The soft is firm enough today

To hold the water up

With gulls on top that won't

Sink in.

I don't know when.

I don't know how.

I don't know I.

I tell the cardiologist that

I'm in love.

The needle draws the champagne

Into crystal flutes the lab will love.

 

I describe you.

I have a chart to.

I hold your

Heart. I feel.

The motor

Of your life

Is not diseased or weak

Or real until

I stress it from the

Outside, how

You test anyone before you

Find them true.

Totally in

Your power,

The stethoscope

Puts its taproot to your chest, and flowers.

The miles of

Treadmill agnostically

Takes core samples.

The bolus which jump-starts us back to life is love.

The light leaps and is living

On the screen

As the mine-detector mechanism

Looks for mines.

Take a deep breath.

You stopped smoking cigarettes.

Breathe out through your mouth.

How many years ago.

We are made of years

That keep on living.

We are made of tears

That as your doctor I can't cry.

 

I enter the center.

I open the book of there.

I leave my clothes in a locker.

I gown myself and scrub in.

Anything is possible that I do.

Cutting a person open

Is possible without pain. An entourage rolls

In a murderous head of state with beautiful big breasts—

Who is already under and extremely nude

On the gurney. Her sheet has slipped off.

Her perfect head has been shaved

Bald. And now a target area

On the top of the skull will

Be painted magenta. Her body is rewrapped.

Her face gets sealed off. Her crimes against humanity

Will be lasered.

I am a Confederate scout, silence in the forest.

The all eyes and stillness

Of a bird watcher has stumbled on

A Yankee soldier asleep.

The dentist's drill drills a hole and

The drill slips and whines out of control,

But no matter. The electric saw cuts

Out a skullcap of bone.

The helicopter descends from Olympus to within an

Inch of touching down

On the wrinkled surface, when a tool falls incredibly

To the floor and I pick it up and am thanked.

The anesthesiologist for my benefit joyously

Declaims Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The surgeon recites a fervent favorite childhood hymn.

He slaps the monster tenderly to wake her up. Wake up, darling.

 

The pregnant woman stares out the spaceship window at space—

But is listening carefully.

The man is looking at the inward look on her face.

The man is answering her question while they leave the galaxy.

Why they are on this space voyage neither stranger quite knows.

There is something that

Someone watching them

Might feel almost shows,

But would not be able to say what.

She was describing the American child

She was, the athlete who played the violin,

Who grew up on Earth upstate.

He sees American thrust, the freckled ignition

Who vanished in a puff of smoke on stage—and the power and

Grandly pregnant happily married woman physician

There on stage when the smoke cleared. He looks at her left hand

And her bow hand. He sees the child lift the half-size violin

From its case, and take the bow,

And fit the violin to her shoulder and chin,

And begin to saw, sweetly, badly,

While she asks him what it is like to be him,

To be a space commander, revered.

He stares softly at her severed

Connection to him as she again looks inward

And very distantly smiles

While he tries to think what she is asking him and answer.

She is smartly dressed in black,

Blond midnight in the air-conditioned hot middle of summer.

She has smilingly said she is the only doctor in town on

Fridays in July, so she knows everything.

It is amazing what people actually do.

I am not possible to know.

 

Sagaponack swings the Atlantic around its head

Like an athlete in the windup for the hammer throw.

It is a hurricane and the radio

Predicts a tornado will follow.

The air violently

Smells fresh like nowhere else,

And I am just assuming it is

You calling to everyone lunch is ready.

We are heads bowed

At our place cards. Zeus is saying grace

When the chairs begin to shake and lightning outside

Shazams you back to life, tsunami

Light as a feather, the feather of life,

Very long legs,

Very short shorts, a chef's apron in front, so that from

Behind … Goddess,

You have returned to earth in a mood and

In a storm, and I have no doubt that

Irreplaceable trees on Sagg Main are davening

Themselves to the ground. They

Rend their clothes and tear their hair out out

Of joy. Chiquita, how can anyone be so

Angry who has died? The whirling light in

The drive is the police, here

To urge the last holdouts in houses near the

Ocean to leave. To help us

Decide, they suavely ask for the name of next of kin.

The ocean bursts into towering flames of foam.

The lobsters in the pot are screaming

Inside the reddening roar.

Your aproned ghost keeps boiling more, keeps boiling more,

And turns to serve the gore.

 

To start at End

And work back

To the mouth

Is the start—

Back to the black hole

That ate the meal,

Back from the universe

And the book

To the illiteracy

Of the much too

Compressed pre-universe

To release. So it was

The hands of fingers on

The keyboard bringing up on the screen

The something thirteen

Billion light-years back that happened,

The
Gentlemen, start your engines!

That made it start,

Which is the mouth

Of the music.

The uncontrollable

Is about to happen—

A gash in the nothingness invisibly

Appears.

The uncontrollable is about

To happen—the strings (of string theory)

Are trembling unseen ecstatically

Before they even are touched by the bow.

It all happened so fast.

The fall weather was vast.

At either end of spacetime the armies massed.

Youth was past.

 

Infinity was one of many

In a writhing pot of spaghetti.

One among many

Intestines of time.

The

Trembling the size and color

Of boiled lobster coral

Was trying

More violently than anything

Could and still live. The

Subatomic particles

Were

The truth. One of them became

The universe at once

While the others fled.

And one—

Not our universe—

Became something else.

Don't think about it

And you won't.

The landmass of the continental

United States compared to an open

Manhole

On the bitter boulevard where citizens buy crack

Is how much bigger the human brain is

Than the entire universe was at the start,

When it was the prickle

Before the zit.

Godspeed, John Glenn.

Fly safely high

In your seventy-seven-year-old

Head thirteen billion years old.

 

A woman waits on a distant star she is traveling to.

She waits for herself to arrive.

But first she has to embark.

3, 2, 1 … ignition.

All systems are go for the facelift.

Her face lifts off into space.

She heads for the distant star

And the young woman waiting for her there.

A man who wanted to look better

But not younger is red

Swells of raw.

Later they will remove the staples.

Ten weeks later

They are younger.

They pull over

Their head a sock of skin.

One day the girl sees in the mirror a girl

Laughing so hard her face falls off in her hands.

You can see the inside of the face.

The front of her head is an amputee's smooth stump.

Her old woman's body is a bag of spotted slop.

The gentleman at least is doing fine.

His face peeks through the shower curtains

Of his previous face.

In the tomb air

Of the spacecraft they get more perfumed

As they painstakingly near

The hot banks of the Nile, so green and fertile.

Heart is safe in a dish of preservative.

Face is a box for the telemetry for the journey.

Perishable slaves caravan the monumental blocks of stone to the site.

The faceless likeness deafens the desert.

 

What's Joel

Got to do but let the jewel

Hatch

The light and hook

It to the flesh

It will outlast

And point the staring

Woman at a mirror?

The stone alone was fireworks

But is Star Wars in his choker.

Of course Joel wears no jewelry himself but

Makes it for these reasons rhyme.

The staring woman is starving and

Eating her own face and

Stares with a raving smile

At her undying love.

The things they

Have to have

Are his

Designs on them.

The richest in the world stick out their necks

And hands and ears for JAR's gems—

Which they can ride through the eye of a needle

To heaven. His genius is his

Joy, is JAR, is

Agonized obsession, is death is double-parked

Outside the palace. Death is loading in the van

The women and camels of King Solomon it is repossessing.

Joel has designed a watch

In platinum.

This watch is the sequel

To anyone you have ever lost.

 

I had a question about the universe

On my way to my evening class,

Stuck between stations on the No. 3 Express,

And it was this.

You don't know what you mean

And that's what I mean.

God is playing peekaboo,

Not There behind the hands.

Then peekaboo and you

See face-to-face and bam.

I'm getting old.

I hid and I revealed myself.

All the way down to the wharf

All the way down to the wharf

All the way down to the wharf

He-wolf and she-wolf went walking.

Shut up, darling! I'll do the talking.

All the way down to the wharf

All the way down to the wharf

The stalker was stalking.

The talker was talking.

You want to talk

Until I droop.

The river runs by

Under the broken pier.

All the great ocean liners left for France from here,

Whose passengers are

Now ghosts mostly. Loup and Louve howl

To Neptune from their heaving gale-force stateroom—

Walk through drought, walk through dew,

Keep walking down the avenue,

For richer for poorer, for better for worse, malgré tout.

 

Sunset rolls out the red carpet

For Charlotte as she walks

To her appointment with life

In the awed soft-focus.

Charlotte sees the crimson trees

With her famous eyes.

Fat rises to the surface of the street in sunset flames.

The magnolias are vomiting brightness

In the mist. Spring in its mania refuses

To take its medication. It

Buys every newspaper left on the newsstand, then

Sobs in a café, sobs with laughter.

A car at a light rocks from side to side with the

Windows down, letting in red, letting out rhythm—

A pounding pulse of rap from the exophthalmic car radio.

She would give anything to be able to

Sleep in a shower of this fragrance.

She is talking on her fear

Phone to anyone in her mind. She is

Saying in a red city

I am alive at sunset.

Charlotte is beautiful but

Charlotte is so beautiful it is

Insolence.

A fan

Asks for her autograph outside a restaurant.