Free Poems 1959-2009 by Frederick Seidel Page A

ice pick jockey’s final ride.
    The heart attack had not been planned.
    He saw my eyes and tried to stand.
    My satin skin becomes the coffin
    The taxidermist got it off in.
    He stuffed me, made me lifelike. Fatten
    My corpse in satin in Manhattan!
    My body was flash-frozen. God,
    I am a person who is odd.
    I am the ocean and the air.
    I’m acting out. I cut my hair.
    You like the way I do things, neat
    Combined with craziness and heat.
    My ninety-eight point six degrees,
    Warehousing decades of deep freeze,
    Can burst out curls and then refreeze
    And have to go to bed but please
    Don’t cure me. Sickness is my me.
    My terror was you’d set me free.
    My shrink admired you. He could see.
    Sex got me buzzing like a bee
    With Parkinson’s! Catastrophe
    Had slaughtered flowers on the tree.
    My paranoia was revived.
    I love it downtown and survived.
    I loved downtown till the attack.
    Love Heimliched me and brought me back.
    You brought me life, glued pollen on
    My sunblock. Happy days are gone
    Again. My credit cards drip honey.
    The tabloids dubbed me “Maid of Money.”
    Front-page divorce is such a bore.
    I loathed the drama they adore.
    You didn’t love me for my money.
    You made the stormy days seem sunny.
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BREAST CANCER
    The intubated shall be extubated and it rains green
    Into the uptown air because it is almost raining.
    You can smell the sidewalks straining.
    The side streets are contagious but serene.
    The disease is nutritious.
    The bitter medicine delicious.
    The beautiful breasts are repetitious.
    The much older man you love is vicious.
    The man will be even older by the time
    She takes down the book to read the poem.
    Â 
RILKE
    As he approaches each tree goes on,
    And the girls one by one
    Glance down at their blouses. A nun,
    Then six or seven, hop in
    A cream station wagon,
    White-beaked blackbirds baked in a pie.
    In his mind is
    The lid of an eye
    The dark dilated closing behind him.
    Rilke. Arched eyebrows and shadowed
    Moist eyes. An El Greco. Swart, slim.
    He’s late to her. He thinks of her, waiting,
    Limb by limb.
    Her defenselessness and childlike trust!
    Smiling to be combed out
    And parted—and her lust
    Touching the comb like a lyre.
    To have been told by her not to trust her!
    And he distrusts her.
    And everywhere he sees
    Hunchbacks and addicts and sadists
    In braces in the cities,
    Roosting in their filth,
    Or plucking the trees,
    In New York for true love,
    In Boston for constancy.
    You can be needed by someone
    Or needy, thinks Rilke.
    They clutch their loves like addicts
    Embracing when they see
    Hot May put out her flowers.
    Or clutch themselves. They can’t shake free.
    He thinks of the time
    He lived by her calendar
    When she missed her time.
    She gave the child a name.
    When she bled, she laughed and gasped
    Tears warm as pablum
    On his wrists. But that is past.
    Rilke feels his body
    Moving in front of his last
    Step. He sweats, and thinks
    Of the rubble massed
    On Creusa behind Aeneas’s
    White-hot shoulders and neck.
    Addresses
    And clothesline laundry swelled
    Like pseudocyesis—
    That’s what he has to pass through.
    His tie is her blue,
    And a new lotion gives him an air
    Of coolness. He combs his hair,
    And tries to smooth his hair.
    He’ll
be there,
    The husband. She’ll have left him asleep—
    A nap, beyond the top stair,
    In darkness.
    Light, light is in the trees
    Pizzicato, and mica
    Sizzles up to his knees.
    A dozen traffic lights
    Swallow and freeze
    And one by one relay red red
    Like runners with a blank message.
    I hate her, I hate her, he said
    A minute ago. Curls cluster
    Rilke’s dark head.
    Â 
CASANOVA GETTING OLDER
    Do they think they are being original when they say
    This is a new thing for me to ask, and ask
    Do you love me?
    Everyone these days keeps asking
    Do you love me?
    Everyone says
    This is a new thing for me to ask.
    The answer is yes.
    This is a new thing for me to ask.
    The answer is