Ode on Being a Little Drunk at Parties
My brain is such a bully—wash your face, comb your hair,
brush your teeth—but drink a glass of wine,
and my id rises up like Venus on the half shell, and says, “Baby,
you’re beautiful—even the stupid shit you say is smart,”
and this is when a party starts to shimmer, and if I’m lucky
the music instructs me in the fundamentals of moving
through space and time, but with rhythm on this occasion,
not the white girl cubist automaton beef jerky, oh, no,
arms akimbo, hips like silk kites in a summer sky, and I am talking
to the gods—Aretha is unlinking my chains,
and Prince tells me what it’s like to kiss, and if I’m extra lucky
I’ll find someone to buttonhole so I can talk about time travel,
because now I want to talk to the gods, as in—Athena,
what’s your problem, girl? You’ve got it all—
howitzer tits and a brain the size of Olympus—and all you do
is cause trouble among the chuckleheads on earth.
Oh, I get it, it’s hard to feel sorry for humans. We’re a hot mess,
and by the time some of us figure it out, we’re playing
our endgames. But what’s the story on Aphrodite? Is she stuck up,
or what? And Hermes, I want those silver shoes
with the little wings—now that’s a look, because with those shoes
and a glass of champagne I could rule the world,
but who wants to be Zeus, with his beard, or Poseidon,
riding the waves with his trident, not me that’s for sure,
because I can barely make it through each cantankerous day
with its roadblocks, red lights, and hurricane sirens—
god, the noise, so a party is like an invitation to take off
your straitjacket, slip into a silver kimono,
and off we go to Monte Carlo, well, not there but the Biarritz
of your dreams, which is like an opera by Donizetti
with lyrics by Cup Cake Delgado—a name I just made up
out of the blue, which is one of my favorite activities,
maybe more fun than parties or wine or dancing to the songs
that nail your scalp to the wall of your orangutan brain.
Ode on the Rilke Metro Stop in the Paris of My Dreams
In this dream we’re in Paris, driving around in a car,
which is a nightmare, so we ditch the Citroën
and take off on foot, though this is not the Paris we know so well
but a fifties futuristic idea of the city with flying cars
or are they mechanical birds—it’s hard to tell, and we arrive
at the metro station, which looks like an Art Nouveau
space shuttle, a mash-up of The Jetsons and The Time Machine,
and I look up to try to figure out where we are,
and the metro sign says Rilke, and I know this is a dream,
whose message is what—you must change your life?—
which is pretty much always true, and I think, what’s next,
a Kafka metro stop where we step out in to a Prague
of dapper insects, or the Keats Metro stop that’s moonlit
and trembling with nightingales, or the Brontë Metro Stop,
that opens on the moors, and look, there’s Sylvia Plath
and Ted Hughes wandering around in their different dreams
of love, not to mention dreams of the future, because medieval dream
scholars divided dreams into two categories— one a Rolodex
of your day with its jumble and flight, and the other a mystery train
of oracles and visions—and that’s the one I’m riding now
through the suburbs of my mind, looking out on the high rises
of 1974, 1988, and 2004, and wasn’t that when we lived
in London, so I get out and take an elevator to the twenty-third floor
and step on to the stage of a play of my midsummer
night’s dream and being lost in Venice that night of the big storm,
rain driving its power into the ground of my consciousness,
the water rising over the bridges, and if I drown, will I find myself
on the train again in a plush seat across from the smiling face
that will pull off her mask and reveal the cicatrice of her akull,
and I have two choices—scream or close my eyes
and hope she’s gone when I open them, and poof, in her place
is my mother, and I say, “Mom, what was that all about?”
and she opens her mouth to let fly the ravens of retribution,
but in their beaks are messages from all the poets I love,
and Horace tells me to open a bottle of wine and lie back
and look at the sky through the trees, while Neruda
cuts open a tomato for the salad, and Emily takes a cake
out of the oven, and we sit down at a long table
in the country on an afternoon in May with Chekhov and Ovid,
who has caught the fish in the waters near Tomis,
and Tolstoy who has a plate of mushrooms, everyone alive, even Sylvia
who sets down a roast and potatoes and her famous lemon pie,
and we toast the past because that train has left the station,
and all we can do is keep riding this one until it is either blown up
by brigands or pulls into the town at the end of the line,
and there’s my mother and Rilke, too, and he says, “Do you
know each other?” And she says, “I know everyone.”
