Alice Friman, American poet, born October 20, 1933.
HOW IT IS
Alice Friman
Late October
and the pitiless drift
begins in earnest. And all
that whispered in the pockets
of summer’s green uniform
is shaken out and dumped.
My mimosa knew, for wasn’t
that death fingering the leaves
all summer? Yet the tree
plumped its pods, spending
all July squeezing them out,
going about its business, as did
the slash pine and loblolly,
spraying pollen—coating
windows, cars, filling every
idle slit with sperm.
What does life mean
but itself? Ask the sea.
You’ll get a wet slap back-
handed across your mouth.
Ask the tiger. I dare you.
And your life, with its
tedium of suffering, what
does it mean but what it is?
And mine—balancing
checkbooks and whomping up
a mess of vittles as my son
used to say. My son, the funny one,
the always-hungry-for-supper-
and-the-happy-ending-
I-was-never-able-to-give-him one.
Who am I to write the user’s manual
for a life, except to say,
Look at trees, dug in and defiant.
Be like the river. Stick out your tongue.
Why not? What’s to lose
when what’s to lose is everything?
=======
LEONARDO’S ROSES
Alice Friman
from Lady with an Ermine, Czartoryski Museum, Krakow
sperm came down from the brain
through a channel in the spine.
So much for genius. I say
sperm, like any seed, travels up,
makes an explosion in the brain
leaving a scent of crushed flowers
in the memory. On such a trellis
true love might climb. On such
a shaky stair, many a bad apple
rotten to the core is persuaded
to polish himself up before rising,
sleek and feverish as a column
of mercury in a tube.
she knew. And Cecilia Gallerani,
seventeen and paramour to Sforza
the lecher, usurper, Duke of Milan.
See how she catches the light
full in the face then beams it back
like truth itself. And look
how she holds the ermine—
Sforza’s emblem—how she lets it
tread her arm, claws unleashed,
and she not flinching. This is
no inert female sitting pretty
for her picture.
She’s present,
expectant, listening to someone
over Leonardo’s hunched shoulder,
maybe Sforza himself who follows
her scent up and down corridors
in case he needs her, yes,
to check his arithmetic, polish up
his correspondence. Later when
he’s pricked to marry someone else,
he’ll set her up for life: estate,
gardens, the works. Cecilia Magnificat.
But she doesn’t know that yet, does she—
stroking his little white weasel,
patting its head?
MRS. BEASLEY’S SUPPER
Alice Friman
“Woman Sees Jesus in Microwave Oven” —supermarket tabloid
She never considered herself
worthy. But there He was—
no bigger than a dashboard doll
riding the revolving plate.
Redeemer. Pin of the pinwheel.
The groaning axis of this world
lit up and acquiescent
as the potato He sat on—
all eyes shooting out His love.
Fixed to His purpose
under last week’s gravy-
spattering of stars, He spun
in slow motion, weeping out
her guilt, unknotting then knotting
the long thread of her shame
into the hair shirt of His Passion.
She crumpled at the knee.
What did she care of wattage
or rebate from Sears?
She pressed both hands to the glass.
He pressed His to His heart
the way He must have in the womb,
lighting the dark squeeze
of infinite space. Homunculus.
Bullion. Fishhook of God
zapped in the humming electrons
of the two million years it took
to make Him. And the eighty years
of pink rollers and patience
it took to bring Him home.
Born blind and spun dizzy,
we stumble into empty space,
clutching the paper tail of the donkey,
groping for connection, then hoot
at where the others end up—
dangled from a lampshade
or out the door. Another headline
for laughs at the checkout.
Another ballerina twirling
on a jewel box, one more joke,
one more rubber chicken from God.
That night—lipsticked
and all fluttery—Mrs. Beasley
put on her best blue dress,
popped a paper daisy in a vase,
then fished out the bottle of Muscatel
to savor a sip with her chop
and baked potato. Who’s not blessed?
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TWO WHITE DOTS
Alice Friman
From Titian’s Danae and the Shower of Gold
By the sheen of the paint,
you know she bathed and perfumed
in preparation, for see how
her body, clothed only in light,
lies languid and open on the cushions
to receive. A different sort of
annunciation, poured not in a shocked ear
but over an eager nakedness: the gift
of ejaculate: the divine shuddering
of golden rain.
But it’s the look
of ecstasy on her face that holds me.
A painter’s trick: one white dot in each eye
to drench the cornea–that’s all it takes–
one white drop to show her
overcome, her fringe of lashes rowing
the flooded eyes, floating their white dot
as if it were a bird riding the swells
of too much too much.
Since that day at the Prado when
I stood stunned before the artifice of art,
whenever I’m outside and I see two white
Flashes out the corner of my eye,
I wheel around, quick, sure
what I’m seeing are white birds–
their dazzle of wings. But I live
too far inland for seaguls and too far
from innocence for a visitation
of white doves.
Maybe I need glasses,
but for a while I want to think
I too am a work of art, those flares–
my own white dots out scouting
for a bit of rapture. If not Danae’s
dalliance under a golden rain,
then an afternoon sprinkle bringing
my birds home where they belong,
riding my eyes on a sea of bliss.