My Earlier Life as a Vampire

Blauer Spaziergang - Blue Walk 38,5 x 48,5 cm pastel by Karin Goeppert

MY EARLIER LIFE AS A VAMPIRE

The first girl whose throat

I had designs on was one

of our baby sitters. Her plump

pale neck was studded with pretty moles.

So whenever she blushed or flushed

I felt like an oil man scratching the

sand at the edge of an oasis, simply dying

to sink my drill into that rich lode. Yes, there were

teeth marks, but I swear, your honor, I

drew not one drop of her sweet blood.

Being older now, deeply mired in middle-age, I’m over

all that, and yet…I’d go for Anne Hathaway

in a pulse beat when she plays amorous Jane Austen  

long alabaster throat exposed in gowns plunging perilously

or as Meryl Streep’s factotum (deeply V-necked sweaters)

or fetchingly short-haired Liv Tyler (all lips, eyes, but mainly neck)

in a Robert Altman flick set in the South. Ethics? I’m a connoisseur

not a philosopher—well, not really—philosophy has its attractions—

or some philosophers, anyway—the vandals, the belligerents—

and I probably won’t get a stake in the heart

so much as a classic spike heel, or its contemporary cousin

the muddy cleat of her soccer shoe. But not even that

will happen. I’ve retired. I’ll have to be satisfied with scrambled

eggs flame-thrown with tabasco, reading Nietzsche till dawn burns through my curtains.

Rosario in Gardenfever

Gartenfieber III - Gardenfever III acryl on canvas 100 x 80 cm

THE AUDITORS

                                                Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye…

                                                             The uncontrollable mystery of the bestial floor.

                                                                           from THE MAGI, W.B. Yeats

I see them even now

in the green light of laptops and tablets

spread sheets scrolling down their pale faces

wasted on caffeine, lips thin and dry and chapped, never

satisfied, oh yeah, that’s them, always wanting what I

don’t want to give them, like junior vampires in search of

a little fresh plasma. Gray or blue suits not quite fitting properly,

handed down, it would seem, from an equally geeky sibling

who’s worked his way up to partner by now, grasping the ins

and outs of VAT far better than he will ever grasp 

the constantly mutating needs of his wife

and who, in fact, is on the verge of leaving him for a

bar tender from Montenegro—but that’s

another story; and the women,

nerdy, snorting, with strangely sour breath,

some of them unconsciously cute

packed hard-bodied in their pin-stripe suits, stealing

from the fourth floor kitchen fridge, and without a twinge of remorse,

half of some stranger’s turkey sandwich. In the Zone finally, eyes

unraveled in cold, unflinching stare, she finds again and again

in the turbulence of ingeniously fudged figures

those controllable mysteries of the bestial executive floor. 

Venice Revisited

Redwood 60 x 50 cm acryl on canvas c/o Karin Goeppert

CAMPO DEI FRARI

Ignoring a swarm of super cute Japanese snap shooters

aesthetes come and go talking of Carpaccio, but they

aren’t dragging their surfboards and their knuckles

behind them, because we are not in Venice, Ca.,

we’re in the other Venice, the one where rising water soaks

sneakers in a heartbeat. Shoppers jostle our unquiet appetites 

and we theirs, each of us in a frantic search for artifacts. I buy a pair

of black dress shoes in a shop the size of a closet. I look at pictures by

Titian and Bellini in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. I eat overpriced,

not very good pizza. I think about my apartment in Berlin. Why   

does that basil near the kitchen window smell like cat pee? Why do I feel

that if I just had a row boat all of my problems would be solved?

Because I’m lost, hemmed in by water, that’s why. O Byzantine scribes,

strutting charioteers of the 6^th century, I dream about home

when I’m here and about here when I’m home. Why is that?

Scientists don’t have much to say on the subject. Issues of the spirit

not easily testable, which is why poets and novelists still manage 

dubiously to teach at colleges that resemble Venice

vaguely (here a bell tower, there a loggia) no matter how

   whorish and worldly the template

before the sons and daughters of Nippon posed giggling in its odors and shadows.

 

Hydra

Gartenfieber I - Gardenfever I 100 x 80 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert

HYDRA

It would seem there’s nothing

better to do in Iowa than to turn

a prize-winning hog into a heap

of barbecue on paper plate,

potato salad hugging

its oily flank, or turning a

sonnet sequence into tenure,

or your wife into my special friend,

sifting through

the fragments, making things up as we go along.

Remember what 4-H stands for?

Neither do I.

No hogs on this Saronic Island.

Just scores of donkeys more or

less inedible but essential—

no cars, just a garbage truck—

for hauling stuff and tourists around.

The hairy waiter’s face is lit up

with a yellow-toothed leer—mother-

fucker also seems to like your wife—as he

smuggles on-the-house ouzo to your table

and you, hammered, nothing but fragments

no one’s bothering to sift through.

This isn’t Iowa, Mary. The island’s harbor

town curling up into the burning blue

nutmeg-cinnamon-cumin odor

redolent of sex on a warm afternoon

in summer. Your mind, finally catching

up with your body, begins to loosen up.

Suspicions fade away. Your dreams

are in technicolor. Back from a swim

you are just in time for lunch—

she’s making tomato salad with those big chunks

of feta cheese and those fat Kalamata olives

you love so much, whose praise you sing endlessly,

and she’s poured you a glass of

crisp retsina—lunch on a hot Greek island 

just the two of you watching the play of light

on flowers and white washed stone buildings

is not only better than most dreams

it might even be one.

Dark Side of the Moon

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