THE SEXIEST MAN IN ANY EMPTY ROOM
Texte
Some certain hopes and cherished daydreams all
but dead. To slide past verisimilitudes,
disburden such a fanciful pastel
of what is dreaded. The vicissitudes
of swashing out a personality,
a cumulative grace contrived in acid-
refluxive reasonings. “Leave purity
to poems!” he barks out. Ravishingly placid,
his smiles, and yet his face is hardly even
sore. (Yet.) He’s moving soon to metaphors,
to giddy tumults of imagination,
if quick and pleasingly cheap. The only forests
we’ll have left in oceans. Meaning lost
spreads, reduced sublimely, like a sauce.
I
The blinders. We all wear them: “Never out
of fashion, never.” We both see and are
half blind according to our lights, to our
benumbing cloudless sunshine in the rout
of all these people who are real, their twinned
and urban diffidence and they’re specific
pastiches past his face, the spool of traffic
that has him quash alarm at every twinge,
queasy as the lone remaining lemming
on the cliff top. Looks askance from tall
Nordic blondes who seem as though they’re strumming
sideburns though they haven’t any. Fall
breezes ease through Her erasures, humming
certain hopes and cherished daydreams, all.
II
According to the sexiest man in any
empty room, the thick and apish smiles
of drunks who should not be within 6 miles
of any dance floor and who are “the only
fuckers dancing!” – he makes one concession,
allowing it a glib, deliberate
lightness. Figures he can live with it
“at decent bars and during a recession.”
And never mind those dramas on the diving
boards – decades past. How memory intrudes,
when he’s hung over in the Sound’s forgiving
coldness that allows him to get used
to the water fast. The nerves’ ruse – drenched in living
but deadened – slides past verisimilitudes.
III
“To die a raisin, when we’ve lived a grape?”
reels off the sexiest man in any empty
rococo tasting room or any nape
of any empty stage. “… Say you, say me…”
Et tu, repeats the mirror glass. Wind blows.
The water roils. The wavelets hop like bulls.
What might it have been otherwise? Who knows.
It’s not that, grinding through the viscous brawls
of personality, he nears his death
with more or less panache than any other.
(Is that the universe holding her breath
or just the ozone’s hole expanding further?)
“It’s a good life, with one’s health.” Let Hell
disburden such a fanciful pastel.
IV
That lime in the Corona. Someone back
in Pittsburgh told him just to shove it down,
affix a thumb atop the bottleneck,
turn bottle upside down. It could be done,
so he was told, without the hissing row
of foam (he never did avoid). At dawn
a faltering and earnest rain the cow
will never cease in straining to escape
begins, and water roils beneath a scow
beneath a bridge who knows how far built. Scrape
the bottom with impunity and flare.
“To die a raisin when we’ve lived a grape?”
The cow no further along for all its nudes
in water’s dreaded, thin vicissitudes.
V
Art and suavely craven isolation –
enough? he wonders of his writing heroes.
Their art just opens our imagination.
We only have their art; nobody knows.
“That’s as it should be. Not as if they thought
they had such useful answers” – leastwise, not
for others. “Had their art, for others.” Answers?
If he finds those himself, like deer their antlers,
he next may find they wilt, as in a time-
release montage of morning glories (for
a sex ed class dressed up as botany);
fob off the questions up from which they teem;
then fizzle out as juicered metaphor
for swashing out a personality.
VI
In syllables and ink this much supplants
a troubled life indeed: that cow’s a plastic
figurine! By some baroque mischance
the moon created for the cow’s gymnastic
feat has broken off. It faintly glows
in orbit round an ashtray, also full.
A purple deeper than the light it throws,
its panniered skirt, its angling monocle,
the warmth gone deep as are the curtains’ veins,
within the depth and deeply in the form
of all these passengers, of all these trains
of thought that wander off, are wandered from.
One sky, another mirror’s nudes, their placid,
their cumulative grays contrived in acid.
VII
The sexiest man in any empty room’s
gentle nihilism vis-à-vis,
shall we say, longevity. The glooms
of nihilism on the Number Three
on up to Swedish undisturbed by any
lyricism, any durable
claim of value. Simple misery,
in wraiths of those crude pleasures once found able
to be enjoyed if not incurable.
“… they can’t take that away from me…” O yes
they can. High Heaven as deductible,
Pall Mallls, straight bourbon or a summer dress
to pre-exist in perpetuity.
Reflexive reason sings leave purity.
VIII
A vague and drunken comity seeps in
from time to time, when all those simple pleasures
confer a feeling of august summation.
“Ah this is what is good,” he, as he measures
another out, will seem to say, if only
of any evening’s envelope of lonely
old air. O warm and lacquered heartbreak, laughed
at, bound to be as dangerous as it’s daft:
a coiffed, oft-quoted desert, sans mirage,
A wavy global blind spot playing brain-dead,
spared the apple green expanse of lucid
daydreams, speculation, and blind rage
which, like a husky palm, has all been read
in poems he barks out, ravishingly placid.
IX
The sultry-vague jazz bass lines and the doors’
inhalant wheeze of traffic noise. The brass band
that sounds a mix of Sousa and of Star Wars
with Carmen bleeding on the brain. The bland
garrulity of fat guitars that ought
on pawnshop walls have languished un-revived
and brittle as their price tags, come to naught
engorging anthems in the graveyard dives
howled by teens with fake IDs – if not as
numbly crooned on cruise ships under stars.
Sexiest in any empty heaven,
helming driest poolside chair regattas,
haunting upstage cooling samovars,
smiling…yet his face is hardly even.
X
Sax man planted like a hangman’s tree
up on the bandstand. Stone-faced trumpeter
looking like a burnt-out porno actor
waiting to play his deal, jiggling his knee,
then drawing minuscule cartoons upon
the clotted the air with his fat, inky mustache
as he sings. Cool shabbiness and flash,
while millennial millionaires wave battered prawn
in gestures toward the flatscreen televisions’
cloying, primrose-populist admixtures
of (muted) social life. Nature abhors
the empty rooms through which our partisan’s
old Eureka, howling its erasures,
soars yet. (He’s moving soon, to metaphors.)
XI
“Suppose we sort out all the pronouns later?”
His arid and astringent “humor” – essence?
His marriage a distraction from that essence,
those years now scooping light, a lunar crater?
Among the funnier things he’s ever said,
he’d won the evening’s laughter at the bar,
but now its context and its meaning far,
far gone. As if a question mark could head
off, follow up, or even sour on
a thought that curves in gilded mystery.
“But let’s not sweat mixed metaphors: we’ve ‘Any-
time Minutes!'” – a redundant oxymoron
that goads him now from clowned exasperation
to giddy tumults of imagination.
XII
“And who knows where it leads to, other than
an early grave?” – its topsoil sundered by
tsunamis turning shorelines of the bay
into a distant sandbar. The sexiest man
in any empty room sits wondering
just how we lose our way; how we enjoy
to gently flirt with death; are deadpan coy
with our potential – all while blundering
through bouts of courtly triage with one version
after another of the ghostly She
(his “we” is masculine it seems and jests
with Gallic shadows nodding off). O verse in
childhood’s old-growth worn anthology,
quickening, pleasingly cheap. O lonely forests.
XIII
Her only slightly awkward and sublime
grace. Her toothy smiles and half-moon cheekbones.
Her Hydra as an archetype of Time,
busy with Her compact mirrors and prone
to repetition. Same, hard lesson. She
is always out there. She can utterly
both captivate the man and see the man.
Enjoys, for howsoever brief a span,
his interest and attention for its own
paltry sake. Flirtations play in shadows;
love filters through the slats of blinds; legs crossed,
obsession poses vigil over one
unending round of Patience. Plastic meadows,
what we’ll have left of oceans, meaning lost.
XIV
It’s this much having not escaped. Glib cask
in syllables and ink. This much supplants
a memory unequal to its task;
throwing psychic energy askance
all over what we walk through every day
and making story of it as we chance;
a mask of narrative submerged in play
of tone and gilded mystery, sweet gloom,
some quiet flourishes, aloofness, stray
gusts of dirty air. As his clean bathroom
not often says, “At least he managed that.”
The sexiest man in any empty room
clarifies and strains his buttery loss.
It spreads, reduced sublimely like a sauce.