They have a velvet rope across the stairs.
I have to leave him alone up there,
dreaming trompe l’oeil clouds on the hallway
ceiling, dreaming his bedroom blue,
“the darkest blue there is,” dreaming black
furniture. Leave him in his midnight with Jesus
on the easel by his bed; pass by the upper
landing, raised like hairs on my neck,
like a few bars of music climbing
and dissolving in front of me. Leave him with his
sleep-mask on, windows blacked out.
Leave him in his giant quiet, his woman
or no woman, his restless sheets. Go on
with my tour, go on convincing myself
that if I were allowed upstairs, I’d retrieve
years of my life, that I could walk in
on the years so quietly they’d let me sit down
and think how to live with their hard facts.
Lisa Marie Presley spits her peas
into the wastebasket, knots up like a pea
in the fruitwood jungle chair, “so big that a window
had to be removed to bring it in,”
Priscilla says on the tape. I know
how she curls to abandon the world, the kitchen
voices. How you climb down the chambered nautilus
of yourself, room after room. How the first dream
you have is a flicker of light on a curve.
You could name it Michael Jackson because
it is a cool dancer, pale-faced, androgynous:
perfect mother and father, not
breaking plates in the kitchen. You watch
your supposed love-light dance, refuse
to be caught, flare cold as panther eyes. In your future
of dreams he breaks free from a dense upholstery
of jungle leaves. You can never touch him.
Your factual life diverts, trying. You think
you’re going straight, but then again, you’re here.
There she is, dozens of her in unison,
stepping down to Elvis’s basement pool room,
stepping through her multiple facets down
to the original, who is stepping onto the now-extinct
running board and into the Ford forever,
not dancing to the radio but climbing in
deliberate as an old woman, gathering her skirt
before the age of jeans, gathering herself
for the long sleep of sex, the ragged
lawns of Garland Street strewn behind her,
the music inside the houses stuck
the way music stays with the insane,
or people with Alzheimer’s: “Mack the Knife,”
“Venus,” “Lavender Blue,” “Teenager
in Love,” “Come Softly to Me,” and so on.
Beyond the Ozark Mountains, Alaska and Hawaii
become states. Nixon debates Khrushchev,
Castro takes over in Cuba. She steps
into the car as if into church, the closed eyes
of the center, the dark from which things wake,
if they can, if they sense the slightest break.
You’re supposed to think on something
by the curved brick wall with Spanish
windows, cupping the two steps down
through Roman columns to the graves
where Elvis, Grandma, Vernon, Gladys,
and Jesse’s little marker fan out
like bracelet charms below. Signs
of presences stand everywhere. Jesus
stretches out his arms to St. Francis
in cowl and hood, to a black river goddess
and a white one with an Elvis-nose.
Cherubs bow their wings. A naked
blackened angel holds an empty pot
beneath his arm. No one knows
what lives inside the hollows of this world,
lip-synching from the other one.
Might as well include a pantheon
of gods, the whole shebang, just in case.
No sign’s trivial: Aaron’s engraved
with double a’s on Elvis’s grave.
If he were really dead and buried,
the story goes, wouldn’t they
have spelled it right—with just one a?
Didn’t I believe Whitman when he said
“look for me beneath the soles of your feet”?
Didn’t I believe the former husband
who said “I’ll haunt you forever”? But one
positive note: I’ve kept singing the old
songs in my lousy voice until they don’t
even recognize themselves. And who’s
to say who’s right, with all the cover-
versions since? Whose song
would you say “Blue Suede Shoes” is,
for instance, Carl Perkins’s or Elvis’s?