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Outside Manaus, not to disappoint the tours,
A number of the locals have obligingly
Gone native, hunter-gatherers in those locales
Not being numerous before the rubber boom
Annihilated all of them. The derelicts
In urban jungles stateside lack so safe a choice.
Feathers and piercings, body paint on them would seem
Survivals of the ’60s, and increase dislike
That they incur, already great. Earrings are threats?
A naked savage is a homeless person, nude?
Curare is a savage’s designer drug,
His head shop all too unequivocally that,
And any medicine of his, Alternative.
Headhunter, herbalist, ex-hippie growing old,
Have you as tourist trap, asylum, dead-end street
A jungle placable as this? All of your past
Tamed? Going native in its time was not PC.
It was admitting failure, just as, now, it’s seen
As saving wildlife with a nose flute. Music puts
Also its spin on histories of peonage
In rubber gathering, an expiation based
On the offending firms’ elitist theory
Goodyear will always be what makes the world go round,
And no town with an opera house can be all bad.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
1897–1957
The perfect hero, perfect plot,
I did not live to score.
That would have meant, as like as not,
Techniques I used before,
But barer. Fewer upward sweeps
Among the strings; no harps;
Fanfares, but diatonic; leaps
Of key from flats to sharps
Avoided, save where, as with change
Of focus, they explain.
You cannot treat the Texas Range
And soundstage Spanish Main
In one tonality. But who
For hero, what the script?
A costumed Jüd in derring-do
Or Zarathustra stripped?
I am not Richard Strauss, alas,
Enjoying it both ways.
I am not sure it’s greener grass
Or topiary maze
Or Herod’s cistern I am in,
With Bette Davis soap.
And underscoring Errol Flynn
Needs certain skills to cope
Or one’s own head is on the plate.
Not quite Jokanaan,
Contract renewed and up to date,
I notate on and on,
Who am an exile exiled thrice:
From city, era, tongue.
Of course, Vienna has its price.
I am no bard unsung.
Ex-prodigy I, you ex-star,
For our time left to be
We are in real life what we are.
The hero may be me.
The Last Newsboy
Not all of us grew up to be Irving Berlin.
There is not space to list the prisons we are in.
Pickpockets, hustlers, dealers, we became that news
We sold, if on the inside pages. Poor excuse
For urchin enterprise the vending that replaced.
A coin box is a generation gone to waste
And cannot give out change. Too often vandalized
To turn a profit, it becomes a recognized
Icon of inner city wreck, as in the past
We stood for rising expectations, if, at last
Our cry of “Extra!” covered the laments of lack.
The newsboy as the Chaplin Kid will not be back,
Having become decades ago the Dead End Kids
And then the Chaplin Tramp unfunny on the skids;
As now newspapers are. As AP, UP ebb,
Ex-buyer on my corner, see you on the Web.
Hitting the Silk
The golden parachute we really need
We need for the emotions. Severance
Can be, of course, itself a payoff. Bleed,
Heal, put behind … Still, falling from the chance
Of hurt through gentle letdown to a ground
On which to keep both feet has too a role.
Do not suppose, Fall Guy, there will be found
A second time such fancies of control
As once you had, or so bright element.
Long love, deep air, and if not silk and gold,
Haiku
