Translations from the Flesh

Fabulous, Just Fabulous

46 fabulous, Just fabulous In my own Eden, I’d have the plants and animals Painted as if they stepped Fresh from the oily panel of a canvas— Leopards by Pollock, baboons by Francis Bacon, And the creamy roses from Renoir’s hand. 777 In the swollen story of our kind, what mutants Had to mate, somewhere Between the sabertooth and the cell phone, To seed me here: Caliban with a banjo and a bitter grunt, And no opinion on the postcolonial love poem? 777 Does the Grand Scheme of Things imply behind it A Grand Schemer? If so, I’d like to sue that sorry tease for Negligence and breach of contract, my case taken up by The bow-tied shysters at Malice, Underhand, and Glee. 777 In some lost ancient life, I might have been A baby in Babylon Or a spokesman for the burning wheel. But the years come down to this: Time, with its clubfoot, Dragging my slow days through the dirt. 777 I can no longer tell the difference between Sublime and slime, or Raise the gate that keeps the low pleasures From flowing through. How can nothing feel so heavy, Like the hole in the middle of a millstone? 47 777 In my own Divine Comedy, I’d give the afterlife More laughs, less God. I’d put an elevator in, from the bottomlands To a station beyond the stars, so cold and black no one Would leave the hard-burnt suburbs of hell. 777 What year, in my dream of peace, lies untroubled, Arcadia of the safe? What red-letter day stays dry and quiet On the calendar of blood? Even the hour of my birth Keeps receding, as far away as my mother’s pain. 777 The two-pack hack, the cough of forty years, wheeze From the spongy lungs— I join the outcast congregation of tobacco, Breathless in the gales of May or the rogue snows of October, Lighting our candles to the Lord of Smoke. 777 I’d like to believe in a heaven of love, and yet Jesus sends me No valentines, and no saints downsize a halo For a friendship ring. I might as well place my faith in A dog that licks me up from toes to nose. 777 I’ve put a lot of mileage on the alphabet, Taking shortcuts To the long view, freewheeling down the dark, And where has it got me? Skid marks on every page, words Surging as they slip, here and here and here. 48 777 Do I suffer the first signs of incremental stupidity? Or has the world become Some late-onset Paris of the impossible, Where I stall in the foreign streets like a tourist With a map of downtown Dubuque? 777 In my own Hamlet, I’d play the upstage prince. Dead father, mother In a rut, kingdom gone wild around me— I’d tame it all with a flameproof tongue, and stir The shy fires of Ophelia twice a night. 777 My state of sulfur and salt and sugar cane, I’m so tired of Inconvenient ancestors and pregnant ghosts. Once I could recite the principal exports from Euphoria, And now my name’s among them. ...