The Entanglers

​
            The best tight harmony since the Everly
            Brothers, said Rolling Stone.  Rapturous, the
            audience's mouths fell open.  Sure, sure.  
            Rapturous.  We know about rapturous,
            starvation too, can recall the reeking
            hairy men pissing over their gunwales
            hooting polyglot filth, watched them forget
            their mothers and their whores, grow thinner and
            waste away.  Those were the days.  Their empty
            mouths fell open too.  Slain by rapture.

            Oars we could cope with but not steam, surely
            not submarines.  And our hair, these scaly
            warbler's feet.  Get with it, girls, our agent  
            bawled.  Times change.  Cut the tresses, get some Doc
            Martens, then we'll see what we can do.

            They say he sang more sweetly than we, waves
            and wind contending, song washed by song as
            the heroes rowed like bats out of hell.  They
            claim we fled, offed ourselves in frustration,
            when the truth is we never heard a word, 
            not one note.  Ligea’s lethal soprano
            was blown back against the wrack and rocks,
            his tenor gulped by gulls and whoosh of wave. 
 
            Now we’ve gone electric, amplified sugar, 
            fishnet stockings, minis, beaucoup cleavage.
            Parthenope vamps, Leucosia sighs, 
            and in Euxine Honey Ligea soars
            above high C.  Our hugest hit so far.

            You’d think he’d have noticed we’re a trio.
            Beeswax in their ears?  Roped to the mast?  Sure.
            Some guys you just can’t reach; duty hardens
            their souls or music is just a cage to 
            them or they can’t get into voices that
            are nude, cool, humid, smooth, round, inveigling
            with words beneath words, sound under sound,
            who never go beyond sandy shallows 
            to the bottom of green forgetfulness.
            He was one you couldn’t tie down.  That’s all.  

            Sex and drugs ensnare, marriages, contracts,
            love—these are our trade, our constant themes.
            Hands held high, they sway through noisy surf, 
            boys and girls wrapped in our strands of sound,
            starving, drowning in eager ecstasy.  
            Swimmers in seaweed.  Victims of harmony.  





Last Time I Saw Euterpe


was when I was sixteen, maybe sixty.
Anyway, I can’t remember but I can 
still summon up the Shantung shade, the fugue 
I was half-wrapped-up-in, almost sense the
sheer lexical rapture, just not the year:
as she lives outside time she could have plucked 
me from the coils of clock and calendar. 
I admit it was a childish thing to
do; I blush with pink chagrin at my 
purple words—still more for sitting down in 
the first place, the puerile pompousness of 
it, the chutzpah…. 

            Okay, it’s bad to force 
a poem, gaze importunately at a 
muse’s barren eyes with your pen poised that 
infinitely empty inch above the fresh
foolscap; worse to style yourself a writer, 
as if striking one match might make you
an arsonist; worst of all is to think
yourself a true poet from whom she turned 
while you plied your Pelikan too tangled and 
inspired to watch her fade or guess with what
sore regret you would yearn ever after 
to behold once more her illegible smile.