after Dean Young
After Myrtle Beach, the new paradisial sins hung free
in the gambled-away air, corralled and beatified,
tosses to prone sailors. They were mad when young,
suggestive when older, and in the end foppish maids
growing into throbbing satin dresses. I thought
Simone Weil was a lazy murderess when not
nakedly swimming in the plasticity of ur-French
thought, dank and dark, like lovers spread on molasses.
Did you say Caesar’s Palace was being torn down?
I hadn’t heard, unless you mean its sensate marble,
which last time I looked had a pink aura of Eco’s
fascism spreading over it, like a drunk Taj Mahal.
Has it shed its skin?—this would be the fifth
year in a row. Not that I care. I welcome all cats,
plump and thin, vomity or sedate, to my aggrieved
door, now that I have plenty of milk to give away,
in jars thick as barrels, as though I were building
wrestlers. None of my high school sweethearts
has called so far, I expect because the phone lines
are thick with the same illness that infected my
father and his kind, who spoke always of hard work
as though it were Mormonism with guts. Notice
you hear Beethoven’s spunk in elevators when you least
need him. A fake sky covers the motel room where
I awake unsuspicious, possibly in Alabama, or
could be Vermont in summer, as though shading
the terrestrial kindling to set the whole show on fire,
earth and its googled habitants, Playboy-hiding
men and their unbunnies, swimmers and their socks,
so that only a sawdust spread of melted humanity
survives. I was told clocks in this country are sensitive
to changes in wind and temperature. Will these
canceled checks suffice? Money is spent by owners
of Lamborghinis in past lives as though it were a dread
Foucault’s last glimmerings of the author’s existence.
Why then have I not yet made your acquaintance?
I am waiting, in a yellow pantsuit of a cousin’s provenance,
if you are willing, if you are dying too of sudden
verisimilitude, which follows our coattails home, in gouts
of tennis-ball size, oozing and oozing agreeability.
