China Blues Page 2

I think Laurence is very good but she focuses too much on the family as a social unit; Thomas Wolfe is a truly great writer, the unfolding of a giant camera, I’m not saying this because he was tall, good-looking, or because he wrote on top of a fridge at one point. > Open Look Homeward, Angel at almost any page and you will see what I mean. The stone comes back into my pocket. > How can we talk about what Ontario was like 40 years ago without talking about the general mood of idealism in America as a whole at that time? > Why do we persist in the belief that Marilyn French OR Bret Easton Ellis are talking about anything of any significance? > I think it’s amazing that so few people read Thomas Wolfe these days. I think it’s amazing that so few people read Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson. These days.

  DARKNESS

  We’re in late spring or early summer now

  in Alliston. Last night

  it began getting dark around 8:30.

  I have been a little melancholy for the last week,

  & Alliston has been a relief.

  Love’s like that.

  I had eaten supper, some fish & a mixed stir-fry of bell

  peppers, & I began to think about how beautiful

  the dark is.

  So I went outside & stood with my back

  against the wall of the house

  & let my eyes play over

  the dark backyard

  smudged poplars & elms, soft dark late-night hawks

  & distant voices,

  to watch the darkness doing nothing

  except being itself.

  But after a while

  I began to feel that our little affair was foolish;

  in fact I began to feel our affair, your underwear,

  your reddish golden hair,

  can I be gender conscious,

  thank you, grazie, your perfect sweet-tipped pair,

  wash slowly out of my kopf. It’s hard to be serious

  about an imagined resentment

  while you’re staring at a whole Milky Way full of

  stars.

  Probably a couple of rabbits down at the end

  of the garden

  don’t think I noticed them

  squinting a bit to see the colour of

  yellow zinnias

  or the shiny bounce of small light

  on a steel trowel left out from the afternoon.

  No light from my friend Duck Moon. Should be a

  fine dark yellow fingernail paring in another

  week or so.

  And then I will write about you

  as a woman I meet on a fall day in a train station,

  in Zurich, or in Kansas going all the way south

  to Texas to see your aunt.

  You Chinese goldfish,

  you sexy bitch, full of planning your first child

  with your black tie stockbroker husband,

  you English crumpet, look at me in the dark,

  I’m blushing like an Italian schoolboy

  with fistfuls of change who can’t find his handkerchief

  for the sake of looking.

  ANNOUNCING BAGHDAD

  I have been thinking about Madonna

  on this blue April morning,

  about how pretty she is, & how good she is

  at faking defiance.

  I like the Madonna video

  called “Justify

  My Love.” I think Gaultier designed

  the cone-nippled bra she wears

  with a clear & full perfection, but nobody wrote

  a Persian Gulf video for her to bop to.

  Although

  all she ever does is tilt her head back

  & grab her crotch.

  But when she

  does that

  she does me, what can I say? there is something

  extraordinarily beautiful about her eyes, blue

  blue

  blue, like Neil

  Young singing “… there is a town in north Ontari io.”

  Don’t mistake me.

  I don’t want to pick on Madonna.

  She’s terrific. She flaunts a form

  of fundamental sexuality with a beautiful arrogance.

  But it’s a mistake

  to assume she’s defiant. We’re

  just talking about having a good time. What

  does she defy?

  And as for singing

  let’s tell the whole dangerous truth.

  She hasn’t got a good voice. Madonna can’t sing for beans.

  There’s Norman Schwarzkopf across the street

  short hair raw slab face dark glasses,

  big 60 lb. beer gut

  hanging over his twill pants. He has a short-sleeved

  Hawaiian sport shirt

  on; and is signing autographs

  as he moves through a crowd of people in Boston,

  I think;

  or perhaps it’s Philadelphia. He was a good student

  at West Point.

  Maybe somebody will do a photo of him,

  if this is Philadelphia, or Windsor, or maybe it’s Detroit?

  I don’t know what Jay Leno had to say about the

  Persian

  Gulf. But what an opportunity to be an asshole about other people’s

  deaths. He probably had 2 or 3 lines every other night from August 15

  to January 15; & then 2 or 3 lines per night until late March. A

  big mouth with those big ears.

  Almost none of his jokes are funny but the

  studio audiences seem to break up.

  So we’re supposed to think he’s

  funny. The guy’s got a face like a package of breakfast cereal. What’s

  so funny about that?

  Even that little kid with the glasses

  who does the Heinz ketchup commercial, he’s about 7 or so, is a much

  better video communicator than Jay Leno.

  And Madonna? Well at least

  Madonna’s beautiful, and when you compare her to Jay Leno then you have

  to say, Sure, she can sing, sort of.

  But neither one is as good as the

  little kid with the glasses.

  Or sometimes

  I think I love the dead Confederate soldier in that Matthew

  Brady photograph

  sprawled face up under a gun carriage eyes closed mouth

  relaxed the gentle line of the jaw pressing into sweet

  Pennsylvania earth.

  The soil

  where you are born, or where those touched

  you as a child were born, is part of your bloodstream.

  It is March & I am flying over the Avalon

  Peninsula. Over the Gulf/Stream.

  Down below through

  the grey March clouds

  the blue is astounding

  as blue as Madonna, as blue

  as the dark blue sands of the desert under a Persian

  or Mesopotamian or Saudi moon.

  As blue as my 4th image the Louisiana Gulf

  where an old man is tying up a rowboat with a piece

  of rope.

  That is the granddaughter of the old man

  dancing in a circa 40s roadhouse near Hamilton

  on the cover of the book you picked up.

  He gets

  out wiping his hands & begins unloading

  4 crates of crayfish.

  I am at home again

  with things I understand & feel comfortable with; I am not

  being jacked off by a thousand eager & empty-headed

  young newsguys

  plus some well-intentioned Susan Haratas.

  Takes a handkerchief out of his pocket & wipes his face

  stuffs the handkerchief in under his collar & walks 150

  feet to back his truck up to the boat.

  If we don’t sell

  our trucks & boats to Europe,

  who in the name of Jesus

  will we/

  sell our trucks & bo
ats to?

  Dolly Parton has a flamboyant Vanity Fair

  cover, June, 1991,

  well after the official cease-fire. She is sitting

  on the shelf edge of an enormous tank

  & almost spilling out of an expensive silver lamé

  dress.

  They have a huge orange VANITY FAIR behind her

  blonde head, & a slightly smaller red, Desert Form! across

  her sexy knees.

  Dolly Parton

  is loquacious,

  she has big ba-booms, & she can’t sing for beans.

  She can’t sing like Patsy Cline.

  And she can’t sing like Lyle Lovett.

  At the intersection of the Dhahran-Khafji highway, an equipment truck connected to the 82nd Airborne has built a wall of pale rosy white bricks at the back of their truck. They have painted a large sign in approximately 12″ – 18″ black letters, facing outward on the white bricks. The sign says:

  P I N K F L O Y D

  T H E W A L L

  Patsy Cline was a great singer.

  She sang that song called

  “I Fall to Pieces.” She died in a plane accident

  when I was a child. I like her voice & I think her death

  probably means more to me even now than the children of

  Baghdad, whom I think about,

  but whom I find abstract. Lyle Lovett, well, he’s a great,

  he’s a natural, he’s a great singer. And me? I’m just a guy

  who keeps thinking about how infinite the desert sands seem

  to be, the amazing blue of the gulf waters, the hot sun, & how

  the women hustle, herd, nudge, their children along, comeon,

  comeon, hurry up, if you’re not careful you’ll get us both

  killed, with little gestures & clucking sounds that go back

  perhaps 2 or 3 or 4 thousand years,

  long before the invention of mainstream Nashville

  or the use of mustard gas in WWI.

  POSTSCRIPT

  This page is also a concept of borders. Obviously now I’m going to talk about other things including social divisions, mangoes, the nature of the self, death, sex, jazz, love, the erudition of professors, darkness, gay as a phenomenon, bread, and the appearance of blue moons over Dubuque.

  Taking this page as a border is simply a form of respect.

  MONDRIAN’S BORDERS

  for Victor Coleman

  Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie

  [which the English for some perverse reason

  pronounce bugee wugee

  & this is not, one gathers,

  because they’ve seen any of the remarkable photographs

  by Widgee – who probably knew every theatre

  & late-night restaurant on Broadway –

  from 4th up into Harlem –

  ]

  was painted in 1942. The

  Germans

  from whom Mondrian has intelligently fled

  are pouring into Russia

  & the Russians are dying by the thousand as they stop them

  cold in the huge white snow & blow their heads off

  like slaughterhouse chickens

  might, if they had stopped

  to think,

  have learned something from this painting. It is

  a favourite of art critics, but it is not really about

  Broadway at all; it is about New York as a set of grids

  & according to Mondrian there is no poverty

  & no stock exchange

  it is all colour & music & Oklahoma –

  pretty girls in flapper skirts perhaps, although it is 1942,

  & perhaps they are drinking Pernod. Who the hell cares,

  it’s a great painting, isn’t it, his only gureat,

  & who the hell was Lissitzky – just some goddamn Russian

  & probably dead of a head wound cf

  Appollinaire

  in that remarkable photograph showing the wide head-bandage

  after he defended Paris from the Germans in WWI.

  JULY LIGHT

  Around late June somebody up in heaven

  must spill a tub of soft butter into the air.

  Partly

  the heat perhaps, & the way light bounces off so much

  foliage & bright glass;

  but this light which lasts into

  late August, this light,

  goddammit, this particular

  Summer Light

  makes the entire

  city as clear as an endless astronomical circuit –

  every ash, elm, maple,

  every child dropping a strawberry

  popsicle on the pavement & crying, “O poopsy,”

  every Samantha slipping

  into a loose summer dress & feeling that she’s the most

  beautiful girl in town,

  even ideas, lost emotions, stray ends,

  all become clear.

  That’s what you want

  isn’t it, Goffman. Clear?

  PROFESSORS

  Their tweed jackets seduced me at a tender age,

  I was about 4½, and too adorable to break your heart.

  That air of being between bohemia and the establishment.

  Rimbaud’s well-educated rogues in charge of history.

  The average lawyer thinks Einstein was a mathematician

  and Georgia O’Keeffe is a West Ireland county.

  Their comfortable 19th century furniture also seduced me,

  there were flowers everywhere at G’s, geraniums and azaleas.

  I wanted their wives to smell of lavender and sandalwood.

  I checked the pockets of their overcoats for interesting

  historiographic lint and crumbs of tobacco.

  Their daughters have straw hair and play volleyball.

  A specialist in the history of Irish speech idioms

  taught me to appreciate the phrase as a floating module.

  His wife had red hair that glistened like crimson pyrites.

  Their good taste in Renaissance music is often amazing.

  They have so many interesting & eccentric cousins.

  I have always admired their slow calm reading ability

  – Fernand Braudel in a long 5-day gulp,

  just like a 17-course Italian meal.

  Finish it off with a 685 page book on Vico.

  You have to admire them.

  WHO SAYS JEFF KOONS IS POSTMODERN?

  Sure, I’ve got a brown paper bag

  over my head

  with holes punched in the sides

  for my Sony Walkman, & the eyes are drawn on

  with orange & blue chalk, just casual circles

  so you can’t look directly into my eyes.

  That’s what high school is like these days.

  The world is too big.

  I only like my friends to look into my eyes.

  So for the rest of Gr. 13

  I’m studying Lou Reed,

  taking him

  more seriously perhaps than he takes himself; The

  Cure, The

  Smiths,

  Jane’s Addiction, Iggy Pop

  singing about Dog Food dog food dog food.

  Someone lays down a simple drum&bass line,

  & you start tapping your foot,

  moving your body to the music.

  Learning about reality

  as we go into the 90s.

  Sometimes these simple images

  lift up & swirl like exploding

  chickens & beat their blood-stained wings

  against the folded walls of my brown paper bag;

  or,

  in a different mood, Living Color appear

  with all that great avant vivid jazz-funk flair

  or Sinéad O’Connor comes on & settles

  things down.

  After all,

  these are songs

  about terrible & also moving things,
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  the car accident dealt with

  in a single line by The Cars; Fine Young

  Cannibals question the nature of profit; Annie

  Lennox or Bette Midler’s depictions of love. With

  a minimalism more extreme than Giacometti.

  With gorgeous voices

  to smooth the edges,

  an ironic back-beat,

  raw honey & fresh lemon as yellow as the moon,

  & music

  to make your head sway.

  Sometimes I listen to

  Sam Cooke just to get back up after the Carnegie Hall

  performance; & then I listen to Laura Hubert

  singing, “I’m So Melancholy I Could Cry,”

  which

  when you stop to think about it

  is

  an extraordinarily joyful song.

  STRIKE

  I loaf on the bank with my shirt off,

  socks

  & shoes off too,

  & watch my friends in the afternoon

  Simcoe sunlight moving their clear white hands

  like passenger pigeons

  pregnant with messages of love. We

  have some cold pizza, 2 chickens, 1 qt. of B&G white

  & a doz. cold Blues.

  It is about 78°

  & some young kids

  from the local high school are water-skiing – hunched

  in that particular stance turning a far north logo

  into a summer Ontario lake image. Their red life

  preservers

  bob up & down above the choppy blue water

  like red beach balls attached to Donald’s back

  or

  Pluto’s, or Huey’s or Louie’s or Dewey’s. We can do

  absolutely nothing this afternoon about Meech Lake

  or the new constitution

  or the striking PSAC workers

  or even the letter carriers who refuse to bring us

  our mail.

  Although they love us. It isn’t personal. I

  would have more to say about these events

  but

  I have a chicken leg in my mmmphmm mouth tastes good.

  I am towelling my face & my eyes are full of Karen sitting

  legs splayed in a black string bikini

  reading

  a paperback of Lives of Girls & Women.

  I have let you

  see us undressed & in return you must promise me

  one thing;

  you must believe me when I say that the

  bourgeoisie begrudge us even this chicken,

  even this

  lake, even this ½ful bottle of Monnet brandy