Mr Miller dreams of his Mistress

 

Mr Miller dreams of his Mistress 100 x 80 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert

“SOMETIMES YOU EAT THE BEAR AND SOMETIMES THE BEAR EATS YOU”

                                                   

                                                                        In a buckthorn hedge, I saw a family of long

                                                                        tailed tits. The white-headed, Scandinavian kind.

                                                                                                                 Nell Zink

                                                                          

Striving for some kind of symmetry

that falls apart in his battered old hands

he starts to cry, slowly. It’s not my fault.

Some forces are too strong to argue with.

Order is to chaos what destiny is to chance, etc.

Even the wind concedes this point as it devours our sail.

The other night I have this weird dream about a blind date.

The lamb with garlic in lemon sauce looks delicious

yet has the texture and taste of sandpaper.

The wine’s an insult: bouquet of hay soaked in acid rain.

And my date’s talk, well, it’s brilliant enough, I guess,

but she resembles a fledgling Richard Nixon, maybe a niece

or cousin, and I fear she might start shaking her  

incipient jowls, give a backward preview of No, I am not a liar

and you won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore,

then offer a final pathetic wave from Marine One, etc.

And if she has to shave her pits, legs, privates twice a day

the way Dick had to shave his famous face, she isn’t talking.

While in line for a frozen yogurt as follow-up to my kraut-dog

the other day (as if trying to prove that indigestion’s a categorical   

imperative) I got to thinking about Decline and Fall…of people.

That it really is a closed system. And that all our fears and nightmares

wander in drunk and deluded, coming off some dreadful meds,

a waste of energy. It is maturity—gradual refinement— that matters:

a pinot noir that feels like silk and tastes like paradise:

Charlie Parker and Miles Davis jamming as the hour turns blue.

Jazz

Downtown 30 x 22,5 cm ink/watercolour/graphite on paper c/o Karin Goeppert

JASS*

Things spread—germs, people’s opinions,

beer bellies, you name it—

because it’s so hot around here.

Thin sheen of sweat on a working girl’s skin, for instance,

some kind of tense perfume

coming off it, dirty feet shapely in embroidered thongs.

The growth, you can’t believe it, just

keeps coming on, everything from moss

to palmetto to the idea behind a melody.

It would seem that the whole point

of darkness is shouldered into a heap

of syncopated rhythms.

Imagine someone coming along,

scooping them up

in his ditty bag and, walking out the door,

dumping its contents into the water supply.

Odd but happy feelings occur.

Friends start

talking fluent saxophone, eyes red,

blessed with cool and cannabis.

   You question them.

But all you get are tired smiles straight from Birdland.

*Legend or truth, I can’t say, but the term Jazz apparently evolved out

of “jass,” short for jasmine, the preferred scent worn by the prostitutes of

Storyville, New Orleans, birth place of a great American music tradition.

Birdland, of course, a famous jazz club in New York City.

Italian Movie

3 Gefässe 2 - 3 Vessels 2 42 x 56 cm Dispersionsfarbe/Tinte - wallpaint/ink/acrylic medium c/o Karin Goeppert

ITALIAN MOVIE

Right now dreaming my way around

a hot room perfumed by bunches of lilies

stuffed into a score of vases and earthen-ware pots

under a baroque rotunda in the Tuscan countryside.

A young woman with a beautiful bare back

playing a piece by J.S. Bach(from BWV 988) on a grand piano

which looks as if it’s been given a coat of lip gloss

just before the performance.  

Her family’s lumped together in a cheering section of sorts, i.e.,

clap or die seems to be the message.

Everyone applauds enthusiastically so no one gets hurt.

Now I am inside the head of an older man

in the audience, an aristocrat from the look of him,

silk tie, sumptuous shark-skin jacket, cheekbones

bespeaking generations of selective breeding. As him, I am beginning

to swell with an inexplicable sense of my own entitlement and

self-importance all out of proportion with what I’ve accomplished

in life and am admiring the girl soloist’s long olive-hued

dimpled back with its faint scatter of pretty moles and delicate  

articulation of finely inlaid muscle during the fugue, and in my thoughts

she’s naked, bound hand and foot to the lowered piano lid

upon which I am having my lordly way with her, enacting the

Tuscan version of droit de seigneur. The woman sitting next to me

is probably my wife, eyes closed, chins resting on a pearl necklace,

dreaming of dinner parties and snoring softly. Cherubs are chasing

amazingly fat nymphs across the ceiling, which reminds an American girl

   sitting in the audience(unable to fully fathom her jabberwockian

Marketing Studies (sic?) majorette soul, I cannot be her)

of a shopping mall in Iowa. The cherubs are beefy football players

from the high school, and the fabulously fat nymphs could be

any local girls over the age of sixteen. She’s pretty much ripped

on a bottle of Vino Santo(16% alc.) which she shared with her

boy friend before the concert began. Picking through the contents of her mind

   I come across a jumble of Victoria’s

Secret under things and shoes and more shoes and a basketball gym dance

after which she lost her virginity and now I witness a fit of  

pique over a rather large zit that dominates her chin

(damn those Italian desserts!)  

plus the echo of a student who earlier mentioned

the state of something called “Italian Cinema.”

   “What,” she might have asked,

“is an Italian movie? Would that be something with Sylvester Stallone in it?

Or, like, one of those boring ancient “Godfather” type flicks that my

dad thinks are s-o-o-o awesome?” She has no idea of course that she’s nothing

beneath the frescoes above her and the frescoes nothing beneath Tuscan sky.

And what of our lovely soloist?

Whose string, as it were, did she pull to get here

this stifling lily-sweet evening, and I hope she never stops.