The great poet, a madman, produced, during the course of his long career, and violent life, a number of images–potent mirages/One I loved was about the heat in his apartment, he could grow a palm tree in it/And I wonder about the palm at the end of the mind Wallace Stevens spoke of/did it fan out, into an atmosphere of thought, eventually dried out by two much sun?/ I imagine that palm in Egypt, I don’t know why/ Probably because of Cavafy and Alexandria, the dust around his feet, a cup of mint tea, and thou/He was your type, that working stiff/Who wouldn’t take your beauty for granted/But he wouldn’t have made a fuss about it, either/Sitting there smiling, you reach for his cigarette every once in a while, your eyes narrowed against the memory of other cigarettes, your former beauty, and your great loves/Who are now pensioners who sit in a park in Paris/Wondering who this Anglais is that changes the atmosphere just by walking by/Cavafy gives it a thought/And so do I, watching you in the “The Look,” a documentary self-portrait with friends/To be released in New York in early November, naturally/The month of Scorpios/Man and ladykillers who insist on their own innocence/And while there are a number of commentators in the movie who discuss your look–those eyes–no one talks about your voice/Which should read poems aloud/Because it’s the kind of voice poets would kill for–mellifluous and disciplined all at once/And no one talks about what I feel (it’s a secret) looking at you now: that your beauty is greater now than it’s ever been/Your face lives in itself/It’s terrible history and joy/Like other boys I fell in love with you in the film, “Georgy Girl”/Your self-interest there was so outrageous/What man could resist?/Even as you screamed about your unwanted child in the maternity ward/Your hair a perfect halo of hate/I had sister like that/A poet who was fascinated by the idea let alone reality of her own power vis a vis men/Including myself/Who could not and would never get over her slim frame/And inability to forgive/Your father wasn’t a military man for nothing/Also an Olympic swimmer/And there are shots of you in the film swimming/Broad breast strokes/It’s in your blood/Along with silence/In the film you talk about how/At age 10/You were sent away/To a French school/You didn’t know the language/No one helped you understand it/And it took you nine months/Or ten months/To speak to anyone other than your sister/Who killed herself eventually/And whose self-death you kept from your mother/Until she died and you fell apart/Only to end up whole and cracked sitting in a cafe/With your colored friend, the Alexandrian poet/A queer/The only man for you/A performer/Which is to say a person who wrestles with words in front of other people/Just like and unlike poets who are ashamed to be seen/And then insist on it/O! The birds follow you/ And pull the sky along with them/As you put on your lipstick/”Just a little” you say as the other cinema object used to say/Sometimes sitting in a cafe with colored poets/Putting it on just a little/Before she stood up and changed everything with a look, too.
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