1 Piece by Robert Sward
My Daughter Dante Paradiso
White, eight-door, hot tub
limo
behind us the driver
on his horn
Move, dammit, move! he yells. No green light,
no green arrow,
no green anything.
"I love L.A. traffic because it means
a whole lot of other people are here too."
She's half way into the intersection
waiting to make a left turn
against
Four lanes of oncoming DeVilles.
"L.A.'s famous for this. I love
how huge it is," she says,
"seeing strangers I'll never see again. And the restaurants...
and the guys...
I should have been born here.
Anyway, I corrected the problem."
Dante Paradiso,
my daughter,
the original
Miss Fire Cracker. Youngest, Newest, Freshest
Ingenue.
Part in "Show Girls" (ugh!),
part—dancer—in "Forrest Gump."
She is the sun and the moon.
Miss Gold Ring.
Applies Creme d'Elegance. "It tones the skin."
A little eyeliner,
Maybelline "tres noir."
"Look, look, there's Julie Roberts! See,
she's honking."
Ms. Paradiso's the moon wearing make-up,
the sun reaching for blue eye-shadow.
Hands me a note from some admirer:
"The power of your beauty
turns all of my plans
into ashes.
"I am willing to let everything collapse."
Reaches for her M.A.C.
("discount for actresses") depilatory,
white cream
on her white arms.
Dante luminous,
yellow, aqua beige and blue,
the sky whitening,
turning, turning at last
waving to Ms. Roberts
silicon limousine with a ready smile,
sunlight, sunlight, the Next Big Thing.
Robert Sward is well known to readers of The Blue Moon
Review (where he recently guest-edited our special feature
on "Fame"); and he has been published in many other online
journals. He is the author of numerous books, including Four
Incarnations: New and Selected Poems 1957-1991, which
appeared from Coffee House Press in 1991. He currently
teaches for the University of California Extension in Santa Cruz.
His home page is at http://www.cruzio.com/~scva/rsward.html.
|
