Opera Chic's regular schedule of several, informative, finger-lickin' daily pawsts has been lately interrupted by her little trip to Pantelleria, an island blissfully deprived of wifi Internet, and, sadly, of Starbucks franchises. Besides, her little hands were too busy brandishing big sweaty glasses of chilled cedrata (with the occasional drop of Grey Goose here and there).
Things will hopefully go back to the regular schedule soon, as Opera Chic is about to return to the US of A for the rest of the season (Montauk @ land's end ftw).
In the meantime enjoy this poem, as an hommage to the half-crazed old skooly Pantelleria fisherman whom we heard the other morning whistle the Bolero, and as an hommage to the awesome old half-crazed commie Jew that is Gerald Stern, the closest thing to a Poet Laureate this country has produced since poor Frank O'Hara got shafted by the envious Muses in Fire Island a very bad day exactly 42 years ago.
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a post-war Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop--in 1945--
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing--in Poland and Germany--
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.