“I am Mrs. Reginald Fincke! Fincke with an ‘e’!”
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ANTON WEBERN
That wasn’t it.
The other wasn’t either.
I woke up looking through a hole.
Love was blowing through.
It was fresh.
The clouds were clean as only
Squeezed out of a tube
In blobs can be.
The universe begins,
And look what happens. It’s spring
At the event horizon.
My future former wife expands
In the ungovernable first seconds to a speck
Which will be high school age fifteen
Billion years from now.
Donna mi priegha—
A lady asks me, I speak in season,
What is the origin of the universe?
What is an event horizon?
If you put a gun to your temple and close your eyes,
And the enormous pressure builds and builds,
And slowly you squeeze the trigger …
Do you hear the big bang?
When you kill yourself,
Do you hear the sound?
Followed by the universe.
On the far side of the invisible,
On the inside of a black hole, is
The other universe, which is closed,
Which you can’t enter or see,
Which you don’t know is right there,
Without dimensions and unknowable.
Eyelet
As vast as a pore.
An entire universe in less than a dot.
The opposite of infinite.
Less than a dot that weighs more than the world.
The opposite of infinite
Is infinite.
The gravity is so great.
Light can’t escape.
It weighs more than the world.
The opposite of infinite is
WNYC’s signal reaches it.
Listen …
How an angel would sing, utterly inhuman.
The ethereal cockroach music of Anton Webern.
They’re playing
All his rarefied work on
The anniversary of his death.
An entire universe in less than a dot.
Faint brief frosts of breath
Fly-cast precise and chaste.
It doesn’t ask to be loved.
These briefest exhalations
In the history of music are vast.
The absolutely infinite God
Of the Cabala
In the twinkling of an eyelet, Ensof.
The future of the past was the New Music.
He believed
The atonal was eternal. He believed
Fifty years
In the future children would be whistling
It on their way to school. The irresistible
Ravisher was pure
Tunelessness.
And the angel
Raised his hand to greet her,
At the same time bowing low.
To the woman,
Never mind her terror,
His hand before he spoke
Seemed to sing.
His utterly inhuman voice,
Which suddenly she heard,
Startled her,
Was gorgeously strange.
Sang without a melody. Sang
So grand a neatness, precision, briefness.
So unnatural and severe
Would come to seem so natural
Kids would whistle it.
Stuck at a fixation point, he sings.
Where the match scratch and hiss sweetens to flame.
Where the boy soprano’s eternal voice is breaking.
And the slow caterpillar turns silently into wings.
Sing a song of sealed trains
Arriving day and night.
These trains had kept it all inside.
These trains had never let their feelings out.
These train-sick trains were just dying.
These trains couldn’t hold it any longer.
These trains shat uncontrollably
All over the sidings and ramps
Jews for the camps.
This century must end.
To modern art I say—
It’s been real.
He fled Vienna with his family
For the mountain village of Mittersill to escape the bombs.
Now with the war over,
He was standing outside
His son-in-law’s house just after curfew
Enjoying the night air.
An American soldier who had been drinking mistook
A great composer smoking an after-dinner cigar
For a black marketeer reaching for a gun.
I am a toupee walking toward me
With no one under it.
I put the gun to my head.
THE RITZ, PARIS
A slight thinness of the ankles;
The changed shape of the calf;
A place the thigh curves in
Where it didn’t used to; and when he turns
A mirror catches him by surprise
With an old man’s buttocks.
UNTITLED
Brought to the surface from the floor of the ocean
And the crushing atmospheres of pressure there,
The thing had wings, a mouth, no eyes.
It started to speak when it exploded.
I see I have described a confessional poet.
Senator, I have no memory of that.
The car alarms go off day and night,
The sound of hard times, easy money. In the dream,
The crack dealer over and over hides his stash
Inside a parked car’s hubcap just in time. Warbling police cars arrive
In rut, wearing on their heads an ecstatic whirling light show as antlers.
I have no memory of that.
I have no memory of that
Is what to say in court. Or when appearing
At a Senate Select Committee hearing
Under oath, and upon being asked
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I have no memory of that.
Thirty-five years ago I strolled through Harvard Yard.
The steps of Widener led one to the doom of reading.
I was a nose looking for the blush of blood—
Sharks glide for hours this way behind their smiles.
Dictionaries opened their mouths. I devoured them.
Girls lay face up behind their smiles.
Stylish Senator John F. Kennedy and I sat facing each other behind our smiles
In his former tutor’s former rooms in Eliot House.
Nothing has been the same since the Zapruder film
Of the assassination was endlessly replayed
On television worldwide. Darkness lies behind the light
That makes home movies.
Nothing could ever be the same after the Zapruder film
Of the Dallas motorcade was endlessly replayed
On TV worldwide, assassinating the young president again and again.
In his wife’s arms. His head explodes.
Darkness lies behind the light.
Blind people feel this way behind their smiles.
Two leaping dolphins stay behind their smiles
And catch treats tossed to them,
And delight a paying audience. Others out at sea on a beautiful day
Talk about everything they love in a language of clicks.
Others, trained by us, moan a kind of baby talk
And a few long whalesongy words, hauntingly unintelligible.
The U.S. Navy experimented with having
Them lay underwater mines in the mid-sixties when I was thirty.
Meanwhile, the civil rights movement I completely missed.
I was so busy doing nothing,
I had no time. T
hey lynched and burned.
I played squash drunk.
GLORY
Herbert Brownell was the attorney general.
Ezra Pound was reciting some Provençal. I was seventeen
Every terrifying hungover sunrise that fall.
Thanksgiving weekend 1953 I made my pilgrimage to Pound,
Who said, Kike-sucking Pusey will destroy Harvard unless you save it.
I persuaded him two words in his translation of Confucius should change.
His pal Achilles Fang led me to the empty attic of the Yenching Institute,
In the vast gloom arranged two metal folding chairs
Under the one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling,
And hating me, knee to knee,
Unsmilingly asked, What do you know?
Pound sent a message to MacLeish. Archie, wake up.
United States of America v. Ezra Pound.
My song will seek and detonate your heat.
Pound reciting with his eyes closed filled the alcove with glory.
My art will find and detonate your heart.
I was a freshman and everywhere in Washington, D.C.
I walked, I dreamed.
THE EMPRESS RIALTO
Native Americans were still Indians
In the Saturday afternoon double features a minute ago,
War paint and feathers still bloomed from the brain stem
Of a brave. He strode from his hogan and wickiup and tepee and wigwam
Into a politically correct text
A woman riffles through crossing Harvard Yard,
What used to be called a beautiful girl a minute ago
Rushing to an hour exam in Sever Hall.
Bison and bison calfs,
Each looking rather like Toulouse-Lautrec, snowed back and forth in black
Across the plains, so many millions they could be seen from the moon,
The only visible feature on Earth beside the Great Wall of China—
Vanished, genocide, more martyrs than in Islam! His eyesight was an arrowhead parting the air.
His silence, immensely, tiptoed forward.
He came on an enemy praying, the chant aimed at something in the sky,
The hands held out, palms up.
Silence the size of a lunar sea,
In war paint and feathers, dressed to kill,
Gazed at the million antelope a few feet away in another world,
Gazed at the prostitute named Jean,
Her pubic hair cut in a Mohawk
By a steady customer
Who was a barber, in the Empress Rialto Hotel,
The walls splashed with brains and rainbow, a minute ago.
LORRAINE MOTEL, MEMPHIS
An angel’s on his knees in front of her.
She’s watching in a mirror while she moans.
The other woman, seated, spreads her legs.
Winged light is on its knees in front of her.
She watches in the mirror while she moans.
The other, head thrown back, has spread her legs.
I have a dream! is here in front of her.
She’s staring in the mirror while she moans.
The other sister, still clothed, spreads her legs.
He’s blazing on his knees in front of her.
She’s praising in the mirror when she moans.
Her daughter has a dream and spreads her legs.
Death sits up like a little dog and begs:
The man who will kill King is eating eggs.
He pricks a yolk. The yellow spurts and groans.
THE NEW WOMAN
They can’t get close enough—there’s no such thing.
Look. When they smile. Each rising like a tree
Inside the other, breathing quietly.
Two women start their hour by moistening.
The engine pulling them around the bend
Exposes irresistibly the train
They’re on extending from them through the rain.
And then it’s night. And it will never end.
They’re in a limousine. The plane they’re on
Is over water. Dawn reveals the two
Berlins becoming one. And now they knew—
The time had come. And now the rain is gone.
Two passengers aboard their lives undress
Down to their hands. They’re holding guns. They stay
Behind their smiles. The guard comes in to say
The hour is over, and they tell her yes.
THE FORMER GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA
The beauty in his arms could kill him easily.
The busboy bending down to take his plate
Could stab him quickly fifteen times.
The woman in the store this afternoon
Walked toward him strangely, selling perfume.
The former governor of California,
The only candidate for president
Who studied Zen, is pitching woo
To eminent New Yorkers in someone’s studio.
The group is small—he’s close enough to kiss;
And close enough to kiss is close enough to blow away.
What a wilderness of empty voting booths
The curtain rises to reveal.
The scene is North America now.
I miss the dry-ice fire of Bobby Kennedy.
I met McGovern in your living room.
Hubert Humphrey simply lacked the lust.
It’s hard to die. It’s hard to live.
We got that way by being
Durable but delicate.
The body lasts and lasts and yet
Is half in love with death. The smiling
President-for-Life is love. The smiling
President-for-Life is love.
The smiling President-for-Life is love.
Idi Amin forces the gazelle to swallow a grenade.
Stalin isn’t a psychosomatic disorder.
LIFE AFTER DEATH
Hundreds stand strangely
In a landscape of vast emptiness on an ocean,
In a silent black-and-white sequence:
A noon of duneless desert with a seat at the U.N.,
A tribal bloodbath nation with a raw gold flag.
A Socialist, poet, murderer king is president.
I made that up.
And when the mass execution starts, one man
Raises his human hands in front of him to block
The bullets. The central character in this serious
Bringing meat to the vegetarians
Movie in ravishing color watches real footage
Of a mass execution glumly. He’s trying
The arc flown by a jet for the astronauts to give
Them a few seconds’ practice weightlessness.
The existential American antihero reporter of nothing
Is impersonating an international arms dealer in a desert.
He’ll have to die.
He’ll find he has a cause.
He’ll find exchanging identities
Is a conversion. The former foreign correspondent
On the lam from himself, floating free,
Trying to float, glares at the footage glumly.
Free will is his fate.
The twentieth century made it possible
For us more and more fictional characters to see
Real human beings being killed
And leave the theater and live.
Leave and live!
Leave yourself and live!
SONNET
The suffering in the sunlight and the smell.
And the bellowing and men weeping and screaming.
And the horses wandering aimlessly and the heat.
The living and the dead mixed, bleeding on one another.
A palm with two fingers left attached
Lying on the ground next to the hindquarters of a horse.
A dying man literally without a face
Pointed at wher
e his face had been.
He did this without a sound.
The forty thousand dead and wounded stretched for miles
In every direction from the tower.
Not a cloud in the sky all day, the sunlight of hell.
Bodies swelled and split, erupting their insides
Like sausages on the fire.
BURKINA FASO
The first is take the innards out when you
Do Ouagadougou. Clean with a grenade.
Thus Captain Compaoré’s kitchen made
From Clément Ouedraogo human stew.
The one man who might help them disappears
And reappears in bowls. You eat or are
The eaten here. French-speaking, Muslim tar
That once sold slaves and blames the French, in tears.
POL POT
Dawn. Leni Riefenstahl
And her cameras slowly inflate the immense Nuremberg Rally.
The Colorado looks up in awe at the Grand Canyon
It has made. Hitler.
European clouds. 1934. Empty
Thought-balloons high above Lascaux
Without a thought inside. The Führer
Is ice that’s fire, physically small.
They all were. Stalin.
Trotsky’s little glasses
Disappear behind a cloud
From which he won’t emerge alive.
The small plane carrying
The Grail to Nuremberg got Wagnerian clouds
To fly through, enormous, enormous. Mine eyes have seen the glory, it
Taxis to a stop. The cabin door swings open.
Leni schussed from motion pictures
To still photography after the war. From the Aryan ideal, climbed out
In Africa to shoot the wild shy people of Kau,
Small heads, tall, the most beautiful animals in the world.
Artistically mounted them into ideal
Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl! Riefenstahl! Riefenstahl! Really,
From blonds in black-and-white to blacks in color.
Now Pol Pot came to power.
Now in London Sylvia Plath
Nailed one foot to the floor;
And with the other walked
And walked and walked through the terrible blood.
STROKE
The instrument is priceless.
You can’t believe it happened.
The restoration flawless.
The voice is almost human.
The sound is almost painful.
The voice is almost human.
I close my eyes to hear it.
Poems 1959-2009 Page 22