Poems 1959-2009 (20 page)

Where Corrado was raised blazes with victory.

The charming young choir in the tiny church sings,

To the strumming of a guitar, that other glory story.

In her MV Agusta T-shirt, the reader reads aloud the lesson.

The roaring of a lion about to devour her

Is an MV 500cc GP racer getting revved up for the rally:

The caviar and flower of Grand Prix four-stroke power.

The champions have no idle, so not

To die they have to

Roar. They roar like the lions in the Colosseum.

They roar like a pride of bloodred hearts in the savannah.

Someone blips

The throttle of the three-cylinder

500, one kind of sound, then someone pushes into life

The four. Its bel canto throat catches fire.

The priest elevates the Host

And his bored theatrical eyes,

To melodramatize the text,

Roar.

It's like the Mass they hold in France

To bless the packs of hounds before a hunt.

The choir of hunting horns blares bloodcurdling fanfares

And lordly stags answer from all the forests around.

I stand in the infield with other connoisseurs near tears

Behind the bars of the gate to the track, smelling burning castor oil.

On the other side of the gate is the start/finish line,

And Monica Agusta standing with her back to me, close enough to touch.

 

Eternal life begins in June.

Her name is fill the name in.

My contubernalis, my tent mate,

My woman in the tent with me in Latin.

The next world is the one I'm in.

My June contubernium.

My tent mate through the whole campaign.

The June moon, burning pure champagne,

Starts foaming from its tail and rising.

One minute into launch and counting.

The afterlife lifts off like this.

The afterlife begins to blast.

The breathing of my sleeping dog

Inflates the moonlit room with silence.

The afterlife begins this way.

The universe began today.

The afterlife is here on earth.

It's what you're doing when you race

And enter each turn way too fast

And brake as late as possible always.

Of course the world does not exist.

A racebike raving down the straight

Explodes into another world,

Downshifts for the chicane, brakes hard,

And in the other world ignites

The flames of June that burn in hell.

My contubernalis, my tent mate.

My woman in the tent with me does octane.

Ducati racing red I ride,

Ride red instead of wrong or right.

The color red in hell looks cool.

In heaven it's for sex on sight.

 

In the middle

Of the field of vision

Is a hole that is

Surrounded by a woman.

The hole is life.

The ones who are

About to be born

Have no choice.

The hole is life.

The ones who are

About to be born

Have no choice.

In the middle

Of the field stood

The middle of the light

Which is love, a heart of light.

I got better.

I can remember taking

A streetcar.

It was June.

The name of the movie star was June

Allyson who was with me in my hospital room.

I bet the glorious wicked star Mae

West would.

June made Mae good.

Mae made June bad.

Is it bearable?

The situation is

No one ever gets well.

People can't

Even stand up.

They pay to cry.

 

Phineas is crossing the pont des Arts,

But he is doing it in New York.

He has made up the Phineas part.

That is not his name.

Nothing is.

Nothing is his.

He is living in Paris,

On Broadway.

Two minutes from his door

Is the pont des Arts arcing

Over the Seine.

Bateaux mouches like bugs of light

Slide by at night under his feet, fading away in English.

Shock waves vee against the quais.

Mesdames and gentlemen, soon we have Notre Dame.

The letter
P
is walking across the pont des Arts.

Back in New York,

Except he
is
in New York,

He is in Paris.

He strolls home to the rue de Seine, punches in the code and goes in.

The next morning the streets

Are bleeding under his feet.

They are cleaning themselves.

Apparently, they are not that young.

The trees are green.

In the jardin du Luxembourg he says her name.

He watches the children riding the donkeys on the red dirt.

An adult holds the halter and walks alongside.

One tree is vomiting and sobbing

Flowers.

The smell is powerful.

How quatorze July it is to be a donkey and child.

 

With Jeremy Chisholm at the Lobster Inn on our way to Sagaponack,

Eating out on the porch in the heat, flicking cigarettes into the inlet.

We ate from the sea and washed it down with Chablis,

Punctuated by our unfiltered Camels, in our eternal July.

Billy Hitchcock landed his helicopter at a busy gas station

In Southampton July 4th weekend, descended from the sky like a god

To buy a candy bar from the vending machine outside,

Unwrapped the candy bar and flew away, rotors beating.

Chisholm found a jeweler to paint his Tank Watch black.

It had been his father's, one of the first Cartier made.

The gold case in blackface was sacrilege.

Chisholm wore it like a wrist corsage.

In a helicopter that belonged to the Farkas family,

The carpet of cemeteries seemed endless choppering out to JFK.

So much death to overfly! It could take a lifetime.

They were running out of cemeteries to be dead in.

Hovering at fifteen feet,

Waiting for instructions on where to land,

Told to go elsewhere,

We heeled over and flew very low, at the altitude of a dream.

Bessie Cuevas had introduced me to this
fin de race
exquisite

Who roared around town in his souped-up Mini-Minor,

Who poured Irish whiskey on his Irish oatmeal for breakfast,

Who was as beautiful as the young Prince Yusupov

Who had used his wife as bait to kill Rasputin and, later in Paris,

Always in makeup, was a pal of the Marquis de Cuevas, Bessie's dad.

Yusupov dressed up a pet ape in chauffeur's livery

And drove down the Champs-Elysées with the ape behind the wheel.

WASPs can't get lung cancer smoking Camels,

Chisholm said, taking the usual long deep drag—look at cowboys!

That July they found a tumor

As big as the Ritz inoperably near his heart.

 

Sky-blue eyes,

A bolt of lightning drinking

Skyy vodka,

A demon not afraid of happiness,

Asks me about my love life here in hell.

I lunge at what I understand I belong to.

I flee, too.

It's her fate. It's too late.

I see the sky from a couch at the Carlyle.

Blond is dressed in black.

It all comes back.

The sky is black.

Thunder violently shakes

The thing it holds in its teeth

Until it snaps the neck

And rain pours down in release and relief,

Releasing paradise,

The smell of honeysuckle and of not afraid of happiness.

Lightning flashes once

To get the sky eyes used to it,

And then flashes again

To take the photograph.

The blackout startled her and started it.

Lightning flickers in Intensive Care.

I am speaking in Ecstatic.

The couch is floating on the carpet.

The waiter burns

From all the discharge and surge, and brings more drinks.

Coition is divine human

Rebirth and ruin having drinks in a monsoon,

In the upholstered gallery outside the bar, in the gold light.

The Prince of Darkness dipped in gold is God.

 

The woman is so refined.

The idea of refinement gets redefined.

Doing it with her is absurd.

Like feeding steak to a hummingbird.

Her hair colorist colored her hair gold

To give her a look. It made her look cold.

Her face suddenly seemed see-through like a breath

In a bonnet of gold and she was in a casket and it was death.

She looked more beautiful than life.

She said she wanted to be my wife.

She comes with a psychiatrist to maintain her.

She comes with a personal trainer.

The September trees are still green in Central Park

Until they turn black after dark.

The apartments in the buildings turn their lamps on.

And then the curtains are drawn.

One person on a low floor pulls the curtain back and stares out,

But pulls the curtain closed again when there's a shout,

Audible on Fifth Avenue, from inside the park.

Somewhere a dog begins to bark.

I climb into the casket of this New York night.

I climb into the casket of the curtained light.

I climb into the casket and the satin.

I climb into the casket to do that in.

Into her roaring arms, wings of a hummingbird,

A roar of wings without a word,

A woman looking up at me and me looking down

Into the casket at the town.

I see down there His Honor the Mayor

In St. Patrick's Cathedral, head bowed in prayer.

His friend—wings roaring—hovers beside him in the pew.

Death is all there is. Death will have to do.

 

Someone is wagging a finger in her face—
Charlotte!

Down here in hell we don't do that!

As if she were a child. Charlotte has arrived

To test the torture.

This is a test. This is only a test. Charlotte

Is yelling at Charlotte for a violation.

Charlotte, as a Human Rights Watch

Observer of sorts, has descended from heaven to an early fall.

Oh dear, is it really October?

Is Charlotte really nearly over?

She still says actress—most actresses today would call themselves

An actor. A star walks down upper Broadway being beautiful

With her famous eyes.
Hello from hell
,

She tells her cell phone.

She's ready to hand

Down the indictments and waves her wand.

The crimes sparkle in the moonlight.

Actually, it's rather wonderful to stalk

The Upper West Side midday,

Between the Hudson River and Central Park,

Looking for a self to put the handcuffs on.

It's lovely if there's been a human rights violation.

There's also cruelty to animals,

The child pornography of do-gooders.

The animal is strapped down for the vivisection, conscious,

Buying a book in Barnes & Noble, pursued by fans

Telling her they love her movies here in hell,

And would she do it to herself for them again.

A man comes to the tenth month of the year and calls it Charlotte—

I don't believe in anything, I do

Believe in you. You always play

A garter-belted corpse of someone young.

 

It is

A hole surrounded

By a voluptuous

Migraine.

It was a universe that could

Burst out

And start

Without a trace

Of where it came from.

The background radiation

Is what's

Left of

The outburst at the start.

The background radiation

Is the delicious

Migraine. The hole of life

Is about to

Start.

Don't make sense.

It is about to start again.

Umbrellas pop open.

Mushroom caps approach a newsstand.

The trees wear truth and rouge.

The trees start to sing

In the soft.

The old penis smells food

And salivates.

One hundred ninety horsepower at

The crank

Going two hundred miles an hour down the straight

Is another motorcycle death

From Viagra in October.

 

It is time to lose your life,

Even if it isn't over.

It is time to say goodbye and try to die.

It is October.

The mellow cello

Allée of trees is almost lost in sweetness and mist

When you take off your watch at sunrise

To lose your life.

You catch the plane.

You land again.

You arrive in the place.

You speak the language.

You will live in a new house,

Even if it is old.

You will live with a new wife,

Even if she is too young.

Your slender new husband will love you.

He will walk the dog in the cold.

He will cook a meal on the stove.

He will bring you your medications in bed.

Dawn at the city flower market downtown.

The vendors have just opened.

The flowers are so fresh.

The restaurants are there to decorate their tables.

Your husband rollerblades past, whizzing,

Making a whirring sound, winged like an angel—

But stops and spins around and skates back

To buy some cut flowers in the early morning frost.

I am buying them for you.