(i)
In all of God’s green earth
there is nothing so depressing
as the sound of a Bolivian marching band
rounding the corner and making its way
up your street.
(ii)
The man who said this was a Peruvian,
which confirms one prejudice and disproves another.
Born in Ayacucho,
married to Mexico,
made French by education
and Danish by inclination. And though his Indian blood
was untouched by that of Spain, his private Elsinore admitted
the treasured deceptive shadows
of Asturias,
the strident clamoring gold
of Aragon.
A little bit of this, an awful lot of that,
as he might say, first begging pardon
his shaggy idiom.
Enough of hints, the name stays hidden.
(iii)
And why? Two reasons why.
[a] man of notable kindness and now[b] long dead …………………………… [a] lest that acid remark (Bolivians, music)
stain the ledger of his kindness,
[b] lest the quote be false,
with no possibility of correction
until that afternoon when we’ll meet again,
to stand each other drinks
in the triple-x neon of that next world,
that next-to-the-last-world,
as the reincarnative case might be.
(iv)
When he lapsed from kindness
he did so with such reasonable pain
that the dome of his bald head
was half-ringed with a pastel halo
and the ancient glaze went out of his eyes
and was replaced by the beaconed wink
of a taxicab on the prowl for spendthrift fare.
These lapses (music, Bolivians)
were impolitic at best,
the follow-up of his regret so palpable
that I scolded myself for smiling and didn’t dare press
for clarification, elucidation,
a repeat of the funniest bit.
(v)
A martyr to truth, his pain hovering
on overdone, a sky-gazing Saint
Sebastian with a bad attack of gas,
he was patient as a beast of burden,
with only that ocular blink and the pinched
prune of a longsuffering smile
to hint how his eternal bride, the Lady Coherence,
lay exhausted in the bedroom of
his deathly quiet mind.
Plowed under and used,
but not used up, not by
a lecherously long shot.
(vi)
A word-man
with a pedigree of kings
entwined with laughing whores,
he struggled for just the right word, the just phrase,
and as a consequence his anecdotes stretched across time,
the plots of these vignettes, thin enough in the best of worlds,
now unraveling from gauze to lace to spiderweb,
till one felt smothered with light,
dog-paddling the middle of a Franz Kline ‘white’,
one’s head poking the smoky navel of a diaphanous giant,
the faint pencil outline of thigh or muscle
set fluttering like a sail by the prissy touch
of barely-a-breeze.
(vii)
But back to the panting bride,
no longer panting by the time I arrive
but snoring a nice coloratura tuck-me-in.
The bedsheet is drawn up to her armpits,
drawn tight as the going-away sheath of a defunct princess.
Patience and disrespect are on my side
and so I winkle down the simple cotton
for a purer view.
The rosy tips of her small breasts,
made rosier still with the aftersting
of a graybeard’s demanding stubble.
The insulted moon draws the clouds
round its plump modesty and all is dark again.
Lady Coherence leaks words.
And even though their mistress
is tempested by unpleasant dreams,
they file forth in perfect order,
an Exodus of monosyllables.
And what few words tunnel out
to where the searchlights slice the lawn in half,
fewer still manage the naked marathon to temporary safety,
there to hush-a-bye their names
and expire out of sheer politeness.
I bow my head in honor of the many words
that don’t, that won’t, that didn’t make it.
(viii)
He smiled with just the tiniest wrench
of winsome pleasure
when one of his students called him ‘cher maitre’.
Those of us who didn’t
exchanged lightweight glances, privately mocking
the suck-up and the leech,
destined for great things as they might be.
There was more than just a hint
of fascism in his theory of aesthetics.
He was aware of this, and deplored it,
sprinkling a tablespoon of crocodile tears
over the neglected window box,
making a great show of his respect
for the feelings of others,
not quite applauding but certainly folding his arms
and half-nelsoning any twitch of alarm
when the marble steps of hierarchy
were flattened smooth and featureless,
a ridgeless, bump-free playing field
where jackboot, flip-flop, and cloven hoof
all sounded the happy dopey same.
(ix)
What did he really think?
What was the ‘qualifying event’?
Was there perhaps the bulemic bloat of Epiphany, that all-purpose party girl?
A flicker of dovelight through the sun-threshed rafters?
A roll in the hay from the 7th Inning Stretch to well past extra innings?
A lucky penny stamped into the furnace-hot icing of new-laid asphalt,
red-gold bubu coppered in a sea of black so wet
one couldn’t help but think of sin?
When Z, struck with unrequited lust at being dead last, dashed away to vanish
through the red enamel mist
of the Insurgentes metro station?
When X zipped up her trousers and knocked her knees, becoming the mimic
of her neighbor, perpetually surrendering Y?
(x)
A tea cup,
a seashell,
a bus token,
a genderless lock of hair: onto the mannequin
of emaciated detail
was postulated the Rubenesque
fatfolds of epic.
(xi)
How a ship steamed out of Danzig
with a manifest of unpronounceable sorrow,
passed with a ghostly lightness near Dakar,
in hailing distance of a colonial bathing party,
and spent the next decade as a disassembled set design
behind an opera house deep in the heart of the Amazon.
How a German redhead learned to flirt in Spanish,
milking from an evening’s worth of black moustachios
the martial best and marital worst of propositions,
compliments, and proposals, the bewilderment
of a stranger’s tongue easing and insistent beneath her,
the tease of her glide across a dance floor wobbly with swastikas.
How the whitesuited Bolivians gained upon the fleeing doe
of music, violins scratching and pitching at the eggwhite underbelly
in hopes of drawing blood, the brass of trumpet,
tuba, and trombone weaving in and out of key
with the seasick warp of an ancient LP,
the crippling honk of a giant blind beetle,
looking not to kill but to be killed,
dragging its misery behind it
like a tin can on a newlywed’s fender.
(xii)
Another, more substantial party girl,
and one who wrote poetry on the side
(memorable for the way in which oil and water
were made to couple and rhyme
like noisy squabbling husband and wife,
punctuation showing the better part of valor
by staying put in someone else’s poem),
swore to me one squalid Independence Day,
some three years after his death,
that she’d seen him.
In the departure lounge at Intercontinental
on a mid-morning Saturday
a week before Christmas.
Doing. What. Exactly?
Sitting all alone.
Staring straight ahead.
Conjugating verbs.
Eating space.
Drinking time.