On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems

Working at Pam-Pam’s

107 Working at Pam-Pam’s Ava, darling, skin white as mayonnaise, eyes of cat-scratch topaz, zirconia smile, making Mogambo with Gable in Africa, Bwana Clark, to you, baby, Grace Kelly tumbling the substitute daddy, you rolling in Swamp Sinatra. What did you see in him—dumb crooner from Hoboken, a shrimp, and you in a gal’s biggest fix, x- and y-chromosomes splitting in your deepest beauty, that toxic ditch of burping and feeding on the horizon. You think you know what the years ahead hold—you left with the baby, Sinatra a cad. Enemies or lovers—who’s to say? Does anyone really change? Henry V, Vlad the Impaler, Saint Teresa of Avila—some do, but some feel sucking the blood from a maiden’s neck is all they can manage. You understood how beauty could take you only so far. Of course, if God were in his heaven, we all might be film goddesses rather than fat timecard-punching factory workers with lacquered beehives, sewing halter tops for girls whose primary job will always be painting their nails. Such a world begs you to believe in the Hindu idea of maya, which is to say everything is illusion, kind of like the movies or theater or remember the time you found your boyfriend with your best friend? I jump at the idea of maya, because though I try to be a good girl, right on cue quick as a bunny, the devil pulls me into his Buick, and the DJ keeps playing “Who Do You Love”? Ava, you started out as a bit player: carhop, pretty hatcheck girl, ringsider, and then your gorgeous face was stuck like candy on magazines and marquees from Sacramento to Buffalo, Orlando to Natchez. When you lay dying in London, did you feel more alive than ever or was it like the story of Vishnu and the holy man Narada, who asks the god for the secret of maya? Vishnu says to him, “Narada, dive into that lake,” which he does and emerges a princess, slim, married to a powerful king. Her life is golden. She has many children, owns palaces, her children have children, but her father and husband quarrel, lash out at each other until all her family are dead on the battlefield. No 108 person has known such grief. Her dear ones lie on the funeral pyre as daybreak kindles its fire in the east, and she lights the flame, dives in, and comes up queen no more, but Narada. “This,” says Vishnu, “is maya’s raj, jailer extraordinaire. For whom do you weep, Narada?” This is the “Q” really in “Q & A.” For whom do we weep? In dreams we are Richard III, ink-stained pen pushers, scullery maids, a hunched-over Laurence Olivier starring as the evil king on stage, Marilyn Monroe on Harry Cohn’s couch. Here’s to the movie queens with their nose jobs, snow jobs, blow jobs. “The beauty thing was fun,” Ava said later in Madrid walking along, gabbing with a friend, passing Pam-Pam’s, a local burger joint under the white sky. “But I’d work at Pam-Pam’s before I’d take off for Hollywood and star in another crappy movie.” O Vishnu, Vishnu, make me dive into that lake every minute of my misbegotten life, every time I forget I am Narada following the black V wild birds make in an autumn sky. Here’s to the mosquito, Lord, drinking our blood, be we factory worker, star, wife, widow, X-rated movie actress, saint, burger flipper, barfly, sporadic mechanic, clown, or crone. Empty me of everything I am—sphinx, minx, yogi, yeti, yenta, yodeling nun. Forgive me for being so dense, so numb. Break my back with the beauty of the world. Throw me in solitary, zip me into a shroud. Throw a match on the pyre, rend the veil of maya, annex me as the Nazis annexed Poland, help me pass your pop quiz. ...