Beautiful Soon Enough

For Flame and Irresistible

For Flame and Irresistible A boy with a cart is giving away cut branches, their exciting adolescent eruptions of unopened blossom pink, oh, I desire one. & I desire me. & I want to know that woman, Tandy. Tandy was / is / was / is giving away her flaming copper locks, all her opened blossom pink, always did, always will, but no one’s buying. Into the tender erotic saleable defended shine of passed-bynow like second-round marked-down maybe scuffed spike heels & 58 berdeshevsky fading eye-bright, her tight pants stand. High, or ugly, or don’t-getfat -now, do-it-drums, perfumed, in all her creases. No one’s buying. The powder breath & push-ups mirror-punched to hot & out-there scary baby—isn’t working. Singing? Her shoulders stiffen elegance into an alto-lyric bluehour star, before she wanders. Keep me company? she says. Are my pants wrinkled? she says. You’re gorgeous, she says. Sing with me? Well I want to tell her some about my own pink. A woman like her who knows some everything. A woman of the tempting kind, round heeled, old soul woman, you must-have-been-has-been-used-&sperm -sheathed-silk-for-skin, high-cheeked & freckle-feisty low-growl mama-woman—all jaguar bitch, smiling, & me a wannabe movie star, out cruising, hey! She says come on over. Then I let me entertain Tandy in her own kitchen where—we’re waiting for her son she’s taught to please women, she says—the way only a mother who was astro-paid & dazzle-gorgeous can, she says. She’s headed in her mirror like a bath. A diver for scars. & lines. & lips. To pass the waiting, I’ll tell her all my Hollywood career, all my kindergarten sins. She does not love her wrinkled echo. You’re beautiful , relax, she says. Be careful, she says. My son’s gonna love you, she says. She likes me. Her son might like—enjoy me. Tandy and her smooth-skinned stud, we’re so Venice Beach, see. When I was twelve & had just grown tits, I tell her—it’s my story of a summer on a shining hill, how I humped a boy my age on a bus & no one knew, & not my mother. I want to make the once-upon-agorgeous -whore laugh. Like me. Teach me what Hollywood can’t, I’m a seeker of, a vagrant of, a woman trying to figure it out—how to be a wild woman. How to be a woman. How, wide-hipped under my new breasts then, knife-waist, then, I was the blonde in a bus-crowd of black-eyed man-bats. Bodies packed like plumped fowl for the block. How our necks strained over a little air & the nipples of the mountains, how at road-curve speed, my own breasts nested, the boy & I noticed, adjusted by millimeters, for flame and irresistible 59 nowhere to go. How he wore cotton shorts & I, a yellow dress, & the two of us studied him, swelled; near-wings; how somewhere on that bus was my mother. This, I love, she says, her unlaced drug done like other women’s diamond pins, all spread. Talk about me, she says, powdering, for cover . Then we cry. I vamp until her son comes home & I can / will have him dimpled in the red room, in the seashell iridescence, in the moon’s hot silent thighs, I’m thinking. Patience, darlin’. Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can, it’s seldom inna woman, & never inna man. I’ve dared—I tell her—I’ve swum in oceans that could kill me, I tell her, climbed that black-eyed bat-boy on a bus, once, is she impressed? She’s stirring coffee with a feather. The window has its dealer & his shadow. It smells all California -night-sage. In their house, it smells of woman. Her silk-screened robe’s open dragons bare the same shiny as her flame-long waves— but they streak down strands of sadder grey. Her legs hang easydangling , freckled ankles, high-heel-smeared. Know how many teeth have circled her strutting? Am I tired? Tandy, who has done it all, could scream. JFK and Sammy Davis had her red hair in their fingers. She’s peeling grape skins. How high a tag her daughter gets, how chic you have to—how muscled chic & how goddamn street-treat dazzling! Well what if I’m not? I’m not. But I’ll get whales tonight, watch & see, sweetie. Whales! So...