To interrupt for a moment, this is my homage
to Jayne Mansfield and my confusion
over what the title was.
"Blonde Bombshell."
"Love is boring and passé, all that old baggage,
all the bloody bric-a-brac of it.
The bad, the gothic, the retrograde,
obscurantist hum and drum of it needs to be swept away.
So, night after night, we sit in the dark of the Roxy Theater
beside Grandma with her shanks tied up
in the tourniquets of rolled stockings,
and open ourselves like earth to rain,
to the blue fire of the movie screen, where
love surrenders suddenly to gangsters and to their cuties.
There in the narrow moat-filled finger of light
is a blonde so blonde, so blinding,
she is a blizzard, a huge spook, and lights up like the sun
the audience in its galoshes.
She bulges like a deuce coupe.
When we see her, we say good-bye to Kansas.
She is everything spare, cool and clean.
She is that gas station on a dark night.
And the cold dependable light of rage
is coming in on schedule, like a bus."