Two
poems from Scott Coffel's Mild Worlds Elsewhere
followed
by a note on the author
Double
Indemnity
Transparent as a think-tank fantasia,
my dream of April expands its empire without resentment,
dissolving all estrangements into an intimacy
that makes a god out of difference,
equating Madonna Ciccione's torment on Biography
with
Blake's engravings of the Inferno –
an amalgam of awe and abhorrence at times
beatifying the damned.
Next week the secret life of Jesus,
his trip to Japan where he devoured the Buddha.
The
liquid crystals of caller ID spell Sears,
on whose raft of credit I sail the river Styx without fear,
waving my unexpired maintenance agreements.
Expire: that vile euphemism. I've watched it lay waste
entire aisles of dairy products.
I've
touched its Braille stippling
on your bare shoulder as we sank into corruption
á la Stanwick and MacMurray in Double Indemnity
–
their eyes the only hint of light as they lusted
through dark Los Angeles, extracting nothingness
from
the oxides of being. Your hair is long
as a winter night in Iowa. I whisper to the damned
that strands of gray are both the metaphor
and the enactment of change, that visions of paradise
thin the atmosphere, coaxing the aurora to slip
southward,
its scarves of light
distracting us from the holy orders of flesh –
Blake's whirlwind of lovers in their white-hot plasma,
Madonna's critics smelling blood
in their netherworld of paparazzi and prey.
Your
hair is as lustrous as a child's.
You hold the small of your back as if to stave off time –
staving
off time. I spent my youth devising ways
to merge parallel lives, cadging graph paper in cafeterias
to plot the coordinates of what might heed or ignore
my
prayers for rescue, my right-angled
mind almost Christian in its lust for changing course
with the abrupt finality of a moment's notice –
as when kindred souls, their bodies touching for the first time,
transmute desire into fate.
Andrei
and Natasha
In a blow to Marxist thought, our romance red-shifted
from farce to tragedy. I had the paper trail to prove it,
a receipt from the erotic bakery with your phone number
and testimonial to the doctrine
of mutually assured orgasm. The Days of Awe were at hand
and I was grateful for something to atone for.
Years and two lovers apart, we kissed goodbye, nostalgic
for the future as rain speckled our trench-coats.
The
Russian winter came early to New York State.
Though corrupted by property and jealous of your freedom
I accepted your collect call, amalgamating
phone sex with War and Peace, my life-thwarted prince
dying in your arms as the Anti-Christ reached Oneonta,
the City of the Hills where love began and ended.
©
Scott
Coffel was born in New York City in 1956, and educated at York
College, a senior college of The City University of New York.
He lives in Iowa City, and works as Director of the Hanson Center
for Technical Communication in the University of Iowa. His poems
have appeared in numerous magazines, amongst them Antioch
Review, Salmagundi, Paris Review, The Wallace
Stevens Journal, The American Scholar, Ploughshares,
Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Margie,
Seneca Review, Barrow Street, Bridge, The
Paumanok Review, and The Adirondack Review.
"Double
Indemnity " first appeared in Ploughshares, and
"Andrei and Natasha" first appeared in the Paris
Review .
