For A Patron Of Leser Men
the man, the tailor, and the amber
i. marmont stationary
i was told there was a color for men like me.
not blue, dont start there.
blue is for people with better lighting
and a woman somewhere
keeping the window open for the myth.
i have no woman.
i have no window.
i have this paper.
CHATEAU MARMONT, it says,
at the top,
which is vulgar in the exact way i needed tonight.
the paper lies better than i do.
[cheap blue ballpoint pen, the kind with which the ban was written. filed without comment.]
stand still.
no, that is not my voice.
stand still.
that is the other one,
the old metal smelling bastard
with the soft voice
and the small bright teeth
who has been living in my lining
since i first learned
a man could be improved
by being made less able to breathe.
i am forty three
and i do not carry a cellphone.
not for moral reasons.
not because i am pure.
not because i am better than the poor glowing animals
checking their little graves at the bar.
it is aesthetic.
which is worse.
it means i chose the inconvenience
and then called it character.
good.
no.
yes.
i have the same suit on again.
same black wool,
same trouser,
same shirt,
same private disaster under the arm,
same beautiful pressure at the waist.
the suit smells like premium wool,
old whiskey,
orchid man,
hotel smoke from another year,
and something else i cannot name.
not sweat exactly.
not powder exactly.
not fear exactly.
something between a locked drawer
and a flower dying with money in the room.
do not identify it.
why?
because once a scent has a name,
it belongs to the day.
[scent ledger: wool, whiskey, orchid man, smoke. four entries filed.
the fifth line left blank; blanks keep their blue longest in this office.]
i had written three notes already.
one on marmont paper.
one on a cheap napkin from tequila’s,
the bar for leser men.
one on the back of a hundred dollar bill
because i had run out of manners
and wanted the sentence to feel ashamed of itself.
the hundred looked new.
i hated it for that.
i wrote:
a man can be ruined
and still look freshly issued.
too much.
fuck you.
better.
i wrote:
don’t call it cool
when the body has only forgotten
where it hid the heat.
acceptable.
i wrote:
don’t call it distance
when the room has learned
not to offer me a chair.
sentimental.
i crossed it out.
i wrote:
don’t call it mystery.
the answer is itemized.
there.
the car waited below
without waiting.
that is what cars do
when they understand money.
not red.
not black.
not silver.
something lower.
a color made of wet asphalt,
engine heat,
blue air,
and the sound a door makes
when a man closes it
harder than necessary
because nobody has touched his shoulder
in a way that counted.
i will not name it.
a named car becomes vulgar,
like a named vice,
like a named saint,
like a man who introduces himself
with the wound first.
again with wound.
shut up.
you are learning.
the car was not glamour.
glamour requires witnesses
willing to forgive the bill.
the car was escape
with leather lungs.
it exhaled cold.
i entered anyway.
the night entered with me,
polite,
like a creditor
with a key of his own.
at tequila’s
they use napkins that dissolve
if the drink sweats too long.
that is more honest
than most publishers.
the men there do not care
what i am wearing.
this offends me,
then relieves me,
then offends me again.
i have come to depend
on that little sequence.
offense.
relief.
offense.
bam.
bam.
bam.
not sequence.
fitting.
offense at the shoulder.
relief at the waist.
offense at the throat.
pin.
pin.
pin.
the man in wranglers sat two stools away.
walmart t-shirt.
white, or once white,
or white in the way cheap cotton keeps faith
with the body longer than expensive cotton does.
he was not warm.
do not make him warm.
possibly attractive.
possibly plain.
dangerous, if he was anything,
because he did not admire correctly.
i have never learned warmth
from a man with less.
i have learned hunger.
i have learned contempt.
i have learned the shape of wanting
when it has no taste for rescue.
but warmth,
no.
warmth came in a glass,
amber and obedient,
borrowed blood at the right temperature,
and did not ask me
to become more human
in exchange.
the first honorable drink
is always a question.
the second is a translation.
the third is a little country
where no one checks papers.
i stopped counting after that
because counting is for men
who expect to return.
you counted.
yes.
you always count.
yes.
you counted the stitches too.
i counted the stitches
because the tailor counted first.
sixty seven,
i think,
though tailors do not age
so much as acquire better posture.
soft voice.
dry mouth.
metal at the back of it.
teeth like a drawer of clean instruments.
he never told me to do anything dramatic.
that is how i knew
he was serious.
bad advice arrives quietly
when it is aristocratic.
not ruin yourself.
never that.
just:
take the waist in.
answer later.
drink before the hand starts.
do not call him.
do not carry the phone.
do not arrive with need showing.
button the jacket.
bam.
button the mouth.
bam.
leave before tenderness can invoice you.
bam.
then inward,
almost symphonic,
the old bastard tuning the ribs
like a room before the overture.
strings: the ribs, a half step sharper.
woodwind: the breath, taken in at the waist.
percussion: the hand, held until the second drink.
the heart seated far from the exits.
now the overture,
if you came this far, congratulations.
this has never required you.
i wrote the last note
on the marmont paper
because the napkin had given up
and the hundred dollar bill
was too clean to be trusted twice.
i wrote:
there is no fuckin facade.
there is only shadow
doing unrequired labor.
good.
i wrote:
there is no man worth saving here.
lie.
i wrote:
there is no man worth saving here,
only a man expensive enough
to be mistaken for a locked door.
better.
i wrote:
for a patron of leser men.
and under it,
without knowing why,
i drew a line so straight
it frightend me.
not a line.
a seam.
not a seam.
what then?
an invitation
to be cut correctly.
[ruler-straight blue. the line frightened the man.
it did not frighten the scissors. filed for later.]
ii. the wristband
the fever left
the way important guests leave,
without saying which of us
had been the host.
the ice bucket is a bowl of water now.
it has given up its one ambition.
the antibiotics are humiliating.
they work.
no ceremony,
no velvet,
no aristocracy of ruin.
seven pills a day
and the body,
that vulgar loyalist,
takes them
and stays.
there is a bracelet
i did not choose.
plastic.
my name on it,
printed by a machine
in a font with no opinion of me.
it is the first thing i have worn in years
that does not fit.
it was not made to fit.
it was made to identify.
i have not cut it off.
the only scissors in this room
are the ones i keep imagining,
and they are his,
and they are clean,
and i am done
being an instrument’s idea of a man.
stand still.
no.
the suit came home in a bag
with handles,
like groceries.
one sleeve open
from cuff to shoulder.
barbarism.
the cut does not follow the seam.
it follows the arm.
[medical-scissors blue. the one blade in his file that asked the body
and not the cloth. cross-filed under barbarism, his word; under honesty, the office’s.]
the suit smells of the hospital now,
which is to say
of nothing.
the fifth thing is gone.
i find that i mourn it
the way one mourns
a debt collector
who knew the way to the house
without asking.
bring it to me.
i can make it
as it was.
as it was.
not yet.
the minibar hums its little hymn.
i know the psalm numbers by heart.
not yet.
not never.
i am not going to lie
on hotel paper.
not yet.
the room has a telephone.
heavy,
hotel-colored,
tied to the wall by a cord
like a man tied to a name.
i put my hand on it.
it was cold.
then it wasn’t.
do not
not yet.
[wristband blue. a name, a date, printed by a machine that never met him.
filed with the rest of the surfaces. the collection is incomplete.]
Elías Delgado
This one goes out to you. Blue, the color of Johnnie, the last days of our forever. Never made known to any office.