Marilyn Monroe wasn’t Jean Harlow.
Jayne Mansfield wasn’t Marilyn Monroe.
Anna Nicole Smith wasn’t Jayne Mansfield.
Thankfully, there is only one Britney Spears.
But know, whoever you are,
whatever your gender, hair color, physique,
within you there does reside an unhappy blonde
archetype with enormous breasts.
It is her you need to contact.
- Elaine Equi, "#4 The Girl Can’t Help It (Jayne Mansfield unbuttons her blouse)" via Silliman's Blog
My living will, waiting to be signed,
sits next to an old New Yorker
it's my ritual to read with breakfast
each morning, to finish
one issue before going to the next,
and this way I skip
the news merely timely—October 2004
with a fundraiser bringing Kerry
within blocks of President Bush
proves painful in December '05
but fast turning to find Graham Greene
his authorized biography reviewed,
I'm relieved, though perplexed, by
Because of an ambiguous comma
in a document Greene signed on his deathbed
other scholars were forbidden to quote . . .
and I wonder as I slowly eat
my oatmeal with raisins and cranberries
and four summer blueberries
I pick from their bag in my freezer,
gathering what pleases me, a woman of 73
with a will nearby, if I might not like
lingering in an ambiguous comma
someday, not rushing
to an afterlife I don't believe in,
drifting dreamily, held
for a day or two in its pause.
- Myra Shapiro, "Because of the Ambiguity"
I am your pilgrim, who wanders You are too difficult to love So I keep your shrine, the best of you, I am a stubborn priest, who knows himself - Val Vinokur, "Your Worship"
to stay home; your monk,
who keeps silent when you demand
confessions and theology.
directly; you have no roof
or floor, and I am too pious
for your rain and mud.
the clean, the smiling rest of you.
only in the dwindling oil of you,
the weeping and rebellious flame
about to die.
Because life's too short to blush,
I keep my blood tucked in.
I won't be mortified
by what I drive or the flaccid
vivacity of my last dinner party.
I take my cue from statues posing only
in their shoulder pads of snow: all January
you can see them working on their granite tans.
That I woke at an ungainly hour,
stripped of the merchandise that clothed me,
distilled to pure suchness,
means not enough to anyone for me
to confess. I do not suffer
from the excess of taste
that spells embarrassment:
mothers who find their kids unseemly
in their condom earrings,
girls cringing to think
they could be frumpish as their mothers.
Though the late nonerotic Elvis
in his studded gut of jumpsuit
made everybody squeamish, I admit.
Rule one: the King must not elicit pity.
Was the audience afraid of being tainted
--this might rub off on me--
or were they--surrendering--
what a femme word--feeling
solicitous--glimpsing their fragility
in his reversible purples
and unwholesome goldish chains?
At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It's intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.
- Alice Fulton, "About Face"
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
- William Meredith, "The Illiterate"
My forefathers gave me
My spirit’s shaken flame,
The shape of hands, the beat of heart,
The letters of my name.
But it was my lovers,
And not my sleeping sires,
Who gave the flame its changeful
And iridescent fires;
As the driftwood burning
Learned its jewelled blaze
From the sea’s blue splendor
Of colored nights and days.
- Sarah Teasdale, "Driftwood"
When the young man on State Street
approached as if to ask directions,
saying, "Can you help me out a little here?"
and I, though I already knew, said,
"Help you out how, exactly?"
"A dollar or two if you can,"
he said, and I took a deep breath,
holding in what I might've held out,
hearing When someone asks, you
give what you can, from my bank
of training in the ways of compassion,
and though I didn't want to,
opened my wallet, and
with the munificence of a toad,
pulled out a five and bought him off.
- Dan Gerber, "Bodhisattva"
Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.
But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being even, the roofs all display
the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,
certain things:
the smell of spilled oil a faint
sickness lingering in the garages,
a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows
give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster
when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.
That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;
guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air
tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows
- Margaret Atwood, "The City Planners"
Everything has been taken that anyone
thought worth taking. The stairs are tilted,
scattered with sycamore leaves curled
like ammonites in inland rock.
Wood shows through the paint on the frame
and the door is open--an empty room,
sunlight on the floor. All that is left
on the porch is the hollow cylinder
of an Albert's Quick Oats cardboard box
and a sewing machine. Its extraterrestrial
head is bowed, its scrolled neck
glistens. I was born, that day, near there,
in wartime, of ignorant people.
- Sharon Olds, "Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942"
| I laugh sometimes when I think about say Céline at a typewriter or Dostoevsky... or Hamsun... ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes, ordinary men with hair on their heads sitting there typing words while having difficulties with life while being puzzled almost to madness. Dostoevsky gets up he leaves the machine to piss, comes back drinks a glass of milk and thinks about the casino and the roulette wheel. Céline stops, gets up, walks to the window, looks out, thinks, my last patient died today, I won't have to make any more visits there. when I saw him last he paid his doctor bill; it's those who don't pay their bills, they live on and on. Céline walks back, sits down at the machine is still for a good two minutes then begins to type. Hamsun stands over his machine thinking, I wonder if they are going to believe all these things I write? he sits down, begins to type. he doesn't know what a writer's block is: he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch damn near as magnificent as the sun. he types away. and I laugh not out loud but all up and down these walls, these dirty yellow and blue walls my white cat asleep on the table hiding his eyes from the light. he's not alone tonight and neither am I. - Charles Bukowski, "one thirty-six a.m." |
Dear Magnitude, I leave the how much
to you. Bereft of equation,
I'd rather logarithms lodged elsewhere—
there is no sensitivity in numbers,
only in effects. In the calm, let us speak
in effects: a ball drops
dragon's mouth-to-frog's mouth,
a pendulum swings on its knife-edge
pivot. I'd say the measurable
captivates more than the measurement
in any accident, but I am merely a mass
suspended. Set my pen
to drum, set my drum recording—
I am the instrument of your intensity
and you my more. If there
be foundation, I have found it
to be oscillating. If there be water,
it is something falling.
Be peak to my trough, be hand
fastened to my throat. Shake me
something fierce and I will be the figure
of what you did.
- Cecily Parks, "Self-Portrait as a Seismograph"
Finally, it was the city that held us, the city they said had no center, that all of us had come to from all over America because this was the place to find dreams and pleasure and love. I noticed – looking at headlines – that some cities emptied and some didn’t. Ours didn’t, not completely. They said we were crazy to stay. But then someone had always said we were crazy to be here in the first place. And someone had always said Noah was crazy to build a boat in his desert, and Lot had been crazy to pack up, on an impulse, and head west. - Carolyn See, Golden Days
