Amanda Is Sitting Across from Me

One of her eyes is bigger than the other. One of her eyes looks like it has a devil in it and the other, an angel. Amanda is sitting across from me. One of her eyes is bigger than the other. In one there is an angel sitting; in the other, a devil. Is this why I have always liked her?

I’d Grab the Wrong Part

And if I were to catch Ernest in a net like one catches a fox, I’d grab the wrong part of the tail, and he’d turn around and bite me back.

Such a Question

“What do you think about when you and your husband make love?” my shrink asks.

Is it appropriate for her to ask such a question?

But this is America. When one submits to its shrinks, one submits the whole way.

His Shadow

His shadow looks like it’s inspecting mine.

Eating Beauty

We were sitting in Gillette’s studio eating fish sandwiches and drinking coffee.

“I call that painting Yeats,” she said. “He was very prophetic. Do you know he predicted the anti-Christ of the year 2000?”

“It wasn’t only his prediction,” I said.

“Uh, I don’t know, but, uh, he predicted it; Christ, though, was the anti-Christ of the Egyptians. So to speak.”

I removed a small fishbone from my tongue.

“I haven’t read much Yeats, except the Crazy Jane poems.”

“Do you like Goethe?”

“Yes.”

“I call that piece ‘I too have had moments of fancifulness.’ I don’t know if the critics will get the allusion; they’ll just get the sex like they did on that last piece. I’d like to be called intelligent just once. X’s erotic and they call him intelligent all the time.”

I said nothing. I bit into another piece of fish.

“With us it’s either one or the other. But I love using literary allusions in art, like little puzzles, you see, like little codes . . . I hope you won’t be mad at me for saying this?”

“Saying what?”

“Well, it’s just that you don’t have any really great literature, so to speak, so you can’t really use any great literary allusions in your work, if you thought to do it.”

I bit into bone.

“Well, I suppose you could use the music. The jazz is great, the spirituals. I never can really get into soul. I don’t like it. But the music, I guess that could be good for allusion in your work—Coltrane influencing your sculpture—that’s real neat, don’t you think? Or some of the great sermons, like Martin Luther King’s. I suppose that. But I wonder how you’d do it, don’t you? I don’t know how you’d quite compete with that.”

I pick another fishbone from my tongue. Bone her.

“Maybe I ought to listen to some Coltrane myself!” She laughs.

She’s standing at her worktable and I’m sitting in a small antique rocker.

“You’re very sweet to be here and keep me company when there’s your own work,” she says. “Uh, you’re so quiet. What is it?”