Poems 1959-2009 by Frederick Seidel Read Free Book Online Page B

inside its valuable fur,
    Inside my leathers.
    She scoops me out to make a coat for her.
    She buttons up a me of soft warm blur.
    Is this the face that launched
    A thousand slave ships?
    The world is just outstanding.
    My slavery never wavers.
    I use the word “slavers”
    To mean both “drools”
    And, changing the pronunciation, “trades in slaves.”
    I consider myself most of these.
    Mark Peploe and I used to sit around
    Cafés in Florence grading
    Muses’ noses.
    Hers hooks like Gauguin’s,
    His silent huge hooked hawk prow.
    I am the cactus. You are the hyena.
    I am the crash, you the fireball of Jet-A …
    Only to turn catastrophe into dawn.
    Â 
BOLOGNA
    My own poetry I find incomprehensible.
    Actually, I have no one.
    Everything in art is couplets.
    Mine don’t rhyme.
    Everything in the heart, you meant to say.
    As if I ever meant to say anything.
    Don’t get me wrong.
    I do without.
    I find the poetry I write incomprehensible,
    But at least I understand it.
    It opens the marble
    And the uniforms of the lobby staff
    Behind the doorman at 834 Fifth.
    Each elevator opens
    On one apartment to a floor.
    The elevator opened
    To the page.
    The elevator opened on the little vestibule
    On the verge of something.
    I hope I have. I hope I don’t.
    The vagina-eyed Modigliani nude
    Made me lewd.
    I waited for my friend to descend
    The inner staircase of the duplex.
    Keyword: house key.
    You need a danger to be safe in.
    Except in the African bush where you don’t,
    You do.
    The doorway to my childhood
    Was the daytime doorman.
    An enormously black giant wore an outfit
    With silver piping.
    He wore a visored cap
    With a high Gestapo peak
    On his impenetrably black marble.
    Waits out there in the sun to open the car door.
    My noble Negro statue’s name was Heinz,
    My calmly grand George Washington.
    You’ll find me
    At my beloved Hotel Baglioni
    In Bologna
    Still using the word Negro.
    I need a danger to be safe in,
    In room 221.
    George Washington was calmly kind.
    The defender of my building was George Washington
    With a Nazi name
    In World War II St. Louis.
    Heinz stood in the terrible sun after
    The Middle Passage in his nearly Nazi uniform.
    He was my Master Race White Knight.
    I was his white minnow.
    The sun roars gloriously hot today.
    Piazza Santo Stefano might as well be Brazzaville.
    The humidity is a divinity.
    Huck is happy on the raft in the divinity!
    They show movies at night on an outdoor screen
    In the steam in Piazza Maggiore.
    I’m about to take a taxi
    To Ducati
    And see Claudio Domenicali, and see Paolo Ciabatti,
    To discuss the motorcycle being made for me.
    One of the eight factory Superbike racers
    Ducati Corse will make for the year,
    Completely by hand, will be mine.
    I want to run racing slicks
    On the street for the look,
    Their powerful fat smooth black shine.
    I need them
    To go nowhere fast and get there.
    I need to begin to
    Write the poem of Colored Only.
    When Heinz took my little hand in his,
    Into the little vestibule on the verge
    Of learning to ride a bicycle,
    I began
Bologna
.
    Federico Minoli of Bologna presides
    In an unair-conditioned apartment fabulously
    Looking out on the seven churches
    In Piazza Santo Stefano, in the town center.
    The little piazza opens
    A little vestibule on the verge of something.
    The incredible staircase to his place opens
    On seven churches at the top.
    The only problem is the bongo drums at night.
    Ducati’s president and CEO is the intelligent Federico.
    Late tonight I will run into him and his wife
    At Cesarina, in the brown medieval
    Piazza, a restaurant Morandi
    Used to lunch at,
    Bologna’s saintly pure painter of stillness.
    I will sit outside in the noisy heat and eat.
    Â 
RACER
    FOR PAOLO CIABATTI
    I spend most of my time not dying.
    That’s what living is for.
    I climb on a motorcycle.
    I climb on a cloud and rain.
    I climb on a woman I love.
    I repeat my themes.
    Here I am