Selected Poems (23 page)

me and my opera ain’t his taste.

Got all of Callas’s
CD
s

to comfort me through this disease.

It’s Puccini next when Pa sends more,

and he got off at the 7th floor …

There’s someone wanting to be Mayor

haranguing winos in the square,

under Verdi’s statue who presides

over crack-heads, crooks and suicides.

Verdi with his vision blurred

by birdshit stares from 73rd

down at Dante at the Met

where Verdi helps some to forget.

But when they leave or enter there

there’s no avoiding Dante’s stare,

nor what’s beneath his constant gaze

and stays there, while the opera plays,

and pizza cartons three feet square

leave mouth-watering hot blasts of air,

a phantom mozzarella trail,

for carton dwellers to inhale

in lungfuls, hungry and alone

beyond the pale of
Pizzaphone
.

A claret goblet and
with care

that housed video or frigidaire

now packages a shoeless man

who rummages the garbage can

already rummaged countless times

for cans you can redeem for dimes.

Shops redeem the empty can

but not the can-redeeming man,

nor that woman who’s got business sense

so beds down where machines dispense

24hr cash, and men, when pissed,

might leave five dollars in her fist.

One night I saw a famous diva

stop her limo there and leave her

scores of fresh fan-flung bouquets

to wake to from her wino haze.

And when she woke they say she cried

with rage and terror, horrified

the morning sun should wake her

laid out for the undertaker.

Death was all these blooms could mean,

these tributes she was stretched between,

beneath the bank’s cashpoint machine.

Once aware she wasn’t dead

she flogged the star’s bouquets for bread,

well, pretzels; those posh bouquets

kept her in booze for several days.

I dread the moment, while I muse

on all my fruitile 8th floor views,

I hear the answerphone replay

the dark side of the fruitile day:

message one, a Scottish friend,

sick, insomniac, half round the bend,

drying out in St Luke’s, lying

all tubed-up, detoxifying.

His message goes as follows:
Hi!

just checking in before I die!

The trolleyphone’s beside his bed.

I call him back. He isn’t dead.

Thought you were dying.

         
I am! I am!

Fucking dying for a dram!

Another friend made mad by AIDS

leaves night-time answerphone tirades.

It wakes us when the tape records

his rabid ravings from the wards.

First his operatic repertoire

that made him a TV bar star:

Sempre libera
, in falsetto,

voice corseted as Violetta,

Sempre libera
, always free,

he from AIDS and she TB.

In sigmoidoscopy he’d brag:

I am the world’s most buggered fag.

Your rooter’s nothing, every dick

I’ve ever had’s ten times as thick!

After the aria and the pause

while he curtsies to applause

and clasps flung posies to his heart

the mad Munchausen stories start

and I hear a new bass voice begin:

Those things like wine-stains on my skin

those fucking things like spilled Merlot

they ain’t what you guys think you know.

They came, these scars like fucking Claret

from the forest of the flame-flayed parrot.

They’re burns! They’re
burns
! I tried to seize

the cure for AIDS from blazing trees.

I was in Brazil, Manaus, where I gave

my
Violetta.
And did Manaus rave!

They adore me, darlings, in Brazil.

They think I was just acting ill.

Brava! brava!
on and on

beside the steaming Amazon.

If I chose I could earn millions

from
brava-brava
ing Brazilians!

(Were you aware the rubber trade’s

booming again because of AIDS?

You see the stripe-gashed
cauchos
oozing

condoms I never packed when cruising!)

I went up-river in a cute caique

from Manaus with the urge to seek

the cure for what afflicts our kind

and the sights up-river blew my mind –

I saw pink dolphins, pink!

and I hadn’t had a drop to drink!

and no Colombia up my nose –

dolphins pink as any fan-flung rose!

I’d gone in costume. It was better

trekking dressed as Violetta.

Those creepers with sharp thorns don’t snag

my depilated legs in drag.

And where the forest was ablaze,

brave Violetta, on behalf of gays,

in corsets botanizing raced

through dense forest now laid waste,

charcoal gallows, charcoal glades

of gutted antidotes for AIDS,

the canopy deserted by

the roasted birds that used to fly.

And there were cures. They’ve gone. They’ve gone

in the bonfires of the Amazon.

Some creeper, bud, some bitter seed

might be the breakthrough doctors need.

All September it’s been blazing

to give more future
Big Macs
grazing.

Even now the forest flames

are burning cures that have no names.

In the ash of Amazonian oak

the cure for AIDS went up in smoke …

All this gabble seems quite graphic

though culled from
National Geographic

bought at the sidewalk mag bazaar

with covers of the passé star

or politician laid between

Butt Lust
‘Seat Meat’ magazine

and iron-pumping
Bulkritude

both with pages wanker-glued.

Then his falsetto ends the story:

Cessarono gli spasimi del dolore …

The sun sets here while it’s rising

on countries just industrializing

and day ends in a dying fire

hued like my rasps piled on papaya,

Broadway windows with glossed sheen

of cranberry and carotene,

sunset as the turning planet

paints New York in pomegranate,

with chemicals that now pollute

the skies to look like too ripe fruit.

The spoon-scraped limp papaya skin

goes first into the garbage bin,

then a big black trash bag, later

down the chute to the incinerator,

and the flotsam of time’s fleeting flux

goes into dawn’s first garbage trucks.

I’ll hear them grinding as it’s time

again for papaya spritzed with lime.

Tomorrow’s rasps piled on papaya

chilled, ready for the life-denier,

tomorrow when my heart says
Yea

to darkness ripening into day,

remembering my mother whose

gifts of fruit taught me this ruse,

whose wartime wisdom would embrace

both good and grotty with sweet grace,

she who always used to say:

Never wish your life away!

Of all my muses it was she

first taught me to love fruitility.

for Siani, on her birthday

My life and garden, both transforming,

thanks to you, and global warming,

started today to intertwine

tasting my first fig on the Tyne.

When I heard scientists predict

there’d be apricots and peaches picked

in Britain’s South, and
pinot noir

where the rhubarb fields of Yorkshire are,

the pithill
pinot
from lush vines

ripening on demolished mines,

a Rossington
viognier
,

Sheffield
shiraz
, Grimethorpe
gamay
,

fancy made a sun-kissed fiction:

Dionysus redeeming dereliction.

Dionysus! Wishful thinking,

sitting in Doncaster drinking

in Southern sun that lasts all day

a local Donny
vin du pays
.

No sommelier worth his salt ’ll spurn

Gewürztraminer
from Wath-on-Dearne!

No longer would we need to traipse

through airports to the lands of grapes.

No more queuing at Heathrow

when we grow all they used to grow.

There’ll come a day no Loiner needs

to go beyond the
caves
of Leeds

to sup champagne that’s bottled where

they throw their empties in the Aire.

The South creeps Northwards, some say sweeps,

swapping
Beaujolais nouveau
for neaps.

This vision of Yorkshire by the Med

no doubt won’t come till I’m long dead.

Torridity in Tyne and Wear

won’t come till I’m no longer here.

Predictions for this land of plenty

start, at the soonest, 2020,

which is cutting it a wee bit fine

if I’m to bask beside the Tyne.

Sometimes I have to fantasize

I’m living under bluer skies,

but today I had a little sign

here in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Not just that this year’s birds are late

leaving the North-East to migrate,

they linger, O they’re welcome, they

still sing for me at break of day.

Some prophets that I’ve read believe

there’ll come a day the birds don’t leave.

The sign I mean was true but small

and grown against my garden wall.

If the scientists’ prediction

isn’t all just wishful fiction,

I thought once, why, if Leeds grows wine,

can’t I grow a fig tree on the Tyne?

Why not, if the River Aire’s

going to wind through wine hectares,

assume the scientists really know

and plant something that needs sun to grow,

more sun than usually comes its way

in Newcastle or Whitley Bay,

and here, on Tyneside, I’ll install

a fig on my least sun-starved wall,

and wait for global warming to produce

figs oozing with full taste and juice.

‘Fig trees don’t grow in my native land’

wrote Lawrence, when his work was banned.

The climate ’s changing, figs do grow

(and franker paintings go on show!)

though not like San Gervasio,

where the starved Midlander Brit

found figs as ‘fissure’, ‘yoni’, ‘slit’.

All those eyesores and black spots

bulldozed flat in his native Notts,

wait the creeping South’s advance

to metamorphose into France.

The climate he was restless for

would come up to his own front door.

I tell him now, the man who grew

one Northern fig, that it’s not true:

If you want figs, stay put in Notts,

trust global warming, you’ll have lots.

In parts of Europe blessed with sun

I’ve picked hundreds. Now, here, one.

I’ve roamed about in similar fashion

seeking Southern fruit and passion.

His restlessness fed into mine

though I’ve always come back to the Tyne.

Though my life ’s been a different story.

I’ve been ‘o ποιητης’ and ‘Il Signore’.

Places where he used to go,

Italy, New Mexico,

I’ve also been to, half-inclined

to leave everything at home behind,

then on Guatavita’s shores I found

gold everywhere just on the ground.

I come to El Dorado and I find

exactly what I’d left behind!

Too busy being Pissarro

ever to let my garden grow

anything but those tough weeds

I’ve known in Newcastle or Leeds,

this gold I came to look upon

with an ‘O my America’ of Donne,

this El Dorado in my head,

when I found it, only led,

after all the searches I got high on

to the El Dorado dandelion.

That was my discovery,

poet/Pissarro of the
piss-en-lit
!

All that we search for when we roam

is nowhere if not here at home.

I picked one for you, and pressed the head

of that Andean piss-a-bed,

and now this one fig I discover

I want to share with you, my lover.

I never thought that it would grow

when I planted it ten years ago.

I decided this was what I’d do

about the same time I’d met you.

I watched it grow and much away

feared it’d die, but now, today,

September 20, ’99,

your birthday, love, here on the Tyne,

not flooded yet in Grecian sun,

I picked one fig from it, just one!

I picked the first fig that I’d grown

but tasted its sweet flesh alone,

when I’d wanted, O so much, to share

the fig with one who wasn’t there,

you with whom I hope to see

years of figs from that same tree,

I’d wanted here to cut in two

one half for me, one half for you,

to celebrate the first sweet sign

of global ripening on the Tyne

and with the first of my Tyne figs

celebrate you’re 46!

I never thought the tree would root

let alone produce a fruit,