Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle

JB, I read your poetry and sigh.

The tale of how he slipped his thumb in my

young mouth alongside host

(Christ, the body of) that florid priest, nocent I

in my white dress you would enjoy, if you alive

hadn’t done at last

It. Elastic you had none,

ajumping from that bridge…To your winsome

Irish grin & your last wit,

we’d raise a finger’s worth in Mississip—

Somewhere it’s five o’clock. Just eight months

we overlapped, ’71.

Of suicide I rarely think. I have yoga, along

with drink, which into his throat my father gunned.

You would know, JB,

that bottle rolling beneath his driver’s seat

weren’t no goddamn Listerine.

Wasn’t I, Mr. Bones, a pretty baby?

~

Man, I love you men. But you “perplex.”

Regarding the fairer sex. The need into the peach

of your praise to slip

the blade. Or the need to pack the cannon

(smoothbore, muzzle–loading)

full of balls—

Of Emily Dickinson, even Charming Billy

Collins writes of taking off her dress…

For foreplay, JB, I’ll

read your juvenilia. & of bald rhymes:

my students who love you not at all

for a depilatory could wish.

~

One last bed. One last cool sheet

to pull over your head. Boats

there must have been—

did they see amazing, a boy falling

from the sky, calm did on they sail? My thoughts

turn to your son Paul:

you’d apologized for This bad fall, his birth.

(Reading that I’d fret I was too happy

to write verse.) Hey, out there,

anyone know Paul Berryman? I’d guess, if at all,

things aren’t well. My father’s ice cubes I still hear

rattling down the hall.

~

To name. To feed. My son was a rodeo cowboy

when feasting on my milk, he’d flap his free arm

in the air. Lip–smacking

no longer metaphor. Like Uma Thurman

in Pulp Fiction snorting coke, Goddamn, goddamn.

You’d have liked that film,

you who force your readers to their knees

to gather & restring the beads that from a height

you dropped—ass

in the air oh awkward but at last—

Look what we made!—dynamite, your sentences

circling our throats.

~

After birthing Homage, you took Wife One to Paris.

Some street fest raged, you manicked, goated, gone—

she found you at dawn

before uncomprehending bakers & floury stars

(the only ones awake) reciting your poem—

took you to the hospital, home.

~

Can I lay blame—“’42: Marries Eileen . . . ’47: First infidelity . . . ”

And if I can’t, how praise my stallion solely

rutting apple–munching me?

Stabled. (Sugar–cube teeth beyond the fence

have I desired? Natch. But no touch–touch.)

(Not much.)

“Free Willie” is the question, a U.S. flick

about a whale I saw previewed in London,

where “willie” is slang for “dick.”

Free Willie. Like whales the giggles breached.

Is accountability just that, some cosmic

inadvertent joke?

~

In roadside Mexico a man macheted pineapple,

sprinkled it with salt & lime & hellborn chili dust.

It cost less than a buck.

Don’t eat it, a fellow tourist warned, coming off the bus.

I ate it. So with your words

my lips sweetburn.

I get (ish) it. I pumped my swing at six

so hard my sneakers toed the sky. You

know, don’t you,

what happened next—after the swing set’s stiff legs

rocked thrice—but before I hit the ground—

I flew.

~

(At girlhood slumber parties, to be the last—

with darks and creaks—awake would terrifize. O wilt

thou abandon me thus?)

Would I like to be redeemed? Yes but

your postconversion poems lack the juice.

“Under new management: Thine,”

you tell the Lord—like a cornball church marquee

wrote by no pal of mine. Makes me

miss old wild bad Pussy–Cat.

Though it seems he resurrected, that mope. Does Rome

goddamn a suicide? Duh. Does the pope

wear a funny hat?

~

You did make light (enduring life) in some,

you lodged a song where others never. I read you

getting my tonenails done

then rest you in my lap. You’re wel–

come. You could report to thems that wonder

whether I’m a natural red.

I bet, sure. But before infinity’s door

I hedge, I haw. Kind Sot, answer my daughter, five,

who spies from the car

the funeral tent in the cemetery:

Mommy, look—[she taps the glass],

is it a slumber party?

~

A hundred & three years ago, Yeats visited my college.

Wrote home to Lady Gregory: I’ve been delighted by

the big merry priests of Notre Dame,

all Irish. Of Yeats, Father O’Donnell summarized:

A somewhat snobbish and esoteric freak.

Out of step, unhanded: the poet’s fate.

My great prof there, Matthias, called your birth scene

in Bradstreet the best he knew. Huffed I,

feministically, eighteen.

Now I, twice bairned, admit he’s right.

When gentle Matthias crosses over, help him

from the boat.

~

—Them deads & sicks & horribles, he suffer each one personal.

& each time seem like forever to Mr. Bones. He was copeless.

~

It’s time to raise, pome fiends, the pelt

that right off its nail has shrunk.

Achoo.

Mothballed, but Functionill, can jig, can still

imaginate & coochie coochie coo.

Will haiku for a cigarette.

Rest for the rest of them dead poets who

selectified their own society—for you,

Henry Dessi–Cat,

no peace till we have voices that—

electrified, raising hell, Arooooooooo—

a drop of Irish, & you come to.

~

Daytime drama is Henry’s theater báse.

Popcorn–munching fans, of whom I’m Ass. Manager

(schooled by a father

who fell for his audience gorgeous & debased)

asseverate, Through literature we’re educated

by the experiences of others;

after witnessing the irresponsibility of Berryman,

etc. We like when planes fly into him, forsooth,

& all fall down.

We get to put the high moral point on it

after voyeuring his entry to the confession booth

(where he dons his cape) the sonnet.

~

the news of war tonight your specs would mist.

Convince some fool did not me at the rose nursery

to purchase a “Barbara Bush”

bush—hacks it to bits, mon plaisir. Does

my husband know we watch TV, JB,

& plot our violence?

I’d better dump you soon, though I’m entranced

with your smart–bomb which budgets its defense

(though it's “idle to reply to critics”):

Well, some dreams aren’t méant to make sense.

Not to Henry–like one must vigilante.

Shantih, Shantih.

~

Yet I leave you, lone. In the next room,

a woman, paid, is playing with my son.

My curred obsession

of a fortnight nears its close.

He laughs. I choose to hear him,

& I rise.

For Dylan Thomas dying in St. Vincent’s

you, Mercy, rose; & for shunned Pound.

See, some of Henry’s guts

wasn’t rot. It helps

you wait in the dark, in the ground.

Save my spot.