I
A prelude written, then unwritten.
I wrote her another poem once
and did she ever read it?
Slipped beneath her pillow
before I slipped out.
Perhaps she dreamed it
all night, woke laughing
in the cold gray dawn?
Never a generous woman
with tips or unearned graces,
did the sonnet stay put,
stay muzzled?
Did the maid, finding it
an hour into her departure,
rain down soft curses
on her slim white ass?
)(
II
Isidore Pelusiota,
carved into the wood straddler
at the unexpected corner.
She jumped, saw the light swirl
tipsy in the sculpted cavity,
covered the plaque with her glove,
wanting no more information
than that which her first impression might bear.
And she bore the rosewood profile in her mind,
from the intersection of cobbles and cupids
to the station’s chilly barn,
a green poster edged with snow
setting off fresh calculations,
as desire’s long fuse began its smoky dance.
)(
III
We met on false pretenses
in the glorious season of lies.
Not her favorite city, nor mine,
though it was her style to drift
through Paradise and find it tacky.
She was, she said,
available for purchase;
and was, she said,
nomadic in her ecstasy,
ranging west of Lyons,
south of the Clyde;
hailing, with a snap of her fingers
one King’s Road holiday,
a cab to breeze her into
Camden Town, to a van
roof-topped on a wren-wreathed
parking garage, for a handheld zoom-
and-freeze tumble, premise flimsy
and hard cash up front.
And in Pas de Calais,
where rumors went to die,
stepping from the shower,
hands a finger-fuss
over her new haircut,
smoothing her bangs to mid-
forehead and hoarsing:
-What news of Rome?
as her aspirants
collided with one another
in their panting bid
to be the first to towel her
beauty dry.
)(
IV
No one knows the date.
January March May
July September November.
St. Joan’s Conduit at night.
Any number or no number at all,
occult glow turning to glass
on the wet red street.
A small child was being lifted
up the stairs in a wheelchair,
lost to pallor and illness, her
turbaned guardian less serene
than herself. Far down the road
Copernicus Station was loud,
movement discernible in its interior,
of sparse crowds ungathering
to the chill outside.
Passport(s) gathering dust in the
concierge’s drawer.
One could go along those streets,
amid the night flowers, and brisk
unspoken signs, and indefatigable
prostitutes and never return
from the harness of an alien life.
Far down the road the streetlamps
seemed perpetual, as though pre-dating
the arrival of the ice age hominids.
And in the light of the streetlamps,
however much one intended something
adventurous, life-altering,
one encountered nothing.
No one will admit to even the smallest
of small kindnesses lest it be seen
as prelude to the changing of the guard:
any number (choose) or no number at all.
)(
V
An ode to ‘few and far between’.
The few she might confess,
the far between the first act and the last.
Shakespearean boy-actors
ferrying cigarettes to her backstage strip
of cobwebbed light.
A career move that none but she
saw coming.
She hammered coined phrases
into spare change,
stuffed clients’ notes beneath
garter belts and bra straps,
to be parsed between dances
by a literate friend, for hint
of any sugardaddy quotient.
)(
VI
Like all good actresses
she exaggerated her nerves,
distraction and deflection wielded
like epee and poignard.
The radius of the spotlight’s fall
rippled on through walls
and sealed doorways, from Pope’s
toilet to pimp’s shrine,
dying one soft beat before she gestured,
so that all eyes followed her fingers’ flight
and looked up into the serene wonder
of the exposed cupola, the scandal
she was staring at,
unable to name it into light,
call it back to shadow.
Nothing but surface,
rippled to a depth of bric-a-brac.
The shocking abstention was more
than a neurotic certainty of cost,
the bargain of a walled-up virgin.
I hoped it was more,
the possibility of anything else
too rough to stomach.
)(
VII
Inside the hum of a hangover
mercurial worms
flinched her eyes.
The insults of strangers
proved ecstatic prophecy.
Flattering the rude lackeys
of the prince, her limbs
dipped like smoke on oil.
She had the good manners
of a courtesan, with gestures
which cried out for exclamation points.
Acrobat, crucified in air.
A dizzying tableau of agony,
belying the vertigo of the velvet gag.
The gay laughter of drunkards
playing rock-scissors-paper
for the key to her cuffs.
)(
VIII
The bawling of an inebriate choir
echoing down the singing metro,
round the drunken velodrome.
The stairwells were loud with the
squeak of transient leather.
Kingflies slummed the glisten,
the jack and stroke of Polyphemus-
bouncers, poised to leap and decaligulate
the air with a boyish, out-of-place windmill.
Concessions hung on cash and frail hope.
Untouchable, backlit, she laughed
past their appropriate maw,
backhanding the barbiturate phallic crush,
stepping lightly beneath the canopy of curses,
her heels dotting puncture wounds
in the pools of emetic gold.
She provided every injured client
with a second shot at humiliation.
Heaven’s bareback rider; one of the
elect who might yet survive, despite
being caught kissing Juno’s lips.
The cab driver, frisked at the stage door,
exclaiming: -She jumped the fare!
she threw ammonia in my eyes!
The two-ton bouncer whistled the
sweetest saddest little song, paid her bills
out of his own deep pockets.
-Keep your mouth shut. Have a drink on the house.
The cabbie fantasized the cost
of that blonde’s ballet lessons, nodding off
into the darkness between spread legs.
Heartcatching stripper’s light.
Her album of ruby nights.
Her album of pearl hours.
Her lotions, chilled on tropic
go-away weekends, curtains fluttering
with pornographic thoughtfulness.
Red chits, pinned like butterflies.
)(
IX
Agnostic, Propertian,
she fed me with the tiny
fruit of bitter kisses and,
to my irritation, quoted Horace
and lectured me on fatherhood.
She spoke rapidly but not rapidly
enough for me to forget the sight
of those ghosts, the way they had
turned back towards us on the bridge,
a turn of such sorrow,
of sorrow but not sadness.
She was, in the words of that old
freight train Don Carlos: the girl
who couldn’t stop sneezing.
No sadness nor bewilderment nor even,
and here I suspected myself of lying,
the desire to be remembered
as a still moment of agony.
The sudden plea of arbitrary numbers,
the native son, that famous mathematician
whose brain was pickled in the island’s light.
Yet I remembered.
Her provocation, her simplicity,
the wee imlay lamb, her sunburst flanks
and Assyrian concussion.
Though the emblem had distinctly indicated
‘forget’, and yet.
The silhouette of an assassin
after a coldblooded night of love.
If?
There had been a noticeable frailty,
remarkable enough to spark a quarrel,
at once repulsive and erotic,
in her unfettered glee: the prospect
of making love with a communist.
She was secure in the jealousy of others.
As the lovely incantation had it,
that there should be no end to carnal commerce in the rubble ….
)(
X
Tutored in chapeled shadows,
turned out on curbs and fire escapes
with a timetable and a quota.
When mocked as ingénues
the youngest prostitutes wept like babies.
Come breaktime, silver sang
to deflect the knuckle dusters.
In Lucky Pussy Brothel,
a cheerleader from some
government-in-exile
eyed recruitable flesh.
Eels of clublight hid a girl’s
erectile body.
Girls ardent with drink and fear,
slow with sleep’s passive dissolve.
Pimps cocked each other’s
weakest lambs, laughed
as though debate were rude,
slipping clumsy bibelots
up on stage.
Impaling her against an alley wall
and its ancient dynasties of stain,
they groaned their love.
Spreadeagled on that most invasive moment,
her eyes reflected the void.
Onstage, her moans remained
autobiographical and extreme.
Contempt, as always, a more
secure refuge than the exposed condition
of love.
Godlike as Marlowe’s Helen,
and on Bernini sheets,
the curving saffron of a nude odalisque.
Ticketed with the usual exotic opening acts
(twins ; amputees with candle wax
and razor ; baby elephants in prim parade),
she was an aristocrat’s penciled-in playtime.
Her heart galloped to the snare and cymbal,
she powdered over the stigmata of abuse,
rushing towards a martyrdom
of party favors and: exit stage left.
)(
XI
Looking back to the end of the 3rd movement
(winking inlets and all that),
Ariel’s postcard of gulls round Cyprus,
Miranda promising the unspeakable from Tripoli,
moat fresh-fed with blood, cleansed by the
bursting sea after the dikes were all pulled down.
But who, in those days, stunned in the monotony
of good weather, honestly expected or even wanted
the famished spirits to speak?
Mouth set grim as the first Roman’s,
bolting the ladder into Masada.
Timidity struck passionate capering poses,
bloodspots forming at the seams of its ballet slippers.
A wrenching quaked the city of the dead,
ghosts long laid stirring into position,
as though pleased at their lovers’ endurance.
Washed by dawn, the color
of her skin beggared description.
Courtyards vibrant with living customers,
the square beyond the gate newly hosed-down,
as though a manmade rain might wash away
something of the pain along with the pleasure.
-Let’s do it then, she said, go all the way!
)(
XII
The votes cast, and all quibbles tallied.
No to the color signaling slut’s entrance
(purple of royalty, purple of Salome’s
fig-plush mouth, white as much a witch’s hue
as a virgin’s).
And so to the groomsmen and their worship,
her Roman uno made pliable as clay and wire.
She smiled as they bent her, gasped as they
spread her, retained a foal’s arch and
sideways buck as they explored her sweet
miseducation. Theirs the pun, hers the stud,
the tuft, the laces gripped in eager teeth,
knuckle to nipple, digit to temple,
hair smoothed back to widen the target.
The chandelier rocked in the buffet
of cavalier plumes and rippled its frantic light
across the table where they laid her,
stilling into place around her like naked surgeons,
ten hands caressing, fifty fingers pinching,
till she was blush and quiver,
a moaning landscape of easy access.
And summoned, then, the draughtsman.
To record the shame and joy,
to incarnate with charcoal spool
and drizzle and stab, the stab and jizzle and drool.
)(
XIII
They pushed her body to the point of radiance,
into a pool of wide light which punished their eyes,
the senses tickling into fray,
nostrils seared with the mercury-thin, ice-cold jolt,
nerves stripped back from shriek to stump,
the void where ecstasy spilled and slopped,
and touching through the hunger painted the
brain in wash and distress, snow-white and blood-red
like in, like out, like breath rising to a clutch,
strangled in radiance.
They caught it on tape, on film,
and offered her first peek, first remorse,
knowing her refusal, like her surrender,
would be absolute.
)(
XIV
Bannered with the rainbow,
the sign of the cross and the clog,
the road-builders started off in the fog,
into the slow fugue of shells in their dredging-off.
And we set out like pilgrims on a punitive raid,
the curling of her smoky hair, the vergil of her
torso putting Empire far from mind.
For a moment, gold.
The charts we left behind,
obsolete and damaged;
wormholed, mouseshat,
swiss-cheesed as any adulterer’s
quick-change memory.
For a moment only,
then the color offered itself in its variety,
from a slightly saturated yellow to a
slightly saturated blue, until the color
began to dull, foaming through the mesh
to capsize the stars, tipping them into
the swallow of the drowning sea.
)(
XV
Ink slash, night by night,
beside each lilac name.
As she inched her way
to confession’s climax.
The bracelet of fake pearls
which she used (throttle, collar, rosary)
to masturbate her more diseased clients.
I flung my arms around her
and found myself standing
in a thin column of acrid smoke.
Pretty prisoner.
Dark eyes already quirked and adult.
Except in these stolen hours,
in a blue and murmured hallway.
She justified herself,
with a glance at the mirror.
Her enemy’s leer, like
sadness or fatigue, a miraculous opportunity.
It was her reflection which was puzzling.
A bewildered gazelle of slink and trauma.
The ferry’s brief judder, as she described it,
leading one to the question ‘is she lying?’
Tender foreplay between pilot and machine.
Stripper’s coup d’etat,
gagging on the rocket’s vapor trail.
An audience waited, and hoped
that what it missed might spawn fresh sequels.
)(
XVI
Night after night,
in careful review, until every option lay exhausted.
The index of letters received, and the index, a la Leonardo,
of gifts unasked for. Diamonds, wet with spittle.
Lined up and spinal on their chamois pallet.
Slim peppermint metronome obscuring the gap
between her teeth. The water in the bidet
was strawberry-colored and sweet with spunk.
She spooned her lover’s discharge as breaking sky
smoked to ocean. Not the first to recognize
Circe’s pawprint on every X-rated poster,
but still among the brave, the happy few, to read
the writing on the wall. The gathering calm
and the coming storm. From raw to refined
her virtues were those of sugar, her ships
assembling in the gray light of a rainy dawn.
When the raid began her password was ‘loyalty’.
)(
XVII
For that which awaited us,
collective drunkenness
afforded little or no insight
and wasn’t it quite reasonable
to wonder, sometimes, as to who
was the more appalled by whose decay?
Another round, let the subject grow idle.
The morning after the rounding of the Cape
she made it obnoxiously known whose caskets
she would not haul, trimming her widow’s weeds
with a pair of pinking shears,
eyes, locked above the unsteady tumbler,
counting the bubbles with each fingernail click,
the silence, like Sahara, all around.
)(
XVIII
The bearded uniform sat on his perch,
gazing at her passport for so long
as to simmer a germ of murmur
in those behind us.
What might he be waiting for, looking for?
A tattletale shadow or a gaudy dart.
Perhaps he’d fallen in love and like a lover
found himself witless, wordless,
at that moment of risky welcome.
His eyes pooled their cheap liquid
and his official finger wormed down
the cautionary list.
He would detain, detrain, and move her
with his life story.
)(
XIX
Her own story followed the braided stream,
beckoning in the mist of a sleeping city.
Words contrived to ambush her,
out for a stroll from Alphaville to Zeppelin,
posing the unanswerables to the dreamers
park-benched to permanent exile,
amid the piles and drifts of dry leaves,
blown such distance, to circulate
to nervous rest around the tall lamp
on Primrose Hill.
Cold threshold twice-crossed,
as though someone were walking across her grave.
)(
XX
The chess-playing, Lieder-crooning Ambassador,
Junger’s autograph, Reverdy’s slippers,
a snapshot of Paz goosing his second wife.
If one looked closely enough, as she did,
sober and with feelers alert for the danger
crowding cranial through drawing rooms
and club, closing in on her with a radioactive shout,
then there was not much but tatters left
when one had suffered through the accounts,
and laughingly told, of Ponge and his bar of soap,
of Neruda’s lascivious snail, of Montale and his father’s
everlasting shoehorn. And there, framed by the gentle dandle
of faded blue tatters she saw a small boy watching his proud mother
break her neck in a fall from an even prouder horse.
)(
XXI
Cold city in summer.
-So go, I said, flushed with false
confidence and her recent overwrought praise
of someone recently other and else,
rise up and go.
And so she did.
One, two, three steps up and out
of the spotless conjugal bathtub.
Blessed by relentless years,
the open sorrows of mere survival
achieved rapid promotion above the loiter
and heel-dragging of the healing arts.
Miniature in recession, the throne room
seen in the curve of the gold orb,
princess attending her weary father.
This was ideal.
Cordelia striking an allegorical pose,
the seducer’s wary symmetry tensed
precipitate at the stairs’ plaiting, curving,
cophetuan rise.
)(
XXII
….. no end to carnal commerce in the rubble
of the high embankment, blind drunk, but lovely.
Sheathed in light and little else the goddess of the harbor
speculated aloud.
Wombats scuttered before my mind’s eye,
half-expected along Collins Walk.
Her murmur ran from wharf to wharf,
rousing literati to a Passover of sullen snapshots.
And another girl with painted eyelids,
who put on beauty over her plain rural face,
interrupting me in my reverie on a sleeping child.
The bistro and the safehouse, the asylum
of the fallen angel, all were rocked
in the gentle wash of her impedemental vowels.
Dazed, in Monkstower Road,
I saw the tenebrae in her window.
She claimed she had been cheated,
divinity devalued to a temporary oath,
a currency worth less than a sandwich and a beer.
Pseudo-Areopagite.
She was driven out of bookstores, coffee houses,
deprived of homesick heavy silks,
sized up and ticked as voluptuously quaint
by sly myopic virgins.
And I knew her as she knew me,
signaling with a slight smile behind her eyes.
Was I free yet? No, not just yet.
Surgeons had plundered her gold,
rubies sprang from her eyes,
her sweat brimmed chalices,
her discharge fed aggressive bees.
She alleged rape (a rear entry, ottoman affair).
But I’d seen the genital candles,
slender lilies thirsty in a harsh climate.
Summoned to the witch doctor’s couch,
I wrecked the anteroom,
swore at the receptionist,
spat venom over the nurse’s knees,
shrieked the furnishing to De Stijl shreds.
Crucified, with her tattoos exposed,
never before had I fallen so deep in love.
Like Catherine, aflame.
)(
XXIII
Beneath their camisoles of snow
the Hotel’s stairs were a crystalline
hazard of shattered relics, an epic
of vitreous desolation.
When she nodded her anniversaries,
those who looked would find a face
entirely open to the world around her,
eyes slow with the incurable boredom
of a goddess.
She had chosen an ogre’s birthday
to amaze those who paused a fraction
too long, jumping the queue and feigning
mute impatience while she tutted from behind
a clacking fan, her dilating pupils
paralyzing them as the room seemed to gather speed
and the music dropped off to nothing but
a lascivious flute weaving the prettiest of lies.
Beneath their camisoles of snow
the Hotel’s stairs were pocked
with a century’s worth of assassinations,
three centuries’ worth of seductions.
)(
XXIV
Cream in the saucer, a stroke to lift the tail.
She approved the analogy, cheeked her fingertips
as if to sponge up some redundant blush.
A wood carving, depicting disasters of war, disasters of faith.
A hint of Visigoth in the precision of the limbs,
the dumbstruck faces: North African martyrs
performing cartwheels before their tormentors.
She stepped back to see the whole thing,
saw it wholed from each crescent of agony,
stopped her ears against the chirps of the
freelance tour guide, hastened to the convent courtyard
till the gallery was again void.
Back to the cat, its care and feeding,
the innuendos freshened in each bay-window breeze.
)(
XXV
How is it you’ve come to be lost,
here in the dark dark words.
Or so the wise old owl might ask.
But having been beaten up
(by one set of villains),
robbed (by another),
vomited on by a curious gawking magpie,
my rising from the stinking ditch and
carrying on was exemplary.
My heart leaping at the smell of gasoline,
the desperate squandering that characterized
the outcasts, bloodshot in the wolves’ moon,
hailing me through the gold maidenhair
of barbed wire, motioning me on to the gap
in the interrupted wall, the promise of
food and fuck and oblivion beckoning
with splintered paws.
Not near enough to turn aside,
merely to skirt the grove until the road
reappeared, leading back to Pendant d’Oreille
or Marcabrun, startled to hear singing
from a foxhole on the side of the road.
)(
XXVI
Her entrances logged in the ledger’s gothic column,
spider letters spindling the days of memorial,
unblessed by oil or water.
First bridal and later (though cruelly soon enough) as terminal.
-Let’s not lose touch again, and we both agreed
and almost too cheerfully, desire a very small thing
when stripped to such naked necessity.
I let my thoughts wander as she caught me up
on the misses and near-misses, the scandals and prophecies.
Wandering away (my mind), with every intent
of permanent return, but away from happiness now,
to preserve its purity for later.
)(
XXVII
The smoothed-out gurgle of the dove’s coo,
as she sighted along the survey-line,
sniping the dog star’s momentary rise
from behind the green-weather hump
of Stratford Hill.
A tribe of ferals harked from the hedgerow,
offered surly guidance through the gardens
of the Pitti Palace.
She demurred, disarmed them with her fluency,
kept her eyes on the exit, two quick leaps below.
Whereupon they retired, deep-scraping the turf
in smiling mockery and she laughed to see the Arno
coiling like chocolate through the flattened postcard city.
The flood-marks taller than a child,
the skybox rooms like a filter for the winter light,
her disillusioned Marxist neighbor taking his pleasure
and prickly when pressed, although she
scored points in theory, tempting him
with viceroy manners, a blue despair
which echoed his own, forced him to look twice
down the hall after she had passed.
)(
XXVIII
One table over, the domestic virulence
of teenage sisters locked in claw-retracted savagery,
of finding things alternately funny and gross.
Her eyes, despite the distraction of a public place,
still the measure of a lost world.
The girls’ mother was the proud preventive,
electric with intelligence, up on things
such as the quirky spellings of youth.
Tolerant of the carbon in herself,
pillar of poor flesh, starved,
neglected in her private Elba
of dust and newspapers.
The father was the marked one,
loved, loved, dipping with his cigarette ash
above the bland snow of hellhot curry.
Desire for once unacted upon.
This was an ideal.
A civilized meal, five courses of
bondage and violence and love
and more of lovely love.
)(
XXIX
Desire for once.
To touch her skull,
to pat her shoulder, to ask:
Where is your mother,
your father, where are the sisters
that would care for you?
The warped glass showed
what she had chosen.
)(
XXX
On the last day, on her last day,
snow fell in Hideaway Hill, as,
ambushed in a bookstore,
the cough of gas heaters
warmed the infamous ghost,
or was it only his widow
the pretty clerks peacocked to?
The light fell in columns of
captive alabaster, gliding down
and into and then out of the shadows
of the dawns-break island.
Morning awaited us in St. Cecilia Park
(a played-out dream? perhaps we both wondered?)
as though love had taken a modern turn
in hope of being not so utterly forsaken.
We were not lovers then, nor,
in the yew-lined aisles between
cold islands of shadow
could we have said whether we had ever been.
-Give me your hand.
I wanted not to be so feeble,
despite my poverty of anything real to say.
Beyond the public gate
an ugly cast iron temple sat waiting.
For a moment, gold,
and then the sun weakened and withdrew
and the wet leaves dangling above the gate
looked darker than the early hour and
first she, and then I, imagined the ugly dome
as it might look on some future night.
One of us was thinking
‘mists that will not fade for hunger or for memory’.
And the other? Best lied about or, best of all,
forgotten.