Emily's Guns

The prudent with a revolver

The loaded rifle by the door

The violent chambers

Of old New England wars

Make me think of Uncle Samuel’s guns

That lined the walls of his hunting lodge

Though I little thought Uncle Sam himself

prowled the corridors of his own brain

like Emily D. prowled hers

Looking for the relics: out of the New England rain.

A nullified wilderness long time gone

a narrative of captivity on the ottoman

the gun she’d finger in her mind

when her brother’s girlfriend came around.

Uncle Sam’s girlfriend found him

on his cedar plank floor

In the gun room where he finished up his own war..

Who has not thought with all the vengeance

Of a child confined to her room

Ot taking a mighty gun

And making the house a tomb.

- Karen Chamisso

Claire poems - Karen Chamisso

 Claire poems

The lyric "I"

It must blur around the edges. Like Claire’s lipstick

So carefully and shamelessly applied

Until worn by kisses and party martinis

The lip, the girl’s lips, show.

And not like the party Doyenne

Famously ever young, whose cosmetic

Is a non-disclosure agreement

Until she goes home, where even hubby number two

Is not to be privileged with a glance

Of exposed neck, eyelash and lip.

- Damn, metaphor has led me into the particularity

Of a solitary drinker’s hilarity.

It is for you, Claire. Whose lips I’ll never again descry

Until we all meet in heaven, by and by.

Claire

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.

- Karen Chamisso

Cleopatra reads T Magazine

 

- Karen Chamisso

“Where’s the soothsayer you praised so to the queen?”

Holed up in the Chateau Marmont

Our Cleo sprawls and bawls and dreams of shawls

And gazes at the latest scream

Of Paris fashion in T magazine.

Does she have a future? Does she even have a past?

To cheer herself up she clicks the “Daily Shoe”

And goes through her favorites: a bit of a blast

In brocaded boots from Stella McCartney

And jeweled Mary Janes from some London party

But this is not how Thursday should go

Un-Anthonied, untexted, floating in icy water

Like some orphan ice floe

Instead of the Exterminator Pharaoh’s daughter

- this is no way to kill time. Sexless, drugless,

or practically. Which is the why for the visit

from her favorite occult-ist, whose Tarot

will get her “out of her own way”

and into another zone and frequence

where click click click she’ll construct a sequence.

Emblemes anciennes she displays, on engravèd cards

Shuffles forth the mountebank and the Spanish Captain.

Sweet Alicia, make me a good fortune

To which she smiles and sez: I make not, but foresee

Your epoch is the mountebank’s totally

But look: the tower struck by lightning comes next!

Disaster will fructify your waste of time

For there is no waste really – the world’s a horder

There’s nothing ever missing in the end.

That’s five hundred bucks, my special friend.

Cherish the time that you waste, for it is true

That this is what time will finally do to you.

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.

 

 

If you be honest and fair - poem by Karen Chamisso

Everything was major

She made the decision

Wrapped in the xray love blazer

To trouble the division

Between the kitchen and the lawn.

The grass whispered under her feet

Slanders older than the jewels she pawned

While God peeped

Like one of the Elders out of a cloud.

Everything was major.

I can’t do it, she said out loud

I can’t

I just can’t

do

do or feel.

In the kitchen she slew

The roast beef made England-red

She slew the puree, she slew the peas

Then she took her head

And slew with the greatest of ease

Every highwire, every antic thought

Burned recipe after recipe.

Later, it was the smell that caught

their attention. Olly olly oxen free.

The Romantic agony in a cocktail lounge lady’s room

 

 

I searched my heart, the street, my ex-‘s habits, my family

I searched them all for opportune  neuroses

That I could jot down for my poetry

And calm my nerves and hide the focus

 

Five fathoms deep in  something posy sounding.

For after all, don’t I claim to be

Some seashell bard, some grounding

Mama, some prophet of the salty sea

 

Minus the albatross around my neck

(come to tell you all)?

-          No?  I’m here to sample wreck

I’m here to smear the large and small

 

Until disproportion proposes

That we go for a little walk, you and I,

A little walk with pretty poses.

A little truism, a little lie,

 

Logos burning a hole  in my pocket

“Like her fair eyes, dude,  the day was fair”  

I was going up like a rocket

A perfect movement in the down and dirty  air

 

And heard myself gibbering like a bat

while the air grew ever more blind

and thick with those who  flew, shrieked and shat

panting for the breath we’d left behind

 

 

until at last I found the perfect  line,  filled with blood

and sucked it all dry and fell and understood.

-Karen Chamisso

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dial 0 for the operator, 1 for billing

 

Dial O for the operator, 1 for billing

 

Who invents? We repair, or we have the man

Bring his tools for a look-see. We aren’t familiar

With the specs,  the codes, the at-hand

Or have anything at our fingertips.

 

We have to back up, we miss the appointment.

We talk to the secretaries of those who have secretaries

Wondering who is holding when we are put on hold.

Are they the holders, really? Is this a hold up

 

That the Lord has made, we in his hands

He in our hearts, the hold em and fold em

Of gross contingency? Are we being

Offered muzak and headache again,

 

Like when we were  little girls in the back seat

When we had to go so bad

And mom said hold it

And we couldn’t, we couldn’t?

Vienna 1921 - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 Vienna 1921

…. where, cigarladen, the “social vampire” steals

from a drunken greenhorn his daddy’s crowns:

Stören Sie nicht der Spiel!

A great admirer of tits, and morocco bound

Pornography, illustrations by Rops.

In the Cabaret Hölle your table, monsieurs

An occasional word with the cops

To smooth down any controvers.

The song surrenders to the singer

Her shorn eyebrows, her glossed back hair

its lips of glass, its sacre coeur.

Shall we linger

by the fall guy’s latest lair?

… his wife threw vitriol

At one of Europe’s famous flirts?

That face was not, although,

Marked – her hat received the worst

Of it… in the “fameux hôtel Sacher”

Behind the Opera, there they built

A love nest out of Masoch and Schnitzler

Everything in gold late Habsburg gilt.

Later: “Les femmes m’ont trompé, le jeu m’a trahi »

The cat, the fatal cat, is out for a spree.

Yellow gloved player in your mental cabaret

Your belly up deuces are leaden and gray.

- Karen Chamisso

A valedition: the party dress

 

She bleeds all in her dress on the back seat of the taxi

Home from the bone

Another good girl dawn

 

Even in my Emily Dickinson silence

I can always hear the click click click

Of the bitch about to pounce.

 

Although I dream of sitting among the big cats

Don't you know

I’m low

in the zoo order

from maneater to shrew.

 

Later, at the dry cleaners, the man says

the dress would the multitudinous seas

incarnadine. Too bad, I sez

 

It was one of my favorites

.-Karen Chamisso

Karen Chamisso, her blues

 

How creep and crawl the future seems

to those of us lying in this house of bones:

rules here the authoritarian spine

and its homo erectus, her jungle gym.

Lumbagos dawn on the painstrewn shores

of all the old girls’ Eldorados.

Oh chiropracter with your spurious art

unspell that post-partum spell

cast on my life force, all obscurely!

Joint sprains, muscle sprains and knots

This is what I gots

Rattling the life force in the house of bones.

These holes I put in the unmarrowed bone

And pipes this song, all alone, all alone.

A drinking song by Karen Chamisso

 A drinking song

In the thirst we inherit from Eden’s milk and water

there’s another thirst under

while the one holds us to the dry steady

the other surveilles each eddy

to lead us, counter-agently

through the counter-stream to a headache laden shore

this thirst, ticked out in a frogman’s sinister togs

dries out eye, brain and liver like so many bogs.

- Karen Chamisso

Heidi-land

Life… makes nothing happen.

I, too, heard the cowbells Mom

Crossing the border into Switzerland

And of course I thought of you.

I thought of Heidi, and then of you

And then of you and me

Watching Heidi, was it in color or b&w?

When you had the power to make me watch

Movies. A coercible five.

You “loved this movie” when you were a girl.

Me, Heidi’s hair bun repulsed me

And the uterine pull

Of the cornsilk blond’s family

In a Nazi dream of the Alps

Lent its props

To various of my nightmares.

If I let go

Of my mudwrestler’s grip on you, Mom

Will I plunge in my worst dream

down some Heidi cursed cliff?

- Karen Chamisso

La Chambre (after Balthus)

 

La Chambre (after Balthus)

A stub fury stands

drawing open the vast drapes

letting in the accusatory light

upon the sprawled, naked sleeper

whose odalisque interiority

is thus so rudely summoned.

She blooms on her throne

like a migraine

in that cat fraught room.

- K.C.

What then is useful to the bee: a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

“Honeysuckle. So named because of the old

but entirely erroneous idea that bees extracted

honey therefrom. The honeysuckle is useless to

the bee.”

 

What, then, is useful to the bee?

My world,  penned in by human pride

Allows me to see as I see

Through the two eyes on either side

 

Of one nose – unlike the bee

Who sports two eyes for domestic tasks

And three ocelli

To make impressionistic tracks

 

Among the flowering vegetation –

What can I know

About such kinds of navigation

About what it’s like to go

 

About, laughing up your sleeve

At the honeysuckle’s vain imposture?

I don’t even bring in the sheeves.

I lay on my sheets as useless as an oyster.

 

 

 

Geography lesson

 Geography lesson

The clams clamor on the shore

I walk by – a tempus fugitive

leaving behind a bitch’s spoor.

This is life. This is how I live.

We’re all undressed in its big blue eye

- that ill named, that surly Pacific.

Our tsunami will come by and by

- divorce, mass shooting, penny panic

of all the investments we should never have made.

isn’t this life? This is how I live

among tanned life guards in their umbrella shade

the beach is a tempus fugitive.

I’m an Atlantic girl. I see Europe

I see Africa. This is how I live.

I’ve come to Cali and I’ve lost my scope.

I’m homesick, I’m – a tempus fugitive.

- Karen Chamisso

A blues for the rich girl - Karen Chamisso

 

A blues for the rich girl

 

Exhilaration and depression

Joined hands above my cradle

One voice

Issued from two mouths

 

How can I

How can I sur...

How can I survive

Such tremendous patronage?

 

Either gloria in excelsis deo

Of mini golf

In the abyss

- darling turn out the light

 

I will run away

And slay giants

On the way to the ruin

Of God’s castle.

 

Uncaught.

Untaught.

Ms. M.M. visits Wallace Stevens - Karen Chamisso

 

When Ms. M.M. visited Wallace Stevens

At his office building where there were

“eleven or twelve white marble columns along the façade”

(her famous precision on parade

but not too much – there’s the fatal “or”

to remind us of what poetry is for

and of what good manners requires as well)

and a wide window, otherwise indescribable

letting the banal Connecticut sunlight through.

No doubt Mr. Stevens had a lot to do

But he did show M.M. his secretarial pool

 

where the actuarial tools

were applied, and procedures for getting reimbursed

if your property had been cursed

by fire, theft, or a smell in the air.

The girls all smiled. “They aren’t bothered with strikes there;

the girls at the Hartford have it nice.” 

Said Ms. M. M. – do her words take a slice?

Or were they just words, and thus  meant quite sincerely?

Then it was over as begun, over merely.

 

Neither one showed the other the truth

- that they were monsters, monsters on the loose.