claire poems

 

Claire poems

------ Karen Chamisso

 

1.

Claire giving tremendous blank looks

All that slut hauteur

Dior Red Vinyl on her lips

Claire in her bodycon bandage dress

15 year old Claire.

 

Up in the entertainment crib

She danced me around

“You’re gonna have to face it

you’re addicted to Claire”

- I’ve got the look.

 

It’s school rule time, she tells me.

We both study intently

The timeless timely things

Prince’s blue sky (avec nuages) frock coat

Annie Lennox’s quasi-tonte allure

 

And the models fakeplaying guitar

Behind Robert Palmer.

Put your gaze in the air like you just don’t care

And don’t care: it’s the most important part.

Darling, she would say,

 

we’re going to live in Berlin

where Claire had flown with her Mama

just last year. Darling, we called each other.

C’est chic, we would say

Excluding, say, some Gwinnet county import

 

Whose bouffant blonde above the pom-poms

Was just too rich a joke.

The entertainment crib – channel 69

From four to six. The pony pound you could see

From Claire’s windows.

 

The go-arounds of spring have left us all behind

Claire, darling, ghost, so kind, so unkind.

 

2.

Claire taught me the larger gestures

The kabuki theater of entrances and exits

In sky high boots at the Killer club

Sweeping into the backseat of the taxi at 2 a.m.

The seriousness at the center of silliness

A moral position, stoic,

Enduring the battering of ten thousand bragging boys.

Claire taught me the larger gestures but

Claire died. They dragged her body from the river.

She chose the largest exit. And though I see and feel

The moral position, I can only visit, stricken.

They buried her in Alpharetta.

Oh Claire. Honeychild.