Dug For Victory: Poems from RIP-TV, Page 3

  31

  Beatrice Portinari

  B. 1266 Florence / 6.9.1290 Florence

  Jesus wanted for sunbeam

  Courtly love:

  While one girl applies her lipstick at a Q train stop, the other holds the doors ajar so the train won’t start and jostle up her line.

  2004-06-09

  32

  Gertrude Stein

  B. 2.3.1874 Allegheny, Pennsylvania / D. 7.27.1946 Paris

  Cancer

  The Q local, one of those perpendicular seating encounters, me in a window perch getting an eyeful of the bespectacled brunette who boarded at 14th Street; that is, of her profile and her hands. She holds a rose

  is

  a yellow one, in one, and in the other hand a pen which she rests, oddly, across her ring finger. On the blank back of a xeroxed handout she scratches strings of numbers, letters, blanks; they appear to be codes or their keys. Perhaps she composes difficult word puzzles for a living and she’s been out at an acrostics trade event or dinner, which is where she got a rose

  is

  no lover gave to her; there’s less than no indication she’s kissed tonight. I sit above my own notebook and stare and wait; through art historical rings—French, cathedral, limestone, saint—her profile’s arrow speeds to pierce a heart of tennis fandom: she resembles Jeanne d’Arc’s modern avatar Justine Henin, the immortally great Belgian player. But without the flush, in spectacles, without the victories, no garlands, just a rose

  is

  scent-less, in a clip-on plastic reservoir. Into the pocket of the dark blue backpack go the handout and the pen. The pale-pale lavender fleece hat next, off it comes—bangs! Always welcome if done well, as here. Pale brown hair, not yet graying but the color plug’s been pulled, the gray is coming. Charcoal gray her coat, black the shoes, again the navy pack, a rose

  is

  all the bright hue to her. Pale hands, winter-pale, sorely red and rash-ridden all along the bowl between forefinger and thumb, wherein rests a rose:

  is

  I should take her home, throw some Elidel on her. She is sleepy. Through the darkened lyre strings of the Brooklyn Bridge I watch the Statue of Liberty twirl out to sea, glowing. The woman with a rose

  is

  starting to nap, reveals notably short eyelashes. I determine to make a journey of looking at her profile. She will be to me Quebec City or Brussels—Bruges, even. I absorb her stone house-fronts, tall and pastel-shuttered; her clock-spotted steeples of historic note; her chilly church naves and organ recitals; her postcard racks squealing protests at every quarter-turn. Meanwhile a rose

  is

  however hardy must start to wilt on the Q train. In slumbering grasp, the contents of the reservoir are tipped away from thirsting stem. Fifty, a hundred brushstrokes a night her hair could use, for luster, and neatness. Is that a bald patch coming at the very top? I will not stand up to get a clearer view: if I arose

  is

  too conspicuously from my seat and woke her, what could I do? I’d have to get off, await the next train. Better to sit and observe her chin puckering as it sinks into her chest; my chin must pucker even more unappealingly when I doze upright on transport. The generations who have dozed thus! Our basic unfitness (I’m coming home from a production of King Lear) as a species for life is overwhelming. Who had the idea for a rose

  is

  whose yellow petals look like they’ve been dipped in crimson dye, just the tips? Why? I see her as she’ll look when she is old—a rose

  is

  sealed tight within its form, a rose

  is

  the same rose. The gloves go back on at Seventh Avenue, the cloche of lavender is next. By Beverly Road her youth’s restored and at Newkirk she rises, goes. The moral? I say, if you want to make sure of being noticed in public, there’s no way like a rose

  is.

  2004-02-13

  33

  Veronica Lake (b. Constance Frances Marie Ockleman)

  B. 11.14.1919 Brooklyn / D. 7.7.1973 Burlington, Vermont

  Hepatitis

  Sunday Brunch in Greenwich Village

  Show tunes

  are

  stuck in the heads

  of every other person who passes

  a prone form

  weighting yesterday’s papers

  to last night’ piss—

  plangent altos

  are

  balladeering in brain space

  all alone in the moonlight; undisturbed,

  the sleep of the just

  too

  drunk

  to have moved.

  2006-11-19

  34

  Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard Récamier

  B. 12.4.1777 Lyon / D. 5.11.1849 Paris

  Reduced circumstances

  Garbage truck eats sofa

  first one end, then the other

  cotton cover (burgundy), rips, stains

  that on one arm resemble blackened sidewalk gum, stuffing,

  foam, staples, frame

  in three bites swallowed.

  What seductions, what aftermaths

  what interludes wore out that sofa?

  (Chelsea garbage truck eats sofa.)

  Or none

  or none to compare in effulgence or frequency with the before during and afters its owner plotted

  while reclining on the sofa

  perched or sprawled, jumping up to get stuff

  pet stuff—

  pets—

  toss more imaginings into the maw.

  Garbage truck eats sofa

  both ends front and back worn out by wild thoughts and chases

  and consequent spillage

  (that is

  by the spastic pining that spikes a graph

  already plotting

  continual low-level cat damage).

  2006-10-04

  35

  Mary Leakey (b. Mary Nicol)

  B. 2.6.1913 London / D. 12.9.1996 Nairobi

  Natural causes

  Season

  of something and mellow fruitfulness

  somehow

  it makes me more me that I can’t remember

  properly

  the blank a fingerprint, a follicle

  of mists? of messages? of waiting?

  I’m the link I’m missing

  of noondays sallowed by Laguardia’s saturated jet trail vapors

  in descent.

  2006-11-28