Two
poems from Scott Coffel's Toucans in the Arctic
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.
