fleurs à la mode

Fashionable flowers
rise at half-past seven.
But rarely close their eyes
before a quarter to eleven.

.

A Sweeter Fame

They are, by common measures,

disproportionately shaped.

No wonder people gape. Especially

at him. Each huge ungainly limb 

galumphs its nakedness across 

whatever acreage the law permits him 

to be in. He is a lot to see.

He knows the most secluded corners,

nooks and reaches of nude beaches.

She admires his audacity. She knew

he loved her awkward neck and head.

“So what if people gawk?” she said.

Her questions mainly were rhetorical.

She felt herself becoming allegorical

by merely sitting on his back.

All sense of lack began to fade.

She was a lady with a purpose.

As she sat, wherever she could

manage to, upon his surface,

she’d felt they’d something to proclaim.

They gave dysmorphia a sweeter fame.

Bodies were a metaphor for oddities

one had to drag from here to there.

They’ve long learned not to care

when people stare, or glare.

They joy in being rare.

.

Sam and Adeline

Some say peace of mind

is hard to find.

“Nope,” say Sam and Adeline.

“Do what we do, you’ll be fine.”

We’ve tried but can’t divine

how what they do

would work for us.

They look so ponderous

wrapped up like big striped

pots. Can psychodynamics

in certain ceramics be found

to connect the dots?

What does one learn

resembling an urn? Defeats

analysis. Seems like a way

to induce paralysis.

And yet their best amenity

is their serenity. “Do what

we do, you’ll be fine,”

say Sam and Adeline.

.

Drawing Hate

To animate the premise and to draw the face of hate,

you must upend the standard menace of a devil –

you must transcend cliché conventions of a mask:

new eyes must open wide, achieve another level

of attention. Draw, draw more: push past Halloween:

convene with breathing avatars of evil’s immobility.

At last you find the eyes – whose mix of pain and pride

breed hate’s utility – and terrible belief in its nobility.

.

No Less Alive

He’ll always take you where you want to go.

All you ever have to do is ask.

It never strikes him as an onerous incursion.

He wouldn’t bother calling it a “task.”

And now, at last, a mental light turns on,

as if illumining the contents of a shelf:

he feels as alive when he is tending to another

as he does when he is tending to himself.

.

Dancing Badly

He rode in on the plumy fumes of hydrocarbons –

stumble-dancing in and out of stinking gas –

the last attenuated progeny of supernova blast –

the stamp and record of the most the Cosmos

had yet ever sired: a thing with consciousness,

intention – incarnation of new ruthlessness –

a hungry self-direction which desired. He lusted

after everything: he’d take whatever he could press

to his exorbitance as wife: all the squirms of chaos,

every edgily resistant strife. His name was Life.

.

Panicky

Panicky?

Who me?

Not me!

No, never me!

I must simply

constantly

flee
anarchy.

.

.

Much Better

Much better, now you’ve climbed the little hill

to sit in solitude until this spill of feelings dissipates:

the overkill of sensory indulgence in a day!

The way the sun keeps gilding hay to gold:

the alchemy of infinitely varied colors, shadows, shapes

in every pebble, puddle, leaf: no relief from their

relentlessly proliferating asymmetric angles, bumps

and curves: the endless importuning of a pressing

strangeness: the painful beauty of its range. Old

is always new now: nothing’s ever through. This is what

the mind imbibes: this is how the revolution of the soul

unfolds: this describes the evolution of an angel.

.

Your Worship

Make up

a deity:

divine
homogeneity!

Kneel to it,
adore it.

Implore it
to fulfill.

Who

knows,

perhaps
it will.






.

Well, Hello There!

We’re told we can’t presume a single

aspect about whom we meet when

we encounter the inevitable Sentient

Others who exist in solar systems

either nearer to or farther from ourselves

than we’ve now basis to discern.

However, if the Universe is infinite,

it’s not a possibility but an imperative

that all imaginable beings somewhere

manifest and breathe and learn – and some

of these will be like us. Perhaps our

android form is mandated by physics

in reaction to phenomena of chemicals

and temperatures and gravity which have

a kinship to Earth’s own. Perhaps,

wherever they occur, our sorts of birth,

intelligence and evolution share a primal

template from the workings-out of which

we can expect to find, in some availing

clime, societies of creatures to whose

symmetries and features we incline.

But when we look into

their similarly fashioned eyes,

will we see anything we recognize?

.

All Is Not Lost

All is not lost, little one.

See how the world’s

just been glossed

by the sun!

.

Loneliness of a Long Poem

As witty as she’s pretty, she’s who every lady

in a gentlewoman’s novel wants to be. Parsing out

the delicacies of her watchful sensibilities and luck,

without of course in any way broadcasting her advance,

she’s found she is the central presence with whom

every man must dance. She chooses confidants

and confidences with an almost playful sense

of mild unguarded ease – a touch of tease –

and yet a breath, though never taken heavily,

that something more than nothing may well be

at stake. She is the cake and they are eating it

and she is eating it: there always will be more. Ears

she favors with her secrets are both known to be

deserving, and deserving. Perhaps this sounds

self-serving: as if her main pursuit resides in publicly

performing her appeal: ministering only to the very

knowing, deeper minds, more handsome brows –

those gentlemen who have a feel for depth and value

and who can’t not fall in love with every ripple

of her surreptitious sense of the absurd – so fresh

with laughter! – touched with nearly negligible sighs.

This is neither solipsistic nor unwise. Wondrous things

get said in bed with human treats as fully formed

and sweet as she. Play it to the hilt, my dear: release

your talent for the balances of volupté and every

elegant, sharp, brilliant bit of evidence you have  

amassed of what you’re more than certain

is persuasive re: the wars of soul and class

in Proust. Perhaps assume a looser stance

onstage today. Love the play. Be the play.

.

Papa Roams, Mama Doesn’t

A father is a father if you’re told he is.

Otherwise how would you know?

Paternity, essential to our genesis,

of course must be presumed: but how

much does it matter who its source is?

No less esteemed a patriarchal clan

than Jews refuse to recognize as Jewish

anyone whose mother wasn’t.

Papa roams, Mama doesn’t.

Fathers are a cipher: not a spiritual stamp.

From points-of-view far too innumerable

to enumerate, dads become de trop:

goods delivered – park the van. Not

that we ought not revere the man – exult

in his carnality! Be deeply glad that dads

get amorous. Their lust accounts for us.

.

Answer

“The answer is always yes.”

“Did you say sex?”

“Yes.”









.

(A Sigh More than an Expletive)

We could make the case that this is all a dream.

It’s certainly the way things seem. Although

we know they don’t seem like a dream to you.

Perhaps it’s not a dream, then. Who

can tell? If something’s cast a spell and we’re

the objects of its scheme, we very likely

wouldn’t know the differences between a dream –

and what? What’s the alternative? Oh fuck.

(A sigh more than an expletive.)

That’s where we get stuck.








.

Fury

Fury is a reflex when

you can’t abide your impotence –

when some unspeakable incursion

puts the lie to innocence,

betrays the heart too badly to deny.

Dare to find the agony

behind the angry eye.

.

Mysteries of Loving New York

I rushed eagerly just now to this laptop in the fresh wake of listening to Pete Hamill talk to Tony Guida about Frank Sinatra (about whom Hamill wrote a book, 'Why Sinatra Matters') on the CUNY TV channel because, watching it, I got a firmer grip, for that moment anyway, on why I can sort of pledge a new allegiance to New York. Pete Hamill has always seemed to me a good candidate for THE avatar of New York - he is so deeply made of it, born into & steeped in every bit of its steam, sturm und drang, glamour, alcoholic depths, deep strengths which have served his writing so well -- out of all of which seems to have arisen a sweet unforced wisdom which entirely identifies him (as he himself all but does) as "New York."

New Yorkers who were born here - and stayed - have always struck me as a troubling extended family: it's like they know 'family secrets' of some strange half-conscious kind which, since I'm not of the clan, are closed to me -- they represent a kind of barrier through which a convert, like me, has no hope of passing. I suppose I harbor a guilty bias against converts to the New York Religion, which group I've always felt includes me. We're way too zealous, often pretentious, too eager to be thought of as professing our devotion to the NYC religion more completely than, well, you do. We make a great show of "knowing." Pushy, childish, transparent: betraying our secret certainty we're inadequate to the task of 'making' this our own.

But as I listened to Pete Hamill in this interview - particularly his description of the teenaged Sinatra standing at the Hoboken docks looking over to Manhattan's lights at night - having a version of what Quentin Crisp said when he first saw this city ("The moment I saw Manhattan, I WANTED it") -- it occurred to me that anything you deeply love you inevitably come to as an outsider - even if it's a place whose geography you're born into. My mother described similar feelings, sitting on the shore of Brooklyn Heights as a little girl in the 1920s looking over at New York. It was "other" than she - which was partly why she was inexorably drawn to it. And that's the secret I maybe hadn't quite cracked till just now, listening to Mr. Hamill's New York-accented voice: Nobody knows New York when he or she opens his or her eyes to it. It is unknowable. If you're drawn to it, you are almost by definition HUMBLY drawn to it -- we all, 'converts' or other, are faced with this huge mystery of a city, a mystery that never entirely reveals itself. It couldn't! It's ADDING to its unknowability every moment of its and our being here.

So we're all strangers to it - and far from that keeping us from loving it, those of us who do, it's what pokes the heart to yearn for it more. We're always both intimately in it and irremediably outside it. Can't have it, can't not have it.

pics: my bro Bob & me, 1960, in front of the New York Library; me where I am right now; Pete Hamill; my mother & her dear friend Millie in NYC 1939.

Mr. Hamill's interview below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsbHTcd7JYY part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-8fTAEORNs part 2

He Liked his Things to be Alive

He was an alchemist

when there were alchemists

who were deserving of the name.

He worked in malleable substances:

bread dough and mud and clay

had brought him fame.

Others conjured gold from old

abandoned medicines

or pulled the volupté of silk

out of salt hay – but he preferred

incurring births of sentient flesh

out of a mesh of all the better parts

of Earth: mulch and silt

and amber minerals comprised

the heart of his organic arts.

And he would bake them into bread,

or mould them into candlesticks,

or leave them in a cozy lump

and read to them in bed.

He liked his things to be alive.

He didn’t like them dead.

.