Monthly Archives: July 2011

Poem: 12 Steps (An Elegy for Betty Ford and Amy Winehouse)

24 Sunday Jul 2011

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“Every time I went through, I used to put a cigarette between her fingers.”

– Betty Ford on a ceramic bowl adorned with two Greek goddesses, a bowl chosen by the Nixons to decorate the Yellow Oval Office in the White House

 

The two aren’t such strange bedfellows

Amy dying only days after Betty

I was in the Betty Ford garden with its yellow

Blossoms and columbines, its flowers like confetti

 

When I heard that Amy was dead at twenty-seven

Like Morrison, Cobain, Joplin and Hendrix

Is there good parking for rock stars in heaven?

Is there a life after green rooms and the quick fix?

 

In Vail, there’s a theatre in Ford’s name, a garden in hers

What a first lady she was, candid and considerate

Entering the yellow Oval Office in furs

Using Nixon’s bowl to hold her cigarette.

 

Across the pond, Amy Winehouse lost track

Of her power to remain our most soulful songstress

So she slid, finally, fatally, back to black

What a wonder, what a waste, what a legendary mess

 

Ford made “rehab” a household word

Winehouse sang its painful praises

One tragic, the other self-assured

The two knew the trouble when one trailblazes

 

 – Vail, Colorado

Poem: “Lord Byron’s Bulldog”

19 Tuesday Jul 2011

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Sleep by day, guard by night the steps at Lafranchi

Until after dinner when Byron and I write together –

Up the marble stairs to his study, the orange tree at midnight.

Gin and water on the veranda as we write at dusk:

His Don Juan, my Diary of a Dog in Heat (Book I).

Byron thinks it my best prose yet but beyond the title,

Can I really hold a gentleman’s attention?

Will the critics care that I’m canine?

 

Amongst friends in this menagerie: the monkey and mastiff,

Nine horses for his five carriages, one falcon, a pair of cats

One of whom was at Cambridge with his Lordship

And told the peafowl (who told me) that Byron kept a bear there

Before he woke up famous, before the Separation

Before he became the Lucifer of literature

And left London for good.

 

With the help of sardines, Byron has taught me to write

I’m quite proficient though I can’t cross my Ts

Still, he calls me the paragon of animals

Only I have seen our Lord’s deformity, the crippled foot

He sometimes calls the “externalization” of his soul

Only I attend each nocturnal routine:

The baths, the mirror-gazing, the naked guests in Venetian masks.

 

When I’m silent too long, his Lordship reminds me

That the public only knows Byron the poet

But what they want is Byron the man

Only I can narrate the night of the stabbing

All seven servants were in quite a state

When the Countess’s brother, bloodied, stumbled to the parlor

Where his Lordship was composing at the time

Late to his side, I was ashamed.

 

An English bulldog in Italy is like a fish out of oil

If that’s the expression?  (Note: ask L.B.)

London’s fog was good for my airways

But the air in Pisa reeks of garlick

That obnoxious spice, as ahorrent as Mr. Shelley said

As if his Lordship would even know

Living, as he does, on biscuits and diuretics

Our Lord frets too much about his waistline

As a result, table scraps are paltry here in the palace

But I can’t complain so long as I sing for my supper

And that supper is sardines. 

 

– Breckenridge, Colorado (7/2011)

 

 

 

Poem: The Padlocks of Paris

13 Wednesday Jul 2011

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Nine nights into their European vacation

And she still felt superimposed on the place

This was Sheila’s idea of her first trip outside the States –

That she and Sam weren’t really part of Paris yet

But pasted onto photos she loved as a high schooler

At Langley, where Monsieur Wallace would insist

En francais, Mademoiselle! Though it was in plain English

That he told her, from the driver’s seat, in the rain:

“Look, Sheila, I have a wife, a family, I could go to jail for this.”

Around that time she began saving to leave Jersey, to get out,

To walk London and Paris, with a husband, which she finally did,

Thanks to Atlantic City and the death of Sam’s aunt.

Along the Pont des Arts, which the book told them

Was the first metal bridge across the Seine,

Sheila noticed the scores of padlocks and remembered when

Sam’s bicycle was locked to hers behind Langley

That’s how it began: by accident, already entangled

The new boy from Tucson who hadn’t heard about her,

About Wallace, about her father in the teachers parking lot,

Smashing windows with his nine-iron, shouting something,

Something about Sheila, “my baby girl,” and broken noses.

She probably loved him then, even before he came to unlock his bike

The red Schwinn that he weirdly resembled: tall, geometric, rickety even

Whatever Sam heard from teammates, he simply ignored

Looking forward, never back, to their first kiss (which wasn’t French),

To the wedding, to children (a trio of sons), to retirement, to Vegas

Where she wore a blue dress and looked longingly at the  miniature Eiffel.

On a dare, she ate escargot in Rue Jacob

Sheila called them “a delicacy”; Sam called them “snails”

But an empty stomach since produced dizziness

And downright elation at the bridge’s center

Where they watched a young couple, almost ritualistically,

Lock, kiss, and throw away the key

And all around them, love’s graffiti,

The urban equivalent, she thought, of trees

With lovers’ initials etched in branches and boughs –

Four strokes of a switchblade and you have a heart –

She thought also of Langley and her disgrace

Though Sam was smiling and had in his open hand

A lock from his luggage, a lock too tiny to protect anything,

Which they fastened to the railing in the rain.

– Breckenridge, CO (7/2011)

 

Poem: “When You’re Away”

10 Sunday Jul 2011

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When you’re away,
I watch Hitchcock, his characters
Like fine china, looking collected but really cracked.
Scottie and Norman have a bad rap –
So, too, those birds – they only wanted contact.
Without you here,
Your toothbrush stiffens to teal cake
While your clothes hang limply in the closet
I find a cuff-link in the beige carpet
It made a matching pair but one’s lost now.
When you’re away,
A whole pot of coffee depresses me
The same is true of the half-made bed
A neighbor’s baby wails
But I have my own crib to decry
Won’t someone change this diaper?
Without you near me,
The gin won’t stay in its green bottle
Because your hand can’t remain in mine
And I use temporal tricks to kill time
“The day after tomorrow” or “Five nights left.”
But time never consoles and the hands on clocks
Might as well wear boxing gloves.
– Breckenridge, Colorado
July 2011.

Poem: Coyote Dream

10 Sunday Jul 2011

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In dreams, the fine line between

Coyote and canine is far from fearsome.

The dangerous, the domesticated

Hardly distinguishable: fur, fangs,

Pet, petrifying, I move among them.

In my sleep, I’m awake

To no difference boys and beasts.

But once my eyelids snap open like cheap blinds,

I’m made painfully aware,

At a trailhead, at winter’s cold core,

Of my own dogs, all puffed up but ultimately defenseless.

The pair are startled by the shrill barks

Then by the largest among them.

They see what was never really far-off

Some adversary, some ancestor

Skulking, lip raised, by the tree line

Flashing that purple streak of meanness.

Poem: Sonnet for Lady GaGa

10 Sunday Jul 2011

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And I thought I’d have to grow old and gay

with Madonna alone! Mother

of masks, of reinvention, who likes to say:

“Just thinking about sex is sex” and whose lovers

Wilt in the shade of her gilded vanity

Until you came alone, well-versed

in Warhol and Rilke and the cold depravity

of life without dance, daring, fashion, who burst

Like some pop Pegasus, some demented diva,

The chastity belt that is America, every bit the Muse

She once was, singing “Vogue” and “You give me fevah,”

Still your own Medusa, affirming “Never lose –

Never compromise.” Yet I’m a guilty fan

Feeling every bit like I’m seeing another woman.

May 2011.

See my “Latest in Gaga” from the _G&LR_ (2010):

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+latest+in+Gaga.-a0232889565

Poem: “My father stands in the swimming pool of time”

10 Sunday Jul 2011

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[“My father stands in the swimming pool of time”]

My father stands in the swimming pool of time

That cement sink in the backyard around which

Kids’ teeth were chipped as they scampered, dripping,

Mouths full of birthday cake, unheeding

All parental caution to slow down.

My father paints the steps to the swimming pool of time

Every spring, for the past twenty-eight springs, he applies coat

Upon coat, always the same eggshell blue but with a different dog

Serenely watching over him, six feet deep and sweating,

A salamander inside a monochrome fresco.

My father leans against a mop in the swimming pool of time

For his sons and daughter, now for his daughter’s daughters

Who hear nothing metaphoric in his quiet work –

The repetition and rhythm of brush- and broomstrokes –

Nothing major in the unambiguous songs of birds and jetplanes.

My father coils a garden hose in the swimming pool of time

Empties its deep end of acorns, mud and branches

And the fake plastic coins the girls went diving for but soon

abandoned

Nearly seventy, every bit the skittish swimmer he was at ten, he stands

Above the drain, looking up, straight into the sun, then down again.

New Jersey. May 2011.