I asked Frances if I could read the next poem, which
one of my friends found a little scandalous.
And she said I could, but she doesn't
know what's in the poem.
So don't hold it against her.
All right, there are a number of poems
in the new collection which have "letter" in the title,
I'm not sure why, and color modifications.
This one is called "The Pink Letter," and you'll see why.
And again, it's a hybrid.
It's a mixture of prose and verse lines,
and you may be able to hear the switches.
"Sore and out of pink with local points,
like a pause in conversation when the last words suddenly
hear themselves sticking out of thought,
with a deep disquiet because she knew Medusa
looked very much like herself.
I call on the pussy I know I have somewhere, yes, on you
dear, to lift me from myself like a pink flamingo.
And you do, except when you're being a cunt.
Then you're like the beggar who stands in front of the Rheims
Cathedral.
I think that's you that ignores the tourists
and asks for something, anything,
from the three Gothic doors stiffed straight
up like punk hair.
The off the shoulder look in my eyes,
you know it isn't like meals and minutes.
It's a long time coming.
Be in me always like the grand, multiplexed sound
of a waterfall edge in Canada, the caribou all the time
rushing over your head like a thin wash of thunder sienna.
If instead art should go all tragique
and send us back to the darkest part of the spirit that created
it, and permit illuminations only through that darkness,
I want your pink wine.
I want you to meet me a stranger in the woods.
That's OK, like having one's ass licked all day
by Poseidon's marine saliva.
After all, one has to touch somebody
in order to begin to die.
Start with pink of child on a purple bike.
Stand on the pedals on the downstroke like angry brushwork
till you've caressed figure after figure once charmed
within the picture, people washing down medicine river.
Trekking from this page to the next
is a way to avoid a lightning return to the archaic.
But what I have in mind, regardless,
is the discharge of radioactive isotopes,
not the metaphor of beauty as a constant and considered
goodness.
Creativity is the pussy of the morning,
racing along with its black leathery bird beak,
drinking the wind until the accident.
I dislike the way he walked up to her as if she were water,
water in a pot hole, water all things
come slapdash to the unknown of the road.
Hadn't I known her when she left for a year
to live in a telescope with June?
She was sensitive about it.
My pupil was terrifying, probably,
and the light practically ate too much of her."