The Godfather Returns to Color TV

The lit night glares like a day-glo strawberry,

the stakeout car beside the hydrant is full of feds,

and the ikon of our secret hero(ine?), atop the

feckless funnypaper mesa we try to live in, is that

poor dumb indestructible super-loser Krazy Kat.

O Innocence, spoiled Guinea Brat!—after whose

fits of smashing and screaming, O Holy Mother,

All-American Girl, I need you, I want

to protect you: after that one sunstruck

glimpse, on a Sicilian mountainside,

of virgin stupidity, its sensual lockbox

so charged with possibilities of being

that we too tremble at the thought of nakedness,

of marriage, we too burn to build a shrine for,

raise armies to protect a property that history

godfathered dumb. I told you: DON'T ASK

QUESTIONS ABOUT MY BUSINESS! While the old

bull in a new world, who's lost respect,

too-big pants bunched underneath the belly, stumbles

expiring past the staked tomato vines,

and the grandchild thinks for a minute he's

only playing, we know he is, admiring

Marlon Brando in a show of weakness. But the blood

isn't all ketchup, or the weekend all football, nor

do all commodities survive in lighted shrines.

O Italy! Imagine Eros reinvented on that hillside

as Giovanni di Paolo did—a passeggiata

where men and women walk into the day ungoaded,

unprotected, unenshrined—while we make do, stranded

on this day-glo mesa, with its epicene cartoon.

Source: The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (Penguin Random House LLC, 1997)