Our shouting knocked over a couple of palm trees
and the gaping sky seemed to reel at our mistakes,
such purple flashing insteps and careers!
which bit with lavish envy the northern soldiers.
Then loud startling deliberation! Violet peered,
hung with silver trinkets, from an adobe slit,
escorted by a famished movie star, beau ideal!
crooning that dejected ballad, Anne the Strip.
"Give me back my mink!" our Violet cried
"and cut out the heroics! I'm Boston, remember."
Jane and I plotz! what a mysteriosabelle!
the fandango died on our lips, a wintry fan.
And all that evening eating peanut paste and onions
we chattered, sad, of films and the film industry
and how ballet is dying. And our feet ached. Violet
burst into tears first, she is always in the nick of time.
Chez Jane
The white chocolate jar full of petals
swills odds and ends around in a dizzying eye
of four o'clocks now and to come. The tiger,
marvellously striped and irritable, leaps
on the table and without disturbing a hair
of the flowers' breathless attention, pisses
into the pot, right down its delicate spout.
A whisper of steam goes up from that porcelain
urethra. "Saint-Saëns!" it seems to be whispering,
curling unerringly around the furry nuts
of the terrible puss, who is mentally flexing.
Ah be with me always, spirit of noisy
contemplation in the studio, the Garden
of Zoos, the eternally fixed afternoons!
There, while music scratches its scrofulous
stomach, the brute beast emerges and stands,
clear and careful, knowing always the exact peril
at this moment caressing his fangs with
a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages;
which only a moment before dropped aspirin
in this sunset of roses, and now throws a chair
in the air to aggravate the truly menacing.
Two Variations
Suddenly that body appears: in my smoke while someone's heavily describing Greece, that famous monotonous line feels white against the tensile gloom of life and I seem intimate with what I merely touch.
1 Now I am not going to face things because I am not a start nor fall asleep against a heart that doesn't burn the wolves away, hunting and virtue beside an open fire. And you know if I drift into the sky it will be heavy as surf.
2 I am glad that the rock is heavy and that it feels all right in my heart like an eye in a pot of humus. Let's write long letters on grand themes, fish sandwiches, egg sandwiches and cheese; or travelling in Mexico, Italy and Australia. I eat a lot so I won't get drunk and then I drink a lot so I'll feel excited and then I've gone away I don't know where or with whom and can't remember whom from except that I'm back with my paper bag and next time my face won't come with me.
Ode
An idea of justice may be precious,
one vital gregarious amusement . . .
What are you amused by? a crisis
like a cow being put on the payroll
with the concomitant investigations and divinings?
Have you swept the dung from the tracks?
Am I a door?
If millions criticize you for drinking too much,
the cow is going to look like Venus and you'll make a pass
yes, you and your friend from High School,
the basketball player whose black eyes exceed yours
as he picks up the ball with one hand.
But doesn't he doubt, too?
To be equal? it's the worst!
Are we just muddy instants?
No, you must treat me like a fox; or, being a child,
kill the oriole though it reminds you of me.
Thus you become the author of all being. Women
unite against you.
It's as if I were carrying a horse on my shoulders
and I couldn't see his face. His iron legs
hang down to the earth on either side of me
like the arch of triumph in Washington Square.
I would like to beat someone with him
but I can't get him off my shoulders, he's like evening.
Evening! your breeze is an obstacle,
it changes me, I am being arrested,
and if I mock you into a face
and, disgusted, throw down the horse-ah! there's his face!
and I am, sobbing, walking on my heart.
I want to take your hand off my hips
and put them on a statue's hips;
then I can thoughtfully regard the justice of your feelings
for me, and, changing, regard my own love for you
as beautiful. I'd never cheat you and say "It's inevitable!"
It's just barely natural.
But we do course together
like two battleships maneuvering away from the fleet.
I am moved by the multitudes of your intelligence
and sometimes, returning, I become the sea-
in love with your speed, your heaviness and breath.
Invincibility
"In the church of my heart the choir is on fire!"
-Vladimir Mayakovsky
1 avarice, the noose that lets oil, oh my dear oh "La Ronde," erase what is assured and ours, it resurrects nothing, finally, in its eagerness to sit under the widely spaced stairs, to be a fabulous toilette, doesn't imitate footsteps of disappearance
The neighbor, having teased peace to retire, soon