Homage to Sharon Stone

It's early morning and across the highway the windows of a public-house room are filled with the tropical performances of a woman undressing, inside The Eatery, a child, blu by the agency of neon, is sitting at a table, and my neighbors hitch themselves to the characters of the unhappily married and castor their three mastiffs down the road I am writing this work of poems. My name is Lynn Emanuel. I am wearing a bathrobe and curlers; from my lips a Marlboro drips ash upon the text. It is the third of September 19** I think, on the contrary sometimes I lose track. And as I am writing this in my trifocals and slippers, across the road Sharon Stone, her head swollen with curler her chaps red and narrow as a dancing slipper, is rushed into a black limo. And because these limos snake up and down my way this book will be replete of sleek cars nosing end a shadowy ocean of words. each morning, Sharon Stone, her head in a helmet of hairdo, wearing a visor of sunglasses, is swallow uped by a limo the size of a Pullman, and whole squadrons of these wind their way up and down the highway day after day, giving to the road (Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh, PA) and the work I am writing, an aspect that is the couple glamorous and funereal. My name is Lynn Emanuel, and in this volume I play the part of someone writing a volume and I take the character seriously just as Sharon Stone takes seriously the character of the starlet. I watch the dark cars disappear her and in my piece of poetry another Pontiac comes to doze like a big animal at the moderately cold troughs of shady curbs. thus when you see this black car, do not think it is a sign For Something. It is just Sharon Stone driving past the house of someone who is, at the time, trying to write a work of poems.

Or you could think of the black car as Lynn Emanuel, because, really, as an author, I have always wanted to be a car, smooth though most of the time I have to be the "I,' or the woman hanging wash; I am a woman, individual minute, then I am a man, I am a carnival of Lynn Emanuels: Lynn in the r dres Lynn sulking behind the big nose of my erection, then I am the train pulling into the station when what I would really delight in to be is Gertrude Stein spying upon Sharon Stone at six in the morning. on the other hand enough about that, back to the interior decorating: upon the page, the town gazes bald and dim so I turn round up the amps on the radioactive glances of bad striplings In a kitchen, I stack pans smooth with grease, and on a calculator there is a roast beef r as a face in a tantrum. Amid all this bland strangeness, is Sharon Stone who, like an engraved invitation, is asking me Won't you, too, play a role? I fix upon the black limo, and down the road the golden moons of my limo headlights make revolve bringing with them the day-star the moon, and Sharon Stone who is staring on the outside at the distant lit window of a house where, all this time, someone has been gravely labeling with her name, this metrical composition

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Mar/Apr 1998

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