Autumnal

Herbstlich - Atumnal 30 x 20 cm

SOME LEAVES

Maternity leave, sick leave, annual leave, an extended

leave of absence (sounds like a corporate coup d’ etat,

the quiet extermination, say, of a corner-office exec-

utive rat) planes leaving airports only to arrive at

other, nearly identical airports, children

on the verge of leaving home the first time

and so many people we know or don’t know, on the way   

out as well, some permanently, while others leap straight  

into the arms of some astonished Bayadere

on leave from the corps d’ ballet of a “major” company,

and that leaves Ingrid Bergman leaving Humphrey Bogart

at the end of Casablanca blah-blah, or is it he

who leaves her by staying behind with Claude Raines

though it’s hard to believe there are still

people alive who give a shit this way or that,

Nixon leaving the White House aboard

Marine One, a standard departure/arrival technology,

   was pretty weird

and there are the leaves of a maple dining-room table

opening onto a sumptuous view of melted gorgonzola

   on fresh spinach leaves  

and the only leaves outside right now are those leaves clogging

the drain of my balcony—I almost wrote the “brain” of my

balcony—and I once saw the tender mimosa

blossoms of Marrakech which aren’t leaves at all, but I don’t care,  

somewhere in a canary yellow courtyard near the  

souks, the rug market I think, an orange tree in its   

exact dusty middle, and wish I’d never had to leave,

escorted through graceful old age by fawning servants,

obedient wives, and one tender if toothless household pet.

Verdi - Requiem Dies Irae e Tuba Mirum

L O V E

Blick von Deya - Deya-Vista 28,5 x 38,5 cm

LOVE

It’s good work if you can get it—

that’s what a skeptic might say—but it doesn’t

pay the rent, my friend, it’s all perks, a jazz quartet

in the lobby of a hipster hotel in lower Manhattan

playing the coolest of Brubeck and Miles

and Charles Mingus too, yes, Charles himself. Sometimes love is

fried scampi with pinot grigio—ah, my love, we adore delicious

food, middle-age entering its Major Phase in silk dressing gown  

as a paunchy, grandly decayed author dictating to his assistant

the Great Unreadable Cookbook—goat cheese

spread on slices of sour dough bread warming us 

up, “as it were,” for wild boar stuffed with rum soaked plums.

Love is Olivia Hussey in Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet,” she with eyelashes

like wings shadowing cheekbone and dimple. Even though I

detested the “school dance” and all it stood for—one nation under

teenage stupidity, with liberty and justice for no one else    

but dumb-assed jocks, of course, and the girls who     

jerked them off in Mustangs, Firebirds, on front porch swings—

I would have taken Olivia to the Junior Prom: so there she is

spreading ripples of dismay and desire and astonishment

at the freshness of her beauty, her iambic pentameter   

otherness. I hear a sprinkler sputter-stutter into life, a basket-

ball pounding in the driveway, “Whole lotta Love” ripping through

my open bedroom window. The world’s going nuts, but this time it’s not so bad.    

 

Glory Box - Portishead

Doors

Die alte Tür - The old Door 33 x 28,5 cm

SUCKING LEMONS

I know someone who sucks lemons twice a day. After which

he licks salt, then slams back a shot of tequila.

Could be, however, that he sucks the lemon after he drinks.

Schools of thought on what comes first are popping up on

   college campuses all over the country: lemon or salt?

He grits his teeth, then repeats the procedure. Whatever that is exactly.

Until an uncommon lucidity permeates his entire being.  

He once told me an interesting story. A diner on the outskirts of Texarkana.

Roughly adjacent to a 24 hour Marine Corps Recruitment Depot.

A waitress denounced for smuggling tiny shots of espresso into day old refills.

She wasn’t so much run out of town as deported to Berkeley.

After a brief interlude as a free-lance theorist in the English Department   

she joined the Gnostics in Santa Fe. This is what happens when normality is thwarted.

Out there they can drink all the arabica they want to. Or is it limes that he sucks? 

Light my Fire - The Doors

Sturm

Sturm über Kloster-Sulz - Storm in Kloster-Sulz 38,5 x 28,5 cm

REAL  AMERICAN

You cannot really dance to Bach or Bartok

and, for reasons of decorum and such, probably shouldn’t 

but once or twice a year we pump up the volume on Grand Funk

Railroad’s “American Band” and dance patriotically across   

the badly warped complaining floors of our Berlin apartment. And

I do have an urge, irrational because impossible to satisfy, for a Chicago

Steak n’ Cheese sandwich plastered with mustard and primed with pickle

   and which, oozing over its edges,

is pierced through the heart with a three-inch tooth pick.

But wait. I’m not finished. I would like

to purchase this culinary masterpiece from a window on Columbus Avenue,

Little Italy, San Francisco, USA and eat it while drifting through

the fog of a July evening.

I want to stand in the parking lot outside Pete’s in Berkeley

on a Saturday morning

and listen in on the conversation of coffee-sipping

anthropology professors and hung-over poets who are no where

in residence, and so please forgive me Peoria (which is ubiquitous) and Tupulo, 

Miss. (hey, Elvis!) and Bulldog, Alabama home to some of the meanest

                       motherfuckers in the Confederacy but above all

Killgore, Texas(O Janice, where art thou in our moment of need, which is always?) in fact

anywhere in Texas, hardscrabble as it gets, and Oklahoma too and gosh darn

   Arkansas as well,  

for wanting to do these most un-American of real things.   

Bach - Cello Suite No. 1 - Prelude

Mischa Maisky

"How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?"

Bad Hair Day 23 x 18 cm

WHAT LIFE WOULD BE LIKE IF YOU OR I WERE GOOD LOOKING

Let’s face it—as you look into the mirror at that

mask you’re saddled with—beauty is more compelling

than truth. Nobody will pay you a thousand bucks

an hour to stand on a soap box in the park and recite

all of your great ideas. And who really gives a shit? Not even you at times.                                                                                                

If you were pretty enough, people would stop, at least pretend to listen, goofy

unguarded smiles on their lust encumbered faces. A well-dressed

fastidious little man from a modeling agency just might

slip you his card. You wouldn’t have to be obnoxiously

smart anymore. As if anyone cared who invented stream-of-consciousness.

It exists, we more or less enjoy it, some of us fish deeply in its shallows. Basta.

All I know about Wittgenstein, by the way, is that he had funny hair. It sort of leaned to one side.

At some European film festival, Natalie Portman, obviously

blown away by all the fuss, is demure in the swift explosions of light,

Bardot, Jean Seberg hawking the Herald Tribune, Sissy at the drug store

in Nashville sucking a straw, unaware of her magic, Romy Schneider

looking like a Greek goddess in a black and white publicity photo from the 50s.

Goethe and Schiller side by side, practically hand in hand, always the same age,

and if not beautiful then at least heroic, noble, which is nearly as good, it lasts longer,

and still the classic targets of shit-dropping birds. If Goethe was right, then

“Youth is a disease that time cures.” Substitute beauty for youth, and we can call it a day.

American Gigolo - Call me, by Blondie