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sward@cruzio.com 
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FASHION MAKES 
THE HEART GROW FONDER
    "Marriage and hanging go by destiny."
     --Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

Partygoers

Her fruity, floral fragrance--
Honey at her dressing table
 like a pilot in the cockpit,
a woman in control, old TV Guides, catalogs,
ordering information
 for all the major scents and potions.

She put on (how can I describe them?)
refrigerator avocado green
  and white
Keith Partridge bell bottoms.  Bizarre and incandescent.
No less bizarre, I wore purple velveteen pants
and a tie-dyed shirt.

Her old lover Warren was there in his pimp suit,
  giant bug-eye sunglasses
and huge fake fur pimp hat,
a party with vintage Joan Crawford movies,
Honey wearing Chanel Number 5,
 the first synthetic scent.

And me, her consort, I wore
 'a blend of crisp citrus and warm spice, mossy woods, a scent
for the feeling man.'

I remember her silver and turquoise earrings
on the make-up table
as the bed jumped and jerked
those first two years.

Ravi Shankar, Thai weed, and a little homegrown,
that velvet ribbon choker with butterflies
and the scent of her, as she,
   O, yummy, yummy,
O, yess, yess, yummy,
  Honey's tooled leather belt on the floor.

Then, "Tell me what you want," I said.
"You can't give me what I want."
"What do you want?"
"I'm out of style and so are you.
I want to lose weight."

And like that it was over.

"How about this handbag?" offered Cosmo,
"the perfect accessory
to the outfit you wear
when you leave your husband."

And that's how it ended.  Honey at some fashion show
throwing back her head, the spotlight playing
on her face and neck.

Yes, I could see what Honey wanted,
to shop where she'd never shopped before,
to pull on high leather boots
and a mini-skirt; then, beaded Navaho handbag in hand,
flashing a little scented thigh, walking out on someone
who couldn't keep up,
a jerk in tie-dye.

I loved the woman, longed to stay with her and,
to do so, if I could have, arm-in-arm with her,
I'd have walked out on myself.

(Reprinted from Santa Clara Review)

ALL FOR A DAY

All day I have written words.
My subject has been that: Words.
And I am wrong.  And the words.
 I burn
three pages of them.  Words.
And the moon, moonlight, that too
I burn.  A poem remains.
But in the words, in the words,
in the fire that is now words.
I eat the words that remain,
and am eaten.  By nothing,
by all that I have not made.

Reprinted from Kissing The Dancer & 
Other Poems, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, NY.  With permission of author.

IOWA

What a strange happiness.
Sixty poets have gone off drunken, weeping into the hills,
I among them.
There is no one of us who is not a fool.
What is to be found there?
What is the point in this?
Someone scrawls six lines and says them.
What a strange happiness.

THE HOUSE ON STILTS

 (Cross Lake, Wisconsin - Illinois   1950)

There is no sleep, this night
in me, in the room
where I write my sleep.
I open the window, and unhook
the screen; the bushes, metal lawn chairs
 streetlamps
the moon, pieces of a livingroom.

Stilts, rotted long pilings,
stand just beneath the bookcase, TV,
bedroom and kitchen,
the four corners of the house.

 The sky,
a starry imitation ceiling-
our family, propped,
  house-on-stilts people,
goiter, bulgy-eyed mother,
 weekend father,
half in one state, half in
another
  dots and dashes on the map,
Cross Lake with a line
running through it.

 * * *

The highway alive, aloud
a blatant strip of rug.
 And people,
 in their houses,
 the back doors opening, slamming.

 Every hour
someone screams quietly for a while.
And babies, in little closed windows.
The TV, a bluish, fluorescent hearth.

-Tilting, facing
 its double, the house on stilts.

A house in the shape, a dream
 in the shape, of itself
 of its house, of its dream.

 A sleep
the impossibility of sleep,
the vision, the life that it requires.
Her eyes opening, singing,
my mother, former Miss Chicago,
 on a springboard.

MILLIONAIRE

  --Grandpa Max, 1860-1958

1. His inventions

Born in 1860, Austro-Hungarian immigrant,
inventor of a cap to keep the fizz
in seltzer bottles, a refinement to the machine gun,
and a metal Rube Goldberg  bookmark
 sold with a diagram and user manual,
Grandpa made big money speculating,
buying and selling tenements.
In the 1920s, offered stock in a start-up selling
flavored water and cocaine, he turned it down.  "Coca Cola," he spat.
"Vhat dreck!  Who'd buy?"

2. His economies

Lean, stiff-necked, pack-a-day smoker
with a fondness for syrupy wine, he wouldn't own a car,
used public transportation;
and, rather than buy toilet paper,
blackened his ass with yesterday's "Chicago Tribune."

Grandpa never left a restaurant
--"vegetable soup, roll, glass of water"--
without pocketing a few cellophane-wrapped crackers
 "for later."

At six, I got my first lesson in thrift.
Grandpa with a smoker's cough:
"Cough into four corners of hanky,
like this--
four coughs minimum--,
before you dirty up the middle."
End of lesson.

3. His curses

Late summer afternoons, partaking of Mogen David
("Shield of David") wine,
he orbited the living room, sonofabitching
the government
  and Democrats with no sense,
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, "betrayers of the rich,
and they stole my patent, too."

God damning union leaders, "schnorrers,"
the United Mine Workers,
the AFL and CIO,
"Stand 'em up against a wall.
Shoot 'em, shoot the sons-a-bitches."

4. His secret to health and long life

Old Testament Moses,
cigarette and drink in hand,
white mustache, gray beard, pacing, pacing,
"God" (it was a prayer after all),
"damn" (the patriarch calling down wrath),
"son-a-bitch, son-a-bitch."
The last of his great inventions,
five syllables to God's four ("Let there be light"),
but good enough.
And that is how he'd breathe, cursing
--head back, chin up--everyone who, he figured,
had somehow cost him money.
"God damn son-a-bitch, God damn son-a-bitch!" he'd rage,
miraculously cured of whatever ailed him.

© All Copyright, 2000, Robert Sward.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.