Naked on my Goat

“Dear Miss Brooks,” I would begin
in answer to her Delphic letters
on ochre paper, in purple ink.
Well what do you say to a movie star?

She was not your regular movie beauty--
Kansas stock, hard-working dancer,
small tits, broad hips and shoulders that
could carry coal or speed the plough—
but those mischievous eyes and those
plump lips beckoned from beneath
that patent-black bob that bears her name,
bewitching men and confusing her.
“I couldn’t unbuckle the Bible Belt,” she said,
though she fucked like a stoat, trying.
Intelligent, well-read, sharp-tongued—
the Moguls, smelling trouble,
gladly shipped her to Europe,
so she cut her hair, became Lulu,
hurried into History.

Going home she found herself forgotten,
shrugged those shoulders, went to work:
days, she sold scent in Macy’s;
nights, she drank with Bogey and friends
and met men who worshipped beauty but knew
nothing of a woman.
Eastman (of Kodak) took her to Rochester,
immured her under the Falls and the crowds,
and she shrugged and wrote, magically,
short memoirs in short-lived magazines which I found
in dusty stacks in London.
I fell in love with mind and beauty,
talked so much of her I one day
got a call, a lunch, an invitation
to rewrite what she’d burnt
and a letter on my dull doormat
on ochre paper
in purple ink.