Sailing Down the Potomac

AMERICA

 

 

 

 

Such stories I have heard! You wouldn’t believe:

people who own clear minds containing this one girl

whose name they publish against her wishes.

A girl whose conscious head is daisy-laden & distributed

easily as a pamphlet made of gold leaf.

Then she clears the dishes.

 

She is the planet malingering in the gravity well of his ceiling fan.

Make a wish upon her: only her memories dead set against convulsions

(as debutantes memories are apt to be). She is effusive

about a few good men

which she forgot to have regretted by someone else.

She has resigned herself

to a coarse and intermittent socialism

of interpretive and dyspeptic apple-sellers,

and her intermedia family—

although it is a family of nuclear engineers on volleyball scholarships

with mothers gaunt and giddy—

hate the New Porous Novel,

Pyro-Poetics,

and having survived a Depression they cannot recall;

their cobalt battery bones dream

of purchasing bread with eyes as coins,

and a bar of soap to scrub the electric beehive,

and so on:

the following year her body changes thoughts like an old car

while her sophisticated fellow-travelers form a Weekly Tragedy Club,

a union which takes pains to point to its free pink glasses,

and the ignorant prettiness of its peasant children.

This is (of course and once more) Anarchy!

Or Malarkey.

 

There remains her nervous novenae in July:

the sacred roads lit by candles from army supply,

counting the stars’ pores,

and that western grin

across which coal light fell scorching the wagons;

every plight lights my mind’s small wildrose window,

a tree surrounded

by the clattering robotics

of her August Revolution.

 

Oh, the blossoms of Revolution frost

upon the pocketbooks

carried to the teashops and parking lots and ruined crops

full of perfumed and later perforated brides

with their stone lace, their capes and white anchors

made from the recast plate of WWII statuary

(broken in an earthquake washed down by a Gibson)

and

upon the little blue coffee cups

of her sub-aqueous culture spots up and down Broadway

where I once feared personal experience but now am protected

and

upon the threshed May darkness

punctuated by elite violences

in which her mutated delicacy speaks

in conference rooms

and rhythmically

upon the umbrellas in Honduras

which bop along the yellow roads toward a shed

reminding us that the Renaissance

has become (of late) moody,

sickly and apt to tinkle upon us—

suddenly it’s as if we had called the wrong number

at the wrong time late night in winter,

and as if filling stations and casinos

took care of the poor

so we don’t have to see them in our delicate condition?

 

And why is Rimbaud so newly listless in his job

as a semi-literate necktie salesboy?

And why those dungheap hotels in debt housings along the Pacific?

And why security cameras disguised as roses

in the Alhambra

where children wear typewriter ribbons in their hair

to celebrate Customer Day

and then the cocaine lawyer forgets to phone the Mayor,

because the profit margin has been fixed (subrosa) at infinity.

And why the laundry full of stains from shrimp boats, cod cakes,

heated egg-white flings, frosted olive squeezies,

tomato massacree, black matter shoegloss,

diamond oil, ashtrays full of warm flesh,

and sausages small as a woman’s cigarette

and just as white.  

 

Oh Sunday

at the propaganda kiosks

bedecked in red leatherette,

cracked but so fetching at first glance

you do not notice the food & wine

dumped in the shady terrarium

for the Pope’s pet panthers,

and the kerosene stove burning

in the ancient Carmelite convent

as a hundred blessed hands picking at the berries

(or are they sores).

But

her friends assure her the streets are charming

even in darkness,

and that the lovebirds are only being hanged

because it is washday in Eden,

and that the muddy rivulets now full of tiny mullet tugs & gun boats

are also filling with sugared oranges & comedic orangutans

for the gray babies coming into their majority

in this Blue Decade of vented sensation,

the Decade of the gold chrome deities

and their stalwart companions,

the prudish conversationalists. Who giggle.

And upon the flesh waving at the crossroads like a rag.

And on and on.

 

And I am sure the driveways have come to accept their own phenomenon,

at least they seem indefatigable and ultimate,

like a youthful Stalin filling his dance card,

and (if we only remember to register)

the Party will blossom beside the outdoor pool,

a lotus surrounded by tall cool drinks and light jazz

and buzzing intellectuals preening.

Her Sunday is always a sweet embolism about to happen,

another miracle always ahead, or a refreshment billboard

advertising mice swimming in hi-ball glasses,

and this is perfectly logical

and we pay.

 

And (finally) it is her depressing blue eyes

(sub-aqueous culture up and down Broadway),

her mother-of-pearl soul, lithe and spike-haired,

dreaming of a baby smoking a cigarette,

dreaming of the raven trace of our scruples

finger-worked deep into the dimpled and deckled slipcovers,

voraciously

dreaming of the sun’s genital scarring,

the immortality of labor and value

whose youth was trivial

and whose senility is irrelevant.

 

And then she clears the dishes. 

GO BACK TO THE COUNTRY YOU CAME FROM!