No Man Worth Her Salt

Joan Crawford Advances Upon Notre Dame Cathedral

 

 

 

     Bakelite harmoniums!—

an intelligent sub-continent

of bruised telephones calling up doctors—

melt in small, third-story apartments, bubbling girlishly

as a thousand and one tree silhouettes scatter their fried lace

to the sound of her morgue castanets.

And with a chain of pearls she tows a train

whose misted windows are proud to complain

about the state of transportation

to an old woman poling a boat on the Seine
and to the breeze’s anarchist

in a crimson punt

in the silt and foam:

which recalls to her the New York City harbor

as she trawls the alleyways of the Revolution

for souvenir parade hands.

Not precious, sophisticated, satisfied,

and a livid as linen—

for she expected too much from the Age of Manners—

she pours two pink aperitifs from a Woolworth’s jug

which is her soul
that noble gas

(lovely as a dark ditch tied at the waist with a rose-tinted scarf)

draining into her red shoes.

 

     “Forget Pisa: everything is leaning,” she moans

as a doll-sized gendarme chips away at her heart

and she pulls away abruptly

just another wounded rebel

smelling of a chicken farm between two glaciers—

who doesn’t nowadays?

And, in her eyebrows, whiskey dewdrops

as big as antelope skulls!

Her eyebrows are the city’s newest structural beams.

She thinks the Eiffel Tower is fat

and isn’t afraid to tell it so

in a short memo scratched upon an opal.

 

She scribbles two notes toward a fresher economy…

 

“At L’Opéra, a sewer rat is playing Juliet

like a Hired Beauty, fresh as fireworks

in a bowl of April milk.

Have her dismissed.”

 

 &                        

 

“A Rose Window will light my incontestable sleeplessness, and the war widows will generate gravity waves which will hold down the overhead.”

 

     Not quite a pleasure but not so much business:

her success an iron moth already elsewhere

sipping Pepsi through a yellow straw

debriefing her patented hairdo

a fire in an abandoned bicycle warehouse

labeled “Basilisk, Inc.”

She imagines her next major project: 

“Cleopatra pulls the trigger (starkly lit)

on an iridescent key which opens the Autumn’s brass fan

made tragic by broken apertures.

The wake of her barge is legible from Marseilles through a 25 cent telescope

but she has become a veined apple freckled with snow

and night’s Black Delicious is searching for a tree

for both she and her French sailor to fall from

into each other’s arms.

(Compose a list of stuntmen)

She plans to be higher—in the French pantheon—

than a borrowed overcoat and she will be stiff

with the saliva of young working girls

making beds beneath a waterfall.

And yet her profile is a wire elevator

within which the Bastille ghost of a post-breakfast cigarette

lies on a tablecloth woven from a torn shirt

that still has some hair clinging to one of its buttons.

Fade.”

 

     Feh! Her dress champagne-sharkskin,

her eyes two daiquiri parasols.

She simply must attend a funeral for a pet rabbit

down amidst the great amber columns of her voice

frosted with the psychologist’s daintiest diamonds

to mimic the black flies still struggling in the room’s air.

 

     And there the ritual mouthful of white cherries

bedridden in her breath misting the train’s tiny windows

back over her burgeoning shoulders,

the Deco pianos like sleepwalkers matted with cobbles

as they pour into the streets below

and just top off her red shoes

so the wrens don’t go thirsty. 

RETURN FOR DEPOSIT