Poems 1959-2009
Page 17
The animal is strapped down for the vivisection, conscious,
Buying a book in Barnes & Noble, pursued by fans
Telling her they love her movies here in hell,
And would she do it to herself for them again.
A man comes to the tenth month of the year and calls it Charlotte—
I don’t believe in anything, I do
Believe in you. You always play
A garter-belted corpse of someone young.
94. FALL
It is
A hole surrounded
By a voluptuous
Migraine.
It was a universe that could
Burst out
And start
Without a trace
Of where it came from.
The background radiation
Is what’s
Left of
The outburst at the start.
The background radiation
Is the delicious
Migraine. The hole of life
Is about to
Start.
Don’t make sense.
It is about to start again.
Umbrellas pop open.
Mushroom caps approach a newsstand.
The trees wear truth and rouge.
The trees start to sing
In the soft.
The old penis smells food
And salivates.
One hundred ninety horsepower at
The crank
Going two hundred miles an hour down the straight
Is another motorcycle death
From Viagra in October.
95. OCTOBER
It is time to lose your life,
Even if it isn’t over.
It is time to say goodbye and try to die.
It is October.
The mellow cello
Allée of trees is almost lost in sweetness and mist
When you take off your watch at sunrise
To lose your life.
You catch the plane.
You land again.
You arrive in the place.
You speak the language.
You will live in a new house,
Even if it is old.
You will live with a new wife,
Even if she is too young.
Your slender new husband will love you.
He will walk the dog in the cold.
He will cook a meal on the stove.
He will bring you your medications in bed.
Dawn at the city flower market downtown.
The vendors have just opened.
The flowers are so fresh.
The restaurants are there to decorate their tables.
Your husband rollerblades past, whizzing,
Making a whirring sound, winged like an angel—
But stops and spins around and skates back
To buy some cut flowers in the early morning frost.
I am buying them for you.
I am buying them for your blond hair at dawn.
I am buying them for your beautiful breasts.
I am buying them for your beautiful heart.
96. NOVEMBER
I’ve never been older.
It doesn’t.
I can’t explain.
Every November is one more.
I’ve used up my amount.
I’ve nearly run out.
I’m out of penis.
I’ve run out.
I look out the spaceship’s vast
Expense of greenhouse glass
At the stars.
It will take a million years.
You open your head.
You look in the dictionary.
You look it up.
You look at the opposite.
You open the violin case.
You take it out.
Actually, it is a viola.
Actually, it is November.
You grab the handrails with the
Treadmill speeding up.
Oh my God. Don’t stop.
It is possible that
The president traveling in an open limousine
Has been shot.
My fellow Americans, ask not
What your country can do for you in
November. The doorman
Holds the door.
The taxi
Without a driver pulls up.
97. GOD EXPLODING
They all claim responsibility for inventing God,
Including the ruthless suicides who call themselves God Exploding.
All the rival groups, of course, immediately take credit
For terrorist atrocities they did not commit.
One of the terrorist acts they did not commit
Was inventing rock ’n’ roll, but, hey,
The birth of Elvis/Jesus is as absolute as the temperature
Of the background radiation, 4°K.
1, 2, 3, 4—I sing of a maiden that is makeles.
King of alle kinges to here sone che ches.
He cam also stille
Ther his moder was,
As dew in Aprille that fallith on the gras.
He cam also stille to his moderes bowr
As dew in Aprille that fallith on the flowr.
He cam also stille
There his moder lay,
As dew in Aprille that fallith on the spray.
Moder and maiden
Was never non but che;
Wel may swich a lady Godes moder be.
I hate seeing the anus of a beautiful woman.
I should not be looking. It should not be there.
It started in darkness and ended up a star.
Jewish stars on the L.A. freeway in Jewish cars
Take the off-ramp to the manger
Somewhere in the fields of Harlem,
Bearing gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.
Rock ’n’ roll in front of the Wailing Wall and weep.
With the stump where your hand was blown off beat your chest.
Hutu rebel soldiers crucify the mountain gorillas.
Hodie Christus natus est.
98. THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
The child stands at the window, after his birthday party,
Gray flannel little boy shorts, shirt with an Eton collar,
St. Louis, Missouri, sixty years ago,
And sees the World Trade Center towers falling.
The window is the wall
The wide world presents to prepubescence.
People on fire are jumping from the eightieth floor
To flee the fireball.
In the airplane blind-dating the south tower,
People are screaming with horror.
The airplane meeting the north tower
Erupts with ketchup.
The window is a wall
Through which the aquarium visitors can see.
Airplanes are swimming
Up to the towers of steel.
Up to the Twin Towers to feed.
People rather than die prefer to leap
From the eightieth floor to their death.
The man stands at his childhood window saving them.
Old enough to undress himself,
Gray flannel little boy shorts, shirt with an Eton collar,
He stands at the worldwide window, after the birthday party,
And sees the mountains collapsing and collapsing.
On the other side of the aquarium glass is September 11th.
Under his birthday party clothes is his underwear and the underwater.
Why bother to wash your clothes, or your skin, why bother to wash,
When you will only get dirty again?
Why bother to live when you will die?
Visitors are peering through the thick glass and taking photographs
Of ground zero—of Allah akbar in formaldehyde in a jar.
God is great. Love is hate.
99. DECEMBER
I
don’t believe in anything, I do
Believe in you.
Down here in hell we do don’t.
I can’t think of anything I won’t.
I amputate your feet and I walk.
I excise your tongue and I talk.
You make me fly through the black sky.
I will kill you until I die.
Thank God for you, God.
I do.
My God, it is almost always Christmas Eve this time of year, too.
Then I began to pray.
I don’t believe in anything anyway.
I did what I do. I do believe in you.
Down here in hell they do don’t.
I can’t think of anything we won’t.
How beautiful thy feet with shoes.
Struggling barefoot over dunes of snow forever, more falling, forever, Jews
Imagine mounds of breasts stretching to the horizon.
We send them to their breast, mouthful of orison.
I like the color of the smell. I like the odor of spoiled meat.
I like how gangrene transubstantiates warm firm flesh into rotten sleet.
When the blue blackens and they amputate, I fly.
I am flying a Concorde of modern passengers to gangrene in the sky.
I am flying to area code 212
To stab a Concorde into you,
To plunge a sword into the gangrene.
This is a poem about a sword of kerosene.
This is my 21st century in hell.
I stab the sword into the smell.
I am the sword of sunrise flying into area code 212
To flense the people in the buildings, and the buildings, into dew.
100. ONE HUNDRED
There was a door because I opened it.
It was the muse. It had a human face.
It had to have to make the three parts fit.
The Cosmos Poems was fire that filled the space
With fire in Life on Earth. The sky
Became a blue lake I was bathing in,
But it was fire. The sun was burning. Fly
Me to the bottom where I’ve been. I’ve been
Completing Area Code 212.
I’ve been in heaven in Manhattan on
The bottom. Hell is what to live can do.
One day I went downtown but it was gone.
The World Trade Center towers still return
In dreams and fall again and fall again
And rise again and people scream and burn
And jump to certain death again and then
They rise back to the hundredth floor and turn
Their cell phones on and call to say goodbye.
The firemen coming up the stairs will burn
Their way to heaven. Everyone will die
And perish, die and live. The people on
The top floors use their cell phones to call out.
Death follows birth as sunrise follows dawn.
High pressure sends a sky-high waterspout
Fire balances on top of. It begins,
The universe begins, and death begins,
And every living being burns and thins
Down to a flame that burns away and grins.
I heard them singing and set fire to it.
I hear their screams. Their corpses run in place.
They burst in flames to make the three parts fit.
My trilogy is fire that fills the space.
The muse now raised the laurel crown above
My corpse, and, praising me with what was fire
To hear, which I breathed in, which burned like love,
Now set ablaze the funerary pyre.
Dead white males greeted the arrival of
My ghost by praising me with what was fire
To hear, which I breathed in, which burned like love.
I wore the crown of laurel they require.
Beneath a crown of laurel lived a liar.
White man speak with forked tongue with his lyre.
They scream like gulls, beseeching. They scream higher
And dive down, crying, corpses on a pyre,
And rise back to the hundredth floor and turn
Their cell phones on. We call to say goodbye.
We firemen-coming-up-the-stairs will burn
Our way to heaven. Everyone will die.
You fling yourself into the arms of art.
You drool to sleep on consolation’s shoulder.
A living donor offers you a heart.
The muse does. Yours got broken getting older.
The UFO that offers you the heart
Replacement is returning from out there,
Deep space, but beaming brain waves saying, Start
Down there, unsheathe the sword inside the ploughshare,
And cut the kindness from your chest, and stick
The Cosmos Poems in the cavity.
A hummingbird of flame sips from a wick.
My tinder drinks the lightning striking me.
Exploding fireballs vaporize the gore.
The runners-on-your-mark can’t live this way.
They have to make the deal so they ignore
Their death and now the flames have come to stay.
They open windows. Now the brave begin
To lead the others to the stairs to die.
The money is the cosmic insulin
The partners in the firms must make. I fly
The UFO that offers you the heart
Replacement that’s arriving from out there,
Its home, while down here the red mist is art
Exploding on the sidewalk from the air.
And some jump holding hands, but most alone,
But some jump holding hands with my warm hand.
They wait inside their offices. They phone
This poem. They stay and while they do they stand.
When I consider how my days are spent,
I’d have to say I spend a lot of time
Not being dead. I know what Garbo meant.
My life is life emerging from the slime
And writing poems. Virgil took my hand.
We started up the steep path to the crest.
He turned to warn me. Did I understand
I would be meeting Dante? I confessed
I hated cold. To flee the urban light
Pollution in the night sky and see stars
Meant getting to a crest of freezing blight
And human nature inhumane as Mars,
And things far stranger that I can’t describe.
I greeted Dante. Maestro! Dawn neared. I
Was looking in the mirror at a tribe
In tribal costumes worshipping the sky.
It made no sense on Easter morning to
Parade in feathers down Fifth Avenue,
Except the natives worship what is true,
And firemen in white gloves passed in review.
The Jewish boy had done it once again.
Wood water tanks on top of downtown flamed.
The Resurrection has returned dead men
And women to the New York sky untamed.
GOING FAST (1998)
For a New Planetarium
MIDNIGHT
God begins. The universe will soon.
The intensity of the baseball bat
Meets the ball. Is the fireball
When he speaks and then in the silence
The cobra head rises regally and turns to look at you.
The angel burns through the air.
The flower turns to look.
The cover of the book opens on its own.
You do not want to see what is on this page.
It looks up at you,
Only it is a mirror you are looking into.
The truth is there, and all around the truth fire
Makes a frame.
Listen. An angel. These sounds you hear are his.
A dog is barking in a field.
A car starts in the parking lot on the other side.
The ocean heaves back and forth three blocks away.
The fire in the wood stove eases
The inflamed cast-iron door
Open, steps out into the room across the freezing floor
To your perfumed bed where as it happens you kneel and pray.
PRAYER
But we are someone else. We’re born that way.
The other one we are lives in a distant city.
People are walking down a street.
They pop umbrellas open when it starts to rain.
Some stand under an apartment building awning.
A doorman dashes out into the spring shower for
A taxi with its off-duty light on that hisses right past.
The daffodils are out on the avenue center strip.
The yellow cabs are yellow as the daffodils.
One exhausted driver, at the end of his ten-hour shift headed in,
Stops for the other one
We are who hides among the poor
And looks like the homeless out on the wet street corner.
Dear friend, get in.
I will take you where you’re going for free.
Only a child’s Crayola
Could color a taxi cab this yellow
In a distant city full of yellow flowers.
THE NIGHT SKY
At night, when she is fast asleep,
The comet, which appears not to move at all,
Crosses the sky above her bed,
But stays there looking down.
She rises from her sleeping body.
Her body stays behind asleep.
She climbs the lowered ladder.
She enters through the opened hatch.
Inside is everyone.
Everyone is there.
Someone smiling is made of silk.
Someone else was made with milk.
Her mother still alive.
Her brothers and sisters and father
And aunts and uncles and grandparents
And husband never died.
Hold the glass with both hands,
My darling, that way you won’t spill.
On her little dress, her cloth yellow star
Comet travels through space.
STARS
None of the Above
Stays down here below.
My going very fast
Describes the atmosphere.
Heady.
And when I die,
We orbit way
Above the sky of
And return
From stars.
We fall from stars
In all the colors of Brazil,