I Smell Esther Williams

THE SPIN CYCLE

Everything I love is gone.

The blue jay hops

from Corinthian column to Corinthian column,

alternately aphasiac and wildly logorrheic.

My hands are meaty like two catcher’s mitts.

Your nose is bleeding into the plastic dish of meow mix

like a leaking faucet in a mobile home where

he is eating a baked potato with chives and sour cream,

the liver of a blaspheming jew, a salad of pistils and stamens,

and the bicycle seat on which you’d ridden to grandmother’s house.

The fishermen serenade their Juliets, adrift in listing dinghies, and the tall trees undulate in the rain like thick inky manes of hair. I am speaking a language called There’s Gold In Them Thar Hills. You are speaking a language called She Feels Like Buttering The Palm Of His Hand And Frying It.

A is for an anonymous man, chasing bubbles of your saliva through the forest with a slingshot made from the elastic waistband of his jockey shorts. B is for Brenda, waving to the peculiar foil ships which flicker against the sky like yahrzeit candles. C is for Gianni Clerici, the flamboyant columnist for Jerusalem’s irresponsible tabloid, Il Giorno, his windshield dappled with the ocher and burgundy leaves of autumn.

There is a lake for lovers only, called He’d Known Janet In Delaware When She Was A Super-Realist Painter With Freckled Breasts, and rising from the lake is a spectacular monolith that makes the Statue of Liberty look like an anorexic Barbie doll, and from a window in its bronze bouffant I can see you through my telescope, whispering into the ear of another man.

In the moonlight, in your sheer camisole, in your cadaverous eyeshadow, you wind your Timex, and call him the best fuck in Jerusalem. You call his mouth Hans. You call his chest Jan. You call his penis Inspector Soto. You call his buttocks Officer Shange and the Prosecutor Nickie DuBois.

Ahmed and his ugly daughter are playing catch with a boneless chuck steak. She’s making a sound like boom lakka lakka lakka boom lakka lakka lakka.

I am the chattering wooden teeth of the president who never told a lie in the crooked mouth of the president who never spoke the truth, and you are the sound of a match striking the unshaven chin of a cowboy, you are the sound of a harmonica falling from a tree and hitting me on the head as I stretch my penis like a bungee cord, chianti-sodden and disconsolate.

The Scarsdale Diet is dead.

Give me a t-shirt the color of azalea

and call Deng Xiaoping, Chapstick Xiaoping.

The industrial countryside vibrates powerfully beneath our sleeping bags and hibachis. Like voltage, “csók” (the Magyar word for kiss) passes from Gabor sister to Gabor sister to Gabor sister. But why do we plunge our faces into vats of formaldehyde like half-witted marines and allow these ghosts, however Rubenesque, to rifle through our luggage and filch our implements of happiness, our insect repellant, our tinker toys, our Spanish fly, and puerto rican rum? Is it because, in the diffuse moonlight, this coppice of barbershop poles resembles the magnificent Piazza di Spagna; and, unable to articulate our loneliness, we belch like prehistoric animals and count our remaining days on the fingers of a single hand …

Distant tom-toms herald the approach of bedtime,

and you, “drows’d with the fume of poppies,”

sleep the sleep of enormous emu.

How I long to give you one last csók.

But now you are far away.

And here I waste,

sequestered deep in the forgettable mountains

of my ancestral homeland.