stand-up delusions

                     First

She invented a man in a novel who died the way
Her husband happened to die, later. What might
Be called coincidence. Or rather, as one critic
Put it, mercilessly, “No sooner said!” Who
Believes a writer writes the world into being?


                    Second

In the restaurant I smile at her goodwife face —
Furious soul who denies global warming
Also a woman’s right to her own body.

I don’t mention those near-lives I decided
Against in clinics, facing smiles, sunflowers.

On the dying planet, we are seated. Heads bow
Over plates of baby shrimp, beef, wall-eyed pike.


                    Third

O Late Style of Fire: I was your lover in
That “apricot-tinted chemise” in my Gramercy
Park flat, bright winter City. In fact, it was
A camisole. Peach silk. & I didn’t banish you.

We were, as you wrote,”in love”, inconveniently.
Even at your father’s death, that fiery forbidden
Given. So American, that collision of infidelity &
False innocence. Those “bright green eyes
That widened” at the airport—those were my eyes.

We stood at the gates to your father’s silent lit City.
Then all those Spring nights in Iowa, another city,
Saying goodbye in my doorway—I kissed
The doorframe, desiring you to go. Reading Pavese

Later: “Death will come and will have your eyes.”
Green & widening. So you were banished after all,
And the gates opened, but on a city so ridiculously tragic you
Hang fire there still, laughing, hilarious, hands in your pockets.

Watching the rafters, beams, the doorframes blaze upward. Spring:
Widening spell of ash. Too late now, Linnet, to show up at my address.

                     Fourth

GG wrote, “Hatred is a failure of imagination”—yet to be hated by
A true poet is to be perfectly imagined. For example, Mandelstam’s
Fatal stand-up image—Stalin’s “cockroach mustache”. “We live

Without feeling the country beneath our feet.” We moon-walk above
Our graves—we poets, among the many irrelevancies, O we are least
Imagined as real. So inventive invective won’t get you disappeared. U R.

Or like that lyrical hero, deep-sixed. The pure products of once-grandeur,
Once public school eloquence, once-literate-America care not about words anymore:
Hatred is downloaded daily, straight from those doing our imagining for us.


                    Fifth

Funny thing happened on my way to the mikvah—
In Salem, lost my chador, my chastity belt, my bad.

Please forgive the crash dummy, homey. No one thinks women are
Funny. But we have a driver’s timing: even in the death seat.

Take my wife: a pole dancer in Krakow. She kills. Late night:
An actress playing Virginia Woolf with a rubber nose, to raves.

Honk honk! All wrong: our Virginia was a drop dead Groucho wit
Even as she filled her pockets with heavy stones and headed for it:

River of “Hello, I Must be Going”, where death doubles back on itself.
Take my husband: how we met in Italy in the late Romantic style.

The night before I first saw his mesmer face, I caught the shooting star,
Green & widening, arc of fire across the Tuscan sky—O look!

The gates keep opening on it: that final, tear-filled, joke-black-lit
City of Knock, knock: who’s not? Who’s not? Then what?

Then, posthumous, the poet writes the world back into being.

Carol Muske-Dukes