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"Grayson
was an EMPHATIC Woman,"
The old theatre queen told me,
Blue contact lenses flashing
Like living amethysts in the candlelight.
Hieratic
Her silhouette turns Through the veils of sleep,
Her smile wide,
Deep,
In the afternoon of my dreams. "Darling! How divine of you to
visit!"
She murmurs, a distracted
Starling
At life's glittering banquet.
One nervous hand
Flies over the ashtray:
We perch
On a French divan
An island of silver-grey
Floating amidst walls illimitable
Of dapple carmine, and gilded angels;
The Biedermeyer chairs
Like the abandoned thrones
Of a dead Byzantine queen.
"Scene!" she gasps. "Where's the
script?"
A rolling laugh, a gasp-=-nails clipped
Severely short, her hand,
Imperious, bestows a benison
Around me, and the room.
Mementi of mores and manners,
Colors pale, bare, firm,
The silken Chinese banners
Trail their florid blaze
Across our laps, hers and mine;
Suddenly delicate, one finger
White as alabaster, lingers
Over a sacred crane, sigil of blessed rebirth.
"Is it
Genuine?" she asks. Curious question; as I
hesitate,
She comments, "DV
Always claimed FAKING it
Was better in the end, you see."
(Invoking that queen
Of artifice, Diana Vreeland, fashion maven
Supreme
Whom she played in her 1966 French film.)
Without making it
Too final, I tell her,
"Whoever made it
Had vision and beauty--
Things you've shown us, with authority,
Create an authenticity
Peculiarly their own."
Pensively, she sips
Her scotch, ponders, smokes her cigarette,
And nods (the light on her face
Made her skin look almost as pale and delicate as
lace):
"It is enough."
She smiles, waves a wreath of smoke,
Arabesque,
About that room,
And takes
A final puff.
NOTES. This poem was based on
two dreams I had at various periods when I was
doing intensive research on Grayson's career. The
setting of our conversation is her New York
apartment as it was decorated in the Sixties and
Seventies. The lead in to the dream is drawn from
a conversation I had with an old gentleman who
used to see Grayson at parties. Grayson and Sam
collected a lot of Oriental antiques, and Sam
still has some of these pieces on display in
their country house. In her 1966 French film, Who
Are You Polly Maggoo?, Grayson played a fashion
magazine editor based upon Diana Vreeland, who
was then the Editor of Vogue magazine and a
powerful figure in the international fashion
scene.
In Chinese art the crane is a
symbol of immortality or of rebirth in paradise.
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