The Godfather Returns to Color TV
By Amy Clampitt
The lit night glares like a day-glo strawberry,
the stakeout car beside the hydrant is full of feds,
and the ikon of our secret hero(ine?), atop the
feckless funnypaper mesa we try to live in, is that
poor dumb indestructible super-loser Krazy Kat.
O Innocence, spoiled Guinea Brat!—after whose
fits of smashing and screaming, O Holy Mother,
All-American Girl, I need you, I want
to protect you: after that one sunstruck
glimpse, on a Sicilian mountainside,
of virgin stupidity, its sensual lockbox
so charged with possibilities of being
that we too tremble at the thought of nakedness,
of marriage, we too burn to build a shrine for,
raise armies to protect a property that history
godfathered dumb. I told you: DON'T ASK
QUESTIONS ABOUT MY BUSINESS! While the old
bull in a new world, who's lost respect,
too-big pants bunched underneath the belly, stumbles
expiring past the staked tomato vines,
and the grandchild thinks for a minute he's
only playing, we know he is, admiring
Marlon Brando in a show of weakness. But the blood
isn't all ketchup, or the weekend all football, nor
do all commodities survive in lighted shrines.
O Italy! Imagine Eros reinvented on that hillside
as Giovanni di Paolo did—a passeggiata
where men and women walk into the day ungoaded,
unprotected, unenshrined—while we make do, stranded
on this day-glo mesa, with its epicene cartoon.
Amy Clampitt, "The Godfather Returns to Color TV" from The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt. Copyright © 1997 by Amy Clampitt. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House LLC.
Source:
The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt
(Penguin Random House LLC, 1997)
