Poem for Friday

Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin
By Frederick Seidel

This jungle poem is going to be my last.
This space walk is.
Racing in a cab through springtime Central Park,
I kept my nose outside the window like a dog.
The stars above my bed at night are vast.
I think it is uncool to call young women Ms.
My darling is a platform I see stars from in the dark,
And all the dogs begin to bark.
My grunting gun brings down her charging warthog,
And she is frying on white water, clinging to a log,
And all the foam and fevers shiver.
And drink has made chopped liver of my liver!
Between my legs it's Baudelaire.
He wrote about her Central Park of hair.

I look for the minuterie as if I were in France,
In darkness, in the downstairs entrance, looking for the light.
I'm on a timer that will give me time
To see the way and up the stairs before the lights go out.
The so delicious Busby Berkeley dancers dance
A movie musical extravaganza on the staircase with me every night.
Such fun! We dance. We climb. We slip in slime.
We're squirting squeezes like a wedge of lime!
It's like a shout.
It's what minuterie is all about.
Just getting to the landing through the dark
That has been interrupted for a minute is a lark.
And she's so happy. It is grand!
I put my mobile in her ampersand.

The fireworks are a fleeting puff of sadness.
The flowers when they reach the stars are tears.
I don't remember poems I write.
I turn around and they are gone.
I do remember poor King Richard Nixon's madness.
Pierre Leval, we loved those years!
We knocked back shots of single malt all night.
Beer chasers gave dos caballeros double vision, second sight—
Twin putti pissing out the hotel window on the Scottish dawn.
A crocodile has fallen for a fawn.
I live flap copy for a children's book.
He wants to lick. He wants to look.
A tiny goldfinch is his Cupid.
Love of cuntry makes men stupid.

It makes men miss Saddam Hussein!
Democracy in Baghdad makes men think
Monstrosity was not so bad.
I followed Gandhi barefoot to
Remind me there is something else till it began to rain.
The hurricane undressing of democracy in Baghdad starts to sink
The shrunken page size of the New York Times, and yet we had
A newspaper that mattered once, and that is sad,
But that was when it mattered. Do
I matter? That is true.
I don't matter but I do. I lust for fame,
And after never finding it I never was the same.
I roared into the heavens and I soared,
And landed where I started on a flexing diving board.

I knew a beauty named Dawn Green.
I used to wake at the crack of Dawn.
I wish I were about to land on Plymouth Rock,
And had a chance to do it all again but do it right.
It was green dawn in pre-America. I mean
Great scented forests all along the shore, which now are gone.
I've had advantages in life and I pronounce Iraq “Irrock.”
The right schools taught me how to tock.
I'm tocking Turkey to the Kurds but with no end in sight.
These peace tocks are my last. Goodbye, Iran. Iran, good night.
They burned the undergrowth so they could see the game they hunt.
That made the forest a cathedral clear as crystal like a cunt.
Their arrows entered red meat in the glory
Streaming down from the clerestory.

Carine Rueff, I was obsessed—I was possessed! I liked your name.
I liked the fact Marie Christine Carine Rue F was Jewish.
It emphasized your elegance in Paris and in Florence.
You were so blond in Rue de l'Université!
The dazzling daughter of de Gaulle's adviser Jacques Rueff was game
For anything. I'm lolling here in Mayfair under bluish
Clouds above a bench in Mount Street Gardens, thinking torrents.
Purdey used to make a gun for shooting elephants.
One cannot be the way one was back then today.
It went away.
I go from Claridge's to Brands Hatch racing circuit and come back
To Claridge's, and out and eat and drink and bed, and fade to black.
The elephants were old enough to die but were aghast.
The stars above this jungle poem are vast.

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.
Outside the windows is New York.
I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland
Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.
And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some
I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.
The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned
Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.
The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound
That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.
The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.
They're watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.
The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.
The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that's missing.

--------

After Adam got me up to play Superpoke Pets with him since there are new items on Thursdays (this time it was the Atlantic seafloor, a chocolate shop, Japanese furniture, and I broke my prime rule and bought him one of the little hatching bluebirds that cost gold), I got stuff together to drive to New York in the afternoon. We picked up Adam from school early, stopped at Daniel's school to drop off the duffel bag he hadn't taken in the morning because he had nowhere to store it during the school day before the chorus got on the afternoon bus, then we drove through three states, ate dinner in a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop to save time and money, and arrived at the hotel around 8 p.m. Originally we were supposed to have a room on the 5th floor, but I asked the concierge how the view was, and she switched us to a fabulous room on the 20th floor. Here is the trip in brief:


Photo taken out my top floor hotel room window (with difficulty, since it has suicide screens that barely open wide enough for my smallest camera) -- we are a block away from the Empire State Building after having watched it appear and disappear in the clouds while we drove from Newark.


We had a very pretty view on I-95 through Maryland and Delaware, where there were lots of trees in bloom.


But once we had passed through Maryland farm country, with newborn calves and horses, then crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge...


...we found that there appeared to be a drought in New Jersey. Lots of the wetlands looked dry, the streams were low in their banks, and nothing was blooming yet, though we saw some geese and egrets in what marshes there were.


Here is a gratuitous through-the-windshield snapshot of the Lincoln Tunnel, taken because it took us more than half an hour to get to it from where the backup began.

From our room, to one side, Herald Square and Macy's...	...and to the other side, the Empire State Building.

Saw a bit of Smallville while getting organized in the hotel...I never felt properly sorry for Davis and now I loathe him, and the only line that really leaped out at me was from Tess, ""Betrayal...you know, the more you love someone, the harder it is," which I appreciated mostly because I'm pretty sure she was talking about Clark and Lex and any use of the L word there makes me happy, even in the past tense. The agenda for Friday is quite full -- Riverside Church for the choir festival early, then the Central Park Zoo unless it's pouring, then the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we haven't even worked out restaurants!