THE GOAL
I can’t leave my house
or answer the phone.
I’m going down again
but I’m not alone.
Settling at last
accounts of the soul:
this for the trash,
that paid in full.
As for the fall, it
began long ago:
Can’t stop the rain,
Can’t stop the snow.
I sit in my chair.
I look at the street.
The neighbour returns
my smile of defeat.
I move with the leaves.
I shine with the chrome.
I’m almost alive.
I’m almost at home.
No one to follow
and nothing to teach,
except that the goal
falls short of the reach.
WORK IN PROGRESS
he’s going to get sick
and die alone
he is the main character
in my little story called
The House of Prayer
OPENED MY EYES
G-d opened my eyes this morning
loosened the bands of sleep
let me see
the waitress’s tiny earrings
and the merest foothills
of her small breasts
multiplied her front and back
in the double mirrors
of the restaurant
granted to me speed
and the penetration of layers
and turned me like a spindle
so I could gather in
and make my own
every single version of her beauty
Thank You Ruler of the World
Thank You for calling me Honey
THE CORRECT ATTITUDE
Except for a couple of hours
in the morning
which I passed in the company
of a sage
I stayed in bed
without food
only a few mouthfuls of water
“You are a fine-looking old man”
I said to myself in the mirror
“And what is more
you have the correct attitude
You don’t care if it ends
or if it goes on
And as for the women
and the music
there will be plenty of that
in Paradise”
Then I went to the Mosque
of Memory
to express my gratitude
NOT A JEW
Anyone who says
I’m not a Jew
is not a Jew
I’m very sorry
but this decision
is final
TITLES
I had the title Poet
and maybe I was one
for a while
Also the title Singer
was kindly accorded me
even though
I could barely carry a tune
For many years
I was known as a Monk
I shaved my head and wore robes
and got up very early
I hated everyone
but I acted generously
and no one found me out
My reputation
as a Ladies’ Man was a joke
It caused me to laugh bitterly
through the ten thousand nights
I spent alone
From a third-storey window
above the Parc du Portugal
I’ve watched the snow
come down all day
As usual
there’s no one here
There never is
Mercifully
the inner conversation
is cancelled
by the white noise of winter
“I am neither the mind,
The intellect,
nor the silent voice within…”
is also cancelled
and now Gentle Reader
in what name
in whose name
do you come
to idle with me
in these luxurious
and dwindling realms
of Aimless Privacy?
PUPPETS
German puppets
burnt the Jews
Jewish puppets
did not choose
Puppet vultures
eat the dead
Puppet corpses
they are fed
Puppet winds and
puppet waves
Puppet sailors
in their graves
Puppet flower
Puppet stem
Puppet Time
dismantles them
Puppet me and
puppet you
Puppet German
Puppet Jew
Puppet presidents
command
puppet troops to
burn the land
Puppet fire
puppet flames
feed on all the
puppet names
Puppet lovers
in their bliss
turn away from
all of this
Puppet reader
shakes his head
takes his puppet
wife to bed
Puppet night
comes down to say
the epilogue to
puppet day
NEVER ONCE
India is filled
with many
exceptionally beautiful women
who don’t desire me
I verify this
every single day
as I walk around
the city of Bombay
I look into face after face
and never once
have I been wrong
WHO DO YOU REALLY REMEMBER
My father died when I was nine;
my mother when I was forty-six.
In between, my dog and several friends.
Recently, more friends,
real friends,
uncles and aunts,
many acquaintances.
And then there’s Sheila.
She said, Don’t be a jerk, Len.
Take your desire seriously.
She died not long after
we were fifteen.
LOOKING AWAY
you would look at me
and it never occurred to me
that you might be choosing
the man of your life
you would look at me
over the bottles and the corpses
and I thought
you must be playing with me
you must think I’m crazy enough
to step behind your eyes
into the open elevator shaft
so I looked away
and I waited
until you became a palm tree
or a crow
or the vast grey ocean of wind
or the vast grey ocean of mind
now look at me
married to everyone but you
EVEN SOME OF MY OWN
This is the end of it all
There won’t be much more
Maybe a cry or two
From the peanut gallery
Where I have made
My last stand
In the meantime
Operate on the heart
With proven songs
Such as Ave Marie
And Kol Nidre
Even some of my own
And execute
The recommended procedures
Such as kneeling down
Beside the appalling heap
Of days and nights
And patting the newest seconds
On to it
As if it were
A child’s sandcastle
Facing the tide
Under a full moon etc.
In other wor
ds
Encouraging
In the old penitent
A borderless perspective
YOUR HEART
I told the truth
and look where it got me
I should have written about
the secret rivers
under Toronto
and the trials
of the Faculty Club
but no
I pulled the heart
out of a breast
and showed to everyone
the names of G-d
engraved upon it
I’m sorry it was
your heart
and not mine
I had no heart worth the reading
but I had the knife
and the temple
O my love
don’t you know that we have been killed
and that we died together
WHAT BAFFLED ME
I took pills for my memory
but I could not stop it
from erasing
I had a family once
They could walk on water
There was a one-way chain
that held me to a woman’s body
She didn’t know she jerked me
every-which-way
But who was she
and who were they?
In the midst of
someone’s explanation
I forget
what baffled me
THE WIND MOVES
The wind moves
the palm trees
and the fringes
of the beach umbrellas
The children go down
the waterslide
The grey Arabian Sea
slaps its soiled lace underwear
on the dirty flats
The wind moves everything
and then stops
but my pen
keeps on writing
by itself
Dear Roshi
I am dead now
I died before you
just as you predicted
in the early 70s
SORROWS OF THE ELDERLY
The old are kind.
The young are hot.
Love may be blind.
Desire is not.
ALONE AT LAST
How bitter were
the Prozac pills
of the last
few hundred mornings
ANYTHING WHICH REFERS
Anything which refers to the matter, even obliquely, is far from the mark. An incapacity for relevance is to be discovered as the muscle of salvation, but flexed and exercised as rarely as possible. The economy of desperation must be recognized. We don’t need Art that often. Now and then let Her step out of Her underwear. A little goes a long way.
For the moment, the Big Picture (or the Pig Bicture) can be accessed only by means of the Loose Canon (or the Coose Lanon), the Drifting Molecule, the Carcinogenic Radical. Après moi, the return to Classical Proportion. My sanity is a contagion.
Although we have not smoked for many a minute, we are tempted to ask the barman for one from his own pack.
Let us concentrate on the vertigo produced by easing up to the great plate-glass windows, which are all that prevent us from plunging 12 storeys into the Bay of Bengal.
– The Taj Mahal Hotel
JANA THINKS OF JOHN
Jana comes out of her house. Wearing almost nothing. The cup is still in her hand. She forgot to leave it on the table. The cold reminds her that she has neglected to dress beyond her underwear and her slip. She turns back. Shivering. Damn you, damn you, John.
She doesn’t know G-d has already killed her, and John, and Teri her Persian, and yours truly, who loves her more fiercely than John or Teri, merely because she is a woman. She doesn’t know that G-d has killed everyone.
Jana was with me once. When she was younger. When she was experimenting with the old. I want to get to know your body, Jikan. Oh sure. This is sufficiently grotesque, Jana, without my undressing. But she doesn’t call out my name as she returns to her unlocked door.
Me, I understand. John, I understand. Jana, I understand, although I hate to lose a naked woman. But Teri, why was Teri killed, as soon as G-d imagined her?
I was one of the things that was put into Jana. Once you have been put in, you have been put in forever. That is love. Sometimes it is greater than Death, sometimes smaller, sometimes the same size.
John has been killed, but that is not why his name is in her throat. It is because she is dismantled in her need of him. It used to be some kind of love but now it is beyond that in the magnitude of pain and dislocation. She has utterly forgotten that she has been killed. Do not comment on this condition unless you’ve been there.
Still, life goes on. Jana thinks of John, not me. He takes her out to the racing car garage, and she guesses which is his. She is wearing a white sweater which she bought when she was an Italian. (Milan. Mussolini’s train station. Kind, grass-stained women I never saw again. All of us killed under the tidal beauty of coming and going.) They kiss. He is off the hook. Her essence is the very leatherness of the bucket seats of his Ferrari.
And over here, my destiny whispers, “Someday in your arms, she will come to understand that she never did anything. And then she will be killed. Many like her will come to you. Many have already come. You have a job. You are a man-at-work, and you have been killed, along with the whole barber-shop, without a hitch.”
MY TIME
My time is running out
and still
I have not sung
the true song
the great song
I admit
that I seem
to have lost my courage
a glance at the mirror
a glimpse into my heart
makes me want
to shut up forever
so why do you lean me here
Lord of my life
lean me at this table
in the middle of the night
wondering
how to be beautiful
LOOKING THROUGH MY DREAMS
I was looking through my dreams
when I saw myself
looking through my dreams
looking through my dreams
and so on and so forth
until I was consumed
in the mysterious activity
of expansion and contraction
breathing in and out at the same time
and disappearing naturally
up my own asshole
I did this for 30 years
but I kept coming back
to let you know how bad it felt
Now I’m here at the end of the song
the end of the prayer
The ashes have fallen away at last
exactly as they’re supposed to do
The chains have slowly
followed the anchors
to the bottom of the sea
It’s merely a song
merely a prayer
Thank you, Teachers
Thank you, Everyone
So Do You
Because you are beautiful, but smelled bad, I knew you had been killed. And you felt the same about me. You said, “You are an elegant old man, but you stink.” After the long event of naked intervention, you brought your hands together and bowed. “Thank you,” you said. “That was the first time I never did anything.” Many are the lovely things I have been told about my luck, but this was surely the loveliest. “How do I smell now?” I asked. “Worse than ever,” you said. “Exactly my impression about you,” I said. Then you went back to France (or was it Holland?) and we have remained fast friends ever since. Sometimes, when the hummingbirds are still, I can smell you rotting halfway across the world.
Now IN MY ROOM
O my Love
I found You again
I went out
for a pack of cigarettes
and there You were
I bowed to everyone
and they rejoiced with me
I lost myself
in the eyes of a dog
who loved You
The heat lifted me up
The traffic bounced me
naked into bed
with a book about You
and a bottle of cold water
THE DARKNESS ENTERS
The darkness enters my hotel room
like a curtain coming through a curtain
billowing into different shapes of darkness
wings here a gas mask there,
simple things and double things
I sit upright on the edge of the bed
and I impede the falling darkness
with my many personalities
just as a high spiked fence
with the tips painted gold
interferes with the French rain
For a number of luminous hours
it is a standoff
Often during this highly charged segment
of my usually monotonous life
a woman enters the room with a pass-key
and in small ways manages to communicate
that we might have lived our lives together
had circumstances been otherwise
I like it especially
when she addresses me in the familiar form
of her incomprehensible language
but always in the back of my mind
I know the important moments
are on their way
and I am that high iron fence
with the spikes painted gold
holding off the inevitable
SUGGESTIONS
“We are college girls from Ontario.”
“What part of Ontario?”
“We don’t know Ontario. We were told to say we were from there.”
“I see.”
They moved purposefully around the kitchen, lighting and extinguishing the gas range, checking the pilot lights, extracting pots from crowded cabinets, kneeling in front of the crisper, but no food was actually cooked or served.
Book of Longing Page 8