For the dancer, Fred Herko

                —Died Dec. 1964 

 

Women, flashing razor blades,

carve their lover’s initials

like dated vaccinations on their arms

and say you were noble, lip and nipple,

more nubile than Monroe,

more woman than they,

your hustling sheep on Forty-second Street

with a vampy tilt of those eyes,

lashes flirting fluttery

as the ungirdled girl within you. . . .

You must have been quite a lay,

bending, scooping up their long looks,

raising your arms like a surgeon

about to perform a difficult operation,

no nurses, no anesthesia,

over and over the body

at the end of a too-short summer

when the sun swallowed, quickly,

more quickly each day,

and morning found you worn away. . . .

Life, skintight as a sore, quit itching.

 

I saw you once, offstage, munching peanuts,

wrapped in a full-length black bear coat,

booted toes splayed like a cowboy’s

shuffling down Third Street.

Bearish like that, were you kicking the traces

of Nijinsky’s scissor-footed pirouette

that curled and folded, curled and bloomed—

a puff of incense

inhaled by the sultry arc lamps?

Or maybe each cruel twist of your heel

ground those grinning Polack faces back into dirt, no?

Ah Freddie, svelte as an oriental tassle,

you were never meant for the grind and grit

and lumbering hassle of the elephant graveyard; who is?

But you, especially, you should have been a plume

on top of a tentpole in the whiteness of the Russian steppes!

All that grace, that unnatural beauty

our women would give their wits for!

Stroking your image, they stroke themselves.

 

Once, beside you, I felt as though a whiff of marijuana

had oiled and lit up my nerves.

Near the end, your boyfriends married,

you slogged around Greenwich Village,

sloven as a dried-up harem girl. Those deep hollows in your cheeks. . . elbow marks

of some lover propped on your face? You gazing at you?

Believing the poems and wild applause

hailed you as Apollo,

your doped, delirious angel danced on air.

Afterwards a leading lady gushed,

“My dear, it was his most beautiful dance.”

You and I, Freddie know

the sad, mean, base, meaningless waste

was no grander than stopping out

for a walk with your dog.