Midas

I surround myself with gold.  Yes, I have the magic touch.

My first act when I took possession of the palace

was to replace the drapes; you’ll notice

they’re in my signature gold shade.  My predecessor,

among his many shortcomings, had no sense of style

or spectacle.  I’ve drawn countless compliments, 

praising my perfect taste.  How did you come up with that? 

everyone asks.  And I tell them it’s a gift.

Women or drapes, I have an eye for beauty.

I see you are impressed.  But that’s just

the beginning.  Step into the royal bedroom, 

its walls festooned with yards of golden silk.  

That painting in the gilded frame above the bed, 

of my daughter turning into gold at the instant 

I touch her, is a genuine Appelles.  Isn’t she gorgeous?  

So sexy!  And if, perchance, you have need, 

take time to admire the gold fixtures on the toilet

and sink.  How they glitter in the light!  

Even the seat-belt buckles in my chariot

are gold-plated—and no doubt you’ve admired 

my initial in gold letters on my many properties. 

My name itself is golden (speaking figuratively, 

of course), which is why I’m besieged with requests 

to license various businesses. Steaks! A university!

My critics—jail them for treason!—claim all of this gold 

is a sign of idolatry and greed.  Or worse, that it’s tacky. 

But gold is good.  Those who lack it are losers,

and triumph is always my aim. Winning and gold

are cardinal elements of my brand.   

The Golden Rule, says the Wizard of Id,

comes down to this: “Those who have the gold 

make the rules,” which makes me a perfect fit 

for kingship.  People who study these things, historians, 

say I’m the finest king this country’s ever enjoyed, 

probably the greatest ever, anywhere in the world.

© Tony Russell, 2020

ARTIST-MOTHER; JUNKYARD-FATHER: BOTH HEROES

My mother’s colors swarmed over the canvas in her basement studio while I watched intoxicated by the smell of turpentine and oil paint.  I swarmed and am still swarming in those slathered lavish hues; some, though, were the night behind the lightning.  When her huge cat Sansloy, scared by a dog as she cuddled him, bit her deeply in the arm, she took no revenge and her bed remained his comfort.  It shames me to say that I did not justly value her soiled white collar husband, my father.  Dazed and lonely in a family of artists, he decided to paint half of what we owned in gold color, to honor his wife, making a golden small domain.  Our concrete steps became gold; our bronze gods holding a clock became gold; chairs and tables often turned gold.  But after he died I realized he saved his children and wife from homelessness.  His finicky investments fed us.  I am ashamed.  He was a better man than I after all and merited his wife more than I.

And his junkyard!  His brief treasured part ownership! S crap!  Yet what the heart discarded or forgot confirmed me as an artist. I owe him that as well as shelter.  As if Stella and Rauschenberg and the Merzbau and Frank O’Hara had baptized me!

At the age of five I climbed over my father’s junkyard fence constructed like entangled steel claws.  In temporarily fearless fierce reverie, I voyaged through what seemed like all the haughty toys we could not afford, mountain ranges of squashed rainbow plastic or tin giddy gizmos that now bored wised-up wealthy children.  I wallowed in mazes, fondled ousted wheels, weapons, torsos, wings, their still exciting insulted spectrums. Encouraged, I hopped into actual condemned automobiles and thrust myself in this one instance through the space-time continuum far outdistancing in those saurian motorless cars the starship Enterprise.  In increasingly scratchy fact, the mutant and quarantined metal around me was for me an alluringly hulking perhaps unidentified dinosaur.  I began to get cut.  I tried to ask help from a nice alien, a “gilt” birdbath.  I levitated, swaying in the lap of armless cast iron garden statues.  I began to get dented.  I skimmed through gravel and into the air on bicycle frames.  I saw sprawling art books.  I tumbled face down into a volume of Aubrey Beardsley.  Unfairly sudden, a jungle of pipes like a pile of anacondas unjokingly and unjustifiably surrounded me.  My daze was dear to me but dangerous.  I strayed bleeding and weeping for an unfunny mile until I came upon a highway like Lake Victoria.  A cop got me.  The sun remained amiably lavish overhead, slathering me with easy gold.

My father had almost lost me.  But I found sharp art and his junk endowed me with the bedazzled and dazzling wound of poetry. In that junkyard was everything that evaded nothingness for awhile, cowering or lowering or posing bravely.  I found the tangle that reveals hard dream and plush but worn reality.  I measured trashed treasure. Merciful mother!  She pardoned the cat!  She pardoned my fine father, finally.  I still inhale her oils.  But has art pardoned me?  Are you justly valued?

© Stephen Margulies, 2014

Junkyard cat
Photo by Downtown gal
from Wikimedia Commons