China Blues (3 page)

             I don’t know what Jay Leno had to say about the

Persian

Gulf. But what an opportunity to be an asshole about other people’s

deaths. He probably had 2 or 3 lines every other night from August 15

to January 15; & then 2 or 3 lines per night until late March. A

big mouth with those big ears.

Almost none of his jokes are funny but the

studio audiences seem to break up.

                                               So we’re supposed to think he’s

funny. The guy’s got a face like a package of breakfast cereal. What’s

so funny about that?

                        Even that little kid with the glasses

who does the Heinz ketchup commercial, he’s about 7 or so, is a much

better video communicator than Jay Leno.

                                                        And Madonna? Well at least

Madonna’s beautiful, and when you compare her to Jay Leno then you have

to say, Sure, she can sing, sort of.

                                          But neither one is as good as the

little kid with the glasses.

         Or sometimes

I think I love the dead Confederate soldier in that Matthew

Brady photograph

sprawled face up under a gun carriage eyes closed mouth

relaxed the gentle line of the jaw pressing into sweet

Pennsylvania earth.

                       The soil

where you are born, or where those touched

you as a child were born, is part of your bloodstream.

It is March & I am flying over the Avalon

Peninsula. Over the Gulf/Stream.

                                          Down below through

the grey March clouds

the blue is astounding

                            as blue as Madonna, as blue

as the dark blue sands of the desert under a Persian

or Mesopotamian or Saudi moon.

  As blue as my 4th image the Louisiana Gulf

    where an old man is tying up a rowboat with a piece

of rope.

       That is the granddaughter of the old man

dancing in a circa 40s roadhouse near Hamilton

on the cover of the book you picked up.

                                                     He gets

out wiping his hands & begins unloading

4 crates of crayfish.

                       I am at home again

with things I understand & feel comfortable with; I am not

being jacked off by a thousand eager & empty-headed

young newsguys

                   plus some well-intentioned Susan Haratas.

Takes a handkerchief out of his pocket & wipes his face

stuffs the handkerchief in under his collar & walks 150

feet to back his truck up to the boat.

                                                If we don’t sell

our trucks & boats to Europe,

                                     who in the name of Jesus

will we/

        sell our trucks & boats to?

           Dolly Parton has a flamboyant
Vanity Fair

cover, June, 1991,

well after the official cease-fire. She is sitting

on the shelf edge of an enormous tank

& almost spilling out of an expensive silver lamé

dress.

    They have a huge orange
VANITY FAIR
behind her

blonde head, & a slightly smaller red, Desert Form! across

her sexy knees.

                 Dolly Parton

is loquacious,

she has big ba-booms, & she can’t sing for beans.

She can’t sing like Patsy Cline.

And she can’t sing like Lyle Lovett.

         At the intersection of the Dhahran-Khafji highway, an equipment truck connected to the 82nd Airborne has built a wall of pale rosy white bricks at the back of their truck. They have painted a large sign in approximately 12″ – 18″ black letters, facing outward on the white bricks. The sign says:

P   I   N   K      F   L   O   Y   D
T   H   E      W   A   L   L

          Patsy Cline was a great singer.

She sang that song called

“I Fall to Pieces.” She died in a plane accident

when I was a child. I like her voice & I think her death

probably means more to me even now than the children of

Baghdad, whom I think about,

but whom I find abstract. Lyle Lovett, well, he’s a great,

he’s a natural, he’s a great singer. And me? I’m just a guy

who keeps thinking about how infinite the desert sands seem

to be, the amazing blue of the gulf waters, the hot sun, & how

the women hustle, herd, nudge, their children along, comeon,

comeon, hurry up, if you’re not careful you’ll get us both

killed, with little gestures & clucking sounds that go back

perhaps 2 or 3 or 4 thousand years,

long before the invention of mainstream Nashville

or the use of mustard gas in WWI.

POSTSCRIPT

This page is also a concept of borders. Obviously now I’m going to talk about other things including social divisions, mangoes, the nature of the self, death, sex, jazz, love, the erudition of professors, darkness, gay as a phenomenon, bread, and the appearance of blue moons over Dubuque.

Taking this page as a border is simply a form of respect.

for Victor Coleman

           Mondrian’s
Broadway Boogie Woogie

[which the English for some perverse reason

pronounce bugee wugee

                               & this is not, one gathers,

because they’ve seen any of the remarkable photographs

by Widgee – who probably knew every theatre

& late-night restaurant on Broadway –

from 4th up into Harlem –

                         ]

                           was painted in 1942. The

Germans

          from whom Mondrian has intelligently fled

are pouring into Russia

& the Russians are dying by the thousand as they stop them

cold in the huge white snow & blow their heads off

like slaughterhouse chickens

                                     might, if they had stopped

to think,

         have learned something from this painting. It is

a favourite of art critics, but it is not really about

Broadway at all; it is about New York as a set of grids

& according to Mondrian there is no poverty

& no stock exchange

                           it is all colour & music &
Oklahoma
–

pretty girls in flapper skirts perhaps, although it is 1942,

& perhaps they are drinking Pernod. Who the hell cares,

it’s a great painting, isn’t it, his only gureat,

& who the hell was Lissitzky – just some goddamn Russian

& probably dead of a head wound cf

                                                  Appollinaire

in that remarkable photograph showing the wide head-bandage

after he defended Paris from the Germans in WWI.

            Around late June somebody up in heaven

must spill a tub of soft butter into the air.

                                                       Partly

the heat perhaps, & the way light bounces off so much

foliage & bright glass;

                           but this light which lasts into

late August, this light,

                           goddammit, this particular

Summer Light

                makes the entire

city as clear as an endless astronomical circuit –

every ash, elm, maple,

                            every child dropping a strawberry

popsicle on the pavement & crying, “O poopsy,”

every Samantha slipping

into a loose summer dress & feeling that she’s the most

beautiful girl in town,

                           even ideas, lost emotions, stray ends,