He Impersonated Flowers all the Time
we wandered through Buckingham Palace together and you kept asking me if this was where Elvis lived and why did he need such a big place when he only had one child – “your dad and me we bought that little house in 1948 and that was plenty of room for three and one on the way”
and I conceal my rage over a life well spent in tourist traps and stop myself from saying that at seventy you really cannot go on living your life in the quicksand of a never-ending country and western lyric and while Robert Redford’s chest hair – even as a much older man – is still a place for us to rest our heads and weep this is still not Memphis and I am not the altruistic flower of love I have been named oh no dear heart “that was another mother poem sweetie” could we just stop arguing and spend the afternoon watching an American film we have seen in a European city we have never been to
and you just cannot keep repeating the same images and place names or my monologic creative nonfiction rants with slight respites into pure unadulterated lies barely concealing the drone of white middle class rage shot through with a slight lyric intensity second only to Montserrat Caballé and Freddy Mercury gloriously mismatched to sing love duets on the Spanish Riviera
oh no this simply will not sustain the kind of pitch and range a middle aged poet needs in order to ensure one slim volume every other year throughout his fifties with a thirty-something Spanish lover waiting dew-eyed and duplicitous on the Catalan Coast when my love for you has been so enduring we have tumbled over cliffs together
we have cried out on half-baked little wooden porches in good company bowing our heads in a circle of bitterness friendship and love spilling a perfectly delightful pitcher of store mix daiquiris that I forgot – in my impossible quest to make this tea party perfect – to put the rum in so we are drinking pure little non-alcoholic chemically enhanced crystals and wondering why we don’t feel any happier than we did thirty-three minutes ago
“And where is the godforsaken rum” we scream and laugh and cry we are nothing without the godforsaken rum! we are nothing but this sad comical cliché wandering petal-like through palaces and theme parks and the fact that you honestly with all of your heart do not know whether we are posing in front of a plastic façade of la tour Eiffel at the godforsaken Epcot Center or is this just another rainy afternoon in the middle of a low grade tropical storm on the gulf coast of nowhere
Paris! Paris! Paris! we have seen all three
France! Texas! Ontario!
“Sweetheart, where are we?” stopped being a question and became the flag of all of your racially detested countries when you turned seventy-four in my middle aged arms and we cried ourselves to sleep in a lower berth somewhere between the Rocky Mountains and Dollywood and you said you didn’t want to turn left at Ohio and go to Manhattan instead of Tennessee because you had already been there in 1938 and yes my love that was Princess Anne we could see from our seats at Burger King being corralled into a west end theatre by the paparazzi on her way to see Lulu in a matinee of Guys and Dolls
and no I don’t think Princess Anne is a lesbian I think she’s an equestrian and yes I do think that her dress looked like a table cloth and indeed I do agree that Lulu sang that theme song just lovely in that film with Sidney Poitier and no I do not agree that Poitier is unusually handsome for a black man you inbred cocktail party racist you – if you only knew how attractive I find black men you would report me to race relations – but we were happy then in London – weren’t we – as we desperately made our faintly cinematic attempt to enact the European tour you had never had in eleven days on twenty-three hundred dollars Canadian
and yes sweetheart I love you even though I sometimes lose it and yell and yell and yell and say such dreadful things and yes I agree that when you call something dreadful instead of mean or cruel it softens the overwrought and hateful sentiments that can pass between us so all right then fine believe it this is Graceland the King lived here without his Queen and he does only have one child and no I do not know why Priscilla left him and yes Vancouver and Athens do look a lot alike in “a certain slant of light” and no I did not have an affair with Prince Phillip in the back of a mini-van during the commonwealth games in the mid-seventies
and perhaps when all these cities fall around us we shall wallow in these unsung plastic memories as displays of light and colour wrap us impolitely in their arms and shuttle us away
