To the Wharf

Let me tell you, motherfucker, she’s no
woman for you.
Her fingers take the voodoo out of style.

He’s been going back and forth
from Adore’s to The Saloon
and back to Adore’s, beloved Adore.

She’s twenty years older than you,
motherfucker.
Her magic floods you with dreams.

At The Saloon, working with elan,
Young Jackson learns the tourist trade;
Roberto dying slowly, where the birds are.

El–you damn near said Lelli or Lel,
or God forbid the tongue to utter
her natal name Eleni Rallis . . .

She could never sit still
except with words in her lithe hands,
and you never learned Greek.

Old friends say hello.
Rocky brings Belle, Big John’s widow, by.
Patsy Rose, sibyl reading cards next door,

pops in to tell you why the heat, the cops,
keep her awake at night
smoldering after the riot, in the still heat.

Cathleen calls after you leave a message.
San Francisco is cool, a breeze
in the park, where she walks every day.

You would like to know ahead of time
who’s dying and when
so you can read your brother’s words

to learn why Carlos walked out
of this life. His manuscript’s upstairs
in the little house in Lagunitas.

You ask Cathleen to bring it to you.
She has to fly to Paris. Business.
She says, Why not come with me?

You think about Cathleen, in bed with Adore
asleep. You go into the alley naked
to see if you can hear the night music,

say to yourself, I so love it here.
This woman is the only one lets you be
Johnny Flowers ne Juan Flores,

while brother Paolo lies with Georgia
in our late mother Nell’s St. Charles
mansion, still called Madame Doll’s.

Your sister Susanna wrote from Seattle.
Madame Peggy had the letter sent on
to Adore’s. Susanna was deep in debt;

you replied: All I got is yours when I die.
She calls the brothel, the ladies sleeping.
Peggy said she sounded frantic.

Susanna's gambling again, said she will be
first to die. Also, this man led her on,
made her think he gave a shit. You think,

That’s the way we talk now, her and I.
Is there no relief from the infamy
of words? You go back to tell Adore,

Let’s go hear some music this afternoon,
it's too hot to keep the doors shut, we can sit
on the wharf. She says, I could use a walk.

(31 July 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Names

Lelli asks him to call her El, what Roberto does.
Is that what you were called in Athens?
His question amuses her, she doesn’t answer.
Adore asks him why he’s changed her name
from Adore to Adora. He can’t say
he did. It’s just the title of a chapter
in her life of poetry, el grito y baile, gris gris
a la ju-ju, he doesn’t know the difference:
ju-ju mama whose blood may run far from
gris-gris daughter she reared to be her own.

From San Francisco comes a letter forwarded
with nothing on the envelope from Cathleen.
What did he expect her to say? Cry foul?
The letter’s from New York City,
Leila Shulamit, Maria Teresa, writing to say
she’s glad she left Chicago, but why,
he wonders. She makes it short. She says
nothing more than telling him where
he can write her, one of two addresses.
She says she loves him. He likes to read it.

He begins to remember how he made a vow,
he did not decide, to write. In a city library
he found Steegmuller’s translation of Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary and Fitzgerald’s Crack-up.
He can’t recall for sure how old he was,
but old enough to know old Scott did not
last long. It was his book he read closely.
The Flaubert he did not read until Paul de Man’s
version. He was already beginning to learn
to make the language sound like his own.

He read incessantly. He woke with the words
dancing in his head and could not wait to go
where he is now, only then he wrote with pen
and paper, sometimes pencil, then typed it up,
not like now going over and over making changes
until it reads like gates opening the Garden of Eden.
El it would be then. Her eyes danced as her feet
danced when he first saw her through his window.
He assured Adore he would not call her Adora,
too near adorar, too far from ahora. They fuck.

(30 July 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Adora Ahora

Adore welcomes him into her bed.
She has her rapturous magic still.
She says Questionmark is good for her,
he gives her someone to sleep beside.
She don’t get loved though, he sleeps too much:
He says he’s getting old, I say he never was.
He comes here less than ever, I don’t know
if it’s me, or him. Juan says afterward,
It’s not you.

The Saloon is full when Juan arrives.
Young Jackson is all grown up overnight.
Roberto works beside him, full partner
rather than the boss and his worker.
Jackson talks to Juan about Adore.
He never knew the mama he had,
but that’s no mind, he says, I do now.
Roberto met Adore, went to her house
with Jackson.

Voices float back and forth across Bourbon.
High-stepping, high-heeled wives from out of town
on the arms of gentlemen with money.
The street kid Jackson was and remains
somewhere under his sweat-soaked attire
finds time to look between taking orders,
mixing drinks, serving, wiping tables.
Roberto tells Juan Adore loves Jackson
like a son.

Adore says she’s been like this all her life,
finding one man who can give her good love,
holding on to get through the rapids
to calm water: the sun shines in mornings,
at night the moon through the only bedroom
window, cooling the skin that’s been meshed
like fingers clasped to keep hands together,
bodies rising and dipping in tandem,
love’s full swoon.

(29 July 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Eleni Rallis

Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow disciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him. –St. John 11:16Lelli opened the door.
Roberto was out back
sitting in the sun
where the birds were.
Juan said, Don’t get up,
I’ll sit on the grass.
It’s good to be back,
California is growing
like . . . He slid from
cancer  to silence,
Roberto ended it
with cancer, smiling
grimly. Lelli’s arms
were around him,
head resting on one
shoulder, dark hair
falling over his neck.
Juan saw she was still
the lady he first knew.
Age was as kind to her
as it was to Adore.
Roberto was training
the young man Adore
had given succor,
providing a place
to sleep, loving him
like her own, of whom
he was her only, ever.
He learned very fast,
Roberto assured Juan.
Let’s go fishing!
Juan replied. He was
eager to settle back in.
So they did. Caught
nothing. Over dinner
Lelli laughed
her old laugh: Greek
laughter as ebullient
as Greek sadness
is wrenching.

(28 July 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Home

Juan hears from Lelli. Roberto is going to have to quit.
November is a good time to go, Juan decides to drive.
He doesn’t even say goodbye. He writes Cathleen a note:
I’m coming back once I have The Saloon taken care of.
You know how I loved Roberto like a brother (Robert,
my brother’s name; all who die so very young are immortal
even as their mothers still carry them wrapped in blankets
and held next to the warmest heart they will ever know . . .
you know, Cathleen, how I loved him, though gone when I was born.)
The Ford Falcon, he assures her, will at least get him there.
A sunny day with no fog or hint of rain when he leaves,
in the back of his mind he knows he is going to stay.
He loves California like an ex-wife. He wants to live
anew. Where else could that occur but in New Orleans?

He drives back the way he came. He stops only to sleep,
to eat, to fill up with gas. He speaks to no one he sees.
He does cut across the northern part of the Mojave,
stops in Albuquerque to find friends dead or elsewhere,
from Texas to Arkansas, looking for his brother’s grave
in Cross Cemetery at the end of the gravel road
his father walked on foot, when it was dirt, to woo his mother.
Cathleen was with him last time. There were still graves to fill.
Thorns bled their feet. The dark sky grew darker, hovered
over two mortals, All Hallows Eve, a good time to hunt
for a sign the immortal were once here and might be again.
Neither one believed such folly. Yet they held out vain hope
that cozens fear and leaves at best the slate blank to be filled
going south, through Louisiana, to New Orleans, home.

(27 July 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
　

Back for Another Day

Everyone I know fears clairvoyance.
To be immersed in the present
wears the mind to bone on bone;
why ask for more?
Christine Mary and I went to Moscow,
Idaho, to drink and dance
in the middle of the day.
She introduced me to the Rolling Stones
and showed me the strut
Jagger immortalized, if there is
immortality . . .
Later she left to have a child.

Henry Miller wrote the best Rimbaud,
and next was Wallace Fowlie’s book
Rimbaud and Morrison.
Paula and Lucy met Jim and Pam
at Whiskey Go-Go. He was high
and she was bummed. Topanga Canyon
was where they were when she aborted.
Baudelaire at least loved the street.
He had the best waking dreams.
Jeanne Duvall gave him the best head.
He wanted his mother to be free
of her imitation lovers.

In the Palouse we stopped at a bar
and got Maced, though we were the only
customers. We talked too loud,
he said, about Vietnam.
I told Lindsay he must have been there.
In those days everyone made poetry
obsolete. You did what you could see.
It was called art, with a capital A,
like war started with W and R
was for rebellion.
Camus got the Nobel but crashed
and died. Kazantzakis died of old age.

All is gone now. Good riddance.
Life may have been remarkable then,
but how did you know
where it diverged from death?
Back in the day
they say, applauding memory.
In Seattle Linda runs into this guy who’s gay,
who hung his lover on a cross
to make his Jesus film, in Pullman.
She may have lost all she let herself love,
but we both grew too old to prefer
Rimbaud to Baudelaire.

(26 July 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Star-Crossed

For some, no going back, never forward,
past you. I wish you would write a poem,
Cathleen declared, All I read is this talk
of Irene and the others. There’s just me.
And she was right, there among cigarettes
and Scotch she was mine in her olive skin.

For us, no forward motion, always back
where we started. The Seattle houseboat.
A cat called Isis traveled the boardwalk.
She belonged to the woman who slept late,
who early in the afternoon emerged
to comb her blonde hair over her fine tits.

Cathleen taught me to see the world this way.
There was nothing she would not do to live.
There was no one to tell her how or why
to live one way, not another. She loved
to love. She called it sex. You’re my only
beloved, she said. I took that to town

when she was gone off on a fucking binge.
She was too gorgeous for her good or mine.
Marilyn may have slept late, but alone.
She liked to emerge half-dressed to listen
to me answer how I made up lost time
waiting for an Irish lass named Cathleen.

My name is Smith, she liked to say, not Jones.
I told her she wanted to mother me.
Her mother lived on Queen Anne Hill.
She drove her Fiat and took me along
to see the harbor down below. I dreamed
more dreams when I was this high. I could see

that far. Down here waves sloshed against the boat,
I was a sentimental, heartless wretch
refusing consolation, but stayed on,
waited, and one day, or had night arrived?
I slept to dream Cathleen and I, star-crossed
lovers, were constellations in some sky.

(25 July 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander