Poems - Bruce Frankel

Hazel Hawthorne Werner at Provincetown, 1953

The world simplified through a revision of three
planes, a geometry made horizontally plain
and true — green, pink, and blue.

We see what, in the summer of fifty-three,
you saw from the primal wind-battered shack
through wavy salt-glazed glass, cataracts

under the shuttering roof,
rented for seventy-five a month flat.
The sea is the field of pink from margin

to margin, but with increments of blue
stretched flat, sponging dusk’s pink hue.
And the low dune—a gentle chartreuse;

you walked through it, to the vacant beach,
pristine except that once—when it was strewn
with a cargo of oranges, all edible and good.

(After Wolf Kahn’s Pink Light on the Sea and accounts of Hazel Hawthorne Werner’s first shack at Provincetown.)

Vacuum (1955)

Originally published in BigCityLit—The Rivers of It (abridged),
Print Series, March 2002 (Headwaters / Hudson Press, New York)

You were the vehicle of her obsession
to rid our house of dirt,
if not disease,

a gray, urn-shaped, chrome-grilled fish,
a stove-enamel bottom feeder
which inhaled us clean.

I come to you, icon, dust grave,
employed by love until you seemed
almost a lover,

angel of hygiene reposing on rounded rail sleds,
Lurelle Guild’s Model XXX
Electrolux,

whose name, richer than Royal, Kirby or Hoover
(though Eureka had its claim),
was scripted

in post-war aluminum over nail-polish red,
implying something feverish,
sexual.

She slid you out— electric, streamlined,
bullet shaped— and unfurled
your cloth hose,

placed it in the slant nose hole
until clips clicked on curled
metal lips.

O ardent machine
that burned to suction rugs
through sculpted snout!

Your motor grew hot and ionized the air while she wielded the long wand,
probing every crease and crevice,
every spot.

Still I smell the air after you had stopped, after the loud hum
cut out and left our limbs tingling
in aftershock.

Smiling, satisfied, she emptied the small sac.
Nothing rare: green cat’s eye,
nugget of snot,

black bobby pin that held her hair in a tight brown bun,
but mostly cotton-candy ash of dead
compacted cells,

sloughed-off selves which day after day confettied
down for your immaculate bride,
vacuuming away.

Paraphrasing Vivian Leigh

Originally published in The Los Angeles Review, Number 4 (2007)

I was buying a venti when out of the steam his face rose.
It was kind and full of smile and almost unaware of the past.
We exchanged hands with the tenderness of two men
passing teacups by Limoges. Hand to hand, bonded
in sudden, inexplicable trust, we prepared to unload.
He told me his Ruth, childless and alcoholic, was in rehab
when she quit him for the one-armed mechanic
with whom, three kids later, she lives on Lake Placid.
And he, old hoofer, had become a noted director.
He drew a top hat to dot his name and number,
“One day,” he says, “let’s break bread.” I tacked his card to cork.
“Yes, Brother,” I was thinking
when my girlfriend entered the room in gossamer linen,
a sheer veil for the birdcage of her body.
I could almost see her heart beat beneath vermilion feathers
as she, an actress who collected hats, opened the door
of her mouth to taste the foam clinging to my fingers.
I loved her and quested in stores you can’t imagine
to find the black-veiled cloche,
like Marlene Dietrich’s in Shanghai Express.
Do you know the adage about Von Sternberg’s movie?
It’s about four hats: two hats, no hat, return to hat.
I’d forgotten that the night I thought to phone my friend
and found his card missing. I went to eat alone.
Should I end the story of my humiliation here? No,
you’d rather hear how, on the hook of the next booth,
I saw the hat’s distinctive five folds and line of black dots.
And then heard him praising the hat and paraphrasing
Vivian Leigh, “A hat is the most dangerous thing
in the world, because then your face is all you’ve got.”