Liz

Walking down Second Avenue, Liz and I

chanced upon a strikingly beautiful transvestite

at whom I prudently did not stare

though Liz, shamanness and anthropologist,

paused to study innocently if over-intently

and remark praisingly on the natural art and artful nature

of what we were then and there perceiving;

whereupon the brilliantly human

and over-dressed specimen of wigged postmodern

East Village goddess

revealed herself as many-colored flames of RAGE

from which appeared the fourfold arms of Shiva,

one with a cook’s knife pulled from Lord knows where

within her personhood of elaborate chiffonerie;

then charging forth on many tiny melting wheels

not towards earnest Liz but me,

as if I were Chief Instigator of the unasked-for staring/commenting;

both of us, Liz finally wakened and I,

sprinting north from the gender-squall of beauty

and many-fabricked choler, the flashing blade

clawing paperdolls of our demise from air.

*

From oh so many years ago now, when I lived in Manhattan; perhaps the same East Village apartment on 11th Street mentioned below. This poem had a counter-turn to it -- about a hyper-masculine fellow in Yonkers who similarly chased the two of us outside a Ho Jo's for some perceived slight -- but I haven't been able to get it right, and so have jettisoned that second stanza, so as to allow the poem to run more swiftly.

Here is Liz as I remember her, spectrally hovering outside my Slonim Woods dorm window, textbooks under her arm; juxtaposed with the filmmaker Maya Deren, the famous still from Meshes of the Afternoon: