Read Nice Weather for Free Online Page B

buds of May uncurled
    On an ice-cold morgue slab, smilingly shaking loose their beautiful hair.
    London rains every day anyway.
    Paris is freezing. It’s May, but Rome is cold.
    Motorcycles being tested at the factory in Varese north of Milan are gray
    Victims screaming in place and can’t get out and won’t get sold.
    It’s the recession.
    It’s very weird in New York.
    Teen vampires are the teen obsession,
    Rosebud mouths who don’t use a knife and fork.
    Germany at first won’t save Greece, but really has to.
    It’s hot hot in parts of Texas, but rain drowns Tennessee, people die.
    It’s the euro. It’s the Greek debt. Greece knew
    It had to stop lying, but timeo Danaos, they’re Greeks, Greeks lie.
    Canoeing in the Ozarks with Pierre Leval: the rain came down so hard
    The river rose twenty-three feet in the predawn hours and roared.
    Came the dawn, there was improbably a lifeguard,
    There was a three-legged dog, the jobless numbers soared.
    Dreamers woke in the dark and drowned, with time to think this can’t be true.
    Incomprehensible is something these things do.
    They bring the Dow Jones into the Ozarks and the Ozarks into the EU.
    A raving flash flood vomits out of a raindrop. The Western world is in the ICU.
    Entire trees rocket past. One wouldn’t stand a chance in the canoe.
    A three-legged dog appears, then the guy it belongs to.
    You instantly knew
    You’d run into a hillbilly backwoods crazy, itching to kill you.
    Berlin and Athens, as the Western world flickers,
    Look up blinking in the rain and lick the rain and shiver and freeze.
    They open black umbrellas and put on yellow slickers
    And weep sugar like honeybees dying of the bee disease.

EGYPT ANGEL
    I’m not on your side, whichever side you’re on.
    My enthusiasm for Nasser is long gone.
    Hail, Hosni Mubarak, and farewell!
    There’s the old dictator dolt
    On TV, a contraption of dyed hair and hair gel.
    Angels in revolt
    Fill Tahrir Square. The angel Gabriel blows his horn
    To announce to the reborn: You’ve been born!
    And Koranically commands: Recite!
    Here are the things that are right!
    Day after day of secular celebration turns into night.
    Not too many people are killed.
    People are thrilled.
    I’m your fat King Farouk,
    Quacking poetry till I puke.
    I’m president and premier and sultan and emir—
    Prime minister and Sadat—
    And oh my God he’s been shot!
    I do nothing but think about you, dear.
    I think about you a lot.
    I revere
    The crypto-philo-Semite Anwar Sadat,
    And what he did, and in consequence the death he got.
    The third president of Egypt agreed to put up with Israel.
    He slithered through the Arabs like an eel.
    It did not go down well.
    The West oinked for oil and said please.
    The Western nations hung out backstage like groupies.
    They barked to be fed, like a seal.
    They stole anything they could steal.
    Anwar Sadat screwed the lightbulb of love into the socket
    Out loud in the dark in the middle of the night.
    Floaters swim by in my eye in the light.
    Darling, don’t doubt me, don’t knock it.
    I fold a linen handkerchief to make three points
    To fountain whitely toward you from my breast pocket.
    Point 1. My cornea detaches.
    Point 2. I have galloping myopia.
    Point 3. My cataracts won’t let me look at you.
    It’s lenticular astigmatism.
    It’s macular degeneration.
    A rainbow coalition of coition ejaculates
    A colorblind wine jelly of jism
    And every radical ism.
    White Europeans conceived these wretched Arab states,
    Now fictively becoming democrats.
    The breeze blows the blue of the sea
    Inland from Tripoli.
    Meet me in Tahrir Square.
    Righty-o, I’ll meet you there.
    Your Nile-green eyes gaze up at me from the pillow.
    Baby, you’re my crocodile Nile. You’re my Cairo.
    Tahrir Square is twirling like a dervish, spinning like a top.
    In Tahrir Square tear-gas canisters pop.
    My crocodile angel joins the