My Vocabulary Did This to Me
Page 17
The shifts of one sense of a word to another
The birds flying there inside the eaves with their wings dangling
Not bats, birds.
And offering up your life to summon anything is a pretty silly thing. I can’t see
Where their messages get me. Another five years
Their wings
Glittering in its black ab/sense.
For the birds. Whose live-r is torn out. Whose live-r is torn out. Pro-me-thee-us. The old turning.
Where their messages get me. The shifts
Of their beaks. Their hungry beaks. But the birds are real not only in feeding. I think
Their wings. Glittering in the black ab/sense.
Pro-me-thee-us. Our mouths water
Like an ocean.
And so I say to you, Jim, do not become too curious about your poetry
Let it speed into the tunnel by itself
Do not follow it, do not try to ride it
Let it go into the tunnel and out the other side and back to you while you do important things like loving and learning patience
Five years. The train with its utterly alien cargo moving on the black track.
Prometheus was a guy who had his liver eaten out by birds. A bum who rode a black train. Who was curious.
Play it cool with Williams or paranoid with Pound but never ride it past the tunnel or look for a conductor to ask questions
Hide, and do not ask the questions,
At the black throat of the tunnel.
Pro-me-thee-us
Pro-me-thee-us
Five years
The song singing from its black throat.
VI.
Dignity
Dig–nity
The extra syllables are unimportant. Have no dignity, no meaning on this world.
Nity. Hear those syllables and dig is an obvious pun for digging graves or whatever that gravedigger is doing at the moment.
The extra syllables are unimportant. I should have loved him yesterday
The boy whistles
Dig-
nity
Or like that little window in Alice which she can’t go through because she’s 27 feet tall because she ate a bottle called Drink Me
Po – etery. Po – eatery. The eaxtra slyllables is unimportant. because the poem said Drink Me. I’ll find a substitute
For all your long-
Ing.
And that little door with all those wheels in it
Be-
leave in it
Like God.
“Dignity is a part of a man . . .”
Dignity is a part of a man being naked before everybody. The part where the heart separates itself from the loins.
The poet is stepping out of the airplane.
Dignity is a part of a rose in a broken vase. The part where the thorns separate themselves from the flower
The poet is stepping out of the airplane
Dignity is a part of not being asked.
*
I miss you, I said. The dead flowers,
The poets who wanted to kiss me, the naked hatred
That wanted to kiss me. I miss their flowers
I miss the hatred of not being asked.
But Jack . . .
Shut up, I said. Nothing but love could have eaten the roses.
*
Then, as we went toward the big ocean
Our poems became more threatening. Words sounded like
D-E-A-T-H, L-O-V-E, and the seals howled up from the rocks like the last line of a French poem.
*
God is merely domestic. Death is merely domestic. They are a lie told to disguise the nature of art.
The poet is stepping out of the airplane.
Magic is merely domestic. Dignity is merely domestic.
The poet is stepping out of the airplane.
My house is merely domestic. I live in my house; my skin lives in my house. We are domestic. My house is merely domestic. We are a lie to disguise the nature of art.
*
I loved him. I loved him. I loved you.
I loved him. I loved him. I loved you.
It is true. It is true. It returns.
HELEN: A REVISION (1960)
Nothing is known about Helen but her voice
Strange glittering sparks
Lighting no fires but what is reechoed
Rechorded, set on the icy sea.
All history is one, as all the North Pole is one
Magnetic, music to play with, ice
That has had to do with vision
And each one of us, naked.
Partners. Naked.
_______________
Helen: A Revision
ZEUS: It is to be assumed that I do not exist while most people in the vision assume that I do exist. This is to be one of the extents of meaning between the players and this audience.
I have to talk like this because I am the lord of both kinds of sky—and I don’t mean your sky and their sky because they are signs, I mean the bright sky and the burning sky. I have no intention of showing you my limits.
The players in this poem are players. They have taken their parts not to deceive you (or me if it matters) but because they have been paid in love or coin to be players. I have known for a long time that there is not a fourth wall in a play. I am called Zeus and I know this.
THERSITES (running out on the construction of the stage): The fourth wall is not as important as you think it is.
ZEUS (disturbed but carrying it off like a good Master of Ceremonial): Thersites is involuntary. (He puts his arm around him.) I could not play a part if I were not a player.
THERSITES: Reveal yourself to me and don’t pretend that there are people watching you. I am alone on the stage with you. Tell me the plot of the play.
ZEUS (standing away): Don’t try to talk if you don’t have to. You must admit there is no audience. Everything is done for you.
THERSITES: Stop repeating yourself. You old motherfucker. Your skies are bad enough. (He looks to the ground.) A parody is better than a pun.
ZEUS: I do not understand your language. (They are silent together for a moment and then the curtain drops.)
_______________
And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost
And if he doesn’t, and he won’t, hope the cost
Hope the cost.
And the terror of the what meets the why at the edge
Like a backwards image of each terror’s lodge
Each terror’s lodge.
And if he cries put his heart out with a lantern’s goat
Where they pay all passages to pay the debt
The lighted yet.
_______________
The focus sing
Is not their business. Their tracks lay
By not altogether being there.
Here and there in swamps and villages.
How doth the silly crocodile
Amuse the Muse
_______________
And in the skyey march of flesh
That boundary line where no body is
Preserve us, lord, from aches and harms
And bring my death.
Both air and water rattle there
And mud and fire
Preserve us, lord, from what would share a shroud
and bring my death.
A vagrant bird flies to the glossy limbs
The battlefield has harms. The trees have half
Their branches shot away. Preserve us, lord
From hair and mud and flesh.
_______________
A twisted smile, a flower I
Could name a rose.
A trick of rhetoric, the shadow standing firm
Against the glass.
A twisted smile, a flower I
Could name a rose.
______________
Which without feeling to the enormous source
Of deep emot
ion
We laugh until we are hoarse.
Each poisons every well
In which each shadow dwells.
Unmixed emotion. You can shoe a horse
With darkness on the plates
For mates.
_______________
Half-real, the iceberg
Was kept from us. By not altogether being there
They couldn’t care less what hit them
(A big, red, joyous caterpillar twisting and spewing the wet leaves
(From top to bottom the iceberg
Totally indistinguishable.
_______________
Nothing complete at the opera but singing
Nothing moves in the grass but noise
There in the edge there, there is some singing
And in the grass there is noise.
Grass is to be prayed for by the singer
A quiet noise that has its grass forever
There in the edge there, there is some singing
Nothing moves in the grass but noise.
_______________
An image of withdrawal. All
Of her beauty.
A pair of sox knitted for her in Sparta
Left there to rot.
The rouge she left in Troy.
Fausts.
Now, in Egypt, she who was never there perceives
Two names.
_______________
“You have done big things,” said the dwarf to the answer.
“We answers live in the ground.” We are called
When we’re cold.
We grasshoppers live a thousand years
When the ants answer.
_______________
Then
Even the extraordinary is unimportant.
Helen’s eyes
Are these.
These are bright as stars
We disclothe.
______________
Troy is a bathtub
(An image)
And like a bathtub (an image)
It lets out all its sparks.
In the dark aftermath of it
The pipeline between the poem and the reader
(Them-and-us)! An
Image of pure beauty
_______________
The last edge of the voice
Where she sings to men and women
Unchanged like the edge of the moon.
A floating parapet an up-there
She worships herself with it
She lives there,
In brandy and in all senses
Alien.
_______________
To make her into an artifact is to try to kill her
Helen was not born of men of history
(They said she had an egg in her cunt)
The what gave life to her
Was extra to her beauty
Housing her.
______________
Dear Russ,
I am writing to you in the middle of a poem about Helen. What there was to her about your body I should have never ceased to wish to know. It is as if there was a dark fleshy space between us labeled, “I am not myself.”
There is utterly no reason for imagining Helen. Whether she was in Troy or Egypt, she would be the same figure of imagination put into being by a vacuum, the same vacuum by which I write poetry or you paint, or, I suppose men fought for her.
Or becomes more unreal every minute. I do not love her. As the thought of you or anyone I loved.
Hold us to the real, lady of the seven webbed fingers, hold us to their hard hearts bouncing to and fro against each other.
_______________
Where the old distrust breaks through the floor of the grainery
No trust is but fallen oats.
On when the seeds do not sprout in the darkness of the underground
Nothing shouts out loud.
The crowd
Of loves possible to a man thins
When the crop is harvested.
______________
Black ghosts and black ghosts
Whose little schemes
Possessed by the right dreams.
There is the horror of what isn’t and what was
And the little people. They
Haven’t anything to say.
_______________
Informed against itself
Like your body twisting on its bed dreaming of poems it is writing or more probably has never written
Hokku, haikku
2400 syllables.
_______________
Invited a daimon
A guardian angel closer
Where we could both
Observe ourselves.
“That Helen cat is nothing
She’s a dream
From Rockefeller.” In Sparta and in histroy (a lump)
They are choosing sides.
“Like Helen isn’t
The Y of her cunt,
A birthplace
Isn’t.”
______________
He was beautiful. I am trying to leave him and it at that.
I am trying to write a poem apart from all beauty
The world is ugly. A sunshade. Figure that in your business. A poetry that don’t matter.
The sun is beautiful. Molecules at 532 miles a second and 832 billion degrees fahrenheit jangle apart
There, his body, when I noticed it. Going at a second a time.
_______________
Years ago a kindly English professor told me that Robert Frost had once said in a moment of absolute vision, “Any damned fool can get into a poem but it takes a poet to get out of one.”
I confused this with sexuality and believed it.
Actually getting out of a poem is no more difficult than answering a lying obvious answer to a lying obvious question in an intelligence test or a lover.
What is difficult is the form.
Past one’s only cleverness (paradoxes, which are songs set aside)
Is the other answer that it is as difficult to get into a poem as into Helen.
THE HEADS OF THE TOWN UP TO THE AETHER (1960)
HOMAGE TO CREELEY
EXPLANATORY NOTES
I.
For Cegeste
Several Years’ Love
Two loves I had. One rang a bell
Connected on both sides with hell
The other’d written me a letter
In which he said I’ve written better
They pushed their cocks in many places
And I’m not certain of their faces
Or which I kissed or which I didn’t
Or which of both of them I hadn’t.
Car Song
Away we go with no moon at all
Actually we are going to hell.
We pin our puns to our backs and cross in a car
The intersections where lovers are.
The wheel and the road turn into a stair
The pun at our backs is a yellow star.
We pin our puns on the windshield like
We crossed each crossing in hell’s despite.
Concord Hymn
Your joke
Is like a lake
That lies there without any thought
And sees
Dead seas
The birds fly
Around there
Bewildered by its blue without any thought of water
Without any thought
Of water.
Wrong Turn
What I knew
Wasn’t true
Or oh no
Your face
Was made of fleece
Stepping up to poetry
Demands
Hands.
The Territory Is Not the Map
What is a half-truth the lobster declared
You have sugared my groin and have sugared my hair
What correspondence except my despair?
What is my crime but my
youth?
Truth is a map of it, oily eyes said
Half-truth is half of a map instead
Which you will squint at until you are dead
Putting to sea with the truth.
They Came to the Briers and the Briers Couldn’t Find ’Em
The goop
Is like mulberry soup
Or like anything
You sang.
The goop is an international criminal organization that talks to each other, makes passes at each other, sings to each other, clings to each other, is as absolutely alien to each other as a stone in Australia
For example
the poem does not know
Who you refers to.
When You Go Away You Don’t Come Home
On the mere physical level
There is a conflict between what is and what isn’t
What is, I guess, is big
And what isn’t, bigger
Metaphysically speaking
What aren’t casts no shadow
And what are is bigger than the moon, I guess,
Bigger than that boy’s pants.
Sheep Trails Are Fateful to Strangers
Dante would have blamed Beatrice
If she turned up alive in a local bordello
Or Newton gravity
If apples fell upward
What I mean is words
Turn mysteriously against those who use them
Hello says the apple
Both of us were object.
To Be Inscribed on a Painting
The fate of the car
And the fate of the ride
Is only a bridegroom
Without a bride
Though she hasn’t a face
And I haven’t seen her
She isn’t a mirror
Whatever she was.
And the light in the air
Was as real as it was
And it hasn’t her beauty
Whose blankness I stare.
Elegy
Whispers—
Eurydice’s head is missing
Whispers—