The Ongoing Lamentation
of Anna Nicole Smith
“You have a beautiful face Mr. Gray. Don’t frown.”
- Wilde
….Right now, for instance, there’s my terrycloth robe,
the walls, the curtains, the carpet, my slippers,
and the sofa. Six pink things. Six pink things
I can see. There’s also the mirror I like,
with the real gold-plated frame, which, from where I sit,
multiplies some of the pink. (It must be lucky
for such a pretty mirror to get to mirror
such pretty things.) And my skin’s almost pink
(it’s peach) and underneath my pink furry slippers, unseen,
are ten pink-painted toenails.
In the corner of the mirror, a shame,
is the window, showing off some drifts of cumuli,
but even when skies are clear,
the picture’s pretty much the same:
just green trees and green hills, a few white specks
of houses, berserk-looking and all
spread out, with jutting decks and sparkling light blue pools –
houses just like mine, that manage to be different
but all alike. California
is not so great. It’d be better,
I think, if I were to replace
all the windows with mirrors to keep all this pink
inside. Then my pink would bang around, wild,
like a bird in a sealed glass box! Maybe
I could even get those mirrors
like the ones they have in the cop movies,
that can be seen through in one direction. That way,
people outside could enjoy the room,
and I’d never have to give any of it up
or look at their faces. I’d stare at the mirrors,
and the people would think I was staring at them
and would wonder how I stayed
so expressionless. Poise, they would think,
and grace. I would like that…
The world’s pinkest prettiest room.
I’m fat. I’m old. I’m a fat old woman now,
though I’m fatter than I am old.
Sitting makes it worse. My stomach
is gross; it bulges; it’s big always
as if half-sticking up
out of tub-water. But I’ve been fat before.
I was a fat little girl.
If you could pull apart my closet doors,
slide the hangers, finger the tags, you’d see.
You’d see my story; that’s all I mean.
There are so many sizes,
a department store rack’s worth of rising sizes.
I keep them anymore so I won’t have to re-buy them,
which is sad, at least to me.
Up and down I go, fatting out
and slimming down. It’s odd;
I’ve been alive thirty-eight years,
and no-one’s ever asked me what size I am
when I dream. Not even Daniel.
Well…I’m fat. Every night! I’m fat and I stomp around,
and I don’t know what to do; I look down,
and the fat pushes out the tops of my shoes.
And even when it’s gone, when I’m thin,
when even my arms are thin, it tingles.
It tingled even when I was beautiful and in magazines
because I was beautiful. It tingles
like those limbs of amputees and scares
the daylights out of me….
But there are tricks, tricks to scare the fears into holes,
sayings I can say into myself any time,
as if started up by a doll’s tugged string.
I just say, "Vickie," putting on my Texas twang,
“Vickie," which is my real name, "Shut up;
at least you were beautiful once.
How few in the world get to be.”
But then I stop; isn’t that the same as saying
that I’m beautiful no longer
and won’t be again? Still, I’m right.
For awhile, I was stunning; I stunned,
and I have framed photos to confirm it,
and remembered looks-in-mirrors to confirm it,
though I’m not always in the mood
to be consoled. Even the teenage boys are old;
they must be pushing thirty now,
with receding hair-lines,
milk-eyed dogs, mortgages, two-car garages.
Do they ever blow the dust off thoughts of me?
Can they climb back into outgrown fantasies?
I used to think of them, up late
in their little darks, gulping, diddling their little peckers,
one me each in their million boy-minds.
At times I’d even cross over, imagine I was them,
let myself play across my very own mind.
I’d see myself, or rather, see a me
patched together from that me in the magazines.
It was sick, but I liked it.
I liked them with my magazines.
I thought of them huddled behind playground dumpsters,
up on their tip-toes, excited.
I pictured them in the backs of yellow buses,
slapping shaken-out centerfolds to rear-aisle windows.
I’d giggle thinking how all this
must make those pretty, skinny, kid-girls cluck.
I am not a vengeful person,
but it wasn’t without its teardrop of revenge.
“Do you know how many people will see this?”
Hef asked, and looked carefully up into my eyes.
(Hef was capable of seeing
into peephole-eyes like mine.)
"Do you? Do you really?"
Truthfully, I didn’t. I still don’t. I tried
to wrap my head around how many,
thought of cities, big foggy numbers,
of people in yellow boxes stacked on top of one another,
but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to;
The idea of all those people
drugged me groggy with vengeance and bliss.
I was invisible once, was an invisible girl,
although I always had a pretty face.
“She has a pretty face,” I’d tell myself.
I’d chant it to myself, chant it till it started swinging,
till it had hills and valleys – a new melody each time:
“She has a pretty fay-ace, she has a pretty fay-ace.”
It was really all I had.
I had an awful yellowing room with no posters,
a ratty-robed mother in curlers,
no breasts, no boyfriends, really no friends at all.
And I wasn’t smart.
But the face was like something I could build on.
My only moon, it, or the lovely idea of it,
would circle me by night, at a perfect speed.
You couldn’t be beautiful without one
(I knew that even then), so I had a small, but real hope,
and because of it, I could dream.
Did others dream what I dreamed?
Of course they did (I wasn’t that stupid),
but because of the face, I dreamed
more and bigger and better than they could.
I dreamed scandals and sequins, red carpets and street vents,
men with rough, experienced hands,
more diamonds than I had fingers for….
There were classrooms (certain ones in particular)
in which I was the new girl at school, except
I walked to my seat not as me,
but as Marilyn Monroe, in silence and heel-steps,
and felt heads turn as if for a bride.
I mapped the bleak side too.
I imagined fame’s worst parts. In my dreams,
I wore big sunglasses, pulled baseball caps low,
tugged un-washed hair into a ponytail.
I left lovers, fell down in public, attended funerals
wracked with grief, wearing no make-up.
I punched a cameraman at a funeral….
And I loved these dreams too.
And I’d replay them, my favorites, over and over,
cycling through them, like records,
amassing new details each trip around,
and soon they became something else I had.
I could be beautiful. And famous.
– But when I’d look at myself, really look at myself,
full-length, towel at my feet,
my heart would beat fast: I was just a fat girl….
But why waste time with the misery of that?
What’s the use re-shedding old tears?
They’re lousy ones anyhow. If the tears
were themselves fat, hot droplets of fat
that dribbled off my chin in pearls
and dried in patches on the floor like candle wax,
maybe then I’d cry. Actually, I’d cry for days on end.
I’d cry till I was thin again!
I’d cry with purpose! I’d weep my tears into a little hill,
then squeeze that hill into a candle.
I’d then stuff the candle, like a conquering flag,
into my next birthday cake, and let it burn
all the way down into the icing,
like a sun going down,
watched the entire way.
Oh, it’s these slow days that get me.
When there are no appointments to be fretted over,
or shoots or interviews to be prepped for,
and the clock-hands drag like a diner waitress’s feet,
(I was a diner waitress once),
that’s when I feel gone. I watch the clock (mine tics),
and beg my dumb pink phone to ring (you fucking thing!)
and think my stupid, crazy thoughts,
which begin either I should or What if,
(I should jog; I should make a list; what if I stretched
my stomach onto a cutting board, like a lower lip,
grabbed a knife and lopped it off? What if….))
then the sky turns white and the trees turn black,
and I… I take more drugs.
It just happened so fast.
It or "I," whichever applies:
one minute sixteen, pregnant and afraid,
the next learning a register in a Wal-Mart apron,
the next whirling around a cold bronze pole
on a platform at Gigi’s Cabaret.
I was too young to serve cocktails, still too fat
(though I’d lost weight) for a night slot,
shaking my clumsy body for the lunchtime sect.
They’d come and go, go and come, letting in
cracks of awful Texas sun,
ugly, blinking, face-scratching men: a type.
But I stripped my fucking heart out.
Oh, you should’ve seen me! Their eyes
would follow like babies’ eyes, mesmerized,
or like a dog’s eyes when you grip a biscuit.
I was their favorite. They said so,
and though the other girls said, “they’re just saying that,”
they weren’t just saying that.
There was a reason they liked me best;
they could tell I needed them;
they could tell I liked what their grabby little eyes,
by taking, could give.
Naturally, I took the older girls’ advice,
changed my name, bleached my hair, got implants,
but there was no “real me” to protect….
That was my secret.
No real me. And I flaunted it; I tossed it off in handfuls,
flung it out to everyone, anyone,
fluttering, dropping, like dollar-bills let go off balconies.
And I fucked too. I fucked like a collector.
True they were sleazy, greasy, small-minded men, losers,
and Gigi’s was a dump, but still
I etched pictures of myself
on their eyelids’ insides. Still I was there, floating,
when they took their wives from behind,
and stared around their boring rooms.
And I liked that too.
Every day I stripped; every day I fucked.
Then suddenly, because it felt sudden,
I’d stripped myself thin;
I had a body pretty as my face,
was being featured outside, on promo posters,
had rubber-banded shoeboxes packed with money,
was flashing strangers out limousine sun-roofs.
Men compared me to Marilyn,
and I saved these Marilyn comparisons into a stack
and marveled at them. It was happening;
and the mirrors said so too.
(But to whom? Whom was it happening to?
Did I dare call that woman me?)
And then...and then...around when Playboy
found and flew me away,
I met Mr. J. Howard Marshall,
who was old; I’d never seen someone so old;
it was like he’d exited oldness altogether,
like when you out-drive a radio station’s reception,
and the station frays into pure fuzz. I peered
at him like a mantis, as if he couldn’t see;
Who or what was he
with his old-man nose and spotted head and wheelchair,
with his ten-gallon hat and folded ears?
Well, he was a big deal, that’s what!
He was rich, and the strippers spoke of him
like a prince. They sighed at my questions:
“Seeer-yuss Annar? Yunh dunno who JAY Howard Marshall iz?”
Then suddenly we were engaged,
this old guy and me.
He’d cock back his head like a baby bird,
wheezing, wanting kisses.
What could I do? I kissed him and kissed him,
left dutiful red smooch-prints
all over him like a napkin. I swam
lap after lap in his pool, tips of my hair wet,
till he drooled himself asleep on deck,
warm as an old tire, except breathing.
Or was he? A fear about that would crank up
and distract me more each lap,
as if my pool-laps were the units fear grew in.
I could see the headlines:
PLAYMATE SWIMS FOR HOURS
UNAWARE BILLIONAIRE HUSBAND IS DEAD,
and feel people circling, again,
as if with black magic markers, my sad parts,
my stupidity, my incompetence.
Then he’d die! I’d burst, slap my wet palms on the edge,
push myself up, run over to him,
and until I slid a confirming finger under his nose,
he actually was dead.
He was dead in my head – no, he was dead
in my whole body, all through me,
out to my shaking hands and contracting toes.
But my heart, in the steady heat, after a talking-to,
would quiet; I’d laugh.
The feeling that I was alone (stronger even
for the fact I technically wasn’t)
would spread out to his estate’s natural borders,
the house, the far-off wall of trees,
the wagging glossy leaves blazing white in the sun.
I’d feel myself perfectly unseen.
I would breathe and breathe, and feel fine again.
God was that a house.
Space! So much of it! I loved it. He loved it,
and he loved me. But that I loved him
is what no one ever believes. For me
there’s never been much difference between
being loved and loving. Is that odd?
Maybe, but I had my little Daniel to think of.
I have always had
my little Daniel to think of.
Daniel, you’ve been comfortable, isn’t that so?
I’ve been a good mother, haven’t I, in my way?
Didn’t I give you the newest toys, once I could?
You can’t be honest; you can’t with me; I know.
Daniel, my best decision and my baby always,
the hairs in my locket, the teeth
in my jewelry box, my snotty nose,
my macaroni necklace and arms-up little boy;
Daniel who is the life preserver
(I’m certain) making a blurry circle on the water’s surface
in my recurring dream, who still slips
and calls me “Mommy,” who is the reason
I smile; Daniel who is practical, Daniel who is tall,
Daniel who asks my opinion of his new goatee,
who, when I’m swaying drunk or in a mood,
tells me I don’t need to apologize,
waving me off. But I do. I need to;
I’ve been a shit mother.
I’ve spent so much time so fucked up.
I am so…so fucked up.
And I know it! Don’t lie to me! Don’t say I’m not!
Because then I can’t be sorry,
and I’m sorry for it all,
sorry for the flashbulbs and the tabloids and the men,
for the times I turned on the TV and left,
for what you saw at night when you opened my door,
(sometimes I didn’t even stop)
for telling you my own mother wanted me,
before you were you, to “take care of you,”
for squeezing your palm so hard at the courthouse,
that you couldn’t be my constant concern
(although you were the reason
I first walked along a highway shoulder to Gigi’s,
the reason I blew a limp “octogenarian”
(as he called himself) in a motorized chair.)
Or maybe I’m wrong about that too.
Maybe I’ve been wrong about it all.
Maybe what I had in mind when I made my decisions
was only my idea of you,
which might mean I confused you into me
– a fat girl with a closet of empty, chiming hangers.
It’s no use; I can’t un-do, cant un-do.
No matter how I wring my hands, my decisions
hang like clouds that won’t dry out
or move. And I’m sorry, in advance, for the future
which I stare at like a sea
because there’s still a sea between the sunset and me.
Thirty-eight is young.
Daniel, you say it’ll be fun
growing old together, that sixteen years isn’t much,
and the gap is closing fast. I agree;
I nod in agreement, but then you leave.
You go off to live.
Alone in my pink room, on my pink couch,
in my stupid pink room, on my stupid pink couch,
your cruise-ship shuffleboard courts
curl at the corners and blow away.
My mind won’t stay.
I stare at some gold-framed photo of me,
and I’m already older than I pictured I’d be,
one year older than Marilyn,
with wrinkles cob-webbing my eye corners,
wrinkles marching from my mouth corners,
wrinkles that make me fear sun, fear laughter.
Mirrors are back to being walls
which I bang my swollen head against, thinking,
trying to find a solution,
a way to twist my story toward a happy end.
But then I’m off course, fantasizing again.
I think, like one about to be fired,
I should flip my lid, go bananas, roll down the long hill
dizzily. (I’m rich enough, I think,
to be labeled “eccentric.”)
I’ll retire my breasts, mount them on a plaque,
maybe two plaques,
and have filmed conversations with them.
I’ll propose marriage to the mailman, lipstick-print
the citizens’ bills with kisses,
parade him in uniform for the paparazzi.
I’ll eat till the couch tips up on one end,
scissor my wedding dress into a bib.
I’ll dye the pool in the back pink,
and live inside it, like a fish.
Yes. That’s it. I've come to it.
A few buckets of food coloring, a coat of pink paint,
and on incoming airplanes, captains will say,
“Down below, you’ll see a pink pool,
property of Anna Nicole Smith;
she sits, all day, on the bottom of it.”
And the tourists will point and murmur,
foreheads pressed to the plastic panes,
and there my pool will be,
glaring up, unblinking,
like a badly photographed eye.
“She’s completely nuts!” they’ll agree.
“She is as nuts as we are not!”
(Just as I was pretty as you were not.)
– But who is the captain and who are “they”?
And isn’t the view from the plane mine too,
taken from that first flight into L.A.,
when I gaped at the dots of blue,
at the circles and ovals and rectangles of blue,
and imagined dying beautifully.
-Matthew Yeager - Spring 2003, Fall 2007
from Rocket Surgery, NYQ Books, forthcoming
Matthew Yeager's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere, as well as in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2005 and 2010, The Strategic Poet, and Inquisitive Eater. "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment," his micro-budget short film, was an official selection at eleven film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up three awards. Other distinctions include the Barthelme Prize in short prose, multiple fellowships to MacDowell and Yaddo, and inclusion in Oprah magazine’s “Top 50 Love Poems of All-Time.” The co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series since 2011, Yeager worked in the NYC catering industry for fourteen years in various capacities: truck driver, waiter, sanitation helper, sanitation captain, bartender, bar captain, lead captain, producer. His first book, Like That (Forklift Books, 2016) received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly. His second book, Rocket Surgery, is forthcoming with NYQ books. He is currently a doctoral fellow at the University of Cincinnati, where he lives with the poet Chelsea Whitton and their cats Merle and Dolly.
The New York School Diaspora (Part 45) Matthew Yeager
When, as a student, I romantically, sentimentally dreamed of writing the voices of lonely women who, I imagined floated above us, departed but still yearning to be heard, I was not thinking of Anna Nicole Smith.
Any reading of this poem would do well to start with a definition of “lamentation”: “The passionate expression of grief or sorrow; weeping.” This Biblical word seems an odd fit with its speaker, a disgraced queen of pop culture; but it aptly reminds us that her griefs are age-old and continually shared.
In Matthew Yeager’s brilliant dramatic monologue, comprising a partial autobiography, Anna Nicole Smith is simply herself; her voice unforced, perfectly colloquial. She is the Lana Turner of O’Hara’s “Poem,” but she has gotten up, and is talking, her voice carrying some of Robert Creeley’s forthrightness in “I Know a Man” (that beyond-succinct portrait of cultural malaise): “John, I / /sd, which was not his / name. . . .”
“The Ongoing Lamentation of Anna Nicole Smith” carries an epigraph from Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray; and indeed, the poem is very much about the fragility of beauty:
I stare at some gold-framed photo of me,
and I’m already older than I pictured I’d be,
one year older than Marilyn,
with wrinkles cob-webbing my eye corners,
wrinkles marching from my mouth corners,
wrinkles that make me fear sun, fear laughter.
We know how the subjective “old” of thirty-eight can be oddly more convincing than the genuine “old” of seventy or eighty. “Older than I pictured I’d be” emphasizes the terrible power of the self-assessing gaze:
Mirrors are back to being walls
which I bang my swollen head against, thinking,
trying to find a solution,
a way to twist my story toward a happy end
What an astute portrayal of the our impulse, when the worst has happened, to retrace steps, somehow arrive at a benign outcome.
While giving us a woman’s identity via her pink possessions, her avid needs, the poem also gives us a portrait of fame, which is nothing if not a succession of mirrors:
I could even get those mirrors
like the ones they have in the cop movies,
that can be seen through in one direction. That way,
people outside could enjoy the room,
and I’d never have to give any of it up
or look at their faces. I’d stare at the mirrors,
and the people would think I was staring at them
and would wonder how I stayed
so expressionless. Poise, they would think,
and grace. I would like that…
We are far into Anna Nicole’s account of her life, with its riotously funny impersonations of her fellow strippers, and chillingly comic descriptions of second husband “J. Howard Marshall,” fresh nonagenarian, “warm as an old tire, except breathing. / Or was he?” when we discover the poem’s primary addressee: her son.
Maybe, but I had my little Daniel to think of.
I have always had
my little Daniel to think of.
She offers Daniel this blunt, sad apology:
I’ve been a shit mother.
I’ve spent so much time so fucked up.
I am so…so fucked up.
The poem, far from idealizing its speaker, gives us a woman buffeted by emotion, drugs, or both into serially idealizing and de-idealizing herself. She is both “fat girl with a closet of empty, chiming hangers” and beauty’s would-be apotheosis.
The story of a single mother leveraging her breasts, her face, to provide for a child is classically American; Anna Nicole (not her real name) is, in William Carlos Williams’ phrase, “a pure product of America,” the mirroring world crazing her in its glass. Not yet done for, she exuberantly imagines taking charge of the process (in lines that faintly recall Gregory Corso’s “Marriage”):
I should flip my lid, go bananas, roll down the long hill
dizzily. (I’m rich enough, I think,
to be labeled “eccentric.”)
I’ll retire my breasts, mount them on a plaque,
maybe two plaques,
and have filmed conversations with them.
I’ll propose marriage to the mailman, lipstick-print
the citizens’ bills with kisses,
parade him in uniform for the paparazzi.
The voice, magically ferocious and Ortonesque in its dark comedy of body parts, emerges from Matthew Yeager’s ear for speech and his mastery of what might be termed the demotic iamb—an uber-loose echo of rhymed iambic verse, both taut and springy. (I’m told that Kenneth Koch sometimes spoke to classes in improvised iambs.) If, as my brilliant, Yvor-Winters-influenced poetic forms teacher, John Williams (the posthumously famous author of Stoner), declared, Wallace Stevens wrote “parasitic” verse, Matthew Yeager’s is epiphytic, drawing sustenance from whiffs of metrical tradition.
The great astonishment of this poem, for me, is that there is no telegraphing or show-through of the poet’s own sensibility. It is not Matthew Yeager speaking for Anna Nicole Smith. It is Anna Nicole Smith, in the same way that John Berryman’s Mistress Bradstreet is Mistress Bradstreet, and Randall Jarrell’s housewife, sad among supermarket shelves of “Joy” and “Cheer,” is that housewife. In other words, the poem animates the speaker; the speaker animates the poem.
But there are tricks, tricks to scare the fears into holes,
sayings I can say into myself any time,
as if started up by a doll’s tugged string.
I just say, "Vickie," putting on my Texas twang,
“Vickie," which is my real name, "Shut up;
at least you were beautiful once.
How few in the world get to be.”
Anna Nicole Smith is, in Matthew Yeager’s expansive “The Ongoing Lamentation of Anna Nicole Smith,” the architect of her own identity, despite all. Her voice, at poem’s end, is antic and poignant, as she imagines eating “till the couch tips up on one end”; imagines a pink swimming pool, “Property of Anna Nicole Smith,” “like a badly photographed eye”; imagines being “captain” of her fate; remembers framed lozenges of blue, like face shapes: “circles and ovals and rectangles,” she saw when first descending into LA. Like her favorite “real gold-plated frame” at the poem’s start.
And isn’t the view from the plane mine too,
taken from that first flight into L.A.,
when I gaped at the dots of blue,
at the circles and ovals and rectangles of blue,
and imagined dying beautifully.
There’s morbidity inherent in being an icon, a coldness that courts eternity. The young actor had looked forward to a romantic demise—like Harlow’s perhaps—a tenuous wasting, a doom. We are left with her foreknowledge of her sad, confused, unglamorous fate; and a thought: knowledge isn’t always power.
-Angela Ball
Janice Erlbaum participated in the group reading we did for "The Best American Erotic Poems" at KGB Bar on March 10. 2008. She read her sestina ("The Temp") from the book, but time constraints stopped her from reading a second sestina, which she has posted on her own blog and which you will find below, along with a few prefatory sentences from Ms. Erlbaum.
