Side Bets and Side Wishes

Side Bets and Side Wishes

Embrace and groan: your face glows...

your pleasure-crazed

arctic-blue eyes glisten.

Your body wraps itself in silk.

The desert reddens at sunset.

          ***

That rockchuck sure got highway-flattened, eh?

Take a deep breath as you look at the landscape.

Swirling dust... black clouds rolling eastward.

Yes, near-like clots of dried mud in a dark stable.

          ***

And what does a recurring dream

about a city made of shiny green apples mean?

I think that's why I'm so drawn to you, baby.

We could sit side by side and read more Italo Calvino.

And, baby, drink some water...

no one coughs from autumn maple leaves.

No... I'm no kind of doctor, but does that

curved crystal glass bowl remind you of us?

          ***

Sometimes when we touch I feel underfoot.

          ***

Do you remember how old people,

people who were old when we were young,

how they used salt and baking soda

to scrub their teeth... real ones and dentures?

That question is such a bailey.

No it's not.  What's a bailey?

The outer wall of a castle.

So what is it you're not saying?

          ***

Yes, baby, you still have sturdy inner thighs.

A silver stain appears to spread

on the peach-colored sheet.

Pine bed, thick brownish quilts.

Shabby, cabin-like house.

So it is that we tuck into each other.

It feels so clean to sleep beside you.



Happy Birthday, Sergei Yesenin

Happy Birthday, Sergei Yesenin 

(September 21, 1895 - December 27, 1925)

The  yellow-hued rope you hung yourself with

still swings in Moscow, back and forth, back and forth.

When he got the news, Stalin danced in mockery of Isadora.

Five marriages in twelve years can wreck a man:

Anna Izryadbnova was the first song of love,

Zinaida Raikh sprinkled lemon juice on the sheets,

going-fat Isadora gave you a taste of American bourbon,

and you hitched-up with Augusta Miklasheyskaya

before butter could melt on Isadora's rye bread toast.

Before there were movie stars, there were poets.

Perfumed silken girls, girls fresh from ten-chicken villages,

begged you to tease, to suck and love them...

more girls than all the wind-blown fir trees in Russia.

Vodka, vodka, more vodka... and more love:

poet Nadezhda Volpin gave you a poet son.

Near the break-furniture, set-fire-to-hotel-rooms, end,

Sophia --Leo Tolstoy's granddaughter-- dragged you

to a hospital for a no-vodka, screaming month.

Now, on the other side, how do you, and Jim Morrison,

and Georg Trakl, grind-out eternity?  Do you run into Stalin?

Is there a heaven with peace?  Is dinner served promptly at five?

Do the wives, all five, and the girlfriends, hundreds of girlfriends,

offer sunrise kisses as you prepare to sleep all day long?

You might like it here, Sergei.  Toaster waffles for breakfast.

Dark tea.  No smashed-head cadavers... like the ones

Stalin's thugs dragged you past to change your poetry.

Here it's as quiet as the skittering of brittle autumn leaves. 



Happy Birthday, Vladimir Holan

Happy Birthday, Vladimir Holan  (September 16, 1905 - 1980)

Swindled by Marxists, euchred by popes,

you thought an evening with Hamlet could

glisten-up tarnished nights.  Solitary mornings...

afternoons of unbuttered rye bread and tea,

rides on random elevators to nod at impossible

milk-white breasts, impartial crimson lips.

At last, overwhelmed by the stench of piss

racing in their veins, you gave up corresponding

with foul-wind Shakespearean scholars.

How goes it in the abyss, Vladimir?

Little better, I suppose, than month upon year

in your Kampa Island apartment by the tomb-

dark waters of The Devil's Stream... center of Prague.

I am with you tonight... your sober-waltz poems.

Leninists and Papish cunts: it was a harmony of lies,

stone grins, bad wine from pus-crusted shoes...

a horror broken every so often by the beauty

of young lovers passing by with what is human:

fresh hope like summer light off silvery pewter.

Happy Birthday, H.D. / Hilda Doolittle

Happy Birthday, H.D. / Hilda Doolittle 

(September 10, 1886 - September 27, 1961)

Loved, thumb-stirred toward sleep,

thighs wet, released to dream crystal lines,

verse on a bed of purple sheets, golden pillows.

Crazy Ezra's voice, his longing, his clinging...

others followed like moons, bodies sharp,

bodies front-porch-blocky, women... a few men.

Sappho's sister!  Hands upon the delicious rose,

only a pearl necklace on pale-dawn skin

to release burning need.  Imagiste!   Freud

was too bland... a boaster with bad breath.

Sweet ruinous delight or nothing at all

to make a poem.  Heart-goddess,

Aphrodite, saint of lust-sorrow,

the poems have broken through to us,

lean-stemmed, luminous apricot-sweet petals. 

A Dirge for Paul Funge

 Paul Funge

1944 - 2011

A Dirge for Paul Funge

It was an exaltation of pure joy... the painting,

the friendships near and windblown.

Now it's better to laugh, stifle a growl...

better to remember us drunk in San Francisco,

a short walk to the surf, snug and well fed

in a surviving '06 quake Victorian,

bombastic for art and poetry...

four decades ago... how you passed out

on a wide couch in a bottle-clogged

front room, my Irish Wolfhound, Bran,

curled at your feet, proprietary guard

of your sleep, your dreaming of new paintings.

How could we have known, that afternoon

in Gorey, Wexford, us in our twenties,

when James Liddy walked me through 

your new festival, when you talked, joked

a verse-wilted sweet-nippled girl

into my arms, annointing me,

The new crazy-great Yank poet...

how could we have known, in that Gaelic sun,

that the nicotine-yellow fish-scale-fleshed 

Abaddon of the Bottomless Pit

would stalk us, trip us into the icy

trap of lights-out codgerhood?

All these decades... no words between us.

My fault the silence.  Wheeling onward with poems.

Giving sweet Kate babies.  Never gathering wit

long enough to at least send you a postcard.

Tonight it's not nearly enough to grieve-stare

at your paintings, luminous on a techno-screen.

Yet that is what your friends must get by on:

the luminous work, paintings you gave with joy.

 Kilmore Quay

Paul Funge

Landscape with Dark Clouds

Paul Funge

Happy Birthday, Cesare Pavese

Happy Birthday, Cesare Pavese  (September 9, 1908 - August 27, 1950)

The sound of grinning traffic on wet stones,

open summer windows, the smell of old boots

tossed against grey shrubbery... a young couple

passing arm in arm toward a love-rippling bed.

And comes a picture of you alone with your pills...

your own voice dead too soon... too-barbituate-soon.

And your red clouds gargled lost love or decay

or both at the sad same time.  You splintered soul.

And comes the sound of you walking past houses

scented with window box roses, bowls of peaches,

a woman's new black slip, dirty leaves in the pockets

of raw-muscled children, ungainly dreamers of new

power lines stretching from weeping hills

to hard-lesson villages... something always moving.

There was no touching any of it... without taking a spear

to the heart, was there?  Every love-glance moment

gone before you could ragged-waltz embrace it.

   

Frank James at Age Seventy, 1913

The Long Riders

Frank James at Age Seventy, 1913

I love my brother, but for years

I've been selling pebbles off Jesse's grave.

Ty Cobb came around one winter with a bottle

to warm  us.  He gave me a baseball, a new Colt,

and leatherbound volumes of Shakespeare.

I gave him a true stone, the others having

come from my nephew's farm.  Teddy Roosevelt

came, too, but I charged him the regular

half-dollar admission and handed him

a gallstone an undertaker removed

from a vagrant, and I charged Teddy

twenty dollars.  He really thought he

was special because of some Cuban hill

a horse managed to get him up.  There he was

with the gallstone, the Yankee kneeling

over Jesse's pebbled grave, half-listening

to how we'd near lost it all in Northfield.

One of his footmen dropped the gallstone

in an envelope: it's in the White House now.

My son finds my small business as irritating

as a chigger bite, thinks there's no dignity in it.

I say it's the spirit of the nation.

This poem first appeared in the last good issue of Prairie Schooner (Summer 1986).

This poem was included in Red Shuttleworth's Spur Award-winning collection of poems, Western Settings  (University of Nevada Press, 2000).