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    Nice Weather: Poems
    Nice Weather: Poems
    Nice Weather: Poems
    Ebook107 pages57 minutes

    Nice Weather: Poems

    By Frederick Seidel

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A stunning new collection from the "beguiling and magisterial" poet (The New York Times Book Review)


    "Something is going on. Something is wrong."

    Frederick Seidel-the "ghoul" (Chicago Review), the "triumphant outsider" (Contemporary Poetry Review)-returns with a dangerous new collection of poems. Nice Weather presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel-and thrilled and offended his readers. Lyrical, grotesque, elegiac, this book adds new music and menace to his masterful body of work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 2, 2014
    ISBN9781466879775
    Nice Weather: Poems
    Author

    Frederick Seidel

    Frederick Seidel's books of poems include Final Solutions; Sunrise, winner of the Lamont Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; These Days; My Tokyo; Going Fast; The Cosmos Poems; Life on Earth; Ooga-Booga; and Poems 1959-2009.

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      Book preview

      Nice Weather - Frederick Seidel

      NIGHT

      The city sleeps with the lights on.

      The insomniac wants it to be morning.

      The quadruple amputee asks the night nurse what time it is.

      The woman is asking for her mother,

      But the mother is exhausted and asleep and long since dead.

      The nun screams to stop the charging rhino

      And sits bolt upright in bed

      Attached to a catheter.

      If a mole were afraid of the dark

      Underground, its home, afraid of the dark,

      And climbed out into the light of day, utterly blind,

      Destroying the lawn, it would probably be caught and shot,

      But not in the recovery room after a craniotomy.

      The prostitute suspects what her client might want her to do.

      Something is going on. Something is wrong.

      Meanwhile, the customer is frightened, too.

      The city sleeps with the lights on.

      The garbage trucks come in the night and make noise and are gone.

      Two angelfish swim around the room and out the window.

      Laundry suns on a line beneath white summer cumulus.

      Summer thunder bumbles in the distance.

      The prostitute—whose name is Dawn—

      Takes the man in her mouth and spits out blood,

      Rosy-fingered Dawn.

      STORE WINDOWS

      I smile in the mirror at my teeth—

      Which are their usual brown.

      My smile is wearing a wreath.

      I walk wreathed in brown around town.

      I smile and rarely frown.

      I find perfection in

      The passing store windows

      I glance at my reflection in.

      It’s citywide narcissism. Citizens steal a little peek, and what it shows

      Is that every ugly lightbulb in that one moment glows.

      A preposterous example: I’m getting an ultrasound

      Of my carotid artery,

      And the woman doing it, a tough transplanted Israeli, bends around

      And says huskily, "Don’t tell anybody

      I said that your carotid is extraordinary."

      I’m so proud!

      It’s so ridiculous I have to laugh.

      The technician is very well endowed.

      I’m a collapsible top hat—a chapeau claque—that half

      The time struts around at Ascot but can be collapsed flat just like that. Baff!

      Till it pops back. Paff! Oh yes,

      I find myself superb

      When I undress.

      A lovely lightbulb is my suburb,

      And my flower, and my verb.

      The naked man, after climbing the steps out of the subway,

      Has moderate dyspnea, and is seventy-four.

      He was walking down the street in Milan one day.

      This was long ago. He began to snore.

      He saw a sleeping man reflected in the window of a store.

      THE YELLOW CAB

      Tree-lined side streets make me lonely.

      Many-windowed town houses make me sad.

      The nicest possible spring day, like today, only

      Ignites my inner suicide-bomber jihad.

      I’m high on the fumes of my smokin’ sunglasses,

      But my exhaust pipe has a leak, which smells

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