Reading Ted Kooser on a Rainy Sunday Morning

Sunday Morning

Now it is June again, one of those
leafy Sundays drifting through galaxies
of maple seeds. Somewhere, a mourning dove
touches her keyboard twice, a lonely F,
and then falls silent. Her in the house
the Sunday papers lie in whitecaps
over the living-room floor. Among them floats
the bridal page, that window of many panes,
reflecting, black and white, patches of sky
and puffs of starlit cloud becoming
faces. On each bright brow the same light falls,
the nuptial moon held up just out of sight
to the left. The brides all lift their eyes
and smile to see the heavens stopped for them.
And love is everywhere. Cars that have all week
lurched and honked with sour commuters are now
like smooth canoes packed soft with families.
A church bell strides through the green perfume
of locust trees and tolls its thankfulness.
The mourning dove, to her astonishment,
blunders upon a distant call in answer.

A languid Sunday in New York. Complacencies of the peignoir, and late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair... The husband begrudgingly wakes, pulls on a pair of sweatpants and makes his way across the street to the deli to purchase the Times. Late coffee and bagels during a desultory reading of the travel insert... planning your vacation to Istanbul. Vaguely exotic. Turkish delight and swarmy snake charmers with twisty Salvador Dali mustaches.. magic carpets.. rubbing a magic lantern. The day is like wide water, without sound, stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet...over the seas to silent Palestine... or silent Istanbul.
In the afternnon, to serendipitously happen upon a street fair and enjoy walking up the middle of Amsterdam Avenue.Thousands milling there. It reminds her of the American version of a medina... the crush of various vendors and food stalls. Bins of bargain underwear and socks. Authentic (but what does that mean?) pashmina shawls that feel, to her perusing fingers, like cheap and papery cotton.Fashion earrings the size of gongs. A man demonstrating a new and improved mop. A Chinese man yells into the crowd "Come here, come here, I'll give you a massage. Very cheap." And the food! Roasted corn on the cob. Crepes. Funnel cakes. Gyros heaped high with shiny meats...the fragrant grease rolling down rapidly devouring chins. Deep fried Oreos? Why would someone want to do that? She remembers the chip shop in Brooklyn where the whacky British owner delights in dipping various foodstuffs in batter and dunking them in a crackling vat of oil. To him it is simply a science experiment, to see what works, what remains edible after his greasy alchemy.
A quick run around the reservoir and back home. To chop Vidallia onions and garlic cloves... making sauce for pasta. The sizzle of a saute pan and a splash of olive oil.. And now, reading from David Kirby's newest book of poems. Remembrance of her time in Tallahassee. A great poet, really. Funny guy. Reminds her a little of Billy Collins Laughing out loud at the poem "Calling Robert Bly" where the college professor talks about settling an angry dispute in a poetry seminar by calling Robert Bly up on the telephone to ask what a particular metaphor meant.

Allen Ginsberg As A Heterosexual

"Joe Blow has decided
he will no longer be a fairy"
--Allen Ginsberg
"The Archetype Poem"

The almost Talmudic obsession with his sex--
The way his cock, normally earthworm and Euclidean
Would suddenly betray him--
The lugubrious gorilla accelerations of desire
Flaring into function at even the most dubious erotics.
It constantly worried him, the around-the-clock fear
That some small thing--oy vey!--could usurp
His usual sangfroid.

Anything could incite him--
Set his Everestian (he thought) limb pitchforking forward
Like a demented trident:
The vaguely aphroidiasical smells of sweater-sweltering women
In crowded elevators, the tumbling triptych of magazine centerfolds
Or the tiny tissued tits of teen-aged girls.
Even the fuck-you-in-Italian gestures of undertipped waitresses
Or the pirate-squint of nearsighted librarians with
Soup-bowl-shaped Prince Valiant haircuts.

Mostly his desire is a kind of divining rod
That doesn't make sense to him 'cause he doesn't know
Where it will lead him or what he'll end up with.
It is alien. Biblical. Star-Trekkian.
Something that is both released, yet far removed,
Like the frying of distant meat.
Some days Emily Dickinson is as sexy as Mae West
And the NASDAQ is a veritable Kama Sutra.
Anything can do it--
Disengage the Old Testament emergency-brake on his libido.
Advertising. Laxatives. Baking soda. HMO's.

Shunned by his family, taxonomized as hopelessly weird
After the Karl-Malden-nosed Casanova was banned
For life from a certain Victoria's Secret in Paramus, New Jersey
(An incident resulting from sneaking one too many sniffs
Of the clean, starchy, still-smells-like-the-mall smells
Of the sherbert-colored satin panties stretched out,
Erotic cruciform, on clear plastic hangers.

He has these urges, these eyes-rolling-back-in-the-head urges,
Where the blood begins to hum in his groin
And then everything gets very quiet--
As if somebody switched off the audio-track
Of the movie which is his life
And in that stillness where
Even speech is mute and ridiculous,
Like the slow mouth-movements of tropical fish,
There is this vaguely school-boy notion
Of what sexuality actually means
That consumes his thinking,
Becomes monstrously iconic,
Like Warhol's Day-Glo Marilyn except bigger:
Marilyn Monroe as huge as a Macy's balloon
With sashaying boobs the size of Herald's Square.

Nervous, censorious,
Constantly apologizing for the total
Vagabondage of his genitals,
He sometimes wonders if life is worth the humiliation,
The restraining orders, the maternal wise-assing about blindness.
But if he is sad, it is only for a moment,
Only until his hand, creeping like a separate consciousness
Once again indulges in the Reader's Digest version
Of sexual gratification.

I am the way I am because I refuse to enter
The drunken taxi-cabs of Absolute Reality!
He yells while dancing alfresco in front of a Hell's Kitchen window.
It is hard to be normal
When it is normal to be hard! Ha ha ha!
His words, something between joy and rage,
Sexuo-liturgical, existential yawp,
The most supercalifragilistic sort of
Howl.

Swan Dive

To jump without benefit of wings

To make an Acapulco of belief

Leap of faith. To hope for water

and yet risk rock

No impetuousness then

No daredevil expostulations

Just the taste of a descending sky

and to feel the imminence

of ocean

Sunlight on clear water

Melancholy is a red sky

and her dreams are boats

no one can bust or blow

out to sea

She stands on a ledge

tests a strong wind

If God is a hand

may it catch us as we fall

Into thy hands...

Jump then

And she does.

Husband in the shower right now. Tapping on the computer, half-watching a repeat of Antiques Roadshow on the television. Listening to little bird-like grandmothers discuss the dusty paintings that have been in their family 'since I don't know when' and have hung, perhaps undecoriously, over their fireplaces for years and years... discovering they are worth thousands and thousands! The flush of surprise on their faces... the chin quivering with thoughts of an easier retirement. Is there some object that she owns, she wonders, that is secretly worth so much? The painting over her own fireplace perhaps? Hardly... a large piece from a Russian dude in Brooklyn... very modern and yet 'anatomically correct.' The reaction of her mother the first time she saw it ... the quiet 'oh my' that is somehow a lengthy dissertation on both aesthetics and morality. To realize that the things that are worth most to her would probably be worthless to the rest of the world. A red leather-bound album of wedding photographs. A family Bible. Her husband's books, inscribed to her. Those small things, somehow priceless in their own right. And of course the damp man, cheerfully toweling himself in the bathroom....