As you undress you sing out, and your voice is magnificent
because now you believe it is the first human voice
heard in that room.
The garments you let fall grow into vines.
You climb into bed and recover the flesh.
You close your eyes and allow them to be sewn shut.
You create an embrace and fall into it.
There is only one moment of pain or doubt
as you wonder how many multitudes are lying beside your
body,
but a mouth kisses and a hand soothes the moment away.
I 51
O W N I N G E V E R Y T H I N G
For your sake I said I will praise the moon,
tell the colour of the river,
find new words for the agony
and ecstasy of gulls.
Because you are close,
everything that men make, observe
or plant is close, is mine:
the gulls slowly writhing, slowly singing
on the spears of wind;
the iron gate above the river;
the bridge holding between stone fingers
her cold bright necklace of pearls.
The branches of shore trees,
like trembling charts of rivers,
call the moon for an ally
to claim their sharp journeys
out of the dark sky,
but nothing in the sky responds.
The branches only give a sound
to miles of wind.
With your body and your speaking
you have spoken for everything,
robbed me of my strangerhood,
made me one
with the root and gull and stone,
and because I sleep so near to you
I cannot embrace
or have my private love with them.
52 I
You worry that I will leave you.
I will not leave you.
Only strangers travel.
Owning everything,
I have nowhere to go.
I 53
T H E P R I E S T S A Y S G O O D B Y E
My love, the song is less than sung
when with your lips you take it from my tonguenor can you seize this firm erotic grace
and halt it tumbling into commonplace.
No one I know can set the hook
to fix lust in a longing look
where we can read from time to time
the absolute ballet our bodies mime.
Harry can't, his face in Sally's crotch,
nor Tom, who only loves when neighbours watchone mistakes the ballet for the chart,
one hopes that gossip will perform like art.
And what of art? When passion dies
friendship hovers round our flesh like flies,
and we name beautiful the smells
that corpses give and immortelles.
I have studied rivers: the waters rush
like eternal fire in Moses' bush.
Some things live with honour. I will see
lust burn like fire in a holy tree.
Do not come with me. When I stand alone
my voice sings out as though I did not own
my throat. Abelard proved how bright could be
the bed between the hermitage and nunnery.
You are beautiful. I will sing beside
rivers where longing Hebrews cried.
54 I
As separate exiles we can learn
how desert trees ignite and branches burn.
At certain crossroads we will win
the harvest of our discipline.
Swollen flesh, minds fed on wilderness
Oh, what a blaze of love our bodies press!
I 55
T H E C U C K O L D 'S S O N G
If this looks like a poem
I might as well warn you at the beginning
that it's not meant to be one.
I don't want to turn anything into poetry.
I know all about her part in it
but I'm not concerned with that right now.
This is between you and me.
Personally I don't give a damn who led who on:
in fact I wonder if I give a damn at all.
But a man's got to say something.
Anyhow you fed her 5 McKewan Ales,
took her to your room, put the right records on,
and in an hour or two it was done.
I know all about passion and honour
but unfortunately this had really nothing to do with
either:
oh there was passion I'm only too sure
and even a little honour
but the important thing was to cuckold Leonard Cohen.
Hell, I might just as well address this to the both of you:
I haven't time to write anything else.
·
I've got to say my prayers.
I've got to wait by the window.
I repeat: the important thing was to cuckold Leonard
Cohen.
I like that line because it's got my name in it.
What really makes me sick
is that everything goes on as it went before:
I'm still a sort of friend,
I'm still a sort of lover.
But not for long:
that's why I'm telling this to the two of you.
s6 I
The fact is I'm turning to gold, turning to gold.
It's a long process, they say,
it happens in stages.
This is to inform you that I've already turned to clay.
D E A D S O N G
As I lay dead
In my love-soaked bed,
Angels came to kiss my head.
I caught one gown
And wrestled her down
To be my girl in death town.
She will not fly.
She has promised to die.
What a clever corpse am II
I s7
M Y L A D Y C A N S L E E P
My lady can sleep
Upon a handkerchief
Or if it be Fall
Upon a fallen leaf.
I have seen the hunters
Kneel before her hem
Even in her sleep
She turns away from them.
The only gift they offer
Is their abiding grief-
1 pull out my pockets
For a handkerchief or leaf.
T R A V E L
Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought
Of travelling penniless to some mud throne
Where a master might instruct me how to plot
My life away from pain, to love alone
In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake.
Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost
Enough to lose a way I had to take;
Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust
The will that forbid me contract, vow,
Or promise, and often while you slept
I looked in awe beyond your beauty.
Now
I know why many men have stopped and wept
Half-way between the loves they leave and seek,
And wondered if travel leads them anywhere
Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek,
The windy sky's a locket for your hair.
I 59
I H A V E T W O B A R S O F S O A P
I have two bars of soap,
the fragrance of almond,
one for you and one for me.
Draw the bath,
we will wash each other.
I have no money,
I murdered the pharmacist.
And here's a jar of oil,
just like in the Bible.
Lie in my arms,
I'll make your flesh glisten.
I have no money,
&nb
sp; I murdered the perfumer.
Look through the window
at the shops and people.
Tell me what you desire,
you'll have it by the hour.
I have no money,
I have no money.
6o I
C E L E B R A T I O N
When you kneel below me
and in both your hands
hold my manhood like a sceptre,
When you wrap your tongue
about the amber jewel
and urge my blessing,
I understand those Roman girls
who danced around a shaft of stone
and kissed it till the stone was warm.
Kneel, love, a thousand feet below me,
so far I can barely see your mouth and hands
perform the ceremony,
Kneel till I topple to your back
with a groan, like those gods on the roof
that Samson pulled down.
1 6 1
B E N E A T H M Y H A N D S
Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing fallen sparrows.
Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.
I am speechless
because you have fallen beside me
because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.
I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me hunter.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.
I want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.
A S T H E M I S T L E A V E S N O S C A R
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.
When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter,
Then turn, then fall to sleep.
As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure
When one is gone and far.
I L O N G T O H O L D S O M E L A D Y
I long to hold some lady
For my love is far away,
And will not come tomorrow
And was not here today.
There is no flesh so perfect
As on my lady's bone,
And yet it seems so distant
When I am all alone:
As though she were a masterpiece
In some castled town,
That pilgrims come to visit
And priests to copy down.
Alas, I cannot travel
To a love I have so deep
Or sleep too close beside
A love I want to keep.
But I long to hold some lady,
For flesh is warm and sweet.
Cold skeletons go marching
Each night beside my feet.
N O W O F S L E E P I N G
Under her grandmother's patchwork quilt
a calico bird's-eye view
of crops and boundaries
naming dimly the districts of her body
sleeps my Annie like a perfect lady
Like ages of weightless snow
on tiny oceans filled with light
her eyelids enclose deeply
a shade tree of birthday candles
one for every morning
until the now of sleeping
The small banner of blood
kept and flown by Brother Wind
long after the pierced bird fell down
is like her red mouth
among the squalls of pillow
Bearers of evil fancy
of dark intention and corrupting fashion
who come to rend the quilt
plough the eye and ground the mouth
will contend with mighty Mother Goose
and Farmer Brown and all good stories
of invincible belief
which surround her sleep
like the golden weather of a halo
Well-wishers and her true lover
may stay to watch my Annie
sleeping like a perfect lady
I Gs
under her grandmother's patchwork quilt
but they must promise to whisper
and to vanish by morning-
all but her one true lover.
66 1
S O N G
When with lust I am smitten
To my books I then repair
And read what men have written
Of flesh forbid but fair
But in these saintly stories
Of gleaming thigh and breast
Of sainthood and its glories
Alas I find no rest
For at each body rare
The saintly man disdains
I stare 0 God I stare
My heart is stained with stains
And casting down the holy tomes
I lead my eyes to where
The naked girls with silver combs
Are combing out their hair
Then each pain my hermits sing
Flies upward like a spark
I live with the mortal ring
Of flesh on flesh in dark
S O N G
I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater
and how I kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I'd
never been your lover
F O R A N N E
With Annie gone,
Whose eyes to compare
With the morning sun?
Not that I did compare,
But I do compare
Now that she's gone.
6s 1
L A S T D A N C E A T T H E F O U R P E N N Y
Layton, when we dance our freilach
under the ghostly handkerchief,
the miracle rabbis of Prague and Vilna
resume their sawdust thrones,
and angels and men, asleep so long
in the cold palaces of disbeief,
gather in sausage-hung kitchens
to quarrel deliciously and debate
the sounds of the Ineffable Name.
Layton, my friend Lazarovitch,
no Jew was ever lost
while we two dance joyously
in this French province,
cold and oceans west of the temple,
the snow canyoned on the twigs
like forbidden Sabbath manna;
I say no Jew was ever lost
while we weave and billow the handkerchief
into a burning cloud,
measuring all of heaven
with our stitching thumbs.
Reb Israel Lazarovitch,
you no-good Romanian, you're right!
Who cares whether or not
the Messiah is a Litvak?
As for the cynical,
such as we were yesterday,
let them step with us or rot
in their logical shrouds.
We've raised a bright white flag,
I 6g
and here's our battered fathers' cup of wine,
and now is music
; until morning and the morning prayers
lay us down again,
we who dance so beautifully
though we know that freilachs end.
S U M M E R H A I K U
For Frank and Marian Sco tt
Silence
and a deeper silence
when the crickets
hesitate
O U T O F T H E L A N D O F H E A V E N
For Marc Chagall
Out of the land of heaven
Down comes the warm Sabbath sun
Into the spice-box of earth_
The Queen will make every Jew her lover_
In a white silk coat
Our rabbi dances up the street,
Wearing our lawns like a green prayer-shawl,
Brandishing houses like silver flags.
Behind him dance his pupils,
Dancing not so high
And chanting the rabbi's prayer,
But not so sweet.
And who waits for him
On a throne at the end of the street
But the Sabbath Queen.
Down go his hands
Into the spice-box of earth,
And there he finds the fragrant sun
For a wedding ring,
And draws her wedding finger through.
Now back down the street they go,
Dancing higher than the silver flags.
His pupils somewhere have found wives too,
And all are chanting the rabbi's song
And leaping high in the perfumed air_
Who calls him Rabbi?
Cart-horse and dogs call him Rabbi,
And he tells them:
The Queen makes every Jew her lover_
I 7 1
And gathering on their green lawns
The people call him Rabbi,
And fill their mouths with good bread
And his happy song.
P R A Y E R O F M Y W I L D G R A N D F A T H E R
God, God, God, someone of my family
hated your love with such skill that you sang
to him, your private voice violating
his driiDl like a lost bee after pollen
in the brain. He gave you his children
opened on a table, and if a ram
ambled in the garden you whispered nothing
about that, nor held his killing hand.
It is no wonder fields and governments
rotted, for soon you gave him all your range,
drove all your love through that sting in his brain.
Nothing can flourish in your absence
except our faith that you are proved through him
who had his mind made mad and honey-combed.
72 I
I S A I A H
For G.C.S.
Between the mountains of spices
the cities thrust up pearl domes and filigree spires.
Never before was Jerusalem so beautiful.
In the sculptured temple how many pilgrims,
lost in the measures of tambourine and lyre,
kneeled before the glory of the ritual?
Trained in grace the daughters of Zion moved,
not less splendid than the golden statuary,
the bravery of ornaments about their scented feet.
Selected Poems, 1956-1968 Page 4