I Am Sitting

Looking at paintings by Purcell
one especially of a hanging
and it is the year of the DOG.

I am sitting, staring at a 4X8
photo of Bogart nursing his drink

in the middle of my bookcase
between a history of England and the diary
of John Evelyn.
He has been nursing that drink for two years
while my mother and father gaze
in a gold frame gave at Shou-hsing
god of longevity
carved from ivory.
Shou stares out at a red candle
on a coffee table
and a sign on the wall above that says
REMEMBER.

Nearby I am standing before the Seine
in a green shirt
between Gardiner’s
EGYPTIAN GRAMMAR and the Greek
Historians.

Eye to Eye: Art to art

Carving from stone
what cannot be drawn
the faults take you
to the core of form
as hand and chisel
find what breaks away
and what holds firm.

Even in this gleaming alabaster
there is a cubist path
to hammering out
the wedges and crevices,
the breasts and pelvis of a woman.

The stone determines how to tap
along the block
and where to pound.
What should be left rough
what should be smoothed round.

The test for beauty
is in the darkness
when you touch what you have cut
from hardness
to know it only in the mind.

2

There’s only so much Picasso
stumbling
we can stand.
Tearing fingers off the fine cigar scream.
All the ahhhhs remain
from dazzling
but
sun piled up along the park
like Bonnard’s smile
wd be better
not to die.

3

She
with her per
-fect breasts
came breathless
to the window
not always
but mostly
catching the Monday
bus.

4

Every day
I get up earlier
than I do.
Meet myself on the ladder
climbing up and down.
I’m in my way
a lot.
I can’t decide what’s longer than a line.
I can’t decide who will give ground.
I try to see
the viewpoint
of the part of me
that gets up
later than I do.
I should ask him
what he thinks
when I meet him on the ladder
in the morning.

5

The pen is dripping blood and sperm
not ink. The pen is always erect.
The pen extends from mind to hand.
The pen is full of words and images.

The pen drips great drops
of me onto all my
paper tomorrows.

6

Is it a lizard
that crawls up the walls
of the Ice Age?
Pleistocene.
Men drank glacial wine then.
There were bear dogs
and art on the caves
was instructional:

the way to hunt mastodons.
There was always the hope
among lizards
that the sun would
return.

7

Angry model
posing with tortoise
what she could have said
now that it’s all shaved away.
Harry Stack Sullivan men.
Clem & Co.

Well done even though she knows
she’ll be gone from the drawing like sardines
when Jules (the paint)her
passes the clap on
to his wife.

Poets, Dreamers, and Anarchists

Honor this old Russian Knight
who springs from the foxpine;
all your future is him.

Locks break open
on the Russian Steppes.
No one wants to hear them crack
in the frozen starlight.
Who are the ghosts
that flee from the Gulag
in bloody rags
nameless without a past
erased from the roles of the living?
I remember seeing their faces in school:
Poets, Dreamers, and Anarchists.
The lost; the damned.
We have come with our hammers
to smash down the doors.
Gates snap open across the Ukraine.
Through the frozen night
we watch the guards run off
before their wolves and foxes
beyond the Urals
where it is safe
for murderers.

As you flee the wreckage of your past
victims of the archipelago
recall this name
SOLZHENITSYN
as the million ghosts of Stalin
tramp across your sleep into history:
for on his back their souls alone
followed him out of the Gulag
and he is forever
them.

Trois Quartier

You will come
with your hair wet
out of breath
the fullness of your beasts
bound beneath your dress.

You will come in the gray
dark on the bridge across Trois Quartier
carrying your sons
in their slumber.

You will come through the blue lamplight
your hair a dark sun
of auburn, the steady drum of shoes
upon the stairs
the night upon your window bathed in sweat

knowing that it matters
as you rush to the door
and fling off the bed
with your warm kisses
my life across the water.

Ben Pleasants is a poet, playwright, journalist and biographer, who is based out of Los Angeles, as well as Northern California, Hawai’i, Japan, and places unknown. He is perhaps best known for his memoir Visceral Bukowski: Inside the Sniper Landscape of L.A. Writers. He is also the author of two books of poetry, 53 Stations of the Tokaido, and Airmail from Oblivion, several acclaimed plays, and numerous articles and meditations on the literary and art worlds.