Self-Portrait In Secondhand Tuxedo Poem by Matthew Thorburn

One of Max Beckmann's flat black numbers-
just shy of midnight, shiny at the elbows,
on loan tonight to help me fit in here

in Bad Homburg, to hear that pale starling
Edda Green sing one more encore.
Headachy, last-call light: it splashes my hands

and face. Makes me squint. Out the window
snowflakes like wishes fall into the river.
Gone, gone. But inside, it's the fug of cigar smoke

the bartender cuts through. He halves
a lemon. See his stippled chin, his too-big knife
you can see your face in? Pince-nez

and pinstripes- that's Uncle Otto, his silver
ear trumpet clamped under his arm.
Cuff links or creme brulee or Katya

like a cream puff in her poufy white dress-
I want something to be nostalgic for
even if it's new to me. Like bald Boris

Someone-or-other, his wreath of smoky hair
tipped low over one ear, and the exiled Count,
he recounts his change. Ha ha. What a pair

of black-pants'd hobnobbers. And such
blue-stockinged gals: Greta and Inga in inky
silks, slinky satins. And now Johanna's bellied up

to the bar, one elbow winged out, and bless
her, just starting to show. She glows
like a Madonna or first-time drinker of beer.

And here's young Gunter slouched at the bar, cheek
to oak, sawing logs. And Magda with her teeth
out and Uncle Otto with a hiccup, they clink

drinks. Now he's breathing a sweet
something in someone's ear (only her ear
makes it into the picture) and there's

hardly room for me to pull up a stool
in this last corner I'm shading in: my antsy hands,
my waistcoat pooching out over my waist.

I'm keeping company tonight with the bust
of Charlie Darwin, that lush. He sniffs
the pale bud in my button-hole. I shoot

my cuffs like a grand seigneur. My heart's
too big tonight to fit on my sleeve.
Hey Klook, hey John Lew, what are you

doing here, besides watching me watching
Inga tuck her money clip back into her brassiere?
Besides lighting candles on a cake I hope

is for me? And Greta, I haven't forgotten you-
I spy a stripe of pink slip strap peeking out
as you make a beeline for the LADIES. Look at you

lollipopping along in blues and pinks.
I'm snagged in all the tiny Ss of your hair.
Now how'd that happen? Somewhere

between the moon and the half-moon
of your face caught in the bar's waxy shine
there's a clue. If absence makes the heart grow fonder

then get lost. Then get a clue- another one.
Dear Max, if only our siecle weren't so far
from its fin. If we could pin a name to our

nameless decade: The Oh-ohs? The Zeros?
The Aughts or Naughts? But nothing's caught
on yet. And now Miss Edda's singing

and there's nothing doing but to listen to her sing:
Call me the ice in your glass- the jiggle, the jingle.
And you, you're my jigger of gin. But man,

how we fiddle. We fiddle and cling. Cling-
stupidly, don't we, to the day before yesterday?
As if it were still here, just the other side

of this foggy window where I sign
my name. How I'd love to leave- fly, fly,
slip away out the back. But there's never a fire,

no, never a fire escape when you need one.