Of Youth and Staying Put

I didn’t go anywhere. The plane left.
I was not late.

Is south of San Francisco SFX?
It’s not L.A. Hell.

I kept the date with Cathleen.
We had dinner in Li Po’s, Chinatown.

Out to the Surf Theatre then.
The young reading Jung on the cable car;

on the streetcar to the beach, Nijinsky’s
unexpurgated diary . . .

Was Aguirre, Wrath of God on screen first
or Last Tango in Paris . . . noble shit:

Brando asking Maria for butter,
Klaus Kinski’s madness among the monkeys.

On the way back to the store
I pondered Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade.

Cathleen drove her Morgan home, my Ford parked.
Sunday morning she served hash and eggs.

Walking in Golden Gate Park,
a boy came up to us and went pow, pow!

I thought of Diane Arbus,
her small body, the kid in Central Park

in shorts and knee-high socks, walking point
and making violent faces.

Only youth had such imagination.
Back on California Street

the cockatoo in the neighbor’s backyard
cried out to be free to fly.

I thought then of Judy Ewing’s peacocks.
In New York are there cockatoos, peacocks?

We talked all the way around the circle
our walk inscribed:

If not Lear, whom? Macbeth? Hamlet’s
father proving even ghosts went insane?

Aguirre, of course, was one of a kind.
The movie only seemed Shakespearean.

As for Sade, Angela Carter
was always indispensable:

She could be Maria and Brando Sade.
We laughed a lot when we walked here.

Cathleen needed sleep to work tomorrow.
I should be home working and not talking.

(13 June 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander