Sunday, December 29, 2019

two chamisso poems


Lucy's the boss
She loomed over my childhood
like a divorcee's vocation:
Lucy says put your hands on your head!
Philistine muse, crabby femme fatale
your schopenhauerian trick with the football
a mean koan.
Later she might have produced a line like:
I am big.
It is the pictures that got small.
Her choric darkness
Snoopy's anarchic daybreak
locked in eternal struggle.
I wrestle with Butler
under the table.
Dog germs! dog germs!
My barbies wait in a box
car crash odalisques
for her summons.
Lucy's the boss! Lucy's the boss!
so when did I stop wearing
my Peanut's gang pyjamas?

Moose agonistes

André Breton and Bullwinkle
set sail on a pea-green sea.
It was all a stunt, set up by a committee
to attract attention to a worthy cause.
Bullwinkle was uncertain. He was into the mob for a certain sum
which is why he took the gig. Usually, he had
a more certain sense of the perimeters,
what was expected of him. The bit with the rabbit
and the hat. The bit with the squirrel.
He and the squirrel hadn’t spoken for years –
it was a legendary quarrel. Supposedly, the squirrel once
even bit Bullwinkle, hard. Credits, money, usual
star vanity bullshit.
Bullwinkle put a poster up
in his dressing room: Beware of rodents!
it said, an X over a squirrel-like silhouette.
Breton, well afterwards everyone said
he’d misread the invitation.
Bullwinkle? he thought it said Bulgakov
an old Troskyist companero from Mexico City.
When the storm struck, the boat in which the camera crew
had set up was parted from
the Bullwinkle boat. The last anybody saw it
was through a fog, a moose silhouette surmounted
by a surrealist, the latter waving his arms.
Rocky, at the memorial service, broke down:
He was my best friend, he wailed.
Was it of the moose he spoke?
- Karen Chamisso

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