to the images of the past are confused.
There’s a war over the rights to the images of the past,
an unspeakable, delirious war in the dreaming self,
a war of tears, standing by the window and listening
to a song. I will always love you and think of you with bitterness,
and when someone offers a remark in a voice
that brings back your loosened voice and your inebriated fear,
I’ll be wounded along scars.
The Honor
At a party in a Spanish kind of tiled house
I met a woman who had won an award
for writing whose second prize
had gone to me. For years
I’d felt a kinship with her in the sharing
of this honor,
and I told her how glad I was to talk with her,
my compatriot of letters,
mentioning of course this award.
But it was nothing
to her, and in fact she didn’t remember it.
I didn’t know what else to talk about.
I looked around us at a room full of hands
moving drinks in tiny, rapid circles—
you know how people do
with their drinks.
Soon after this I became
another person, somebody
I would have brushed off if I’d met him that night,
somebody I never imagined.
People will tell you that it’s awful
to see facts eat our dreams, our presumptions,
but they’re wrong. It is an honor
to learn to replace one hope with another.
It was the only thing that could possibly have persuaded me
that my life is not a lonely story played out
in barrooms before a vast audience of the dead.
Poem
Loving you is every bit as fine
as coming over a hill into the sun
at ninety miles an hour darling when
it’s dawn and you can hear the stars unlocking
themselves from the designs of God beneath
the disintegrating orchestra of my black
Chevrolet. The radio clings to an un-
identified station—somewhere a tango suffers,
and the dance floor burns around two lovers
whom nothing can touch—no, not even death!
Oh! the acceleration with which my heart does proceed,
reaching like stars almost but never quite
of light the speed of light the speed of light.
Proposal
The early inhabitants of this continent
passed through a valley of ice two miles deep
to get here, passed from creature to creature
eating them, throwing away the small bones
and fornicating under nameless stars
in a waste so cold that diseases couldn’t
live in it. Three hundred million
animals they slaughtered in the space of two centuries,
moving from the Bering isthmus to the core
of squalid Amazonian voodoo, one
murder at a time; and although in the modern hour
the churches’ mouths are smeared with us
and all manner of pleading goes up from our hearts,
I don’t think they thought the dark and terrible
swallowing gullet could be prayed to.
I don’t think they found the smell of baking
amid friends in a warm kitchen anything to be revered.
I think some of them had to chew the food
for the old ones after they’d lost all their teeth,
and that their expressions
were like those we see on the faces
of the victims of traffic accidents today.
I think they threw their spears with a sense of utter loss,
as if they, their weapons, and the enormous animals
they pursued were all going to disappear.
As we can see, they were right. And they were us.
That’s what makes it hard for me now to choose one thing
over all the others; and yet surrounded by the aroma
of this Mexican baking and flowery incense
with the kitchen as yellow as the middle
of the sun, telling your usually smart-mouthed
urchin child about the early inhabitants
of this continent who are dead, I figure
I’ll marry myself to you and take my chances,
stepping onto the rock
which is a whale, the ship which is about to set sail
and sink
in the danger that carries us like a mother.
Movie Within a Movie
In August the steamy saliva of the streets of the sea
habitation we make our summer in,
the horizonless noons of asphalt,
the deadened strollers and the melting beach,
the lunatic carolers toward daybreak—
they all give fire to my new wife’s vision:
she sees me to the bone. In August I disgust her.
And her crazy mixed-up child, who eats with his mouth open
talking senselessly about androids, who comes
to me as I gaze out on the harbor wanting
nothing but peace, and says he hates me,
who draws pages full of gnarled organs and tortured
spirits in an afterworld—
but it is not an afterworld, it is this world—
how I fear them for knowing all about me!
I walk the lanes of this heartless village
with my head down, forsaking permanently
the people of the Town Council, of the ice-cream cone, of the out-of-state plate,
and the pink, pig eyes
of the demon of their every folly;
because to say that their faces are troubled,
like mine, is to fail: their faces
are stupid, their faces are berserk, but their faces
are not troubled.
Yet by the Metro
I find a hundred others just like me,
who move across a boiling sunset
to reach the fantastic darkness of a theater
Spaceman Tom and Commander Joe
I will never be his father. He will never be my son.
The massive sense of everything around us,
the sun inside our heads
in the blue and white woods, a mile away the sea
hunched dreaming over its business—under
the influences of these things
I can’t keep us from drifting out of ordinariness
on a barge of light.
The princess he gives his mother’s name to
fails in the invisible prison. The mangled
extraterrestrials blandly menace us, the Zargons
and such, who fall on a soft bewilderment,
and they cry tears like a little boy.
Our heartbeats make us go in search of these monsters
and of the dead generations of the forest
and of the living one, as we come up suddenly
against the border of a marsh,
where a golden heron startled by star-wanderers
lifts with the imperceptible slowness
of a shadow from what seems to be
a huge reservoir of blinking coins.
I can remember being seven years old
in the morning and going outside to play.
With the door of my home behind me,
the people who loved me, the bowl of cereal,
the rooms where the sleeping children grow up, pass
smoking cigarets through their sleeping children’s rooms
and enter their graves,
I stood at the door of the world.
You are my father. I am your son.
Willits, California
Meadows that wr
eck with a solitude,
tractors that have run down and died like toys,
even here among you
they are embarrassed and can’t hide
from their obscurity,
the trembling
ugly young girls, their lips
making that speechless consonant they always make
in the clouded mirrors before they carry
their roses into the flames of evening.
And when they arrive among mainstreets down
on which the cheap outdated names
are sobbed by the marquees,
driving and stopping and getting out
under the avalanches of sunset and walking into stores
as cool and still as pantries—they know how it is.
History…Sadness…A bubble
of some old error swimming up through the years,
and gossip that grows stale and then is venerated…
They know who we are,
our every pain
outnumbered by the studious array
of little crucifixions in the vineyards,
they know how we begin to disbelieve
the moon and stars,
and the wild
deer who blows over the road,
and how we are visited by craft from distant worlds,
people who come near but never land.
Oh they know
the tortures of sweetness,
these young girls
waiting under the beautiful eyes of billboards.
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly
James Hampton, 1909, Elloree, SC—1964, Washington, DC Custodian, General Services Administration; Maker of The Throne
1
I dreamed I had been dreaming,
And sadness did descend.
And when from the first dreaming
I woke, I walked behind
The window crossed with smoke and rain
In Washington, DC,
The neighbors strangling newspapers
Or watching the TV
Down on the rug in undershirts
Like bankrupt criminals.
The street where Revelation
Made James Hampton miserable
Lay wet beyond the glass,
And on it moved streetcorner men
In a steam of crossed-out clues
And pompadours and voodoo and
Sweet Jesus made of ivory;
But when I woke, the headlights
Shone out on Elloree.
Two endless roads, four endless fields,
And where I woke, the veils
Of rain fell down around a sign:
FRI & SAT JAM W/ THE MEAN
MONSTER MAN & II.
Nobody in the Elloree,
South Carolina, Stop-n-Go,
Nobody in the Sunoco,
Or in all of Elloree, his birthplace, knows
His name. But right outside
Runs Hampton Street, called, probably,
For the owners of his family.
God, are you there, for I have been
Long on these highways and I’ve seen
Miami, Treasure Coast, Space Coast,
I have seen where the astronauts burned,
I have looked where the Fathers placed the pale
Orange churches in the sun,
Have passed through Georgia in its green
Eternity of leaves unturned,
But nothing like Elloree.
2
Sam and I drove up from Key West, Florida,
Visited James Hampton’s birthplace in South Carolina,
And saw The Throne
At The National Museum of American Art in Washington.
It was in a big room. I couldn’t take it all in,
And I was a little frightened.
I left and came back home to Massachusetts.
I’m glad The Throne exists:
My days are better for it, and I feel
Something that makes me know my life is real
To think he died unknown and without a friend,
But this feeling isn’t sorrow. I was his friend
As I looked at and was looked at by the rushing-together parts
Of this vision of someone who was probably insane
Growing brighter and brighter like a forest after a rain—
And if you look at the leaves of a forest,
At its dirt and its heights, the stuttering mystic
Replication, the blithering symmetry,
You’ll go crazy, too. If you look at the city
And its spilled wine
And broken glass, its spilled and broken people and hearts,
You’ll go crazy. If you stand
In the world you’ll go out of your mind.
But it’s all right,
What happened to him. I can, now
That he doesn’t have to,
Accept it.
I don’t believe that Christ, when he claimed
The last will be first, the lost life saved—
When he implied that the deeply abysmal is deeply blessed—
I just can’t believe that Christ, when faced
With poor, poor people aspiring to become at best
The wives and husbands of a lonely fear,
Would have spoken redundantly.
Surely he couldn’t have referred to some other time
Or place, when in fact such a place and time
Are unnecessary. We have a time and a place here,
Now, abundantly.
3
He waits forever in front of diagrams
On a blackboard in one of his photographs,
Labels that make no sense attached
To the radiant, alien things he sketched,
Which aren’t objects, but plans.
Of his last dated
Vision he stated:
“This design is proof of the Virgin Mary descending
Into Heaven…”
The streetcorner men, the shaken earthlings—
It’s easy to imagine his hands
When looking at their hands
Of leather, loving on the necks
Of jugs, sweetly touching the dice and bad checks,
And to see in everything a making
Just like his, an unhinged
Deity in an empty garage
Dying alone in some small consolation.
Photograph me photograph me photo
Graph me in my suit of loneliness,
My tie which I have been
Saving for this occasion,
My shoes of dust, my skin of pollen,
Addressing the empty chair; behind me
The Throne of the Third Heaven
Of the Nations Millennium General Assembly.
i AM ALPHA AND OMEGA THE BEGiNNiNG
AND THE END,
The trash of government buildings,
Faded red cloth,
Jelly glasses and lightbulbs,
Metal (cut from coffee cans),
Upholstery tacks, small nails
And simple sewing pins,
Lightbulbs, cardboard,
Kraft paper, desk blotters,
Gold and aluminum foils,
Neighborhood bums the foil
On their wine bottles,
The Revelation.
And I command you not to fear.
NEW POEMS
Our Sadness
There’s a sadness about looking back when you get to the end:
a sadness that waits at the end of the street,
a cigaret that glows with the glow of sadness
and a cop in a yellow raincoat who says It’s late,
it’s late, it’s sadness.
And it’s a sadness what they’ve done to the women I loved:
they turned Julie into her own mother, and Ruthe—
and Ruthe I understand has been turned
in
to a sadness…
And when it comes time
for all of humanity to witness what it’s done
and every television is trained on the first people to see God and
they say
Houston,
we have ignition,
they won’t have ignition.
They’ll have a music of wet streets
and lonely bars where piano notes
follow themselves into a forest of pity and are lost.
They’ll have sadness.
They’ll have
sadness, sadness, sadness.
Feet
Obedient to the laws of meat we walk
our feet wounded by joy
toward our humiliating rendezvous with mirrors
and toward the mysterious treasures tossed at our feet
as when I crossed the yard at Florence Prison
and heard someone calling
Poet
Poet
My name is James man
Life sentence!
Iowa City
The stifled musk of wood beneath linoleum
in the tall listening stairwells of certain
buildings stays, and the timbre the walls gave to your weeping
and to our snide talk and marijuana coughing,
that also stays, and some of the anger, and some of the stopped
feeling, the stranded, geologic
grieving of seedlings on a wind—and such we were—
they remain. But where do they remain?—the place
has gone, the receptacle
of these essences is mysterious.
I’ve returned to that same town, and nothing—
no raking, no ghostly notes, only
shopping malls standing where I beat you up
and spring’s uncertain touch and stuck breath
and women who smell like flowers or fruit or candy
moved by delicate desires along the aisles.
As we did, the same trains drag through town,
summoned up out of the prairie and disappearing
toward places waiting for their conjuring,
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Page 12