This poem is madness, or at least one of the many forms poetic madness can take. It may seem at first a departure from my usual approach, but it is merely an extension of the styles and materials typically found in my poems. The photograph below was taken at L’Absinthe in New York City, one of the poem’s settings. Others include the bar at The Pierre on Central Park East, the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, and the ocean off of St. Petersburg, Florida, also home to a major antiquarian book fair. The title is drawn in its entirety from a line in William Butcher’s translation of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, selected because I felt it captured the sensation of being an antiquarian book dealer in the declining age of the printed book. The poem appears in the lastest installment of Boston Poetry Union’s bold new online magazine Poetry Northeast, and again in the print annual at year’s end.
1.
We slug
Champagne.
It blazes
In sharp glass
Like a June bay.
We survey
Mermaids,
And I sing
Ah, my sea slugs,
Liquid in flapper frills,
My Saharas,
My slinks
Of eel and arrow,
I’m desolate snow-melt,
Rich marrow
In my blood-baked
Italian suit.
My back bends
In your books.
My neck seeks
Your boots.
2.
The sun
Was half-sucked
All day today,
A lozenge,
And I’m glad
It’s gone.
3.
I see my centaur
At the Pierre.
We proceed
To the bar
Where my martini
Is classical, bijou,
And lethal as light
On the Alps.
The caramel glow
Is heavy all around,
Like smoke
From the 40s
Hung in a jar.
He regales
Me with scenes
Of horses
Frozen mid-river
In the Finnish War,
Jupiter-bulged eyes,
Sofa-thick necks,
Ink-fountain tails
Jutting from ice.
“Can you imagine
Sitting on one,
Like a club chair?”
Think of all that
Glossy horse hair
Hard as ice glowering
Alone at the Pole.
4.
Once I rolled
In surf till I was
Roasted gold
And believed
I could float forever,
Consoled that
A man born
To be hanged can
Never drown.
5.
We tramp in traffic
Down Park Avenue, damp,
Until we’re at Absinthe
Where we breathe absinthe,
Trickling polar rivulets
From the ancient
Silver chamber,
Its spigots like gargoyles
Gargling fresh storm water
Over cubes of sugar poised
On silver war blades
Above misty grass
Of Amazonian green.
Ah, it’s all okay,
Especially today,
We will have more
To drink, and more,
And in love with all
We’ve finally found,
And tomorrow
Is left in the rain,
Where it belongs.
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