TAKEOFF

Mistaken, taken for

granted: her hips rose, rose

hips. The top note, that initial overpowering

scent can be mistaken

before it fades into the heart

note, which is the final,

true scent that lingers when the purple

finches have flown away. Granted: a song is a verbal

fence, and so Delilah sings Mon coeur

s’ouvre à ta voix, My heart opens

at your voice, but then must cut

Samson’s hair because he prefers

God to her, Miss Taken

for Granted. In Fra Angelico’s painting, even the flames

of cypress flare up

along the road where the gold-haloed

heads of the martyred Saints Cosme and Damien

roll like rocks with notes

bound over their eyes. It is a splash

of black in a sunny landscape,

van Gogh said of the cypress,

but it is one of the most interesting

black notes, and the most difficult

to hit off that I can

imagine. Mistaken for granite—the skyline

of San Gimignano fallen

on its side, lines grazing out

and back like the lines of

this poem, like cows coming

home, where Italo Svevo swore

to his new wife, Livia: I will love you

forever, as far as the fin de siècle

will allow. He meant to be

diagonal like agony, to outlast

the flat leaves of the hollyhock, which hasten

to lace. Mistaken: the closed burgundy

whorls of the hibiscus fallen

on the path, soft and damp

as the bodies of birds. “Chicken in half-

mourning,” poulet demi-deuil, has so many black

truffle slices slid under

its skin that it appears to be

wearing black, just as the pearl-grey

waves of moiré in the Venetian lagoon

could be the waves

of the brain: Touch your hair

if you’re going to the Ridotto. Nod

or shake your head

to tell me whether you plan to

go to the piazza, Venetian

lovers once wrote in secret

notes that from the air

could be mistaken

for ruins along the canal where

they met: runes arching their backs

against the sea. Your plane taxis

out to the runway; in a moment it will

lift as you have so many times

beneath me.

TRUE CONFESSIONS

If I’d been a ranch, they would’ve

called me the Bar Nothing.

Gilda, 1946

I can never get a zipper

to close. Maybe that stands

for something, what do you think?

I think glamour is its own

allure, thrashing and

flashing, a lure, a spoon

as in spooning, as in l’amour

in Scotland, where I once watched

the gorse-twisted hills unzip

to let a cold blue lake

between them. St. Augustine says

the reason why humans behave

as they do is because they are

not living in their true

home. In Rita Hayworth’s

first film, for example, Dante’s Inferno

is a failing Coney Island

concession, and Margarita Cansino

plays the part of Rita

Cansino playing herself. And the true

home of glamour, by which

I mean of course the grammar

of glamour, is Scotland

because glamour is a Scottish variant

of grammar with its rustle of moods

and desires. Which brings us back to

the zipper and why we want it

to close, each hook climbing another

the way words ascend a sentence, trying on

its silver suture like clothes. In a satin

strapless gown, Gilda slowly peeled off

her black arm-length gloves, showed

how to strip down, diagram a sentence: Put

the blame on Mame, boys. In 1946, a pin-up

of Rita Hayworth and the name Gilda

rode on the side of the atomic bomb

tested at Bikini Atoll; it was summer

and you could buy a record, hear the sound

of her beating heart. By her last

film, The Wrath of God, her hair was a burning

bush; she couldn’t remember

her lines, whether it’s memory or loss

we’re in need of most: to remember

the way home or forget

who we are when we get there.

Every man I have known has fallen

in love with Gilda and wakened

with me. St. Augustine asked, But when I love you,

what do I love? He asked the earth

and the breeze, perfume, song,

flesh, the sun, the moon

and stars: My question was the attention

I gave to them, and their response

was their beauty.