sing Tuscany Mercury Verdi Prosciutto—
hail Mary, just Mary, three times for my penance
and thank the aniseed liquor for blacking me out.
Avoidance Behavior
The square watermelons that sell for ninety-two dollars in Japan
show up next to a painting by Congo the chimpanzee,
which sold for twenty-six thousand dollars yesterday,
though by yesterday I don’t mean “yesterday”
because Congo died of tuberculosis forty years ago
and this newspaper is two months old,
and who knows where you (hypothetical reader) lie
if-anywhere in the future? You’ll have to add X
to all the numbers as time passes
because the prices usually inflate
while space collapses around these things that hum as if with current,
until they’re placed so close sparks arc across
and make my dental fillings zing.
And though matter is supposed to fly outward for X more billion years
(minus the time-space between me ≠ you)
flick the remote or
turn the page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer—
and this melon turns into a mouse grafted to a human ear,
suggesting we’ve hastened the constriction
of the final falling-in. Yet
might not all this juxtapositional cram-it-all-in-ness
be our sly protest against the flying-out?
As in the new craze called sacred snuggling
where bodies touch, but do not rub
any membrane that might lubricate?
Wishful thinking? This belief
that we’ll move toward the smell of sweat and scalp
when the giant meteor comes at last
or the bomb slants across the laundry lines (≠)—
whatever the accelerant of our demise?
Me,
I’d rather be immersed, that’s how far my matter’s scattered,
that I’d leave all you behind
to skinny-dip in darkness at the end,
touched by nothing but a spring-fed lake.
Postcard from Florida
After paddling out, I found the manatees
in canals behind the pricey homes,
as I once found the endangered Hawaiian goose
beside the hulks that once were dream cars.
So the scarce beast gets its camouflage
at the farthest outpost of our expectations:
the gators prefer golf courses to marshes,
prefer Cheetos, Fritos, nachos, Ho Hos
to baby fish as bright as coins.
What doesn’t kill us makes us strong
(see the scar where propellers have cut through the hide),
but doesn’t that mean some of us will be killed
and not made strong? My sweet flabbies
swing their gum-rubber hips in freshwater
murmuring from the air-conditioning compressors
and waggle my little boat with their bristles—
what doesn’t tip us over
makes us give a whopper sigh.
Look up, and a geezer by his pool
feeds a great blue heron from his hand:
they are so alike they could be twins, him croaking
a tune the bird has come to know
and stalks at certain times of day.
Meanwhile two girls next door in bathing suits
who have turned on the hose in their backyard
hop now at the edge of their wooden bulkhead
singing Come to us humanities
and oh see how they do.
Transcendentalism
The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks
before coughing up the question
that had dogged him since he first read Emerson:
Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered
while his lecture drifted against us like snow.
If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind.
I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too,
a quiet little interlude from everyone outside
rooting up the corpse of literature
for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer
to my own question (how come no one loved me,
stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle):
I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet,
though I liked If the red slayer think he slays—
the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul.
Then he read a chapter from his own book:
naptime.
He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks.
When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard
where dogwood bloomed despite a few last
dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal
being chased across the tundra by those wolves,
the postmodernists. At any moment
you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes.
And I am I who never understood his question,
though he let me climb to take a seat
aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade
of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it
from his yard, into my life — remains a mystery.
The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.
Final Leap
When the Black Elvis takes the stage, five of him appear—
start with the man in his white jumpsuit,
then add the jumbo projection behind,
throw in a replication of his replicated feet
plus two copies of his shadow. Though he is five,
he has never been ranked #1
because he does not look like Elvis, which is true:
his voice is more soulful than anyother Elvi
but the judges at the yearly Memphis finals
will not close their eyes and make that final leap.
Not so for the women here, who can frog
the leap still one bounce farther
until a spirit descends and the dead man
lives. It is a little troubling
how much the pageant resembles a Catholic mass
when the women approach as he descends
the stage’s steps, bell-bottoms aflutter
around the doves of his white boots.
Then he drapes a satin strip around their necks.
Then comes the Amen of their swoons.
As for me, I don’t see why a spirit
would deign to enter the body again
when you consider bloat colitis amphetamines etc.
and the final humiliations of the toilet.
Me, I’d prefer to be housed in a ghost
as I’d also prefer that Robert Washington
not wear the electric guitar around his neck
when it is not plugged in. But the scarves
have plugged in these women, who sound
as if they too have been amplified by five, forming one
big animal body my soul just might deign
to descend into. For the plain speech
of its snarls and yips: we are housed
in fur and we’re housed in heat—
we are dogs tied to trees, at the end of a leap
before the lights come up and we are yanked back by our chains.
NOTE: Robert Washington did win the 2003
Images of Elvis contest, after I wrote this poem.