Pleasure Dome. Yusef Komunyakaa
Читать онлайн книгу.
hundred purple rooms
in a mirror of black water.
I must enter each,
interrogated by a different demon.
In the distance I can hear
the sea coming. A woman at Laguna Beach.
Her eyes now seashells.
Her arms two far-off sails.
Like a tree drags the ground on a windy day
with yellow & red fruit too soft to eat,
she comes toward me. Stars cluster
her laughter like a nest of moth eyes—
her focus on the world.
The closer she comes, the deeper
I work myself away into music
that I hope can save us both.
A man steps from a junkyard of chrome
fenders & hubcaps,
pulling off masks.
At least a hundred scattered about.
The last one: I’m him.
The Dog Act
I’m the warm-up act.
I punch myself in the face
across the makeshift stage.
Fall through imaginary trapdoors.
Like the devil, I turn cartwheels
& set my hair afire.
Contradiction, the old barker
drunk again on these lights
& camaraderie. The white poodles,
Leo, Camellia, St. John, & Anna,
leap through fiery hoops
to shake my hand.
I make a face
that wants to die
inside me.
“Step right up ladies & gentlemen,
see the Greatest Show on Earth,
two-headed lions, seraphim,
unicorns, satyrs, a woman
who saws herself in half.”
I can buckdance till I am
in love with the trapeze artist.
Can I have your attention now?
I’m crawling across the stagefloor
like a dog with four broken legs.
You’re supposed to jump up
& down now, laugh & applaud.
For You, Sweetheart, I’ll Sell Plutonium Reactors
For you, sweetheart, I’ll ride back down
into black smoke early Sunday morning
cutting fog, grab the moneysack
of gold teeth. Diamond mines
soil creep groan ancient cities, archaeological
diggings, & yellow bulldozers turn around all night
in blood-lit villages. Inhabitants here once gathered seashells
that glimmered like pearls. When the smoke clears, you’ll see
an erected throne like a mountain to scale,
institutions built with bones, guns hidden in walls
that swing open like big-mouthed B-52s.
Your face in the mirror is my face. You tapdance
on tabletops for me, while corporate bosses
arm wrestle in back rooms for your essential downfall.
I entice homosexuals into my basement butcher shop.
I put my hands around another sharecropper’s throat
for that mink coat you want from Saks Fifth,
short-change another beggarwoman,
steal another hit song from Sleepy
John Estes, salt another gold mine in Cripple Creek,
drive another motorcycle up a circular ice wall,
face another public gunslinger like a bad chest wound,
just to slide hands under black silk.
Like the Ancient Mariner steering a skeleton ship
against the moon, I’m their hired gunman
if the price is right, take a contract on myself.
They’ll name mountains & rivers in my honor.
I’m a drawbridge over manholes for you, sweetheart.
I’m paid two hundred grand
to pick up a red telephone anytime & call up God.
I’m making tobacco pouches out of the breasts of Indian
maidens so we can stand in a valley & watch grass grow.
Feet Nailed to the Floor
The Gypsy gazes into her crystal ball
to see a rooster drop in the dust.
One note of samba still burns
in the skull. The white-haired orator
has fallen asleep in his fireside chair,
& it’s now out of my hands.
Even your dear mama has taken the gold
crucifix from around her neck
& dropped it into a beggar’s tincup.
The seal is affixed. What can I say?
That informer, I bet his hands
are now on your sister’s legs.
I want to wash mine. Seven times
today the guards have chased children
who shout your name. You are a saint
to them, but blood isn’t yet dripping
in the courtyard from mango leaves.
The hole has been dug & a blindfold
cut from a lover’s nightgown.
The Nazi Doll
It sits lopsided
in a cage. Membrane.
Vertebra. This precious, white
ceramic doll’s brain
twisted out of a knob of tungsten.
It bleeds a crooked smile
& arsenic sizzles in the air.
Its eyes an old lie.
Its bogus tongue, Le Diable.
Its lampshade of memory.
Guilt yahoos, benedictions
in its Cro-Magnon skull
blossom, a flurry of fireflies,
vowels of rattlesnake beads.
Its heart hums the song of dust
like a sweet beehive.