Collected Poems
Page 8
Don’t cry at that—
Do you cry at the wind pouring out of Canada?
Do you cry at the reeds shaken at the edge of the sloughs?
The Marine battalion enters.
This happens when the seasons change,
This happens when the leaves begin to drop from the trees too early
“Kill them: I don’t want to see anything moving.”
This happens when the ice begins to show its teeth in the ponds.
This happens when the heavy layers of lake water press down on the fish’s head, and send him deeper, where his tail swirls slowly, and his brain passes him pictures of heavy reeds, of vegetation fall on vegetation. . . .
2
Excellent Roman knives slip along the ribs.
A stronger man starts to jerk up the strips of flesh.
“Let’s hear it again, you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?”
A long scream unrolls.
More.
“From the political point of view, democratic institutions are being built in Vietnam, wouldn’t you agree?”
A green parrot shudders under the fingernails.
Blood jumps in the pocket.
The scream lashes like a tail.
“Let us not be deterred from our task by the voices of dissent. . . .”
The whines of the jets
Pierce like a long needle.
3
The ministers lie, the professors lie, the television reporters lie, the priests lie.
What are these lies? They mean that the country wants to die.
Lie after lie starts out into the prairie grass,
Like mile-long caravans of Conestoga wagons crossing the Platte.
And a long desire for death goes with them, guiding it all from beneath:
“A death longing if all longing else be in vain,”
Stringing together the vague and foolish words.
It is a desire to eat death,
To gobble it down,
To rush on it like a cobra with mouth open.
It is a desire to take death inside,
To feel it burning inside, pushing out velvety hairs,
Like a clothes brush in the intestines—
That is the thrill that leads the President on to lie.
Now the Chief Executive enters, and the press conference begins.
First the President lies about the date the Appalachian Mountains rose.
Then he lies about the population of Chicago,
Then the weight of the adult eagle, and the acreage of the Everglades.
Next he lies about the number of fish taken every year in the Arctic.
He has private information about which city is the capital of Wyoming.
He lies next about the birthplace of Attila the Hun,
Then about the composition of the amniotic fluid.
He insists that Luther was never a German,
And only the Protestants sold indulgences.
He declares that Pope Leo X wanted to reform the Church, but the liberal elements prevented him.
He declares the Peasants’ War was fomented by Italians from the North.
And the Attorney General lies about the time the sun sets.
4
These lies mean we have a longing to die.
What is there now to hold us on earth?
It is the longing for someone to come and take us by the hand to where they are all sleeping:
Where the Egyptian pharaohs are asleep, and our own mothers,
And all those disappeared children, who went around with us on the rings at grade school.
Do not be angry at the President—
He is longing to take in his hands the locks of death-hair:
To meet his own children, dead, or never born. . . .
He is drifting sideways toward the dusty places.
5
This is what it’s like to watch the altimeter needle going mad
Baron 25, this is 81. Are there any friendlies in the area? 81 from 25, negative on the friendlies. I’d like you to take out as many structures as possible located in those trees within 200 meters east and west of my smoke mark.
diving, the green earth swinging, cheeks hanging back, red pins blossoming ahead of us, 20-millimeter cannon fire, leveling off, rice fields shooting by like telephone poles, smoke rising, hut roofs loom up huge as landing fields, slugs going in, half the huts on fire, small figures running, palm trees burning, shooting past, up again; . . . blue sky . . . cloud mountains . . .
This is what it’s like to have a gross national product.
It is because we have so few women sobbing in back rooms,
Because we have so few children’s heads torn apart by high-velocity bullets,
Because we have so few tears falling on our own hands
That the Super Sabre turns and screams down toward the earth.
6
A car is rolling toward a rock wall.
The treads in the face begin to crack.
We feel like tires being run down roads under heavy cars.
The teenager imagines herself floating through the Seven Spheres.
Oven doors are found
Open.
Soot collects over the doorframe, has children, takes courses, goes mad, and dies.
There is a black silo inside our bodies.
Bits of black paint are flaking off,
Where the motorcycles roar, around and around,
Rising higher on the silo walls,
The bodies bent toward the horizon,
Driven by angry women dressed in black.
7
I know that books are tired of us.
I know they are chaining the Bible to chairs.
Books don’t want to remain in the same room with us anymore.
New Testaments are escaping . . . dressed as women . . . they slip out after dark.
And Plato! Plato . . . Plato
Wants to hurry back up the river of time,
So he can end as a blob of seaflesh rotting on an Australian beach.
8
Why are they dying? I have written this so many times.
They are dying because the President has opened a Bible again.
They are dying because gold deposits have been found among the Shoshoni Indians.
They are dying because money follows intellect,
And intellect is like a fan opening in the wind.
The Marines think that unless they die the rivers will not move.
They are dying so that the mountain shadows will continue to fall east in the afternoon,
So that the beetle can move along the ground near the fallen twigs.
9
But if one of those children came near that we have set on fire,
Came toward you like a gray barn, walking,
You would howl like a wind tunnel in a hurricane,
You would tear at your shirt with blue hands,
You would drive over your own child’s wagon trying to back up,
The pupils of your eyes would go wild—
If a child came by burning, you would dance on a lawn,
Trying to leap into the air, digging into your cheeks,
You would ram your head against the wall of your bedroom
Like a bull penned too long in his moody pen—
If one of those children came toward me with both hands
In the air, fire rising along both elbows,
I would suddenly go back to my animal brain,
I would drop on all fours, screaming,
My vocal cords would turn blue; so would yours;
It would be two days before I could play with my own children again.
10
I want to sleep awhile in the rays of the sun slanting over the snow.
Don’t wake me.
Don’t tell me how much grief there is in the leaf with its natural oils.
Don’t tell me how many children have bee
n born with stumpy hands
All those years we lived in St. Augustine’s shadow.
Tell me about the dust that falls from the yellow daffodil shaken in the restless winds.
Tell me about the particles of Babylonian thought that still pass through the earthworm every day.
Don’t tell me about “the frightening laborers who do not read books.”
Now the whole nation starts to whirl,
The end of the Republic breaks off,
Europe comes to take revenge,
The mad beast covered with European hair rushes toward the mesa bushes in Mendocino County.
Pigs rush toward the cliff.
The waters underneath part: in one ocean luminous globes float up (in them hairy and ecstatic men);
In the other ocean—the Teeth Mother, naked at last.
Let us drive cars
Up
The light beams
To the stars . . .
Then return to earth crouched inside the drop of sweat
That falls
From the chin of the Protestant tied in the fire.
II
SLEEPERS JOINING HANDS
A Long Poem
THE SHADOW GOES AWAY
The woman chained to the shore stands bewildered as night comes
I don’t want to wake up in the weeds, and find the light
gone out in the body, and the cells dark. . . .
I see the cold ocean rise to take us
as I stand without feathers on the shore
and watch the blood-colored moon gobbling up the sand. . . .
The owl senses someone in the hole of his tree,
and lands with wings closing, claws out. . . .
I fall asleep, and dream I am working in the fields. . . .
Now I show the father the coat stained with goat’s blood. . . .
The shadow goes away,
we are left alone in the father’s house.
I knew that. . . . I sent my brother away.
I saw him turn and leave. It was a schoolyard.
I gave him to the dark people passing.
He learned to sleep alone on the high buttes.
I heard he was near the Missouri, taken in by traveling Sioux.
They taught him to wear his hair long,
to glide about naked, drinking water from his hands,
to tether horses, follow the faint trail through bent grasses. . . .
Men bound my shadow. That was in high school.
They tied it to a tree, I saw it being led away.
I dreamt that I sat in a big chair,
and every other second I disappeared.
This was during Stanley’s visit to Africa.
In high school I was alone, asleep in the Law.
I slipped off one night into the water,
swam to shore with no one watching,
left my brother alone on the ship!
On 66th Street I noticed he was gone.
I sat down and wept.
Hairs of depression come up through the palm laid on the ground,
little impulses shoot up in the dark,
in the dark the sleeping marmoset opens his eyes.
There are nights in which everything is torn
away, all piers gone. . . .
I walk through the trees, and come into the Indian encampment.
The Sioux are struggling up the mountain in disordered lines,
the field littered with robes, dogbones, thongs,
the great cooking iron in which my shadow was boiling!
Walking through the camp, I notice an old chest of drawers.
I open a drawer and see small white horses gallop away toward the back.
I see the birds inside me,
with massive shadows like humpbacked Puritan ministers,
a headstrong beak ahead,
and wings supple as the stingray’s,
ending in claws, lifting over the shadowy peaks.
Looking down, I see dark marks on my shirt.
My mother gave me that shirt, and hoped that her son would be the one man in the world
who would have a happy marriage,
but look at me now—
I have been divorced five hundred times,
six hundred times yesterday alone.
I hear the sound of hoofs . . . coming. . . . Now the men
move in, smashing and burning. The huts
of the Shadowy People are turned over, the wood
utensils broken, straw mats set on fire,
digging sticks jumped on, clay bowls
smashed with dropped stones. . . .
Thousands of men come,
like dwarf antelopes in long streaming herds,
or hair flying behind the skidding racer. . . .
No ministers or teachers come out,
I am flying over my bed alone. . . .
I am flying over the Josephine forests, where only the rat builds his nest of leaves,
and keeps his mistress in the white dusk. . . .
The moon swims through the clogging veins,
the sun leaps from its dying bed,
divorced men and women drown in the paling, reddening sea.
The Marines turn to me. They offer me money.
I turn and leave. The sun sinks toward the darkening hills.
My mother’s bed looms up in the dark.
The noose tightens,
servants of the armor brain, terrified hired men whom the sharks feed,
scales everywhere, “glittering on their bodies as they fall.”
The Sea of Tranquility scattered with dead rocks,
and black dust resembling diesel oil.
The suppressed race returns: snakes and transistors filling the beaches,
pilots in armored cockpits finding their way home through moonlit clouds.
MEETING THE MAN WHO WARNS ME
I wake and find myself in the woods, far from the castle.
The train hurtles through lonely Louisiana at night.
The sleeper turns to the wall, delicate
aircraft dive toward earth.
A woman whispers to me, urges me to speak truths.
“I am afraid that you won’t be honest with me.”
Half or more of the moon rolls on in shadow.
Owls talk at night, loons wheel cries through lower waters,
fragments of the mother lie open in all low places.
I have been alone two days, and still everything is cloudy.
The body surrounds me on all sides.
I walk out and return.
Rain dripping from pine boughs, boards soaked on porches,
gray water awakens, fish slide away underneath.
I fall asleep. I meet a man from a milder planet.
I say to him: “I know Christ is from your planet!”
He lifts his eyes to me with a fierce light.
He reaches out and touches me on the tip of my cock,
and I fall asleep.
I dream that the fathers are dying.
Jehovah is dying, Jesus’s father is dying,
the hired man is asleep inside the oat straw.
Samson is lying on the ground with his hollow hair.
Who is this that visits us from beneath the earth?
I see the dead like great conductors
carrying electricity under the ground,
the Eskimos suddenly looking into the womb of the seal. . . .
Water shoots into the air from manhole covers,
the walker sees it astonished and falls;
before his body hits the street
he is already far down the damp steps of the Tigris,
seeing the light given off under the door by shining hair.
Something white calls to us:
it is the darkness we saw outside the cradle.
My shadow is underneath me,
floating in the dark, in his small boat bobbing among reeds.
A f
ireball floats in the corner of the Eskimo’s house—
It is a light that comes nearer when called!
A light the spirits turn their heads for,
suddenly shining over land and sea!
I taste the heaviness of the dream,
the northern lights curve up toward the roof of my mouth.
The energy is inside us. . . .
I start toward it, and I meet an old man.
He looms up in the road, his white hair standing up:
“Who is this who is ascending the red river?
Who is this who is leaving the dark plants?”
I don’t want to leave, and walk back and forth,
looking toward the old landing.
I dream that I cannot see half of my life.
I look back, it is like the blind spot in a car.
So much just beyond the reach of our eyes,
what tramples the grasses while the horses are asleep,
the hoof marks all around the cave mouth . . .
what slips in under the door at night, and lies exhausted on the floor in the morning.
What cannot be remembered and cannot be forgotten,
the chaff blowing about my father’s feet.
And the old man cries out: “I am here.
Either talk to me about your life, or turn back.”
I look from bridges at cattle grazing,
the lizard moving stiffly over the November road,