Vida Nova, Los Angeles
A house like this has rooms you’d never enter,
rooms for wrapping gifts, those ritual
weapons of exchange the global rich bestow
because they love to see themselves reflected
in each other’s eyes. At sixty thousand feet
it’s just a third smaller than the Sun King’s
palace at Versailles, but newer owners
need a tutelage in the great lesson of excess:
Who can live in such ungovernable space? When even
many residents are dropped into a maison bigger than a mall,
they sometimes flounder in their rushing affluence.
Versailles had hundreds of servants,
sometimes thousands of guests. Anyone with a rented coat
could watch the King eat supper from his golden plates.
Now the owner-class monogram their entry gates,
iron letters readable only when locked, and still
the clouds will wander carelessly away,
bearing their little plunder of the dew.
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Heat Index
Summer mornings my husband fills the house
with CSPAN comments on the latest news — the proletariat’s hot take
on masking, emails, and the Supreme Court. Marie Antoinette will stay in bed
if she’s not up before the talk comes on. Why quibble with the dead?
The world she knew is just as lost as ours. You’d make a decent queen,
she purrs, gentling the remote in her white royal hands
to summon up the Property Bros. Who cares which one is Drew
and which is Jonathan? They share the pecs and mannequin teeth
of modern princes, would never try to make her sweat without a/c
the way I do, clocking the thermostat to nearly ninety,
collapsing Marie’s lavish coif against her cheek before I’ll click
the magic of cold summer wind. Marie despises
talk of climate change. We all live in a dying time, she says. And I respond,
The Scott boys, look, and power up the air. For if I don’t,
I know I’ll hear her whole sad tale again,
queen in the Tower praying her little boy survives.
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Teaching Marie Antoniette to Drive
— Her dainty foot takes quickly to the gas —
— It’s the whip she’s wanted —
— We lurch out from the drive as though the car
might rear on its hind legs —
— Who will stop us in this grand machine of shining chrome —
— Is it so much, she asks, to be powerful and free —
— Bigger than ourselves & we can own the road with what
we drive—
— I too love coming and going — — Will pause to curse
the idle drivers who detain me — — Gros cons, the lot,
Marie is quick to add —
— She turns her jealous eye towards bigger cars until she sees a Hummer on the road —
—Oh untouchable glory—
— Portable fortress — Bulletproof windows — Leather seats — Wheeled throne —
— Yes, yes, that’s what she wants, to be so far removed —
— What else will keep our children safe —