MAKING PRINTS

MAKING PRINTS

/ January, 2018 / Leave a comment / Poetry


“What was it like—-being married to Mick Jagger?” – (American journalist)
“I had to be a hell of a whore in the bedroom.” – Jerry Hall (American)

Five woodblocks to make five woodcuts for prints.
The more rounded
The cuts, the slower, more perilous. Instruments
Fucking sharp. I’ll move
Like Jerry Hall for Jagger.
When I was twenty-two! The Englishman!
Victoria station! London pigeons still the only beautiful bird. Blues

Their grays their fan-tails all around, pigeons surrounding, the

Beautiful young
Young man falling. So sweet and clean that Englishman’s shirt.
Before he fell he threw a bouquet cone new
Of flowers to me blurted
Before he fell
These are for you
Flowers thrown forward. Then his fall.
I did not last long there let the English throng bend to tend
His dazzling twisting head let them touch that soft clean shirt
Did not touch station floor bouquet did not kneel did not stay beside his
Seizure, convulsions. (The flowers surely not for me—he had not fallen for me!)
(Who were those flowers for?) Sweet in expatriate pain of twenties
The what-must-I-do-next-pain of twenties—I was not

Fine or important enough—-to stay. Ghost and drifted

Once medicals were called.
These are for you, he had cried
In that second before falling—-pool-cue eyes to mine. Yes, should have
Stayed, following with flowers. Telling all at hospital I was his.
Some time before
He was able
To disagree?
People say they remember nothing about Denmark
But harbor. Red blue yellow, their breakfasts, harbor
The mermaid there.
On soccer fields in America sons moon-loyal dodging ball I drink
Tea with milk. England
You stay with me. England
You stay with me. I think and sip. I remember his soft pale shirt.
Pleasurable, once done, the woodblocks for making prints—
My fingers. Such pleasure in their ache. The blue-red, red-gold—bleed.