A Touch of Spring

 

Catalyst 50 x 40 cm acrylic/graphite/charcoal on canvas board

REPORT FROM THE PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISORS

Oiled body rub. Cornices. Summer brush

fires near the tree line. An agent creates our

desires, then says, “Just doing my job, sir.”  

How much better can it get? All I can remember is some   

larcenous hard-body surfer girl, the waves of Ocean Beach  

reduced to mere ripples in her wake; she stole

John’s girlfriend; then she shop-lifted your ex, Trish,

and put her back again, though none too gently. Sublime

Sappho, feral eye winking at my second wife

   even while making out with a  

cute little fox called Lu Lu or Suzie or someone.

Forgive me, friend, I often don’t even make

sense to myself anymore: there’s hardly any here… here.

How much better, you say. Don’t make me laugh.

We need something noble. Flying buttress. Entablature.

Something to prop up an aging structure. Subversive elements

caressing my sweet spot. An agent whispering down the pipeline:

look both ways, take what you need, then add ten-percent.

Letting the oils really flow. Trickle down anyone? Go on, rub it in.

  

Snap

 

Snap 120 x 120 cm mixed media on canvas - c/o Karin Goeppert

ROMANTICISM

Is Romanticism merely adolescence

extended a century longer than feasible? And does

an American Ballet Theatre gala seem to meet the criteria?

Balletomanes, long past romanticism—i.e.

not at all in touch with the sublimely unattainable

in love, faith, art—

are in the bar downstairs, smoking and drinking, waiting for the bell

and clearly more interested in bodies than in spirit.

I remember wearing torn-up yellow running shoes,

no socks, commenting loudly, “Doctors are little more

than glorified plumbers.”  Which may or may not

be true, but who cared about truth? I was all about impact.

A response from strangers of bewildered admiration.

Strangers because, well, people I knew shook their

heads, though never responded with

“Fuck you talkin´ about?” For which I’m grateful.

How old was I? Not too. Not very. Not enough.

First experience of ballet: an aspiring

Ballerina, a kinky sixteen year old, once asking

me to sit on her upright feet: the third most

erotic moment of my life.

The world was not so much my oyster

as a 24/7 drive-in burger palace

in the Berkeley flatlands, where San Pablo Avenue hits University.

Enough about me ( I hear “me-me-me-me”

echoing like the opening phrase of Beethoven’s Fifth.)

Natalia Makarova and Antony Dowell take the stage

for a short number from Manon Lescaut. No dancing,

just mime and emotion, lots of heat, panting, intense looks.

Now, back to me.

I feel uncomfortably warm while those experts

in romantic manipulation struggle with all kinds of

feeling. There’s a heater in my chest. I feel ecstatic, in the ancient Greek

sense of the word. All of this sublimity is not healthy. Neither is

using the ancient Greek sense of a word. Any word. Almost as

bad as racing home with a bag full of bean and beef burritos

and watching Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet with an equally underemployed

neighbor who, steeped in sensibility, is harmful to no one but herself.

And what flesh-eating Romantic wouldn’t take advantage of that?

After the ballet we stagger off to Ghirardelli’s

for triple banana splits, feeling more or less normal by now,

even common, even rather pleasantly stupid,

and pushing this as far as we possibly can. 

You're No Good

Green Promise 63 x 47,5 cm acrylic on paper

MUST EVERYTHING DROP?

Dude, I would make over that thinning

Rasta mop if I were you, I mean,

the whole Jamaican thing, if you

ask me, is so thirty years ago. And it’s no news

that your pecs are heading south, fast,

are in need of additional support.

Must everything drop? Collapse? Wither? When

was the last time

a lovely apparition on a train platform

saw you as an object of desire, obscure or otherwise?

When was the last time

you felt even a twitch of ambition, that

all consuming

what the hell

I’m doing this thing

feeling

that exhilarates, excites, deepens

all of life?

Let me guess: it was just before

you took two Alka Seltzer and tottered off to bed.

In the dream that always comes back

you tuck the girls in with

a good night kiss on their smooth, shiny foreheads.

Then maybe an angel starts to sing.

Or is that Linda Ronstadt? 

Charlotte Rampling and Botticelli

Garden in Autumn 30 x 42 cm acrylic on paper - sold

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I WRITE POETRY ON AN EMPTY STOMACH (SONNET 4)

I am dreaming again, only wide awake

this time, hanging from a precipice,

a cliff in Austria, say, on the verge

of taking my obsessions too seriously.

A lot of prepositions in my life. Participles dangle dangerously.

But my stomach’s whooping like a moog synthesizer.

So I order a little supper. We’re in a gallery of the Uffizi,

vitello arrosto con patate e Bottticelli; just below my nose

deep red Chianti swirling slow-motionly (sic!) in a broad bellied glass.

Across from me a simulacrum of Charlotte Rampling.

The way she looked in Woody Allen’s first really

bad movie, ersatz Fellini, the one after “Interiors.” Full-blown

narcissist, speed reader of Schopenhauer, cat-eyed femme

fatale, she has my wife in a fit of giggles, maybe a little in love,

and I can scarcely take my eyes off their words.