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