POEMS
Please enjoy these poems composed for past FiLmprov events and kindly shared with permission of the authors.
He said
I’ve got to have it.
That playing called love
That twirling, curling, crossing and crumpling
Called love—
I’ve got to have it.
The ivory deliquescence of love,
The coiling, flowing, folding and enfolding of limbs
Of love—
I’ve got to have it.
Ends meeting ends,
Points meeting points
That dancing, do-see-do-ing
To-and-fro-ing
Kind of loving—
I’ve got to have it, he said.
Two coiling bodies, one single desiring,
That rolling kind of playing, called love.
That inward circling, cupping, spooning
Going in opposite directions kind of loving—
I’ve got to have it.
Which is your body, which is mine?
Felix conuiunctio!
Why deny it? why delay it?
Can’t ever repay it,
That compressing, pressing, decompressing
All play, always playful,
That romping, frolicking
Kind of loving—
I’ve got to have it.
If you lack it, if you miss it
Don’t resist it, he said.
You’ve got to have
That back and forthin’
Lunging, falling, surging, splurging
Kind of lovin’.
What’s the point of it?
Speak to me in theology of it!
But I’ve just got to have it,
That twisting, creasing, unceasing
Let-the-shades-down
Kind of lovin’.
Gotta have the lovin’
That wrings me out exhausted,
Roll-me-right-into-a-ball
Kind of love.
Got to have it, he said to her.
Lovingly.
Richard Chrisman
Lee, Massachusetts
11.10.2008
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Mi Chiamano Mimi (A Sestinetta)
The lid, paper musk, wool dust, and camphor rose.
A shawl, and in a desiccated ash-black morocco case a pair, a
Pair of abalone-clad theatre glasses. Gift from an old beau ‘em.
He was too old for her arm, for the army, for harm. “Per mia? Mia?”
She thought him generous, her father a fool, the nuns brave.
The leather still scented of his waxed jet rancid hair.
With binoculars, chaperones, and Signor in Turin to hear
Ferrani. “She’s no Marchesi” said the generous fool when as one the rows with roses rose.
That memory etched, those moments so brief.
But these tacit icons? “That,” he said, “was opera.”
Old goat would’ve done as well to listen to mime
Violists rosin up, tune, and bow’em.
These relics: Ricordi scelti. Tie them with a bow. Aim
Them loosely toward posterity and perhaps some heir
While recalling, from the aria, “Sola mi, mi
Far gigli e rose.”
Chi es l’aprire?
Anile, feeble, irrelevant and still crooning “La storia mia è breve.”
The next bed, an unlikely neighbor, una Contadina. Her time is equally brief.
Edematous legs had war-time rickets and nine pregnancies to bow ‘em
“Scrivano. Leggiano. Sempre opera.”
And twenty city years in the fat New World still kept a hutch with a stewing sized hare
Or a dozen, and a driveway pergola, bucket tomatoes, and piselli in rows,
The tub-grottoed St. Francis adored by flamingoes from a truck stop near Miami.
Despite objections, deaf, she sobs “mi chiamano Mimi!”
They call her only “hon” or “sweetie” and brave
The wrath of imagined injuries from one in throes
Of dementia, and another lost in a matinee of La Boheme.
Each of those worlds is light years from here:
La Scala, Bellevue, East Cambridge before the co-op era.
These grizzled signorini, long past extreme-unction appear a
Pair from the same old country (it never was). But the real Mimi,
Edith Piaf, sings now (malgré elle est mort hier).
Yesterday, October 11, 1963, at 46, her life aria-brief.
Now, that was La Vie Boheme.
Unaware hear distant radios, in unison, chant “La Vie en Rose.”
Today the contents, flea market opera-buffa, and the fetid trunk air bereave.
Foxed and mottled cabinet cards hold then-future Mimi whose flesh glows like porcelain by Boehm.
The broken-lock trunk and a lock of hair: “Si dolce malia di rose.”
P. H. Bloom
Copyright © 2004 P. H. Bloom, all rights reserved
Sestinetta 6/27/04
