My Vocabulary Did This to Me
Page 7
The third word is eros
Who will cling to you every birthnight
Bringing your heart substance.
Whomever you touch will love you,
Will feel the cling of His touch upon you
Like sunlight scattered over an ancient mirror.
The fourth word is thanatos, the black belly
That eats birthdays.
I do not give you thanatos. I bring you a word to call Him
Thanatos, devourer of young men, heart-biter, bone-licker.
Look, He slinks away when you name Him.
Name Him! Thanatos.
The last word is agape,
The dancer that puts birthdays in motion.
She is there to lead words.
Counter to everything, She makes words
Circle around Her. Words dance.
See them. Anthropos ageless,
Andros made virgin, Eros unmirrored,
Thanatos devoured.
Agape, Agape, ring-mistress,
Love
That comes from beyond birthdays,
That makes poetry
And moves stars.
BIRDLAND, CALIFORNIA
The stairs upstairs were stairs
For the sake of ceremony
If Gertrude Stein had tried them on tiptoe
She would not have reached the 2nd floor.
The 2nd floor was a floor
For the sake of ceremony
What I mean is
This is a poem about Orpheus
Orpheus, he had the weight of Eurydice upon his back
He tried to carry her
Up that imaginary stairway.
Eurydice could be anyone. Is
I suppose
Anyone.
That makes the poem harder.
This night (Joe Dunn could give a date
October 1st
That’s Joe Dunn’s date)
But I can’t.
Butterflies transfigure and burn
In the absences of postmen.
But Joe Dunn will come home
Past all those unreal stairs
Will
Make a noise when the door opens,
Will turn on the light. Will turn on the light
Madness lies there. Orpheus collapses
Under the weight of the sentence, killing butterflies.
It is already
October 2nd.
October 3rd. Will it ever be important again
Whether it is October 2nd or October 3rd?
Have you ever wondered
What I mean is
When will they take all of us back to Birdland?
An embarrassed Orpheus
Arises
With a heavy Eurydice in his arms
What I mean is can a poem ever
Take accidentals for its ultimates?
It is now October 5th (or 6th)
English majors
Can discover the correct date
(The Yankees used seven pitchers
That will tell you the day)
I was lonelier than you are now (or will be)
October something, 1956.
“Imagine Lucifer . . .”
Imagine Lucifer
An angel without angelness
An apple
Plucked clear by will of taste, color,
Strength, beauty, roundness, seed
Absent of all God painted, present everything
An apple is.
Imagine Lucifer
An angel without angelness
A poem
That has revised itself out of sound
Imagine, rhyme, concordance
Absent of all God spoke of, present everything
A poem is.
The law I say, the Law
Is?
What is Lucifer
An emperor with no clothes
No skin, no flesh, no heart
An emperor!
THE SONG OF THE BIRD IN THE LOINS
A swallow whispers in my loins
So I can neither lie or stand
And I can never sleep again
Unless I whisper you his song:
“Deep in a well,” he whispers. “Deep
As diamonds washed beneath the stone
I wait and whisper endlessly
Imprisoned in a well of flesh.
“At night he sometimes sleeps and dreams.
At night he sometimes does not hear my voice.
How can I wound you with my well of sound
If he can sleep and dream beneath its wounds?
“I whisper to you through his lips.
He is my cage, you are my source of song.
I whisper to you through a well of stone.
Listen at night and you will hear him sing:
“‘A swallow whispers in my loins
So I can neither lie or stand
And I can never sleep again
Unless I whisper you this song.’”
BABEL 3
It wasn’t the tower at all
It was our words he hated.
Once our words rose
Into God’s willing mouth
Like bells sing into houses.
When someone loved
The word said love,
On the 38th floor,
On the 94th floor,
On the 1224th floor.
Words were different then. God didn’t
Divide us into different languages
He divided
Words and men.
Men and words—He called the words angels.
We called the words angels.
Things were different then.
THEY MURDERED YOU: AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF KENNETH REXROTH
To be accompanied by five jazz flutes and a contrabassoon
I will never again climb a mountain, read St. Augustine or go to bed with a woman
Without wishing that you were there, Kenneth Rexroth
Sharing my experience.
I will find you now in the leaves and in the sunsets,
Yes, and in the saxophones and peyote buttons
Wherever God and Nature make it quietly together
And the murderous squares don’t try to stop their experience.
When you died last month at the age of 52 of stomach ulcers
It was as if we young men had lost the last hope of a libertarian revolution
A society where poetry, jazz, sex, politics, and religion could function together like a giant gong
Each of whose tones perfectly overlays the other.
A society where Bohemians wouldn’t starve and predatory men wouldn’t lynch Negros and kill Jews and Hungarians
A society where wars would be abolished
A society where men and women would be perfectly free to do, say, think, feel what they wanted
Under your leadership.
When Christopher Smart
Went to bed in the meat market
You were there Kenneth Rexroth
Giving encouragement to the best minds of his generation
When Jakob Boehme
Was busted by ten Christ-hating policemen
You were there Kenneth Rexroth
Breathing comfort.
Sacco and Vanzetti will never forget
The sound of your rough voice
Or Rosa Luxemburg
Or Allen Ginsberg.
Yes, you have taught the youth of our generation to write political poetry
That does not really offend the F.B.I.
And yet is unsquare, mystical
Firmly in favor
Of God, physical exercise, and companionate marriage.
A POEM TO THE READER OF THE POEM
I throw a naked eagle in your throat.
I dreamed last night
That I was wrestling with you on the mountainside.
An eagle had a dream over our heads.
We threw rocks at him.
<
br /> I dreamed last night—
This is false in any poem
Last night never happened
Couldn’t
Make you feel the meaning so quickly
That I could tell you what I dreamed last night
That I could tell you that I dreamed I was wrestling
With the reader of this poem.
Dreamed—
Was it a wet dream?
Or dry
Like a dream is
When boys in a dream throw rocks at it?
I heard myself sobbing in a wet dream
Don’t worry I will tell you everything.
I had a dream last night
That I was wrestling with you on the mountainside.
Was it a wet dream?
No I would tell you if it was a wet dream.
It was this poem
Us
I wrestled with you in this poem
And it was not a wet dream.
Then define
If you don’t want to scare him out of the poem
Define
The dream
The wrestling
The lie
And in
What sweet Christ’s name the eagle we were throwing rocks at was,
And why I love you so much
And why it was not a wet dream.
I can’t deny
The lie.
The eagle was
God or Charles Olson
The eagle was men wrestling naked
Without the hope of men wrestling naked.
The eagle was a wet dream.
But the eagle in my throat says, “Jack,
How can you write a poem to the reader of a poem?
Even in a dream you must love somebody.”
This is another lie.
I did not wrestle with anybody
I wrestled with the reader of this poem.
Men kiss men
Not like anybody
Kisses a girl
Kiss each other like the map of Africa
Or a picture of a desert
Or a scale-map of the entire universe.
But this is not a wet dream.
We did not kiss each other.
My darling, if you flew
A naked eagle in my throat
I’d shout, “Exactly!
When I said this was a poem to the reader
I wanted to dig a pitfall
Only you could fall into.
You
Know who you are
Know how terribly far
From last night you are.
If I am old when you read this,
If I am dead when you read this,
Darling, darling, darling,
It was last night
When I wrestled with you.
I am wrestling with you.
It was not a wet dream or you would be wrestling
With a naked gravestone.”
Take it simply
Suppose we had been exploring
The hills and canyons of hell
And wrestled
And fucked
And—Hell,
Nothing but a spoiled camping trip.
Wrestling! It was as if we were in a room full
Of faceless comedians.
That wasn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell you
That there is innocence too
And the blind grandeur
Of the face of a mountain
In all we would have surveyed
If it had been a wet dream
If we had traveled
Mapless, past what either of us knew
Past the dead eagle,
Past the faceless comedians
Who bug us,
Past the past that has misplaced us,
Past all the dead lines in a poem that after all
Are only dead lines in a poem,
To the mountains
Where our hearts are
Where the heart is.
A wet dream—
I’ll tell God
It was a wet dream.
SONG FOR BIRD AND MYSELF
I am dissatisfied with my poetry.
I am dissatisfied with my sex life.
I am dissatisfied with the angels I believe in.
Neo-classical like Bird,
Distrusting the reality
Of every note.
Half-real
We blow the sentence pure and real
Like chewing angels.
“Listen, Bird, why do we have to sit here dying
In a half-furnished room?
The rest of the combo
Is safe in houses
Blowing bird-brained Dixieland,
How warm and free they are. What right
Music.”
“Man,
We
Can’t stay away from the sounds.
We’re crazy, Jack
We gotta stay here ’til
They come and get us.”
Neo-classical like Bird.
Once two birds got into the Rare Book Room.
Miss Swift said,
“Don’t
Call a custodian
Put crumbs on the outside of the window
Let them
Come outside.”
Neo-classical
The soft line strains
Not to be neo-classical.
But Miss Swift went to lunch. They
Called a custodian.
Four came.
Armed like Myrmidons, they
Killed the birds.
Miss Munsterberg
Who was the first
American translator of Rilke
Said
“Suppose one of them
Had been the Holy Ghost.”
Miss Swift,
Who was back from lunch,
Said
“Which.”
But the poem isn’t over.
It keeps going
Long after everybody
Has settled down comfortably into laughter.
The bastards
On the other side of the paper
Keep laughing.
LISTEN.
STOP LAUGHING.
THE POEM ISN’T OVER. Butterflies.
I knew there would be butterflies
For butterflies represent the lost soul
Represent the way the wind wanders
Represent the bodies
We only clasp in the middle of a poem.
See, the stars have faded.
There are only butterflies.
Listen to
The terrible sound of their wings moving.
Listen,
The poem isn’t over.
Have you ever wrestled with a bird,
You idiotic reader?
Jacob wrestled with an angel.
(I remind you of the image)
Or a butterfly
Have you ever wrestled with a single butterfly?
Sex is no longer important.
Colors take the form of wings. Words
Have got to be said.
A butterfly,
A bird,
Planted at the heart of being afraid of dying.
Blow,
Bird,
Blow,
Be,
Neo-classical.
Let the wings say
What the wings mean
Terrible and pure.
The horse
In Cocteau
Is as neo-classical an idea as one can manage.
Writes all our poetry for us
Is Gertrude Stein
Is God
Is the needle for which
God help us
There is no substitute
Or the Ace of Swords
When you are telling a fortune
Who tells death.
Or the Jack of Hearts
Whose gypsy fortune we clasp
In the middle of
a poem.
“And are we angels, Bird?”
“That’s what we’re trying to tell ’em, Jack
There aren’t any angels except when
You and me blow ’em.”
So Bird and I sing
Outside your window
So Bird and I die
Outside your window.
This is the wonderful world of Dixieland
Deny
The bloody motherfucking Holy Ghost.
This is the end of the poem.
You can start laughing, you bastards. This is
The end of the poem.
A POEM WITHOUT A SINGLE BIRD IN IT
What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not even know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only know that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun’s over. The picnic’s over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.
THE UNVERT MANIFESTO AND OTHER PAPERS FOUND IN THE RARE BOOK ROOM OF THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY IN THE HANDWRITING OF OLIVER CHARMING. BY S.
THE UNVERT MANIFESTO
1) An unvert is neither an invert or an outvert, a pervert or a convert, an introvert or a retrovert. An unvert chooses to have no place to turn.
2) One should always masturbate on street corners.
3) Unversion is the attempt to make the sexual act as rare as a rosepetal. It consists of linking the sexual with the greatest cosmic force in the universe—Nonsense, or as we prefer to call it, MERTZ.
4) Sex should be a frightening experience like a dirty joke or an angel.
5) Dirty jokes and angels should be frightening experiences.
6) An unvert must not be homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or autosexual. He must be metasexual. He must enjoy going to bed with his own tears.
7) Mertz!
8) All the universe is laughing at you.
9) Poetry, painting, and cocksucking are all attempts of the unvert to make God laugh.
10) The larger the Dada, the bigger the hole.
11) Sidney Mertz was the only man ever arrested for drunken-driving of a steam locomotive. He is now the bartender of the American Legion bar in Jackson, Wyoming.
12) Jews and Negros are not allowed to be unverts. The Jew will never understand unversion and the Negro understands it too well.
13) An unvert only loves other unverts. He will, however, consent to perform an act of unversion with almost anything else except lovers and mountain lions.