Sinatra at the Sands
Sinatra dies.
(And at twenty-seven eleven people
from your graduating class in college
won't be at the reunion for reasons that are out of their
control.
They're dead.)
And it's not fair, it's not right.
The world should treat you with more respect.
You should get to live as long as you like.
You should see Sinatra at the Sands.
You really should.
Would change your life.
Maybe you would start doing it your way.
Maybe you'd own a casino
or direct your own movies
or sing at Madison Square Garden.
Maybe you'd be borderline psychologically problematic.
Maybe you wouldn't give much of a damn
if anyone thinks you're a bit too aggressive
for being a girl.
(And as it stands you're more aggressive than all the boys too.)
And some shrink wants to write a book about you.
But you tell him to take a number,
seeing as there's an entire school of philosophy
that's emerging out of your attack on life.
You find that you hang your ass out on that line so much
that they give you the whole damn line.
And you get to rival Nixon on all issues of rejection.
You get to fail and win in one lifetime
more times than most people brush their teeth.
You'll be sent to Rome just to spit in Trevi fountain.
You call the Pope, just to call the Pope.
You get famous and infamous, try out all religions,
change your name once or twice
and live next door to "Controversy," "Scandal," and
"One Hell of a Good Time."
You live and love and chew gum
a little too provocatively.
You're seductive to your own shoelaces.
Maybe you have no honor to defend
so you stop asking other people to defend it.
(But they'll want to…ever so secretly.)
They'll warn their children about you.
They'll re-release the song about not letting your babies
grow up to be cowboys.
Only, this time, you'll be the cowboy.
But behind all this fear and trash-talking to the kiddies,
they'll all go to your parade.
Every last one of them will be there.
At the end when you're laid up
in some Tibetan monastery and the Pope
has flown in for your last rights
(even though you're long since being Catholic),
people will be crying and wanting to know
why you led such an extraordinary life.
All you'll have that's really worth saying is,
"Sinatra died when I was twenty-seven.
I never saw him at the Sands.
But let the record show,
I took the blows,
and I did it my way."
© Carrie Amestoy 1998
European Territory
You are Switzerland:
a good vacation, a quiet sleep,
a thought perhaps that this
was the Garden of Eden
where we were telepathic
and unclothed all the time.
The water of you is too green, too calm,
too disposed to be trusted. Maybe it
will murder us one day. But for now
we like your version: it is perfection,
your green water is perfection.
You are serene and majestic,
unaffected and wisdom-born.
You are Inter Lachan expensive.
It would take a wealthy woman to reside in you,
which is fine, because you could always be alone.
People unsettle you,
but you are too quiet to let them know.
Instead, you retreat to places with rain, snow,
natural conflict. No argument.
You make the bed so precisely.
Excellence in handwriting, timeliness
and neutral ground.
I am Spain:
a GenX vacation where your luggage
gets stolen, a black-out sleep,
a hallucination perhaps that this is where
Adam and Eve were exiled to after the Fall,
the place where they ripped off their clothes
for the hell of it. Crowded, flagrant, excessive.
My water is always untrusted. It will kill,
and everyone knows it.
So far from perfection,
so near to annihilation.
I am the open market where you must fight
for a more reasonable price
on the mangos and seductive-sunny freedom.
Pamplona-traveled and tread-upon,
it feels obvious that it would take a man
full of bravado to turn my head,
which is fine, because there are plenty out there.
The bed is never made.
Always filling with argument and wonder,
no point in singing of excellence,
only surrender.
You will continue on as Switzerland.
I'll go my way as Spain.
People will come to you for peace.
People will come to me
to get their luggage stolen.
© Carrie Amestoy 1998
She was mortal today.
Wearing jeans,
tilting in chairs,
feet up on everything,
a controlled heathen with her future,
watching the workclock,
she was the timed beneficiary
of a known, planned, scrutinized life.
For this day, she kept solid and understood,
a small margin on mystery,
unhooked from sky and wonder,
she was capable of being eulogized
by her head-down-to-do list:
1. Out of detergent and dental floss
2. Next in line for self-promotion
3. Email plaque to be sifted through
4. Anti-oxidants to be inhaled
5. Thirty minutes on the treadmill
There was no reason to die any younger
than should be expected.
But she did.
Graduate of an illustrious university,
she had a knack for procrastination,
low stress and high tolerance
for more zen-living than most
(she never had a "real" job).
She made what could be considered a "fake" job,
out of working for the cause of being transcendent
and hitching up her well-lived wagon to a savage star.
But on this day, it is uncharacteristic to have to say,
she was merely going-through-the-motions-mortal.
Brain buried in fiscal responsibility,
heart collapsed by small cracks in unrelenting ceilings
and a shrieking chicken little,
she put her hands far into the future-making of her millenium
leaving nothing over for that sensation of being
so madly in love, so strongly immortal,
so far under in the joyroom.
Such a shame she'd leave on the day
she didn't look twice at the sky,
the day she dressed in mortality with no reluctance
and missed her Lover in the morning.
© C. E. Amestoy 1999
ADG
January 4, 1999
Levitation
I have observed you for years,
studied your transcendence like a piece of music
that every time through the head redirects itself.
You are the strange force of keeping
Lucifer and Buddha seated
at the table of compromise,
the first woman I have known
who is bored by extravagance,
and crosses lightly
between silence and extraordinary heat.
I remember the day we personality-tested.
You came up a "severe introvert nearing pathology."
I was shocked, disturbed, unhinged.
I, who had known you for seven years,
had believed you to play all your cards in clear view,
unraveling piece by piece
in any world with a strong sunset.
I wasn’t the only one.
There was that man who had written you for years
and thought for sure as he put it,
"you carried on like Anne Sexton."
held some amount of darkness within you,
as if creation stems from discontent and unrest.
Then he saw a picture in someone else’s home
of you, exuberant, child-like you, on the trampoline,
"without any heavy thought residing in your world,"
he wrote, "and to think for all that time I had wanted
to console you, ease you. unburden you."
How complicated you are.
Your invitation arrived yesterday,
asking in formal handwriting
that I be so gracious as to come to your home
for some time this summer,
"and abandon all allegiance to gravity:
go water-skiing by day,
and levitating like Teresa of Avila by night."
While sitting in the chair this afternoon
writing a response to you,
I had the dream
that I’ll get marvelously lucky in this world,
write your biography when no one’s looking
and pass it off as my own.
"There is no fame in my head greater than yours.
I’ll be there for levitation."
© C. E. Amestoy 1999
Levitation
I have observed you for years,
studied your transcendence like a piece of music
that every time through the head redirects itself.
You are the strange force of keeping
Lucifer and Buddha seated
at the table of compromise,
the first woman I have known
who is bored by extravagance,
and crosses lightly
between silence and extraordinary heat.
I remember the day we personality-tested.
You came up a "severe introvert nearing pathology."
I was shocked, disturbed, unhinged.
I, who had known you for seven years,
had believed you to play all your cards in clear view,
unraveling piece by piece
in any world with a strong sunset.
I wasn’t the only one.
There was that man who had written you for years
and thought for sure as he put it,
"you carried on like Anne Sexton." held some amount of darkness within you,
as if creation stems from discontent and unrest.
Then he saw a picture in someone else’s home
of you, exuberant, child-like you, on the trampoline,
"without any heavy thought residing in your world,"
he wrote, "and to think for all that time I had wanted
to console you, ease you. unburden you."
How complicated you are.
Your invitation arrived yesterday,
asking in formal handwriting
that I be so gracious as to come to your home
for some time this summer,
"and abandon all allegiance to gravity:
go water-skiing by day,
and levitating like Teresa of Avila by night."
While sitting in the chair this afternoon
writing a response to you,
I had the dream
that I’ll get marvelously lucky in this world,
write your biography when no one’s looking
and pass it off as my own.
"There is no fame in my head greater than yours.
I’ll be there for levitation."
© C. E. Amestoy 1999
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