Fucking by Frederick Seidel

I wake because the phone is really ringing.
A singsong West Indian voice
In the dark, possibly a man's,
Blandly says, "Good morning, Mr. Seidel;
How are you feeling, God?"
And hangs up after my silence.

This is New York--
Some mornings five women call within a half hour.

In a restaurant, a woman I had just met, a Swede,
Three inches taller
Than I was among other things, and immensely
Impassive, cold,
Started to groan, very softly and husky voiced.
She said,
"You have utter control over me, and you know it.
I can't do anything about it."
I had been asking her about her job.

One can spend a lifetime trying to believe
These things.

I think of A.,
Before she became Lady Q.,
Of her lovely voice, and her lovely name.
What an extraordinary new one she took
With her marriage vows,
Even as titles go, extra fictitious. And ah--
And years later, at her request, paying a call on the husband
To ask if I could take her out
Once more, once, m'lord, for auld lang syne. She still wanted
To run away;
And had,
Our snowed-in week in the Chelsea
Years before.
How had her plane managed to land?

How will my plane manage to land?

How wilt thy plane manage to land?

Our room went out sledding for hours
And only returned when we slept,
Finally, with it still snowing, near dawn.

I can remember her sex,
And how the clitoris was set.

Now on to London where the play resumes-—
The scene when I call on the husband. But first,

In Francis Bacon's queer after-hours club,
Which one went to after
An Old Compton Street Wheeler's lunch,
A gentleman at the bar, while Francis was off pissing,
Looking straight at me, shouted
"Champagne for the Norm'!"
Meaning normal, heterosexual.

The place where I stayed,
The genteel crowded gloom of Jimmy's place,
Was England—coiled in the bars of an electric fire
In Edith Grove.
Piece by piece Jimmy sold off the Georgian silver.
Three pretty working girls were his lodgers.

Walking out in one direction, you were in
Brick and brown oppidan Fulham.

Walking a few steps the other way, you heard
Augustus John's many mistresses
Twittering in the local Finch's,
And a few steps further on, in the smart restaurants,
The young grandees who still said "gels."

There was a man named Pericles Belleville,
There is a man named Pericles Belleville,
Half American.

At a very formal dinner party,
At which I met the woman I have loved the most
In my life, Belleville
Pulled out a sterling silver-plated revolver
And waved it around, pointing it at people, who smiled.
One didn't know if the thing could be fired.

​That is the poem.