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| First Martini |
Three Martinis
by Stephen Perry
I
The jewel is not in the light,
but in the mind, amethyst
glass and the sudden incandescent
nova above the candle, which
gravitates the eye, all white, as if
primary and singular, pure
and featureless as number
0, becoming as it expands
the new spiraling beginning—
so even the light is drunk
from the mind. What escapes
the eye is sight alone. A ghost
of the blue self. So in
the end is light itself and
mind which breaks and
scintillates into all universes
of gold and glass. Even the
olive is a world. Then two
worlds, the axis a red toothpick,
then a hand, then a tongue,
then the underwater of strangers
blurred in creation as if
they were yours alone—
as if the goldburst bulbs
of the paparazzi were snapping
pictures of you from mirrors
over the bar, each tiny explosion
only an echo of your genius,
smalt Buddha, coronagraph, whatever
you call it, recentered back
into the eye which is quiet
while all of creation sings.
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| Second Martini |
II
The pimento that dangles out
of the eye is not a tongue,
though it is, if we could see
it though we can’t. It’s
exhaustion of the consciousness
which cannot breathe
too well after two double
martinis. What
is invisible
is the color of glass.
Barely
tinted are these fleshly fingers
behind the lens, the thumb
over the optical viewfinder
which reduces the world,
a change from the little mirror
which snaps back into the dark,
technology automatically steadying
your hand, but the world
oddly tipsy-turvy by slowing
the nonexistent shutter speed.
It’s as if the moon had an aneurism
and burst into gold.
It is
as if your heart had stopped
at this point, but reality moved
faltering on, floundering, elbows
propped upon a bar in a tilting
line we know is horizontal, but
lurches like the peg leg of a tooth-
pick with an oval foot on deck
of a ship that is listing behind
the watery lens of an aquarium
undersea with the grotesque
fish who grows a worm out
of its head and uses a bacterial
lantern at the end as a lure.
Who is that woman in the red
skirt or is it wool with her back
toward us? Everything
is what
it is not, the wine is ice, the crystal
glass is gold, the fat boy’s soft T-
shirt is hardly crushed amethyst
(a sobering thought) but sub-
titles all definitively as WET,
as if it knows, but we know,
don’t we, the incandescent
autumn of her wide white legs?
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| Third Martini |
III
Hospital light has never been
this gold or coalesced into
that closing center of sheer
intense brightness, though in
retrospect we expected it
all along. When
we first burst
into air and gasped at
the godlike light, we felt
we would never forget it
and we didn’t, the lambent
light of a surgeon’s mask
like a mother licking her kitten
and the burning colors:
diamond,
cobalt, ruby, scintillant
gold and all their eyes, shimmering
back like a cat’s.
As if
we had created this world,
as if it were waiting for us,
like the breath of our mother,
reality and the cradle enfolding us—
not this relenting unrelenting
succubus that sucks
us out into the void and anesthetizes
the softer colors of dusk;
with a little prick—
so when they push the glass
tube in our penis, we hardly
feel it. It’s
then our hearts beat
irregularly and then we sleep,
to dream of drunken lightning
bugs flitting about our eyes,
somewhat as stars are pesky
about the moon. No
one
to stroke our soft fur with her
tongue. Its as
if our heads
were ripe with tangerines—
like that orange-headed man
near the girl in red who loves
her. Perhaps,
in that time-
less moment before our raft
goes over the edge of the cat-
aract, we can link fingers,
before they snap, and the blind
bass player offstage plucks
the thick red worm strings
of our intestines, tightened
into catgut, while the most gorgeous
girl in the world sways and
sings, fingers tight around
the silver microphone in a light
jazz beat, sultry as the light
patinaed, invisible as the words
are almost invisible—maybe
“In the Mood” in a fateful
contralto in the golden honeyed
light like a emerald woodnymph
in a bulb of amber—and time
almost stops. Then
it does.
And you imagine holding her,
kissing her, stroking her cheeks,
while she sings “Ma Rainey’s
Black Bottom,” laughing her
opaly echoing twinkling laugh
of pearling notes between
the deeper blues and in the dusk
you wish all this beauty
which was never seen could be
spun into a silken chrysalis for all
to see and appreciate and love
as you do—camera obscura—gold
light reflected on a wall—projected
only when the light goes out—
and so do you—snap!—the glass
breaks—the moment crystallized—
while Eternity like a walking stick
insect on the glass ambles away—
we do hang on, don’t we? our brain
goes away—but still we cling
to the light, like old vaudevillian
comedians, the poem and the humming-
bird, who teeter at the edge
of the stage, even though it’s time
to go when the klieg lights blink
and yawn and even the moon
shuts down.
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