by Amiri Baraka
The house is old and night smooths its fetters with screams. It rolls in the wind and the windows sit low above the river and anyone sitting at a table writing is visible even across to the other side. The shores are the same. A wet cigarette burns the brown table & the walls heave under their burden of silence.
HEATHEN: No. 2
1
The first sun is already lost. The house breathes slowly beside the river under a steel turn of bridge. Myself, again, looking out across at shapes formed in space. My face hangs out the window. Air scoops in my head. To form more objects, fashioned from my speech. Trees in the other state. More objects, room sags under light. My skin glistens like glass. Metal beads on the pavement. Eyes on mine. Slick young men with glass skin. Dogs.
He had survived the evilest time. A time alone, with all the ugliness set in front of his eyes. His own shallowness paraded like buglers across the dead indians. Some time, some space, to move.
All I want is to move. To be able to flex flat muscles. Tendons drag into place. My face, the girl said naked, is beautiful. Your face is beautiful, she had said, only this once in her dirty cotton dress. Bernice. Some lovely figure here in a space, a void. Completely unknown her stink. Dirty eyes slippery in dark halls. She lived under my grandmother and peed in the yard. Before the fire. And shouted in the movies under the threat of boredom and myself, who had not yet become beautiful.
Women are objects in space. This new sun, could define them, were they here, or sane, or given to logical things. The mind objects them. Sterile Diane. Not the red-haired thighs / and mad machine of come. Another beast in another wood. One who wore wings made of moths.
He sat and was sad at his sitting. The day grew around him like a beast. Large and vapid, with blue fur turned in the thick fall air. All those people were silent. Their voices grew thinner. Their heads shrank. Their shoes came untied. They had to tug up their stockings several times to make them stay. He was thinking about his enemies. The iron eyes they sucked in their sleep. His own image flayed & drowned mandala. Innocent breathing. These lost beasts hated his mouth. They would kill him for it.
George was a child in blue bonnet. He stood naked against a window and begged for Oscar Williams. The piano struck notes at random. The wind did it. Naked he was smaller than his blue bonnet. His breasts were red sores, hard & indelicate, tasteless as the wet hour bleeding. The sun had come out. The rain had stopped. It was not yet dark.
All the other times I know form crusts under my tongue and hurt my speech. I slur my own name, I cannot remember anyone’s name who I thought beautiful. Only indelicate furtive lust. Even intimacy dulled by some hacking silent blade. The knife of the lie. Lying to one’s self. You are uglier than that. You are more beautiful. You have more sense than to kill yourself this way. You are invisible in my mouth & talk through my head like radios.
George would laugh & float 3 inches off the ground, in deference to the old man. Believing anything he told himself.
You’ve done everything you
despised. Flowers fall off trees, wind
under low branches shoves them into
quick chill of the river, the high
leaves disappear over stone fences.
Frank in armor thrust out his sword. My flesh is stone but I scream and he cringes with grunts. He screamed when we were close and laughed at the night. Its wet insanity.
Diane disintegrated into black notes beneath my inelegant hands. She died. She died. She died. I walked out into the morning with her breathing on my face. I never came again.
More forms against the white sky. I remember each face, each finger, each dumb word against lips against my face. The words. The stink of insolence. Or even I backing away from the zone. The area of feeling. Where anyone can enter. Unawares, even the cautious sterile greeter.
Another man walked through me like hours. Not even closeness of flesh. Not against this blue ugly air. Not against you or myself. Not against the others, their unclosing eyes. The fat breasted fashionable slut of letters. Her blonde companion in the sulking dugouts of stupidity. She clasped my face in her bones & kissed silence into my mouth.
THE INCONTINENT: Lasciviousness
Petrus Borel is the lascivious man. Doubt yourself before you doubt me. To lie to anyone: white birds low over the house, over the roof. Me inside under the same roof. Night for the birds. And the light here burns all night. Burning away the air. Animal life will die. The plants later, when all is stone or the insane reflection of sun on stone. White rocks for the world. From water to low beach houses, expensive paintings to please that young elder.
Leather jacket, glasses, lost outside of purgatory. (Passd the neutrals into the first circle. And then the blue air blows in. Biting his thoughts. The man at the bar with fat trousers & filtered cigarettes. In his brain, white etch. Mouths without pictures.
But to the next level: Minds, faces collapse on the pavements outside of bars like these. Next to the traffic. The white wax casualness. Make up under the canopy. “You wouldn’t be able to see those birds at night.” To know the numbers inside darkness.
Your mouth, like the street, a cavern. Siren. Full moon hung low over wood. At the green cold streets. We were “downtown.” Eclipse like metal, over the umbrellas, shrubs at high altitudes. And the doorman wd sit unconcerned in a white sport shirt.
Think to what you see. Even past, its origin in a dust we scrub ourselves of. A link. to white and yellow spaces.
The idea of space. Eyes rub at night under alcohol. The distance to the ceiling. Crowds of lives, I could picture a man saying, between us and the ceiling. The river would roar underground. Ministers would walk by the windows. People would write poems. No one would be kissing me or talking seriously about my death.
It was a picture of a street. Six slim trees. Without animal life beneath the airplanes. Planets of justice. The white beard of God. All is suddenly not commonplace. Now it is again. Sinks. Laughter. Brooms. Language. You are empty of me. You could not recognize sidewalks without me. Lucre of the blood. The image is cold, without space, a dead talking of earth.
Lascivious is to meat. They take it into their mouths. Meat. Blood on the paper . . . or in Fielding’s head on the sidewalk. A thrust. The walls of words, intimate gestures. The street took his feet. The dirt sung in night’s hook. The moon again, in the cold.
A rung of the law. To thighs, because blood seeps from them. Flesh/ to pure air. Black smelly hair. Coarse, or softer than touch. Each to himself, as the pure image. Nothing remains with me . . . except myself to each, as to himself. The pure image. Nothing remains. a hallway of night. In a heavy season.
Anger is nothing. To me fear is much more. As if trees bled. The hour hung in my flesh. Pure act. The lie under streets stomping mist. The innocence of myself. Of you, under me. Of each finger dying. Egyptians, Praxiteles, Lester Young. Sources, implements under the ugly sea. Bright lips to colors seeping through the warm day. It could die. And the lust in the world fashioned into snow.
Gluttony
(It wd be present or forward, or as
each thing turns toward us, the
brown heavy past.)
City is gluttony. Mind you! The sparks hiss and sun drips on leaves.
This place is not another. Cold white sidewalks. Time, as intimate. To myself, beautiful fingers. You stand so straight. The mob of buildings. Their factories. Our incontinence.
She cd die on the street with her stockings pulled up. Her letters, not to old men on the east side. Myself, the young. Myself, again, under the spattering leaves. The west is a bridge. We’ll travel someplace wide open. Not that slow brown water. A river. Another blue eye washing our land. Water to the east. We leave under the heavy air. Still, and winter coming on.
Fog settles on the bricks in the junkyard. The old cars smoking. In summer, smoke raised over the cities, black in winters. The woman could die with her stockings pulled up. Black bulbous eyes. Filthy sandwiches, if you can remember. A boy named Th
omas who drew well with perfect pencils.
Perfect, these paths. Even on cement. We march well and head around the corner. A black catholic girl had written my name on a trash can. I love you I love you I love you. It was cold then, and I unwrapped my shiny badge. The birds’ peace officer. Skinny legs against the red buildings. Telephones against the green braid rug. The warm radio. All their old voices.
That was a wide street where James Karolis lived. He died in a bathroom of old age & segregation. His nose was stopped up and he could pee all over anybody’s floor. Mr. Van Ness wd stop by to shake my hand & soothe his bohemians.
You cd be the leader of this weather. If you ran faster & told those jokes again. 7 or eight boys slumped against the wall. Or under the jungle bars, the shadows wd get in your eyes. More faces. More leaves. A farm sits there for years.
What do you want now? The street disappears. Night breaks down. Dogs bark in blue mist.
The blossom, the flower, the magic. If my flesh is sweet, my mind is pure. I am awake in your cold world.
INCONTINENT: The Prodigal
On a porch that summer, in night, in my body’s skin, drunk, sitting stiff-legged in a rocking chair. Vita Nuova. To begin. There. Where it all ends. Neon hotels, rotten black collars. To begin, aside from aesthetes, homosexuals, smart boys from Maryland.
The light fades, the last earthly blue, to night. To night. Dead in a chair in Newark. Black under irrelevant low stars.
On a hill night fades, behind the house. Silence. Unmessed earth. My feet, my eyes, my hands hung in the warm air. Foppish lovely lips. Allen wrote years later. A weeping wraith.
Hung in words, lying saints. The martyrs lose completely light. That slow feel of night. Industrial negroes with cold rusty fingers.
The steps of tears, or dust between tall shadowy buildings. Germans with bald heads. To go backward, or cross over, into what you mean. What becomes realer than mere turning of hours. Shadows on long afternoons. Silent mouths
Break out. The turn. Bleaker. In the cold, my lips and hands turn hard. Peacock. Lone walker of mornings. Box-cars of fairies tilted into night. Jeliff Ave. Where Beverly lived and her father grew heavy mustaches. On that porch, on that air, words. To disappear, and leave the maid sad in her mother’s gown.
A summer of dead names. Early twilight hoots of birds beyond the buildings. Each excess past. Now, this other, to be a beginning. A walk thru sun on stone. The train stations bracking a few blocks from where I walked.
He wore glasses and sold greeting cards. The buses went up Raymond Blvd. and turned left at Academy St. The O.D.B. (Office of Dependency Benefits) of the burning dogs. The red house with clubs. The white woman fondling me in a sand pit. The boy with his hand in my pocket. My watch. The lies. Snot. Wind blows smoke across tar. Chalked names. We jumped off the garage and I put my hand between our old friend’s legs. Today the leaves clatter & the sun weights my fingers.
The old houses were slums except mine. Even that high apartment the french girl died in. Wallpaper, and bebop orchestras at the first sex. “Do anything you want to me . . . but don’t hurt me. . . .” Wool for the cold. The old man sold his gas heaters and I kissed Lenore in the hall. She went back to the projects and had some baby. Leaves blew through the empty playground. The bigboys beat the little boys. The sun itself was gray.
We skipped together . . . in school. Her brothers (this other one), were failures. But she pressed close to me and stood that way for hours. My fingers loosened and I wished I had curly hair.
More than this is some other doing. Some other word. The man turned away cranes toward his beginning. Olson broke, Allen losing his hair. The faces seep together.
Or feathers of sun. Their noise. Steam from the streets. A long shadow of my body, tilted across the street. Danny Wilson’s. A union organizer lived across the lot, Pooky, an italian with twin sisters. Or an accordionist, or the tiny television showing leaves. Augie’s effeminate hands, my womanly mind. Voice, under their shrieks. Murray and Ora, hard and living. In light, they still sprawl in light. A thin bar of shadow on the stone. They live in light. The prodigal lives in darkness.
I have lost those clear days. Blue hoops, more days turning at the rust. The short throw across field. The pit. Noses. Rauscher. Old Black Rag Picker.
And blind adventure, those fences, with the Germans & dotty faced Keneir. In summer that seems cold. A breath.
Did John Holmes really jump off the Warren St. bridge? But his legs healed and he watched us hump the big italian bitch in Sweeney’s cloakroom.
Eliot, Pound, Cummings, Apollinaire were living across from Kresges. I was erudite and talked to light-skinned women.
Trains, parties, death in a chair. Come back or leave it. His heavy jaw fastened to yours, from unknown dustiness. Pure movement. Of which to place himself, as himself, in a wooden cell, looking down on blue fenced water and the statue of a colored man.
A black cloak of distance. A blue box of toys, or have it books and razors. Let blonde lips shatter on his face. Asleep under blue coats. Awake at night for any substance of lost day. Already past. Each second the blue air turns. Each invisible leaf. Each snowed down street. An impossible distance of shadows. Wool cloak of years. Not time, not ever time. Not to myself, a young fat-lipped corpse.
Tell your lies some other time. “Your parents still visit the child.”
Wrathful
I had forgotten to run. But if you believed I’d cuss that girl out. Fuck you, he repeated in his chin. Behind his meat counter I think even later he admired me. The polack did, for what reasons my mother could tell you. We worked next to that hospital & worked for a fat old man that one summer in the garage with all those rotten potatoes. A long spinster. An ugly middleclass negro bitch laughing in the hot kitchen at my red wool shirt & new jeans. Because its “too hot.” Liars. Gossips. Widows. Cooks. Lived in the basement & went around the corner to her inferior nephews.
A bucket of coal. She shouted that from her stairs. The Owl Club. My father’s adultery. Bowling down Quitman Street. That old 3 finger man with the gas station. Andy. Is he still there? On Quitman St. Dolores, who sd to me behind her pimples. My brother is dumb, my mother is dumb, my father is drunk, but you’re beautiful. Will you be a doctor & take me to the proctors. The movies. The ball games. & later we will watch television on our linoleum & throw apple cores out the window. A fat blind woman tipped me for bringing her cokes. I went home in the afternoon & fucked Beverly. She had a baby & hid its face in her lips. Her paintings. Her Vincent, not a white Frenchman but an old rag head from the south.
A belly rub, a christmas tree, a negro. Autumn, is correct always. In the dark instinct. They believed me, and told others. Their walks. Their love affairs. Their sun.
My substance dark & talked of now odd times when everybody’s dressed up. Forgive me.
SEVEN (The Destruction Of America
The Dead,
are indians. White bones dust
in their jelly. Dead in the world, to
white dust bones.
And Riders,
coming toward us. The Gloom
lifting. Trees
blown back.
Cold season,
of steel, colors,
cheap medicines.
I am, as you are, caught. Here,
is where we die.
On this mountain,
Looking down.
We will die up here
in the cold.
White man white crushed stones. In the cold rattling. Small fires, from drills. These hopis, pimps, rattlers, strolling in blue sun. Were killed or tortured. Worked for the land. The sun, the wind Gods of our secret ocean. Break out. Now, the boat rattles against soft mud. Its destination printed in expensive inks, in the captain’s pocket. That tall person squeezing among shadows. These streets echo. The flag, so late, still chiming on its pole. The cold draped above the buildings. No one there to watch you. Dirt shows thru the grass. Dead trees rot in penthouses. Dogs, mad at du
st. The wind pounds white bones.
White man fedora smiles. Pink fingernails. Abstract death flowers. Color to live, he slunk. Away, the radio squalled & the weather got bad. She undressed and walked thru their ranks. A black feather like his teeth had clamps. Stuck out beyond his lips. My name, like Indians. Dead hard ground.
Violence
against others,
against one’s self,
against
God, Nature and Art.
SEDUCERS
The cold light, even inside. Say Autumn. Say Railroad. Say leaves. Go back. After crossing the street. The tracks. Dark stones. Your own space, wherever. It was afternoon, when she died. Everyone lie. For Lillian. who never understood the seasons. My shadow against the marquees. The dark / and it clutched her. Lillian, so thin with my talk. Gifts against the cold. Her space, impossible to say. To define. That distance across the trees. Her park. Her friends.
The sun had slept on grass in the south. The sun had marked its time. Lillian. Say love. Say slept. Say place your fingers here.
There were, of course, parties. She came. I stayed in the metal halls, rifling the mailboxes. Grinning. Being popular. Dancing alone, or with those heavy fleshed men I forgot to tell most people abt. She would look out the window & identify us. Even in the shadows. Even from the roof, those myths, the beautiful naked speech.