On the rolling hills of the la-la lands, you just go in
To Villa dei Papiri, a rising into Elysium, a nest
Befitting Hadrian, painstakingly imagined, of how
To live at last like a human being (Nero’s words)
Under Vesuvius, the dangerous, before the underground spoke,
To leave us one man’s fantasy, emanated from J Paul’s will,
A villa he never saw himself, as he last set foot in California in 1951,
Before too much was made of his fortune.
We pulled a J Paul move inside
Parking he wanted to be free, our poetically correct handicap tag
Hung so we could snag some electric car charge and walked
Down the amphitheater seats surrounded by his silent quotes,
As he would have spoken here, to no one.
He bought Doheny’s interests after his disgrace at Teapot Dome,
Never thinking a few bribes would cause such grievance
Even if his friend’s name was Fall, who he’d stolen from before.
The Feds had forced his son to say how the money was delivered
Via a partner that was the son’s secret lover (it was whispered)
And both son and lover ended up murdered by the same gun, same day,
The son who followed him and learned the blood business,
Whose name still echoes in the wind of Dana Point and down
“Dead Man’s Curve,” “Surfin’ USA” – But the wind in California
Always changes, and J Paul, student of the way things move,
Specialized in those who fall with the wind,
How losers are always a bargain.
So it was with Doheny, in the teeth
Of the Great Depression. He must have been an easy mark,
This man accustomed to drill other's milkshakes direction-ally,
And J Paul in his rumpled suit, sweater out at the elbows,
Who chewed every single bite of food 33 times,
Wore his pedometer ‘til bed time and missed not a thing –
He could see in the flat land strain of locomotive
There was oil under Santa Fe Springs, and how to hide it
From the ones who did the work and the ones who paid.
Why reveal what you know when you come to know everything?
“The person who,” as he said, referring to information,
“Had the most got the most.”
J Paul’s entourage is just inside,
From the 26th Egyptian dynasty, in 2026, 100 years
After taking charge of his father’s company, as if he was
Amenhotep (who looks like J Paul here himself)
And wants to remember the golden days
Too crudely reconstructed in this unrefined time and place
When the desert holds the flow of chambers turning
As if the force to submit was as natural as the Nile.
He’s held in a portal by the supervisor of secrets, who held access
To restricted truth locations where the oil sometimes lived
And serpents ruled, and his particular kind of currency
Was respected,
The Third Intermediate Period, of Saite priests,
Kushite rulers, winged cats glazed by inter-galactic awe who throw
Their tongues out in surrender as a big-headed alien stands
At the door and Ptolemy looks nervous, Nakhtherheb kneels
In reverence, Hemnetjerhornebkhaset holds the portal shrine,
Eyes in pure devotion, as the priest at Mut, Controller of the
Estates tends like goats the sons of Horus: a falcon,
Baboon and jackal – like J Paul’s own sons, powerful
When controlled. And there is the royal treasurer,
“Beloved sole companion to the king,” his left arm no longer there,
A tattoo of wormhole instruction embossed upon his heart
And a bird in a cage on his arm. He toughs it out, seeing what is not
As if it is, but he serves anyway, loves the truth anyway,
And two blue Ushabtis animate to perform labor for owners
Who hold – not scythes – electric manifestation rods
That trip the light language hieroglyph fantastic
Rich with symbols, ore and reference,
Metaphysical doubling in every verb.
Wings are chiseled into the chest of Nesisut,
The keeper of the storehouse, who knows the price of everything,
Knows how to say nothing, even in his sarcophagus,
For Re takes him too across the sky as morning Khepri,
The procession of the dead, of the walking to the light,
Each one holding an ankh – at the end of the line,
The magician doubles as serpent high priest
Who manifests instantly.
So it is in every reimagined room,
Where a vast emporium of lives has materialized
From incarnation, imagination, fantasy, thin air,
As from a wand not unlike the one that divines oil.
It clears the way for one last hero’s victory lap
Just as a gray gentleman in pastel colors walks by
Eyes charged with the idea that he too is J Paul
And this is his perfect fountain, the one all others are based on,
White-eyed muses catching what the winds bring,
Their black bodies shadow the water, giver of life
That flows everywhere the ear can hear,
Ripples like the dragon scales of reality as they bend.
Busts of poets surround the horti’s geometrical shrubs,
Gardens of cat thyme and sorrell, lamb’s ear, burgundy plum –
Such are the cultivations of a Roman – a Draconian
And his fountain, the richest motherfucker in the crib.
One can practically taste the Tivoli marble
Extracted from the purest veins, lines like fine calligraphy
Engraving histories no one has seen.
Apollo with his hollow eyes,
Unthreateningly naked, smiling, Endymion blessed
With the love of sister moon, Young Bacchus
Finding such truth in concoction his whole worldview turned.
All the faces set in stone are some liege of mind to J Paul,
Some mode of feeling his way through, just like Jupiter
In the center of the room, vibing the truth enough to not have to
Bark orders.
There’s Commodus, infamous for his cruelty,
Impassive with a boa’s gaze, Salus the physician
With a snake and an egg, then a murder of soldiers
Attuned to the right move to take, their best weapon their eyes
Guarding a line of philosophers holding not speaking
What they have realized: Epicurus trying to free himself
From fear, Demosthenes expressing the inexpressible curse
Of knowing how everything works but never why.
Caligula looks like a decent chap,
Almost a frat boy in here out to avenge his many unhealed wounds
Amid J Paul’s exquisite visions of heaven, Corinthian ledgers,
Ibis lyres, the “Griffin warrior” found underground,
A DNA hybrid half-eagle, half-lion, the blank-slate messiah
Who the Minoans gathered like the Magi around,
A human in divine form, and vice-versa.
But the lion always attacks
The do-good griffin, the bad half always vies for supremacy.
Force needs to overcome acuity, as J Paul tried to be
His own divine female, as he liked to play himself at chess.
But no matter how longingly he looked from the coast of oil mosquitos
At the sublime he left behind, no matter what portal he spied
In the beehives, what gold foil, blue glass jewelry,
He could not help but reach the shore an argonaut –
Pelagic octopi – who made it his business to be everywhere,
To choke off supply points, convince himself
If he only knew each route the boats would take
He could meet every navy with the force of his no,
That could see and yet resist, for kept men
Don’t know themselves enough to see ahead.
As with columns
So with soldiers – precision-measured expenditures
Subjugate any stone, and history will remember you,
Surveyor of all you control, on griffin-drawn chariot,
A freak of nature with a terrifying shriek,
Who swoops down in a way impossible to stop,
Who thinks that by knowing, the heart will be humbled,
But it’s always hurt, and money once used for fuel
Is always repurposed as poison
On any relation not built on
Unyielding obedience.
“I would give all my millions for lasting marital success” …
But not enough liquidity to save his 12-year-old son Timmy
From a brain tumor (and whose funeral he didn’t as custom attend)
Or his grandson Paul, famously, with ear Van Gogh’d
In brandied tourniquet to prove he wasn’t like his son,
Who did heroin with the Rolling Stones in Morocco
While his mistress OD’ed, or his other son, his “Vice President
Of Failure” who took his life at 43, or his other, favored son
Who had a secret second family …
Ah the irony,
These children would inherit J Paul’s father’s wealth
Because old George kept it from him, to teach his son
That lesson people born with everything never learn.
It went to his mom, but he could never separate
His business affairs from her as he would have liked.
When someone called him out for trading her a dry well
For access in the Kettleman Dome she only smiled,
Replied “isn’t he smart?”
There’s Agrippina the Younger,
Looking viperous as ever, her minions with snakes
For curls like roaring twenties girls he broke to break his heart.
And there’s Nemesis, the goddess of retribution,
Foot comfortably on the male head, who gazes almost lovingly
With the other women in stone who look on you adoringly
No matter what you say or do.
And they are all Faustina the Elder,
With medusa-snake hair, the mother wound softly resigned,
Staring down the room with ambivalence and scorn.
She’s goddess Minerva strategizing with pursed mouth
And Flavian curls her next move, then the emperor’s wife,
Unrepentant with snake bracelets, then the head
Of Antonia Minor holding the sadness of feminine victory,
Cups in forms of heads, women as goddesses, goddesses as women,
Women with cupids as if to conjure from stone the eternal elixir.
And his signature piece, Crouching Venus,
The one he worked hardest to pinch – he had the head reset
When convinced the placement was correct.
Forever in search, it seems
Of the muse that doesn’t blink, that sees through grief,
Finds the lost, holds the answer, knows things as they are.
A sarcophagus of muses carried you through –
They knew the music you had within you
And remembered the dreams you once really wanted –
Until your will got in the way.
The will of a boy, whose best mosaics came from public baths,
Who favored the Satyr always innocent, its smirk of being served,
Allowed to love.
He had lovers on an oil jar with a Scorpion lamp,
Wine cups of couples fucking, women drinking games of chance,
Mixing vessels appointed with Gods who loved humans:
Bacchus and Ariadne, Adonis and Aphrodite,
Silenius riding a wineskin at the Symposium
Where men can agree on women and the talk is no longer
Of Theseus slaying the Minotaur, Herakles wrestling lions.
He loved his comic figures,
Sought the Fool he never had, dwarf boxer, snake-legged giant.
And he loved the daily magic of flasks,
One for every hetaera, each prettier than the last,
Perfume vials that pulsed with lust, amulets of power
Charged with a manifester’s wand, of glass fine as it was marred,
Faded for peak redolence.
He never lived with these pearls.
He reserved them for us, to reveal who he was,
Beneath the veneer that had to be sand blasted.
Whatever kingdom this was in his mind,
Whatever past lives he self-medicated his karma,
He left himself the collector’s task to reconstruct
From what was ritualistically flung to be broken
What he could never bring to the surface from underground:
Etruscan portraits in the manner of the Egyptians,
Odysseus in the Underworld, the funeral boat of a wool merchant,
A pair of peacocks and crocodile genii of the hippopotamus God,
Bulls and insects on the pottery, beehives and seashells,
Statuette of a begging Lar tondo always hung in patrician homes,
Appliques in the form of the stars, Bactrian treasures of jaspar,
Torque with trumpet-shaped ends, goat’s head buckles,
Golden priest with bird, a Cycadean harp player
With that head that tells us we don’t have all the answers, even now.
J Paul retained the Methodist virtue
Of being all alone in the world, answerable to no one,
No matter how compelled they made it seem,
The mafia who kidnapped his grandson had no more stranglehold
Than Rockefeller cartel-chiseled, who conspired
To keep John Bull and Uncle Sam apart in the neutral zone,
But that was just the kind of prison J Paul walked right through,
To pay, with other people’s money, for the precision of Fortuna
To bless and curse him, may he learn to be worthy.
Of course there was a payphone,
By the restroom, a magnificent Roman bath.
He reveled in the tales of his miserliness,
It saved him the trouble of having to ask.
He claimed to read every letter from the down of low
Addressed to the richest man in the world claiming coin
In the name of Pathos, that higher vapour that Sir J Paul quaffed,
And their victimization was his vindication
Because everyone made their choice.
He made his, of course,
To not give in to the apple of temptation, the curse of compassion.
He iconoclastically laundered his own shirts to save soap money
For silk brocades, bergeres, Boucher’s most celestial tapestries.
When it came to business he believed, like the Japanese,
It was so unclean one had to reuse envelopes and paper
Yet he collected every issued Roman coin from
Mother Earth reclining to Constantine as Janus,
Fished from the cisterns and seas with the relish
Of a youthful numismatist, as if he had finally found
Tender that would hold forever its value.
Out across the peristyle lies the great Pacific ocean,
Above a painted bus in Malibu and the canyon’s blackened palms.
A drunken Satyr lounges at the end of the long pool
As Platonic solids in marble play chess with themselves
And Mercury faces the sea.
Paul, of course, lived near here,
Down the Mermaid beach of the Palisades above the Santa Monica
Wheel of Fortune pier. He had sent through channels instruction
On sex with a quadriplegic, but only gave her a cheap agate coaster
For all the healing she’d performed. She broke it heartbroken
Onto the floor, because everyone is a greater victim
And chooses how to respond.
When she first met Gail
She was dressed like a homeless person and, though no longer
On heroin still held a firm maternal force field over her alone,
Always desperate son, who by any objective measures
Had already gone to the birds. Why would one go to Hollywood
To recover from a such a Babylon, from such a notorious thing,
Such an object lesson in how love is not here?
Only under Vesuvius
Were the great Roman paintings unearthed, an isolated current
Of a road not taken, that lives on deformed and little known,
Imbuing like J Paul the emotion of absence into the obelisks
And cornices in empty, mostly unobtrusive space,
Exquisitely ordered as ornament and nothing else,
The barest minimal of vertex and plane to make peace
And still be liminal, harmonious with no true angle,
No lines symmetrical, no mark unintentional, milked of color
With beeswax, sap and dye until the richness of paint gleams pure
To express how it feels to be here,
How power is powerlessness, the strength to endure,
Emotions alive with awareness and nothing more.
The Getty's in the end lived up to the name
Of Gettysburg, addressing, their next generations, the needs of the lost,
As the oil of J Paul's donation still greases cultured palms
That may itch at that relief of grief, for a boy taken tragically
So that he – we – can console ourselves.
Olive trees are still for sale, to collectors.
