Esta Noche

In a dress with a black tulip’s sheen
    la fabulosa Lola enters, late, mounts the stairs
to the plywood platform, and begs whoever runs
    the wobbling spot to turn the lights down

to something flattering. When they halo her
    with a petal-toned gel, she sets to haranguing,
shifting in and out of two languages like gowns
    or genders to please have a little respect

for the girls, flashing the one entrancing
    and unavoidable gap in the center of her upper teeth.
And when the cellophane drop goes black,
    a new spot coronas her in a wig

fit for the end of a century,
    and she tosses back her hair—risky gesture—
and raises her arms like a widow in a blood tragedy,
    all will and black lace, and lipsyncs "You and Me

against the World." She’s a man
    you wouldn’t look twice at in street clothes,
two hundred pounds of hard living, the gap in her smile
    sadly narrative—but she’s a monument,   

in the mysterious permission of the dress.
    This is Esta Noche, a Latin drag bar in the Mission,
its black door a gap in the face
    of a battered wall. All over the neighborhood

storefront windows show all night
    shrined hats and gloves, wedding dresses,
First Communion’s frothing lace:
    gowns of perfection and commencement,

fixed promises glowing. In the dress
    the color of the spaces between streetlamps
Lola stands unassailable, the dress
    in which she is in the largest sense

fabulous: a lesson, a criticism and colossus
    of gender, all fire and irony. Her spine’s
perfectly erect, only her fluid hands moving
    and her head turned slightly to one side.

She hosts the pageant, Wednesdays and Saturdays,
    and men come in from the streets, the trains,
and the repair shops, lean together to rank
    the artifice of the awkward or lovely

Lola welcomes onto the stage: Victoria, Elena,
    Francie, lamé pumps and stockings and always
the rippling night pulled down over broad shoulders
    and flounced around the hips, liquid,

the black silk of esta noche
    proving that perfection and beauty are so alien
they almost never touch. Tonight, she says,
    put it on. The costume is license

and calling. She says you could wear the whole damn
    black sky and all its spangles. It’s the only night
we have to stand on. Put it on,
    it’s the only thing we have to wear.

Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing

The world is full of women
who’d tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of 
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent 
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they’d say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I’ve a choice
of how, and I’ll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it’s all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything’s for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshipers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads 
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge 
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can’t. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape’s been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there’s only a bleak exhaustion.

Speaking of which, it’s the smiling
tires me out the most. 
This, and the pretense
that I can’t hear them.
And I can’t, because I’m after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don’t let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I’ll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. 
That’s what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body. 
They’d like to see through me, 
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don’t hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I’m rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I’m not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you’ll burn.

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing 

Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 

And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 

I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. 

Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn 
I lean'd, the Secret of my Life to learn: 
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd--"While you live 
Drink!--for, once dead, you never shall return." 

Ah, my Belov'ed fill the Cup that clears 

To-day Past Regrets and Future Fears: 

To-morrow!--Why, To-morrow I may be 

Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years. 

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best 

That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest, 

Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before, 

And one by one crept silently to rest. 

And we, that now make merry in the Room 

They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom 

Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth 

Descend--ourselves to make a Couch--for whom? 

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, 

Before we too into the Dust descend; 

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie 

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!