‘Now all we’ve got left
are those biblical grotesques
or Jane and Phil
down the street at the sports bar.
That bastard in Vienna
with his triple-crossing gang
milked dry the last good reservoir.
It’s left to bones and matters
we were never equipped to make sense of.’
He manages to round the phrase,
as if a swipe of silk
might lessen the sting,
like painting a bull’s eye in the sand
for the high-wire alcoholic.
When his daughter mentions
that she’ll close the door behind her
he murmurs ‘I wouldn’t be surprised’
which manages, at least,
to stir the air before the next visitor
arrives to rifle through his things.
The score with Villa-Lobos’ autograph,
the steel plate from Sebastopol,
an aerogram mailed from the King David
Hotel. He hasn’t seen them
in a butterfly’s millennium.
His outrage is a virtuoso’s warm-up scale,
vowels and dentured consonants clash
a cornered lion’s lifetime of regrets.
He seethes in an imagined sea
of ignorance deep as darkest Mariana,
vast as Gaia’s thousand blues.
It’s the daughter I’d prefer
to plunder, trembling in an ancient rage
no New Age potion might de-claw,
as I probe her with a vampire’s skill,
here at the corner of Speedway and Isis.
-There must have been….’, and she lowers her eyes,
and is it a downwards look of coyness,
shyness, shame, attention deficit?
Before she lifts to the resumption and the finish.
-there must have been a lot of bad karma
from those previous lives, that I should,
personality-wise, be such a sucky creep.’
In Ancient Egypt, no doubt, although she
hasn’t yet shared the Hollywood details:
haughty princess, not an ounce of lovely fat,
barged on the glass-green Nile,
feeding dolphins from a purse of thyme,
channeling the guttural commands of a
cross-eyed cat.
If I were to take up her latest passion,
would I be freed from the seven plagues
which burn me? The anxiety of influence,
the fear of falling, those others
which will come to me if I close my eyes?
-I don’t think you’re that big of a creep.
But tell me how you sinned in Egypt.