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Now
is Always A Good Time
Between the Age of Enlightenment and the age
of thirty, I lost my way. Disappointment
scuttled
down the breezeway. Ennui stretched out
across several white wicker chairs. "Beauty,
closely apprehended, breeds fear," I told myself
by
way of reassurance. "Then sorrow, then loneliness."
Then I felt better. Poor L.A. Where could one turn
without
running into a pink-tinted martini,
a kiss on each cheek, that hankering that follows
the hankering for gin? Oh, for an ice cube
and
something to plunk it in! I lip-read the director
as his leading lady tucks into the duck pâté,
the
duck canapés. "The world's too twilit,"
he seems to say, "too black and white." The
yellow
bowl of arugula sits unnoticed off to one side.
Who
loves lettuce? But Hoagy Carmichael does
a funny thing at the piano and my heart
swings
open like a Murphy bed. Now a hint
of stale Nag Champa tickles my nose, or is this
Chanel No. 5 letting go of someone's taut tan wrist?
I
know no one wears it anymore. Things change –
we'll always have that. "I liked it better,"
someone
says, "when the world was flat."
That someone is me. "I agree with everything
you've ever said or thought in your life."
Me
again, but headed home. Ma petite amie,
Jeanne D'Arc, rolling over like a wheel of cheese –
what
are you doing still up and smoking in bed?
Tonight, the stars are quoting the collected
works of Howard Hawks, word for word.
It
takes us all night and all morning. We watch
and watch. We drink it in like gin.
Gravy
Boat
I
wonder who wound up with it
in the divorce – and notice immediately
how wound looks the same
as wound, a hurt – that tacky
ceramic number, tricked out with leaves
and grapes, I picked off the gift registry
at Marshall Field's and actually saw
hard at work once – full of bubbly
steaming brown gravy! – on a Thanksgiving
table, oh, five, six years ago. It's the name
that grabbed me, a boat designed
to keep liquid in, that frail coracle
that carries not necessity, but condiment –
this rich, salty blend of meat drippings
and flour in the original, whisked up
right in the pan, or some processed, jarred
whoseywhat from Wegman's, nuked
and on the table in 60 seconds flat.
If I had any say in it, it would've been flung
at the wall – finger-pointing, yelling,
goddamn it, a ducked head
and crash! – in an after-midnight
fight months before anything was "settled,"
the paltry goods divvied up, boxed
and trucked off – what's left
hauled away to what's next. Let it be
one more victim, shards
of green and brown on waxy
linoleum, swept up, binned and gone –
to be dumped and forgotten, left to crumble
into dust and blow away into the dark
indifferent waters off Staten Island
from the landfill called Fresh Kills.
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