Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
Page 3
as if time were no problem,
and they come up to you:
a car full of young,
laughing,
and you watch them go
until
somebody behind you honks
and you are shaken back
into what is left
of your life.
pitiful, self-pity,
and your foot is to the floor
and you catch the young ones,
you pass the young ones
and holding the wheel like all love gone
you race to the beach
with them
brandishing your cigar and your steel,
laughing,
you will take them to the ocean
to the last mermaid,
seaweed and shark, merry whale,
end of flesh and hour and horror,
and finally they stop
and you go on
toward your ocean,
the cigar biting your lips
the way love used to.
vegas
there was a frozen tree that I wanted to paint
but the shells came down
and in Vegas looking across at a green sunshade
at 3:30 in the morning,
I died without nails, without a copy of the Atlantic Monthly,
the windows screamed like doves moaning the bombing of Milan
and I went out to live with the rats
but the lights were too bright
and I thought maybe I’d better go back and sit in a
poetry class:
a marvelous description of a gazelle
is hell;
the cross sits like a fly on my window,
my mother’s breath stirs small leaves
in my mind;
and I hitch-hiked back to L.A. through hangover clouds
and I pulled a letter from my pocket and read it
and the truckdriver said, what’s that?
and I said, there’s some gal up North who used to
sleep with Pound, she’s trying to tell me that H.D.
was our greatest scribe; well, Hilda gave us a few pink
Grecian gods in with the chinaware, but after reading her
I still have 140 icicles hanging from my bones.
I’m not going all the way to L.A., the truckdriver said.
it’s all right, I said, the calla lilies nod to our minds
and someday we’ll all go home
together.
in fact, he said, this is as far
as we go.
so I let him have it; old withered whore of time
your breasts taste the sour cream of dreaming…
he let me out
in the middle of the desert;
to die is to die is to die,
old phonographs in cellars,
joe di maggio,
magazines in with the onions…
an old Ford picked me up
45 minutes later
and, this time,
I kept my mouth
shut.
the house
they are building a house
half a block down
and I sit up here
with the shades down
listening to the sounds,
the hammers pounding in nails,
thack thack thack thack,
and then I hear birds, and
thack thack thack
and I go to bed,
I pull the covers to my throat;
they have been building this house
for a month, and soon it will have
its people…sleeping, eating,
loving, moving around,
but somehow
now
it is not right,
there seems a madness,
men walk on its top with nails in their mouths
and I read about Castro and Cuba,
and at night I walk by
and the ribs of house show
and inside I can see cats walking
the way cats walk,
and then a boy rides by on a bicycle,
and still the house is not done
and in the morning the men
will be back
walking around on the house
with their hammers,
and it seems people should not build houses
anymore,
it seems people should stop working
and sit in small rooms
on second floors
under electric lights without shades;
it seems there is a lot to forget
and a lot not to do
and in drugstores, markets, bars,
the people are tired, they do not want
to move, and I stand there at night
and look through this house and the
house does not want to be built;
through its sides I can see the purple hills
and the first lights of evening,
and it is cold
and I button my coat
and I stand there looking through the house
and the cats stop and look at me
until I am embarrassed
and move North up the sidewalk
where I will buy
cigarettes and beer
and return to my room.
side of the sun
the bulls are grand as the side of the sun
and although they kill them for the stale crowds,
it is the bull that burns the fire,
and although there are cowardly bulls as
there are cowardly matadors and cowardly men,
generally the bull stands pure
and dies pure
untouched by symbols or cliques or false loves,
and when they drag him out
nothing has died
something has passed
and the eventual stench
is the world.
the talkers
the boy walks with his muddy feet across my
soul
talking about recitals, virtuosi, conductors,
the lesser known novels of Dostoevsky;
talking about how he corrected a waitress,
a hasher who didn’t know that French dressing
was composed of so and so;
he gabbles about the Arts until
I hate the Arts,
and there is nothing cleaner
than getting back to a bar or
back to the track and watching them run,
watching things go without this
clamor and chatter,
talk, talk, talk,
the small mouth going, the eyes blinking,
a boy, a child, sick with the Arts,
grabbing at it like the skirt of a mother,
and I wonder how many tens of thousands
there are like him across the land
on rainy nights
on sunny mornings
on evenings meant for peace
in concert halls
in cafes
at poetry recitals
talking, soiling, arguing.
it’s like a pig going to bed
with a good woman
and you don’t want
the woman any more.
a pleasant afternoon in bed
red summers and black satin
charcoal and blood
ringing the sheets
while snails are stepped on
and moths go batty
trying to put on the eyes
of lightbulbs in
artificial cities;
I light her a cigarette
and she blows up a plasma
of relaxation
to prove we’ve both been
good lovers—
white on black, and in black;
and her toes strike dark
intersections
in my beefy sheets
; she says, that elevator boy…
y’know him?
I say yes.
a bastard…beats his wife.
I put my hand
flat to the surface
where the curve goes down.
damn for an OLD man,
you sure likes to play!
I reach over and pick up
the bottle, suck it down
flat on my back,
the suds like soap
gagging me with gulp-dull
sounds, and she’s listening,
eyes rolling
like newsreel cameras,
and suddenly I have got to laugh,
I spiral out a whale-stream
of foam and liquid
majestic against the wallpaper
not knowing why,
and she laughs
looking down at my flat madness,
she laughs
holding her cigarette
high in the air
with one arm
smoke sifting off
ignored
and we are in bed together
laughing
and we don’t care,
about anything
and it is very
very funny.
the priest and the matador
in the slow Mexican air I watched the bull die
and they cut off his ear, and his great head held
no more terror than a rock.
driving back the next day we stopped at the Mission
and watched the golden red and blue flowers pulling
like tigers in the wind.
set this to metric: the bull, and the fort of Christ:
the matador on his knees, the dead bull his baby;
and the priest staring from the window
like a caged bear.
you may argue in the market place and pull at your
doubts with silken strings: I will only tell you
this: I have lived in both their temples,
believing all and nothing—perhaps, now, they will
die in mine.
love & fame & death
it sits outside my window now
like an old woman going to market;
it sits and watches me,
it sweats nervously
through wire and fog and dog-bark
until suddenly
I slam the screen with a newspaper
like slapping at a fly
and you could hear the scream
over this plain city,
and then it left.
the way to end a poem
like this
is to become suddenly
quiet.
my father
he carried a piece of
carbon, a blade and a whip
and at night he
feared his head
and covered it with blankets
until one morning in Los Angeles
it snowed
and I saw the snow
and I knew that my father
could control nothing,
and when
I got somewhat larger
and took my first boxcar
out, I sat there in
the lime
the burning lime
of having nothing
moving into the desert
for the first time
I sang.
the bird
red-eyed and dizzy as I
the bird came flying
all the way from Egypt
at 5 o’clock in the morning,
and Maria almost stumbled on her spikes:
what was it, a rocket?
and we went upstairs.
I poured two glasses of port
and we sat there as the money-grubbers
were belled out of their miserable nests
and Maria went in and watered
the bowl
and I sat there rubbing my three-day beard
thinking about the crazy bird
and it came out like this:
all that really mattered was
going someplace
the faster the better
because it left less waiting
to die. Maria came out
and peeled back the covers
and I tore off my greasy clothes
and crawled beneath the sweaty sheets,
closing my eyes to the sound and the sunlight,
and I heard her drop her spiked feet
and her frozen toes walked the backs of my calves
and I named the bird
Mr. America
and then quickly I went to sleep.
the singular self
there are these small cliffs
above the sea
and it is night, late night;
I have been unable to sleep,
and with my car above me
like a steel mother
I crawl down the cliffs,
breaking bits of rock
and being scratched by witless
and scrabby seaplants,
I make my way down
clumsy, misplaced,
an oddity on the shore,
and all around me are the lovers,
the two-headed beasts
turning to stare
at the madness
of a singular self;
shamed, I move on through them
to climb a row of wet boulders that
break the sea-stroke
into sheaths of white;
the moonlight is wet
on the bald stone
and now that I’m there
I don’t want to be there
the sea stinks
and makes flushing sounds
like a toilet
it is a bad place to die;
any place is a bad place to die,
but better a yellow room
with known walls and dusty
lampshades; so…
still stupidly off-course
like a jackal in a land of lions,
I make my way back through
them, through their blankets
and fires and kisses and sandy thumpings,
back up the cliff I climb
worse off, kicking clods,
and there the black sky, the black sea
behind me
lost in the game,
and I have left my shoes down there
with them 2 empty shoes,
and in the car
I start the engine,
headlights on I back away,
swing left drive East,
climb up the land and out,
bare feet on worn ribbed rubber
out of there
looking for
another place.
a 340 dollar horse and a hundred dollar whore
don’t ever get the idea I am a poet; you can see me
at the racetrack any day half drunk
betting quarters, sidewheelers and straight thoroughs,
but let me tell you, there are some women there
who go where the money goes, and sometimes when you
look at these whores these onehundreddollar whores
you wonder sometimes if nature isn’t playing a joke
dealing out so much breast and ass and the way
it’s all hung together, you look and you look and
you look and you can’t believe it; there are ordinary women
and then there is something else that wants to make you
tear up paintings and break albums of Beethoven
across the back of the john; anyhow, the season
was dragging and the big boys were getting busted,
all the non-pros, the producers, the cameramen,
the pushers of Mary, the fur salesmen, the owners
themselves, and Saint Louie was running this day:
a sidewheeler that broke when he got in close;
he
ran with his head down and was mean and ugly
and 35 to 1, and I put a ten down on him.
the driver broke him wide
took him out by the fence where he’d be alone
even if he had to travel four times as far,
and that’s the way he went it
all the way by the outer fence
traveling two miles in one
and he won like he was mad as hell
and he wasn’t even tired,
and the biggest blonde of all
all ass and breast, hardly anything else
went to the payoff window with me.
that night I couldn’t destroy her
although the springs shot sparks
and they pounded on the walls.
later she sat there in her slip
drinking Old Grandad
and she said
what’s a guy like you doing
living in a dump like this?
and I said
I’m a poet
and she threw back her beautiful head and laughed.
you? you…a poet?
I guess you’re right, I said, I guess you’re right.
but still she looked good to me, she still looked good,
and all thanks to an ugly horse
who wrote this poem.
II
Crucifix in a Deathhand
Poems 1963-1965
the dark is empty;
most of our heroes have been
wrong
view from the screen
I cross the room
to the last wall
the last window
the last pink sun
with its arms around the world
with its arms around me
I hear the death-whisper of the heron
the bone-thoughts of sea-things
that are almost rock;
this screen caved like a soul
and scrawled with flies,
my tensions and damnations
are those of a pig,