Exquisite Hour


1

A white police-car with its flashing lights
is parked three feet behind
another car, black,
its driver obscure except
for the set of his shoulders and head,
facing front.  For an indefinite
moment they sit,
the cop, the other driver, and the cars.
Soon the cop will come out
to take his careful walk
to the window of the other,
which will be lowered,
letting in the cold, letting out
perhaps a smell of wine,
and allowing the exchange
that, in this time,
is of all usages
the undoubted paradigm.
But for now they await,
while briefly self-conscious
traffic passes,
their different messages;
as if, unaccountably,
two cars had agreed
to pull over and meditate.

2

When the rain stops, a mauve
and ecru light seeps
across the fallen leaves, grateful
for surcease.  As grateful
as people are for peace;
for a mercy of weather,
now ever grander
and Godlike; for the vagaries
of business that allow them
for the moment a home
to rush to and dry in;
for life and the boss.

Yet a certain concentrated
nervous yearning
afflicts objects
in this light and wind.
A plastic bag
soars to a second story;
it saw that in a movie
and since then there’s no stopping it.
A recalcitrant dog imitates
a rock, and vice versa.
A tree, still full
of leaves, unusually red,
likes being ruffled
and wants, not mobility
so much as to become an animal.

3

Regret is a small Mafia clan.
They hang around their clubhouse,
do accounts and scan
their neighborhood, the world,
for shopkeepers to absorb,
new services to offer, new markets.
(Have said so often they are businessmen
they believe it, and why not.)
A face ratlike and wise
in the ways of the moment
it lives entirely in,
despising the addicts, the compulsive failed
gamblers it understands,
belongs to the *consigliere of regret.

They sell me a blue powder
from Afghanistan.
When I take it, a gallery rises:
backslaps and drinks and noise,
the auxiliary and corollary joys
of friends, the stabs
of envy, which are sweeter.
Spilling into the courtyard (that space
priceless in the city), beneath
the flying leaves of fulfillment,
the other galleries beaming down,
the sky where only the strongest stars
survive.  And the stuff on the walls
(red dots blossoming beside prices)
is sweet.  Has brought the *maniera grande*
into a time of tiny, solitary
men, providing insight. –
Thus the important critic,
rarely effusive, who hugs
and is seen to hug, and takes
his drink into the courtyard,
and, nonexistent, is completely blind.

4

From the manager and extra guards
in the lobby, to the carefully-vetted
maids, room service standing by
with more champagne, and the vicariously triumphant
sun, the staff attends
the trillionaire in the Royal Suite,
whose garden is the roof, its grounds the city.
A flight of fighter jets, their boom
disrupting all below, entertains
and guards, ascending towards the sun;
while the trillionaire, reclining
on the gold-threaded pillow, says
softly to a non-paying guest, “For you
I would strip continents of industry
and air, reduce billions to penury
and let them scrabble from the rising sea.
For you I would annex the planets
and process them into one jewel
or car, to please you.
To make you laugh.  I would twist
and torture DNA itself
until organic life became
one orifice or limb, whatever
would tease you.  I have bought
or have a controlling interest in
all love, and lay it, darling, at your feet.”
And the boytoy looks at the trillionaire,
and as the words faintly
register, his usual calculation
flails in a void,
unable to find relative advantage;
so that he is almost annoyed
but, professionally concealing it,
murmurs into her ever-golden hair.