Poems 1959-2009
Page 23
The restoration flawless.
The beauty is inhuman.
The terrifying journey.
O strange new final music.
The strange new place I’ve gone to.
The blinding light is music.
The starless warm night blinding.
The odor of a musk rose
Presents itself as secrets.
Paralysis can’t stop them.
The afterburners kick in.
The visitors are going.
I dreamed that I was sleeping.
Physiatry can’t say it.
I can’t believe it happened.
A handshake is the human
Condition of bereavement.
A thixotropic sol is
A shaken-up false body.
I know another meaning.
A life was last seen living.
A life was last seen leaving.
The summit of Mount Sinai,
The top of their new tower,
The stark New North Pavilion,
Looks out on New York City,
The miles of aspiration,
The lonely devastation.
I listen to the music
Nine years before 2000.
CHARTRES
The takeoff of the Concorde in a cathedral.
Ninety seconds into it they cut
The afterburners and the deathly silence
Was like a large breast as we banked steeply left.
AUTUMN
A fall will come that’s damp and delicate,
A geisha voice, a male ventriloquist.
The dummy on his knee will coo she’ll get
The other woman ready to be kissed.
The garter belt–and-stockings one will crawl
For him, will crawl on all fours down the hall,
His voice between her teeth. She’ll show him all.
He’ll want to see. He’ll walk behind. She’ll call.
THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES
Her lighting all the candles late at night,
Hours after he had turned out every light,
Was her preparing to be left alone
Once she had pushed aside the heavy stone
And left the tomb and their apartment where
She’d leave herself behind to not be there.
THE LOVER
(René Char’s last poem, L’Amante)
I’d been so seized by passion for this delectable lover.
I not exactly exempt from feeling, from tremblors of lust.
It meant I must, meant I absolutely must not,
Just fade away quietly, mildly changed,
Recognized only by the eyelids of my lover.
Nights of savage newness found for me again
The flaming saliva that connects, and perfumed the fevered connection.
A thousand precautions gave way thirstily
To the most voluptuous flesh there could be.
In our hands desire that transcends.
What fear on our lips tomorrow?
THE
The poem as a human torch. I burn. Burns out.
THE DEATH OF META BURDEN IN AN AVALANCHE
I don’t believe in anything, I do
Believe in you, vanished particles of vapor,
Field of force,
Undressed, undimmed Invisible,
Losing muons and gaining other ones,
Counterrotations with your
Robed arms raised out straight to each side
In a dervish dance of eyes closed ecstasy,
Tireless, inhuman,
Wireless technology
Of a ghost,
Of a spinning top on its point,
Of a tornado perspiring forward a few miles an hour
Uprooting everything and smelling sweetly like a lawn.
It’s that time of year.
It’s that time of year a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day,
A thousand times a day,
You are reborn flying to out-ski
The first avalanche each spring,
And buried alive.
I went to sleep last night so I could see you.
I went to see the world destroyed. It was a movie.
I went to sleep that night so I could see you.
And then a drink and then to sleep.
That’s Vermont.
The universe hung like a flare for a while and went out,
Leaving nothing, long ago.
Each galaxy at war exhaled
A firefly glow, a tiny quiet, far away …
On and off … worlds off and on—and then
The universe itself brightened, stared and went out.
I cannot see.
I will not wake though it’s a dream.
I move my head from side to side.
I cannot move.
The nights are cold, the sun is hot,
The air is alcohol at that altitude
Three thousand miles from here—is here
Today a thousand times.
You haven’t changed.
There is a room in the Acropolis Museum.
The kouroi smile silence.
The way a virus sheds. The way
A weave of wind shear
And the willingness to share is the perfect friend
Every child invents for his very own. I don’t know.
The Parthenon suddenly made me cry.
I saw it and I sobbed,
And it doesn’t share.
I was so out of it
You came too close. I got too near
The temple, flying low. I got too near
The power, past the ropes. I touched the restoration work.
It could mean a loss of consciousness
In the right-hand seat to be with God.
The Early Warning Ground Proximity Indicator is flashing.
Never mind. I knew it was.
The alarm ah-oooga ah-oooga and the computer-generated
Voice says
And says and says Pull Up Pull Up Pull Up Pull Up.
You say come closer.
You say come closer.
I cannot move.
You say I have to whisper this. Come closer.
I want to hear.
There also is the way a virus sheds.
I want to see. And the ground whispers
Closer. In the Littré the other day and you were there
In the Petit Robert. Grévisse—Larousse—
Ten million years from now, will there be anything?
The rain came down convulsively on the dry land,
As if it would have liked to come down even harder,
Big, kind, body temperature
Shudderings, and on the far bank of the newborn river,
The joyous drumming of the native drums,
Making a tremendous sound twelve feet beneath the snow
Without an avalanche beeper in those days. It’s true—
I don’t believe in anything I do
Believe in, but I do believe in you
Moving your face from side to side to make a space to breathe.
I think I am crying on all my legs
From a dark place to a dark place like a roach.
I am running on the ground with my wings folded—
But now I am extending them,
Running across my kitchen floor and
Running down the rue Barbet-de-Jouy,
Trying historically before it’s too late to get into the air.
I have on my ten Huntsman suits,
And many shining shoes made to my last.
I believe in one Lobb.
Faites sur mesure. Everything
Fits my body perfectly now that I’m about to disappear.
I don’t believe in anything.
Lightning touches intimately the sable starless. Thunder.
It starts to rain, in your intoxication.
Communism and capitalism go up in flames
And come back down as rain—I’m coming now—
But Greece stays parched.
I’m coming now.
I’m being thrown violently at the sky,
The deck of the carrier shrinking to a dot,
Thirty-some years ago
Suddenly catching sight of Chartres Cathedral miles away;
Horizon to horizon, a molten ocean
The beautiful urine color of vermeil,
Color and undercolor as with a fur;
Soaring stock-still above the windblown waves of wheat,
Dialing on the seemingly inexhaustible power.
Break it.
I swim over to the sealed
Aquarium window of the TV screen to try.
President of the United States descending the stairs
Of his helicopter pixels snap a salute at the American flag
Pixels. I turn the sound off
And the Marine band explodes.
I’m coming now.
I can’t breathe.
I’m coming now to the conclusion that
Without a God. I’m coming now to the conclusion.
THE SECOND COMING
Half Japanese, half Jewish.
Hemispheres of a one-night stand in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
God instantly appeared.
Nine months later born in Rome.
Put up for adoption after four days.
Half Jewish, half Japanese.
Imagine the solitude that is.
Imagine how beautiful she is.
How powerful and pale.
The courier arrives.
The millennium begins.
MY TOKYO
Moshi-moshi. (Hello.)
Money is being made.
Money was being made.
Make more make more make more consumer goods.
But the shelves were empty.
The snow was deep.
At Lenin’s Tomb the Honor Guard
Stood there actually asleep.
Red Square was white.
Snow was falling dreamily on Beijing.
This was global warming.
Twenty-four hours passed and it was still snowing.
In New York the homeless
Reify the rich.
The homeless in the streets.
The car alarms go off.
The cherry blossoms burst
Into Imperial bloom. The handheld fax machine has something
Coming in. This spring our Western eyes are starting to slant.
They caution you composites can’t.
O O O Ochanomizu,
You are my station.
The polished businessman warrior bowed
Cool as a mountain forest of pine.
And the adolescent schoolgirls like clouds of butterflies
On the subway in their black school uniforms
At all hours of the day going somewhere,
Daughters of the Rising Sun.
New York is an electrical fire.
People are trapped on the top floor, smoking
With high-rise desire
And becoming Calcutta.
Tokyo is low
And manic as a hive.
For the middle of the night they have silent jackhammers.
Elizabethan London with the sound off. Racially pure with no poor.
Mishima himself designed the stark far-out uniform
His private army wore, madly haute couture. He stabbed the blade in wrong
And was still alive while his aide tried in vain
To cut his head off as required.
Moshi-moshi I can’t hear you. I’m going blind.
Don’t let me abandon you, you’re all I have.
Hello, hello. My Tokyo, hello.
Hang up and I’ll call you back.
You say to the recyclable person of your dreams Je t’aime,
And the voice recognition system,
Housed in a heart made from seaweed,
Murmurs in Japanese Moi aussi.
RECESSIONAL
How many breasts a woman has depends.
But not on how much need for them you have.
A woman with no breasts applied the salve.
The modem won’t receive, it only sends.
What hasn’t happened isn’t everything
Until in middle age it starts to be.
I woke up wrinkled underneath a tree.
The breasts above me swayed, not listening.
Drought. Ethiopia. We circle low.
Each parachute a breast. Blind mouths look up.
Each breast is liquid living in a cup,
A nippled Nobel Peace Prize Stockholm snow.
The famine’s everywhere there’s UNICEF.
The Red Cross carpet-bombs the dead with food.
We hear, Zaire, you’re in a bitter mood.
(We do have better hearing than the deaf!)
I had a radical mastectomy.
Crack troops flew in at once with extra breasts.
Big Bang of AIDS in Africa invests
The dark with vaster stars than I can see.
It is the role of government to rule
The Congo crocodile who likes blond curls.
The lab discovered undigested girls
Inside the humid darkness of his stool.
I swing from tree to tree and beat my chest.
I beat my breast and cling from tree to tree.
I’m going back. I start to squat to pee.
You were my partner and I liked you best.
THESE DAYS (1989)
SCOTLAND
A stag lifts his nostrils to the morning
In the crosshairs of the scope of love,
And smells what the gun calls Scotland and falls.
The meat of geology raw is Scotland: Stone
Age hours of stalking, passionate aim for the heart,
Bleak dazzling weather of the bare and green.
Old men in kilts, their beards are lobster red.
Red pubic hair of virgins white as cows.
Omega under Alpha, rock hymen, fog penis—
The unshaved glow of her underarms is the sky
Of prehistory or after the sun expands.
The sun will expand a billion years from now
And burn away the mist of Caithness—till then,
There in the Thurso phone book is Robin Thurso.
But he is leaving for his other castle.
“Yes, I’m just leaving—what a pity! I can’t
Remember, do you shoot?” Dukes hunt stags,
While Scotsmen hunt for jobs and emigrate,
Or else start seeing red spots on a moor
That flows to the horizon like a migraine.
Sheep dot the moor, bubblebaths of unshorn
Curls somehow red, unshepherded, unshorn.
Gone are the student mobs chanting the Little Red
Book of Mao at their Marxist dons.
The universities in the south woke,
Now they are going back to the land of dreams—
Tour buses clog the roads that take them there.
Gone, the rebel psychoanalysts.
Scotland trained more than its share of brilliant ones.
Pocked faces, lean as wolves, they really ran
To untrain and be famous in London, doing wild
Analysis, vegetarians brewing
Herbal tea for anorexic girls.
Let them eat haggis. The heart, lungs, and liver
Of a sheep minced with cereal and suet,
Seasoned with onions, and boiled in the sheep’s stomach.
That’s what the gillie eats, not venison,
Or salmon, or grouse served rare, not for the gillie
That privilege, or the other one which is
Mushed vegetables molded to resemble a steak.
Let them come to Scotland and eat blood
Pud from a food stall out in the open air,
&nbs
p; In the square in Portree. Though there is nothing
Better in the world than a grouse cooked right.
They make a malt in Wick that tastes as smooth
As Mouton when you drink enough of it.
McEwen adored both, suffered a partial stroke,
Switched to champagne and died. A single piper
Drones a file of mourners through a moor,
The sweet prodigal being piped to his early grave.
A friend of his arriving by helicopter
Spies the procession from a mile away,
The black speck of the coffin trailing a thread,
Lost in the savage green, an ocean of thawed
Endlessness and a spermatozoon.
A vehement bullet comes from the gun of love.
On the island of Raasay across from Skye,
The dead walk with the living hand in hand
Over to Hallaig in the evening light.
Girls and boys of every generation,
MacLeans and MacLeods, as they were before they were
Mothers and clansmen, still in their innocence,
Walk beside the islanders, their descendants.
They hold their small hands up to be held by the living.
Their love is too much, the freezing shock-alive
Of rubbing alcohol that leads to sleep.
FLAME
The honey, the humming of a million bees,
In the middle of Florence pining for Paris;
The whining trembling the cars and trucks hum
Crossing the metal matting of Brooklyn Bridge
When you stand below it on the Brooklyn side—
High above you, the harp, the cathedral, the hive—
In the middle of Florence. Florence in flames.
Like waking from a fever … it is evening.
Fireflies breathe in the gardens on Bellosguardo.
And then the moon steps from the cypresses and
A wave of feeling breaks, phosphorescent—
Moonlight, a wave hushing on a beach.
In the dark, a flame goes out. And then
The afterimage of a flame goes out.
OUR GODS
Older than us, but not by that much, men
Just old enough to be uncircumcised,
Episcopalians from the Golden Age
Of schools who loved to lose gracefully and lead—
Always there before us like a mirage,
Until we tried to get closer, when they vanished,
Always there until they disappeared.
They were the last of a race, that was their cover—