LIMITED SPLENDOR
1
I was Cleopatra in a previous life.
I stood at the top of the center of things
where I surveyed the pulverized shebang
from the heights of my palanquin
those dazzling off-shot remains of
this cosmic ornament in the wake
of a 13-billion-year-old spill,
hot molten heap of stars which were ours
to drown out
and in.
The voice of quantum succulence informed
our sapient flesh as drums held
the rhythm gravity circumscribed.
We invented the wheel, love
poems, threnody, the slide-
rule. Sometimes we chased the rabbit
nearly every time while
on other occasions
we went through the motions.
2,000 years later, detectives returned to the scene
of the sublime, arriving almost
too late to find anything they could
dust or dismantle
to good effect.
The button men made off with nearly
everything, leaving us with zilch.
The bagmen almost beat them
to the finish and punch
but the joke was on us.
2
While some were clubbing
dinner, others did algebra.
While some engaged in slaughter
others birthed and sang.
On the African continent
mathematicians nosed ahead
while the others scratched forth
from their gym spots in the ice.
Choreographed plumage skittered across alabaster.
Papyrus accrued characters and neumes.
Monuments rose. Shapely
strains and characters stained creamy
weaves and pliable open fields of
leaves unbound then bound again then ramifying
sang creation on planes of blanched jerky
whose heat-seeking, gut-stitched seams sought light,
shed light, brought light, let light —
ut that and fruit got born.
3
Drums held the rhythm gravity
circumscribed. We let our money ride
on Spontaneous Combustion.
A series of grand finales ensued
whereby everything that was
built to last went up in flames.
But mysterious champions
waited in the wings aiming
to extinguish our bonfires with pee.
Next, the light of a star stopped us in our tracks, but
most of us just said “Huh?”
Soon blood-thirsty chess pieces
bearing racks and manacles
leaned in, intoning the Battle Hymn
of Christ the Butcher.
They appeared at the table.
They showed him the door.
They booted him from the temple —
Him and the dame he came in with.
Behold, your mother, he said,
walking backwards out the door.
Behold the color of a woman
who does not run.
4
Dead Man walking
banged his head
against the garden wall
and cried out “Why
me?” The God Star raved.
5
Wearing gang hues
cathode and blood,
we consented
to narrow our own minds.
We made the NFL our pantheon.
We prayed for the coming
of the feely chip in our heads.
We prayed as our home-field planet
Rotated. We reached for revolvers.
We remanded suspects to lockup.
We traded roses for strip malls.
We paid cold, hard
tender for nothing
anyone really made.
We applauded the gargantuan
shadow plastic cast.
We outlawed beauty, lyric, satire and scale.
We erected a tower of gold
bullion to stand in our light.
We starved on a daily basis.
We nominated Greed to be our Caesar.
We blew on Hitler’s dice.
We sucked
up our own extinction
through straws.
Think Big
Gulp with added sugar and
a twist. Yet
when the morning star came
we were born.
GLAMOUROUS LIFE (AUBADE)
“Living the Dream”
—Ramses the Great
I
I awoke to a gorgeous gamine straight out of the Renaissance,
a long-necked Maria beside me in bed, nosing her lustrous
osculating face into mine, her mane a crimped spray
coppery, arrayed about pillows, her extremities all-
encompassing, her epidermis impossibly aglow.
She was working me all right, shaking me down for food,
but I didn’t mind. (It won’t be long, Botticelli girl,
‘til you’re old enough to play with fire.
Then you’ll feed yourself in the morning and
make magic using beans and a French
press to catalyze our early antemeridian routine!)
For now I too am a big baby
in the morning. I like lots of milk
in my coffee and the first one best, drunk
in bed. I like news! Weather! And the voice of an
on-air “personality” whose politics I detest.
I met the handsome oaf once
in the flesh. In a bookstore of all places.
He had a light heavy-
weight countenance. I’m a sucker for pugs.
Sometimes we are not the sum of our parts.
Sometimes the loins hold the key to the ancient city.
He’s the kind of man you know
can kill with a jab, the kind who looks down
the front of your blouse when you’re trying to hold
a conversation, but you fail to object —
even if you are the objecting sort —
even if you are intelligent and saying things he’d be
better off knowing but what do I know? But beyond that
I’m a sucker for man with a voice.
Next enters the Pre-Raphaelite sister—darker, smaller, a tad
shorter on propriety — who enters the boudoir
with tony regal countenance followed by her biggest fan,
Chulito the Splendid, who chases her up onto the bed—
What a glamorous life I lead! Chaque matin,
a pair of sprites and boy like a god, a trinity of
cupids amok, scrap amok in my midst like Huns vying
for the Grand Prix of my attentions.
This, as Zero Dark 6:30 dissolves
into broad daylight’s escalating imperative
kicks in, kicks off — O rise we must, spawn!
Light is breaking, the morning is under
way, and we know well the thrills won’t let up
until the chicken music stops.
Proceeding with cautious confidence
,
in my capacity as the Greek executioner
of alimentation, I will jumpstart the skillet,
get the eggs cracking. Sunnyside up,
whiskey down. Armed with spatula
and whisk, I will serve short-
order fare. Farmers’ Breakfast, Brooklyn style.
In my role as Inspector of Hygiene,
I will preside with the usual élan
over assembly-line ablutions with (special
concentration on fingernails and teeth).
“Let me smell your breath, Private!”
As Minister of Shodding assigned to Lost or
Strategically Concealed Footwear,
I will bark out orders in the tradition established
by those hyper-fecund Irish bitches, my foremothers:
“They didn’t just get up and walk away.”
As Czar of Swaddling I shall first demand,
then register the grievance: “Where’s your raincoat?”
“I left it in the schoolyard.” “Every time it rains,
I’m 20 bucks lighter.”
I will harp and winge as those foremothers did
at the Great Wall of Blah Blah
as the sotto voce insurgence of the too
clever by half freshly verbal cherubs/primates sounds:
“Can’t you see we’re not even listening?”
Leaving oatmeal to petrify and a coffee-
milk ring to congeal ‘round the interior
circumference of a glass. Circumnavigating
flies WILL swarm over warm juice.
We can always swat, disinfect and chisel anon.
Order would be nice but it’s boots on the ground
time. Operation Civilization commences at 0900 Hours,
at which designated time my commission
requires that I report for duty
at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
II
Upon arrival, reconnaissance, renaissance —
We shall look up and find Thucydides in a lineup,
alongside Confucius, Aeschylus, Homer, Pindar, Saint
Peter, Moses and Deuteronomy. At street level
We shall notice a fresh layer of thatched evergreen vinyl
tethered to a chain-link fence which
obscures the new hemicycle
whose new origin,
having been established beneath
an existing dome, accommodates an oblique
axis of approach. The day is Paris matin.
Limestone mist hovers. What state of matter:
liquid? Gas? Potage? N’importe quoi. For it is mighty
clear the morning’s precipitation
will not soon cease and clouds burn off,
clear that weather has already foreclosed upon
the mixing of cement and such, leaving
the construction crew stuck doing
what construction crews most often appear to do.
Not much. Haloed
in a cannabis cloud,
they loiter in a cluster, sparking
skinnies in the drizzle at the base of
a young pear tree. Their diffusing
cloud infuses fog, lends incendiary nose
of honeysuckle and piss to weather’s vapor.
Due to rain there is nothing
outside to build but inside,
structure is everything!
Do union regulations require the hard-
hats to remain where they stand on the site?
Do they not know what miracles
manifest just beyond the revolving doors?
Should we tip them off?
‘Head on in, fellas, for the ride of your life!
Experts believe the new Degas
well-hung in the ballroom
whose walls perpend a floor of glass
to be an under drawing.
Watch light come down
upon one of her breasts as the newly
immaculate baigneuse dries
her body with a cloth. I have it
on good authority that heterosexual men
in their testosterone-lousy primes
are partial to undraped demoiselles.
Never more so than when toasted.
Let the workers admire Hiram Powers’s
“The Greek Slave” on 5.
At first glance she is ancient and
white, but eyes deceive as history does.
Necessary lessons get missed
like train connections and ships that sailed
by the heartless and stupid.
At second glance one comes to see
her shackled beauty is black.
An American slave, she is
poured of cream,
black not white.
Larry Rivers’s July (also on 5) delivers us
a half-drawn, softly operatic summer glimpse
of a cookout in progress: a black bike, a geometric
shirt and verdant yard reveal that sun
is working behind the scene to throw
unified light upon a table
where visitors in chairs enjoy shade
and its counterpart.
The rendering is replete and as incomplete
as leisure itself on a warm afternoon
when thoughts of industry wash sunlight out.
But there’s work to be done and
world and time insufficient in which
to do it, so edifying those tool-belts from the local
will have to wait. For the proper focus of today’s
enlightenment agenda falls
upon those enlivened pupils
wriggling in the foreground of the museum’s
edifice, departing
yellow vehicles
in an orderly fashion
approximately in the order
in which they were received,
who queue up at the point of entry in the rain.
III
Whatever did I do
to deserve this being summoned
to join them among the sarcophagi?
To be charged with distributing
the ebony implements of invention
and ensuring that each is returned
to the Medaglia d’Oro can
once each eight-year-old master
has completed their works.
Whatever did I do
to deserve these obligations?
Of reminding the uninitiated and forgetful
that touching is prohibited,
of fielding inquiries, counting heads,
herding 30 3rd graders — Ms. Lehman’s class—
through chambers of stone?
Whatever did I do to deserve the honor
of astonishment in the face of
the Guardian Eye of Horus,
Precinct of Mut, and flexible equilibrium
of the Late Egyptian Period before the
Persians and Ptolemies advanced,
in the company of these still-baking minds?
To enjoy the privilege of
apprehending these particulars
of mummification — the practice, for instance,
during the reign of Ramses II
whereby the brains
of the imperial dead
were drawn out through their nostrils
by means of a hook, in order that
the organs of the head
might be preserved
in canopic jars along with other viscera —
The hearts, we came to notice,
were left unbroken, intact within
thoracic cavities, because
the ancient Egyptians believed
the muscle of the heart
to be the locus, not
of love, but of intelligence,
which sounds like a pretty good idea to me.