someday
you’ll sit across from me saying
similes explain the human
condition—we can never be ourselves
but only like ourselves (though some of us
ascend to metaphor).
at first I won’t
know what the hell you’re talking about
(and maybe never). what does it even mean
to be like ourselves if we’re not already
ourselves? but I’ll agree because
even if the meaning isn’t self-
evident, profundity is implied; and you
will likely remind me of girlfriends
I used to drive cross-country with (their
bare legs lifted, their feet out the passenger side
window V’d like the winged heels of a Greek
Goddess, ankles crossed on the rear view mirror)—
when all I could think about
was the intoxication of a girl’s bare feet
in an 80 mph air stream; and you might say:
that’s the way it is to be a barefooted
girl—always that 80 mph wind licking your feet
until the tank runs out of gas
until the sun runs down the sky, until she finds
herself landed barefoot on the sun-cracked
asphalt of a seedy, run down
motel where the parking shines with glass
ground to glitter after God knows how many bottles
and demands.
but afterward in bed,
I know, it won’t be me she remembers
but the 80 mph hour wind like fingers
at her ankles that, if they could have, would
have parted her thighs and you
have no idea or, knowing you, you do,
what an 80 mph wind can do to the imagination
(or a hippy sundress); but anyway, we didn’t even
get that far because she’d say something like,
‘we can only ever be like ourselves
never ourselves,’ or she’d say,
‘all men ever want to do is fuck me’
and Christ, I’d want to say, is that so much
to ask? and before the end of the road trip she’d
be hitchhiking to LA and
I’d be broken down in Wichita.
maybe you’re wishing you were in LA too?
I have that effect on chicks like you.
and by the way I expect
you’re the type who reads the rhymes
in a toilet stall. goddamn those people
know how to write—artists and poets all.
and know damned well who their audience is
and where to find them.
I wouldn’t be surprised
if you came back from that temple
of runes and oghams reciting
what omen was given you to give the masses:
women drinking booze
talk of dicks and new tattoos
and that has me asking if there shouldn’t be
a comparative lit course in men’s and women’s
toilet stalls; and anyway what happened
to you and rhyming? is nobody singing you the blues?
do you really think if Keats had to choose
between you and Fanny Brawne,
you’d stand a chance if she recited lines
about crumbling cathedrals and dandelions?—
in corseted iambic pentameter
with a bouquet of rhymes? you poor
deluded poet. have you even read your own poetry?—
lately?
there’s more anatomy
than tits and ass that sag, though maybe yours
were archetypal? i don’t know
but honestly, does the world really need
more self-pitying poets eulogizing the loss
of their fearful symmetry?
we’ll soon enough all fit inside a Grecian urn—
but I feel your pain.
did I tell you about the time I met
Hayden Carruth in Bennington, Vermont?
there may have been me, his publisher,
students and admirers, but there was mostly
the red-haired woman in the sleeve-wrap leopard print
top and black leather mini-skirt
and I can tell you there was no talking poetry
that night or at that table with Hayden Carruth.
Carruth is your poet. Keats
never knew how to treat women, but Hayden?
I tell you, go for the man with the yellow McCulloch
chainsaw.
but who hasn’t woken
to some new piece of poetry wondering
what in the hell happened
the night before? who said what and what
was spoken and never mind the hangover—what’s
the fucking title? I’ve been there—
a fifth of rum, midnight, some piece grinding
moves on the dance floor, moves
I’ve never seen before until, the next morning,
I’m wondering what-the-hell future I ever saw in it.
must have been the drink because I can’t
begin to explain whatever goddamn
Picasso of indiscretion I woke to—words tossed
like underwear across the exaltation
of the page. spontaneity. sure. call it that. the kind
you used to find at a 90s rage;
but as I was saying: isn’t anybody, these days,
singing you the blues?
women drinking booze
talk of dicks and new tattoos
stuck in my head now
for Christ’s sake, but haven’t any
of those poets promised, at midnight,
to walk you sly along the railroad track?—
just smooth as Scratch himself?
‘don’t you know,
‘sweet girl,’ he’d say, ‘the kinds of rhymes your hips
could make with mine?’
take me down your boulevard
of saints and swindles, where the old men leer
and the young men sing beatus vir;
where the women preen with looks as flammable
as gasoline. let’s you and me find out
the lanes and alleyways that rub against
the skin, where neon advertises sin
and preachers lick the air sweet with the carnal
and serpentine locution of the streets;
we’ll find a sidewalk curb or sway backed porch steps—
we’ll sit among the bottle caps and cups
the foil, paper wrappers, and cigarette butts
and talk about the raff we leave behind:
the drafts and stanzas; maybe here and there
a poetry worth the reading? but why guess?
go a few stone steps into the cellar
and there the mystic Madam Coriander,
who owns the laundromat around the corner,
will tell us how the roots of the raspberries finger
the sockets of a skull—
Mary, where the thorns are many,
where the autumn’s black leaves eddy
do you hear the children skipping
while your bloodless bones are slipping?
Mary, Mary, dead and buried,
buried beneath the red raspberries.
one for the money,
two to elope,
three for the noose
in the jump rope’s rope.
four for the crime
beware of four!
four’s for the rhyme:
Mary’s no more.
Mary, Mary, in the brambles
where the barren winter ambles
do you hear the children’s laughter
singing of the ever after?
Mary, Mary, dead and buried,
buried beneath the red raspberries.
—the thorns, the brambles,
the twisted vine are growing from my skull,
and children pick the berries—I see it all.
I hear them mocking the divine, their laughter,
and Madam Coriander asking if
I understand. do you? my mouth is filled
with sand and weeds are sprouting from my eyes.
I can’t decide. but do you know the spikes
of bulrush where the river dimly swims?
down by the salt-fingered pilings? I’ve been meaning
to describe the way the yellow lights
oil the river’s slippery back, the wharf,
the detritus of the clouds before they’re swept
at midnight out to sea. there’s a place
the moon goes up mechanically. behind it
the turning plate of stars goes round and round
the blinking lights. there’s not a night I’d trade
for this but I digress. the filigree
of roots, the brazen nettles, the skull beneath
the winterberry—was it winterberry?
I’m guessing you would answer: whiskey. whiskey
works just as well. you could almost mistake
the sky— let’s put it this way: let’s say
we stuck our feet out of the world’s side window,
the ocean rolling underneath. we’ll tell them
we crossed our ankles on the far horizon
and dipped our toes into the moon, we stirred up
comets and let the streaming Milky Way
wash clean our feet. (don’t ask me who the hell
is driving.)
but we’ve been here before,
barefooted in the parking lot. don’t ask
the exit number. if I’m first arriving,
I’ll have the front desk bring your room a bottle
of Vanni Fucci (if that isn’t wine
it should be) vintage 1954—
I wonder if you like my metaphor?
but then I’m thinking back again to driving
with my girlfriend’s heels on the rear-view mirror, and
she asks me—’don’t you understand?
we’re never ourselves but only
like ourselves: the skull, the briars, the raspberries,
winterberries or whatever—
what Madam Coriander meant
was: in the end—but you should change the poem
to winterberries. you never
eat a winterberry raw—they’re poisonous.’
but raspberries bleed, I say.
and by this I mean: if I hear you caterwauling
at the trash bins in the middle of the night, I’ll always
put out a saucer-full of gin
for you.
Ode to Kim Addonizio
writ by me
January 3rd 2023
1. this might be a little darker
than your average Dorothy Parker.
PoemShape 