Pour La Petite Mort

“Pour La Petite Mort”

FACTS:
Poem was originally written
for silent English Movie Star
Chili Bouchier who I met in 1973
at a London Party for artists.
She was sixty-four to my thirty years.
She lived from 1909 to 1999 made 57 films.
She laughed at Hollywood. She was
“The other side of Hollywood,” but
if she had played the game would have been
as some say, the grandest international star.

1.
Desire stops suddenly in surge and muscled
tight in retort by means of sensations not lies.

We find empty room and a vase with dead roses.
Beauty risks nothing. It was that long sky
with bare clouds that emptied loneliness
for the most part. I am inside her skin with
the terror made morning when glory seeds
picked for ashes burn in one final hurrah.

My movie star had lost her movies.
She begged for the lights again.
I found them in her eyes turning her lips
to breathe my skin for motion to light
my Thames reflected by Turner shows
the patience of love as a fire, and rivers
bound inside leap. We swallow ancient
water. We begin to row time against flood.

2.
Love scenes bear with her that nitrate
dust when exploding bombs leak waste
from kisses in clips that charmed
and were lost. Her photographs
held opened movies in black and white
as they were shot on any Wednesday.

"I want to read you every day, but I can’t."
I answered. "I am old. I am young."

I was as old as she that day.
I was bound in her scent.
"never write poems about me.
You need to write about human things"

I wrote poems to that darkened serious.
Chili completed eyes and kept blank
stare open and full; "I was her leading man."
We walked book shops, talked how Turner fed
Picasso; we both loved Matisse and Joan Miro.

Woman found again. Chili Bouchier
more than nitrate preserved
in bomb shelters transfered
to media and I in her arms
gesticulating wildly alive.

We watched one night,
my last night in England
brief flashes forgotten

We will not explode.
I carry you tonight
to my time during
the Blitz when we
fucked at parties
in distress.

In that din I
bent my light
to her mouth
in rows of
accidental waves,
high stepping gams.

“Do not come back; you need
life, and I need routine
for my revival of the past.”