1
 
Twice a week, fantastic and compelled,
Betty Davis in her latest film,
beyond the half-drawn window shade, voice
ablaze, she yanked a suitcase off the bed,
unloosed the death ray of a drop-dead stare,
the parting gusts of her furious red head.
"You'll see!" she screamed and slammed the door.
So?
       So nothing. She crept back in
and cried and fell asleep and slept.
A lion was on the landing,
a mouse was in the marrow inching.
Cornered, she poked at the burning eyes,
she spat at them, she hissed.
Fury and Misery.
The lion leaped and tore her thighs,
mice were gnawing in her feet.
A restless girl, a rotten period.
 
"Feh! She talks like a mocky."
                                                  So, my sisters
while we lie and peep across the airshaft.
Then I, like the summer dawn's ambitious sun
 --- eager to shine and burning to please, pink
with preference --- ignite my gift for scorn
in the absence of understanding.
(Let them be praised! these red-haired sisters,
they taught my senses' prosperous bride
the famine arts of transcendence:
bitching, snobbery, condescension.
Their smell, the pale juvenile nighties,
the bloodlettings of their reddened fingernails
on passionate mornings --- damp and idleness
and tempers and kicking in the tangled sheet
 --- brought me to a woman's country
of warmth, disorder, and cruelty,
biting envies and a smoldering shame,
so that I don't know yet if my mockery
is defending a privilege or a pain.)
My act is idiot approval that stings
her sleep.I am the little devil spurred
to spank those cheeks and roust her from bed,
nerves afire with sarcasm and applause.
 
   2
 
One day, I think, driven as always,
she got to the door and didn't stop,
set off with her squat delirious suitcase
to wow America, or marry
 --- like an absentminded salesman,
his dirty wash in the sample case,
and they want it! they buy!
Who needs talent, with such despair?
What else is America for!
Bad news, bad breath, bad manners,
the grievous suitcase marches on,
prophesying from every corner.
"Betrayal!" it screams
and snaps itself shut.
What a start in life!
those scraps of rumpled underwear and clothes,
sloppy habits, bad teeth, a roaring tongue,
a crummy job and worse marriage.
 
   3
 
Straddling your freckled shoulders,
riding high and sly in 'sixty-nine,
smiling (no less!) and sentimental,
each time I shift gears, underfoot
I feel your wronged hysteria
revving in the block. What
have they done to your gut?
					Cracked
moon, homeless ginger cat,
I want to take off on you,
pilgrims to nowhere,
streaking toward skid row
and failure like the vast frontier.
My young heels drum
excitedly on your tits.
At midnight you awake and cry,
My pride is injured,
my soul is empty,
my heart is broken,
my womb has died.
O my brother,
avenge me!
 
Rising beyond the pane,
red and pale, feverish, gaunt,
burnt crust but raw dough,
you grip your satchel
and leap through the window into
the middle of the Great Depression,
your eyes endowed with total misunderstanding.
 
   4
 
Would it be too fatuous of me
and too late, too squeamish, too phony,
too perfectly American,
touching three small fingers to my brim,
to say across thirty feet of foul airshaft,
thirty years of life, "Help you with your bags, Red?"