by Tom Kuhn
On exertion
1
We smoke. We besmirch ourselves. Drink ourselves over
We sleep. We grin at a naked face.
The tooth of time gnaws too slowly, my lover!
We smoke. Write a poem. Trot off to the shithouse.
2
Unchastity, poverty, they are our vows
Unchastity often has sugared our innocence.
The things a man did in God’s sun, for those
In God’s earth he will do his penance.
3
The spirit made whores of the joys of the flesh
When it pulled the hairy hand’s claws off us
The sun’s sensations can no longer push
Through our skin, it’s like vellum: impervious.
4
Mornings, no make-up, how do you look then
Oh you green islands in tropical zones?
The white hell of visions is only a broken
Wooden shack that leaks when it rains.
5
And we, the betrothed, what drug shall be ours?
Furs of sable? Oh gin does it better!
A lilac mixture of sharp liqueurs
With flies in, drunk-drowned, tasting bitter.
6
We ascend in our boozing to toilet water.
We dole out the schnapps with black coffee but no
Such thing works, Maria, it’s better
We tan our delicious skins with snow.
7
With the cynical poverty of frivolous verse
A bitterness with an orange taste
Cooled in ice, and Malayan plucked hairs
In your eyes, oh the opium-smoke haze
8
In wind-crazed huts made of paper of Nankeen
Oh world with your bitter good cheer
When that gentle white creature, the moon
Falls from the skies that are colder than once they were!
9
Oh heavenly fruit of the maculate conception!
Brother, what perfection did you ever see here?
With kirsch you will toast your cadaver’s defection
And with little lanterns of delicate paper.
10
Early morning awake, a grin comes along
On hairy teeth with the nicotine waste
And often we find when we yawn on the tongue
A bitterish sort of orange taste.
On climbing in trees
1
When you rise from your waters in the evenings—
For you must be naked and your skin be soft
Climb after that then into your big trees
In a light wind. And in the sky no colour left.
Big trees that in the evening blackly
And slowly rock their crowns, choose those
And wait for nightfall in among their leaves
Nightmares and bats encircling your brows.
2
The small hard leaves in the foliage
Will notch your back, which you must brace and raise
Hard through the branchings: so you climb
Groaning a little, higher among the boughs.
Rocking on the tree is nice. But don’t employ
Your knees to rock yourself. Instead be
Rather as the tree’s own crown is to it
Which it has rocked at evening for a century.
On swimming in lakes and rivers
1
In the pale summer when the winds above
Sough only in the leaves of the big trees
Then you must lie in rivers and in ponds
Like waterweed in which the pike house.
The body gets light in water. If the arm
Lightly out of the water falls into the sky
The small wind rocks it in an absent way
Thinking it a brown branch very likely.
2
The sky offers great stillness at midday.
You close your eyes when swallows come to you.
The mud is warm. When cool bubbles rise
You know: that was a fish that swam through you.
My body, the thighs and the still arm
We lie still in the water, all one
Only when the cool fish swim through us
I feel the sun is shining over the pond.
3
When in the evening after a long time lying
You are very indolent and your limbs sting
Heedlessly fling all of it with a splash
Into blue rivers whose pull is very strong.
Best thing is you hold out till evening
For then the pale shark-skies arrive
Evil and ravenous, over river and bushes
And all things are as they must be to thrive.
4
Goes without saying, you must lie on your back
In the normal way. And drift where the current will.
You need not swim, no, but behave as if
You simply belonged to the shoals of gravel.
The right thing is to look at the sky and lie
As though a woman were carrying you, which she is.
Quite without any fuss, as God the Father does
When He comes at evening and swims in His rivers.
Orge’s reply on being sent a soaped rope
1
Often he sang he’d be very glad
If his life could be better:
His life is indeed very bad—
Better than he is, however.
2
The rope and the soap are welcome:
It’s a disgrace, of course
How filthy he has become
Here on this planet of ours.
3
There are hills and dales, he says
He’s never set eyes upon:
Best off then are the choose-
iest—best off in passing on.
4
As long as the sun is still near
He says it’s not too late:
And he’ll wait so long as it’s still there
And—so long as it’s not yet night.
5
There are trees still, any number
Of shady agreeable trees
To hang yourself up above from
Or beneath to take your ease.
6
However, his last reality
No man is glad to give up.
Yes, he’ll swear this eternal verity
On his last piece of crap.
7
Not till with disgust and bile he
Has had it up to here
Will he blankly and no doubt coolly
Slit from ear to ear.
Ballad of any man’s secrets
1
Everyone knows what a man is. He has a name.
He walks on the street. He sits in a bar.
You can see his face, you can hear his voice
And a woman washed his shirt and a woman combs his hair.
But strike him dead, and we shan’t mind
If never again in his own self he
Was there as the doer of his iniquity
Or the doer of his anything kind.
2
And the skinless spot on his chest, oh they know
That too, and the bites on his throat, who bit
Those bites, she knows and she’ll tell you, and the man
With the skin, with the skinless spot, he has salt for it!
But salt him down, there’s no harm in it
If he weeps, get rid of him before he hurries
To tell you yet again who he is.
Shut him up if asked to be quiet.
3
And yet at the bottom of his heart he has something
That no friend knows nor even his foe
Nor his angel nor he himself either and nor when he dies
And you weep is it that—that you weep (if you do).
And if you forget him, that’s
nothing bad
For he deceived you through and through
Because he never was the one you knew
Nor the doer only of the things he did.
4
Oh the man who like a child with his earthy hands
Shoves his bread between his teeth and chews it merrily
The animals blanched when he eyeballed them
Like a shark he looked, very friendly.
But be nice to him, be merry with him too!
Wish him well, give him a hand!
Oh he isn’t good, be sure of that
But you don’t know what they might still do to you.
5
Oh you who fling him in the dirty-yellow seas
Or in the black earth dig him six feet down
In the sack swims more to the fishes than you know
And more than you buried rots underground.
But dig him in, dig him in, it’s nothing bad!
For the grass he never even saw was not
There for the bulls when he trampled it flat.
And the doer doesn’t live for what he did.
Song on Black Saturday in the eleventh hour of the night before Easter
1
In spring under green skies in the amorous
Wild winds, half-beast already I rode
Down into the black cities with cold
Maxims wallpapering me inside.
2
I filled myself with black beasts of the asphalt
I filled myself with water and with uproar
But it left me cold and light, my friend
I was quite as light and unfilled as before.
3
True they broke holes in the walls and into me
And crawled with curses out again. There was
Nothing in me but much room and quiet
You are only paper, they screamed at me with curses.
4
Smirking I rolled down between the houses
Into fresh air. Softly and solemnly
Now through my walls the wind ran faster.
And it snowed. It rained in me.
5
The meagre snouts of cynical youths have found
That there is nothing in me. Wild boar though
Have mated in me. And by the ravens
Of the milky sky often I’ve been pissed into.
6
Weaker than clouds! Lighter than the winds!
Not visible! Light, half-animal, solemn
Like one of my poems I flew through skies
With a stork, but not so fast as him.
The great chorale of thanksgiving
1
Praised be the night and the darkness that hold and enfold you!
Come in a crowd
Look up to heaven, behold:
Already daylight has left you.
2
Praised be the grass and the creatures that near you are living and dying!
See as you do
So grass and creatures live too
And with you also are dying.
3
Praised be the tree that from dead things uprises rejoicing to heaven!
Praised be the dead
Praised be the tree that they fed
Also, however, praise heaven.
4
Praised from the heart be the failing memory of heaven!
And that it knows
Neither your name nor your face
Nobody knows you’re still here.
5
Praised be the cold, the darkness, demise and decay!
Look up and know
Nothing is asked of you
And you can die without worry.
THIRD LESSON: CHRONICLES
Ballad of the adventurers
1
Sun-sick and wholly eaten up by rain
Stolen laurels in his dishevelled hair
He has forgotten all his youth but not its dreams
Long since the roof but the sky above it, never.
2
Oh you who were driven out of heaven and hell
Murderers to whom much harm occurred
Why did you not stay in your mothers’ wombs
Where it was quiet and you slept and there you were?
3
But he is still seeking through absinthine seas
Even although his mother will forget him
Grinning and cursing and also sometimes with tears
Always a land life would be better in.
4
Strolling through hells and lashed through paradises
Quiet and grinning with a face that is vanishing
Now and then he dreams of a small meadow
Blue sky above it and otherwise nothing.
Ballad on many ships
1
Brackish water is brown and the ancient sloops
Lie around in it bloat and crab-eaten.
Their ruined masts, that are rotted and slant
Have rags, once white, now like shitty linen.
The dropsy works in the spongy bodies
They no longer know how it feels to sail.
In wind and moonlight, latrines for the gulls
On the saltwater tide they loll and reel.
2
Who left them? How many? Improper to count
But with their lapsed licences all have gone
But still it may happen that a man comes along
Asking nothing anymore and he boards one.
He has no hat, he swims in naked
He no longer has a face. He has too much skin!
Up on deck he looks back at his trail in the wake
And the ship herself shudders at his grin.
3
For he has not arrived without company
Nor fallen from the skies, he has sharks in tow!
Sharks have swum with him to where he is now
And they dwell with him wherever he might go.
So he makes his entrance, the last seducer
This is their meeting in the forenoon light
And one ship parts unsteadily from other ships
Sicking up salt in remorse and pissing in fright.
4
He cuts up the last of his sails for a jacket
He draws his noontide fish from the sea
He lies in the sun and at evening
In bilge-water he washes his toes, cleanly.
Now and then looking up to the milky sky
He notices gulls—which he snares with loops of weed
And throws to his sharks in the evening.
Week by week he fobs them off with this feed.
5
Oh while he is crossing in the east trade-winds
He lounges in the ropes, eating eel, eel-like
And often the sharks hear him singing a song
And they say: he is singing a song at the stake.
But then one evening in the month of October
After a day without song he is seen
On deck in the stern and they hear him speaking
And what is he saying? “Tomorrow we go down.”
6
And the following night he is lying in the ropes
Lying and sleeping as his habit has been
And then he feels it: another ship has come
Looks down: and she lies there under the moon.
And he plucks up courage, crosses over with a grin
He doesn’t look around him, he combs his hair
For a good appearance. What matter if this sweetheart
Is a worse sweetheart than the one before?
7
Oh for a while he stands at the railing
And looks and it is given him to view
The ship sinking that was home and a bed to him
And among the ropes he sees a shark or two . . .
8
And so he lives on, the wind in his eyes,
Aboard ships that are worse and
worse, he is
On many ships, half under the water
And changes his latrine when the moon changes.
Hatless, naked, with his own pack of sharks
He knows his world. It is known and seen.
He has a desire in him: to drown
And he has a desire: not to go down.
Death in the woods
1
And a man died in the Hathoury Woods
By the roaring Mississippi.
Died like a beast with his claws in the roots
Stared up high into the treetops where over the woods
For days stormwind had hurtled unceasingly.
2
And a few men stood there around him
Saying, so that he would be quieter:
Come, we’ll carry you home, fellow wayfarer.
But with his knees he thrust them from him
Spat and said: Carry me home where?
For earth or home, he had neither.
3
How many teeth you still got that can chew?
And by the looks, the rest of you’s that way as well.
Die a bit quieter, and get on with it, will you!
Last night we had your nag in a stew
Why are you so unwilling to go to hell?
4
For the woods were loud around him and them
And they saw: him holding tight to the tree
And they heard: him screaming at them.
They stood there smoking in the woods of Hathoury
Watching him go cold, they were angry
For he was a man like them.
5
You are behaving vilely, like an animal!