Mae West as an Apartment
(Dalí, 1934-35)
As I walk through your tapestry of silver hair
toward the cruel delirium of eyes
that are windowframes
the right eye is Paris winking
from across the Seine.
In the left, the plains of Spain
stretch toward the Pyrenees of your eyelash.
Now I can see myself, a fleck of shadow
in the glare of your blue light.
"Why don't ya come over sometime?"
you ask, hinting I might recline
on the sofa of your lips.
So I step across the threshold
as if entering the machinery of your mind
and your face becomes the face
of a gilded clock on the mantelpiece
of your mother-bone shoulders
ticking, as if you are inventing time
luxuriously, one tick at a time, until
minutes before two in the afternoon
you rise to greet me, arms
perched on those insatiable hips
always there, your hips, rocking
back and forth. You smile
with silent hysterical laughter
as you emerge, stepping forth
it seems, from the floorboards
of history, molten matter
the core of the planet
churning, lifting continents.
Your forehead, an unashamed wall
of scarlet, your indomitable bosom
the centerpiece of all interior design.
The Angelus of Gala
(Dalí, 1935)
Two peasants, a man and woman
praying at the hour of the distant bell's
tolling -- the painting erupts
from the furrow of her mind
as if a plow could cultivate that slate
aristocratic countenance, impassive eyes
black asshole eyes, you call them
the poet in you rising to greet love.
She's always part of the painting
and to see this is to see a woman
hovering over you -- this woman
as if you were a child, half-dead
buried in her garden, the endless field
where peasant farmers cease the work
of living, the painting says, to pray.
What massive cruelties hide here.
She entered your life and kissed you.
Your penis is feeble and small.
In her hands you're a paintbrush.
The shadows are so strange here.
I can't explain it, and the hands
such equanimity, like a god
who reaches down, because
he wants to feel his hands there
wrapped in prayer around her ass
a warm loaf of bread, dressed in linen.
Her ass you saw in dream, a continent
of melting time before she came to you.
Her ass that becomes the face of Lincoln
because she freed you from desire.
She's a praying mantis. You can see that
and it's what you love -- when nature says
copulate, then devour the mate.
The Burning Giraffe
(Dalí, 1936-37)
She sleepwalks, ripped
top to toe, stirring about
in this strange kitchen
where dinner's late
and the giraffe is burning.
Sliding my eyes upward
from her kneebone
to the humid interior
of her thigh, I open
each secret drawer
of her life, one by one.
What fragrant nausea.
On the Ampurdan plain
the tramuntaña howls
wind that licks your brains
dry, and from all parts
of martyred Spain, you say
the same choking odor rises --
"incense, burned curate's fat
spiritual flesh, mingled
with the smell of hair dripping
with the sweat of promiscuity
the mobs fucking themselves. "
She takes a red scarf
from the drawer below
her breasts, under the milk
of kindness. "Unsex me now."
You can hear her say it.
Her proud head leans back
in dreams of black smoke
flame, overcooked giraffe.
In her hand, the scarf
becomes a bloody dagger.
Her flowing nightgown
is a chasuble. The dagger
is a ripped-out tongue
she lifts and holds above her
like an offering. The table's set --
a pitchfork and a dangling tongue
for everyone: time for supper.
Nude with a Codfish Tail
(Dalí, 1941)
The distant blue mountain is only a mountain
rising above the plain. Jagged, perilous truth.
Mountainous jawbone of rectitude.
Bell of granite and iron that will not be silenced.
It is unmovable, and I love the mountain
as I love the stillness inside myself
where I travel, sometimes, to find what's lost.
But the mountain is not mountainous
like her ass, when she stands
like that, hand on hip, flank
thrust toward me, light haloing
her backside, just after rain
when the sky throws down spears
of light, with shadows blue
and buttery, spreading liquid gold
along the gluteus maximus
muscle of all things rounded
where the world divides, and I sail
rounding the Cape of Good Hope
to her thigh, strapped with a codfish tail
because she comes from the sea
to her ankle, strapped with a codfish tail
because she walks in the sand
bones of shipwrecked sailors at her feet.
Hiding in the rocks, an old man
with a face of carved onyx, his brow
heavy, twisted like driftwood
looks on astonished. He doesn't see
that fisherman with short legs
who strolls toward the sea with a landing net.
He's singing a codfish chanty:
"Catalan girls, they have no combs.
They comb their hair with codfish bones."
Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon
(Dalí, 1941)
If you want to send your soul via U.S. mail early in the morning, when your
soul is still unwrapping from the heavyside of darkness behind your Spanish
eyes, you'll need, first, to prop up your chin. Then your lower lip, which
wants to sag. And the upper, where it twitches, the first inning of a snarl
-- jam it with a fork. Then a toothpick in your nostril to smell that slab
of good Virginia ham and bacon sizzling in the pan, in the kitchen where
America cooks up the spirit for a war.
That lean, hungry hairline of rebellion on your lip -- it's the handsomest
moustache in Europe, said the American woman, a writer in Paris, who looks
like a loaf of bread. She gathers artists like a farmer's wife gathers eggs
from the henhouse each morning and sorts them for breakfast. If you were
American, she says you'd be the depraved son of a midwest Presbyterian
minister. You'd mount a motorcycle hellbent headon for the eighteen-wheeler
of Puritan judgment roaring toward you down the straight highway of the
future. You'd be going faster, even, than Captain America hauling
sideburned Brando and Marilyn and the invisible hips of Elvis.
But for now, let's put your soul into this envelope of loose skin, and seal
it with camembert, melting over the edge of the counter, drip, drip, like a
clock ticking in the distance, a sound of such extreme pleasure we don't
want to hear it. The busybody ants peering in from the rim of your eyes,
worried about how everything looks, we'll send them too, the whole grisly
package of you, with your peculiar smell of grease and perversion, a
letter-bomb from the heavyside of darkness festering behind the sleepy
eyeballs of reality. Open with care.
The Ship
for Sharon Olds
(Dalí, 1942-43)
I want to be the body of a woman.
Want to fall, tumbling
in a dream of sea urchin
briny lips, nacre and mollusk
wearing a necklace of teeth
treading the ocean floor, lost
in a storm of gray-green water
searching for the sister of my self.
My breasts are the bow of a schooner
scudding the white lip of a wave.
I feel the moon pulling me, hips
of wind-blown water. My cargo
is bleached bones, silence, eyelids
peeled back from scalded eyeballs
charred bones of war. I'm sailing
the world's ocean of sorrow
toward a distant shore, my mother
the port of her wounded beauty.
I want to feel the torn-away fish-hooks
spasms of that voyage into light
when my body was hers.
Sea-wind gusts my seaweed hair.
Only a woman moans like this
flotsam and screaming gull.
I want to be born, whole
as the windflower, anemone.
I want to be fragrance of humus.
Land ho! I tremble, the awful step forward.
© Copyright, Michael Schneider.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.