Warhol / Madison Ave. / 9-11

By Peter Balakian b. 1951 Peter Balakian

When I left Eli Zabar the cut-out star on the window

was whirling in the animation of the rich and hungry

hunched over tables for a $30 sandwich and a Diet Coke.

It was raining and the blurred glass of the galleries

was the gold leaf of the Carrig Rhone frames—

Childe Hassam’s dabs of Connecticut trees

the diaphanous blue on the fleshy rocks,

the melting opal of the shoals.

Inside the Whitney the rain trailed down my face;

and I found myself in a quiet corner staring

at the pink face of Marilyn Monroe.

I could still smell the smoldering high-tech plastic

as it burned the air. In the whiteness of her teeth,

in the almost aahh of her mouth and the half-drugged eyes

under the lids of teal shadow, the air kept singeing my nose.

Against the pale walls Marilyn’s face dissolved

like a stretched mesh and litho ink

where plain form is a place of no desire

like the empty mirror of the Hudson at dawn.

In the fissures of her make-up, the planes of color

led back and back behind her teeth longing—

to the deception by the Falls on her honeymoon

(with Joseph Cotton in Niagara)—where we found her clothed

and alarmed, and later desperate for the affirmation,

of a President’s limp dick and the crisp sheets

the same color of these walls—as my t shirt dries to my skin

and the faintest scent of ground zero

sifts down on the walls

whiter than the wingtip vortices

of melting in the morning light.

Source: Ziggurat (The University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Biography

Peter Balakian is the author of several collections of poetry, including June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974–2000. His recent book, Ziggurat (2010), wrestles with the aftermath and reverberations of 9/11. His poems have been widely anthologized, including in the 1985 Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, and have been translated into several languages. He has published essays on poetry, culture, and art in . . .

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