Song

By Randall Mann
Read the Translator's Notes
I found my muster station, sir.
My skin is patent leather.
The tourists are recidivists.
This calm is earthquake weather.

I’ve used up all the mulligans.
I’d kill to share a vice.
The youngster reads a yellowed Oui.
The socialite has lice.

The Europe trip I finally took
was rash and Polaroid,
was gilt, confit, and bathhouse foam.
And I cannot avoid

the end: I will not die in Paris,
won’t rest for good behind
a painted mausoleum door.
The purser will not find

me mummified beneath your tulle,
and Paris will not burn.
Today is Thursday, so I’ll die.
Come help me pick my urn.


Translator's Notes:

Q & A: Randall Mann

What makes the poem a song?

It’s a ballad of sorts; it has some of the music of a song.


The tourists are “recidivists”? What do you mean by that?

Travel has been an excuse for me to backslide into bad habits (the bathhouse foam in the poem; the vice). And I like the sound of “tourists” and “recidivists” in the same line.


How does Vallejo enter the poem?

I have always liked the arbitrary specificity of Vallejo’s death on a Thursday in “Black Stone on a White Stone”; also, “Song” is about not dying in Paris, which means it’s about dying in Paris, which means I must have been thinking about Vallejo. And of course I was.


Can you say what, if anything, these three poems have in common? They seem related.

Forms, accessories, sex, and death.

Source: Poetry (April 2010)