Three Poems by Hilary Menos

Double Silver Elvis

I’m in MOMA, on 53rd, just around the corner from Fifth,
looking at Warhol’s Double Elvis.
Elvis is looking over my left shoulder,
legs tensed, shoulders squared, gun drawn, eyes steady,
like every little boy playing the man.
He shoots from the hip. ‘Reach for the sky’ says Elvis.

The silver painted background under the silk-screen ink
is like a full-length mirror, slightly mottled.
I can almost see my own face in it.
Next to Elvis, a second, ghost Elvis.
The repeated image implies the flicker of the silver screen
and guy on guy action, maybe.

I hold out a hand to Silver Elvis
and he steps down from the vast stage of the unbroken prairie
onto the light oak laminate floor, shaking his legs out
and close up I see the sweat on his greasepaint,
smell the pomade on his pompadour. He’s smaller in real life
and not half as sexy.

He tells me how Bob Dylan finessed him from Warhol,
Dylan’s posse hustling him down the Factory freight elevator,
Warhol watching from a window several floors up
as they tied him to the roof of Dylan’s station wagon,
how he fetched $37 million at auction
ten years ago.

He starts to croon — ‘Are you lonesome tonight?’
Who does he think I am, Elizabeth Taylor?
I step into the vacant silver frame
and put my face where his face was. It feels good.
‘Fuck you, Double Silver Elvis,’ I say.
‘Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.’

Snake River Canyon Rocket Jump

Forget the actual Sky-Cycle, that jerry-rigged bucket of old bolts
lashed together with baler wire and wobbling on its scaffold,
the Hell’s Angels hired for security, the naked woman, the ‘irregular acts’,
the early release of the parachute and the spiralling dive into mud.

Forget the months of hype, the thin crowds, cancellations, no-shows —
the empty promise of John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Liz Taylor, the Queen.
Forget his walk, the crabbed stiff-hip hobble of the landmine victim,
crashes, comas, come-backs, all those bones broken.

Because this had it all — a man in a cape who was not afraid to die,
his old High School band resplendent in silver and purple,
his wife and kids at the canyon rim, granny sobbing quietly
as a hundred fresh-faced choristers sing ‘The Ballad of Evil Knievel’.

Blast off. Confusion. Suspense. Then he comes back alive
and just for one moment we all want to believe.

Spirit in the Sky

After the after-party has wound up
and Johnny Depp and John Wayne are long gone
to the next hot ticket in the next hot town,

men with trucks come to break down and take apart
the viewing lounge, the steel pole, the 400 kilowatt sound system
in a kind of reverse stop-frame animation.

And the grass unflattens itself from the weight of impressions,
and the horses approach, alert to the smell of cordite,
the fine print of ash on the mountain,

the echo of star mines in blue and red and gold,
silver salutes hitting the high white notes
and smoke trails like dead men’s fingers.

Here, now, standing in the valley, feeling the air still
shudder from the impact of the sonic boom,
I wonder what we’ve been sold.

Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem. She won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010 with Berg (Seren, 2009) and her pamphlet Human Tissue (Smith|Doorstop) was a winner in The Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition 2019-20. Her second collection is Red Devon (Seren, 2013) and her most recent pamphlet is Fear of Forks (HappenStance, 2022). She read PPE at Oxford, took an MA in poetry at MMU, and has worked as a student organiser, journalist, food reviewer, organic farmer, dramaturge, and builder’s mate. She is married with four sons and lives in France.