Poems 1959-2009
Page 25
Who holds it almost like a dagger but
In blessing, handle up, and not to kill;
Who holds it by the blade that cannot cut.
ON WINGS OF SONG
I could only dream, I could never draw,
In Art with the terrifying Mrs. Jaspar
Whom I would have done anything to please.
Aquiline and aloof in the land of the button nose, her smile
Made her seem a witch, my goddess,
Too cool, too cold. She was my muse
Because she hardly spoke a word.
We used to pronounce her name to rhyme with Casbah,
Mimicking her fahncy Locust Valley lockjaw.
Say Christ through your nose!
Part of her allure and majesty and
Wonderful strange music for St. Louis certainly,
Though not as musical as her silence was. Casbah,
White flannels on a summer evening, Jasbah,
Endless lawn down to the sea. The accent
Was preposterous, the voice beautiful
Green running down to the sea nine hundred miles inland,
Preposterous. The accent
Was preposterous, her beautiful voice a
Bassoon, slow velvet cadence of the sound,
Shy but deep. Shy but deep. Clangs / The bell. Eliot.
The lips are drawn back slightly;
As if it had been hinged that way, the jaw doesn’t quite close—
Actually, the opposite of lockjaw since it
Moves, and it doesn’t close.
The very back of the throat without the use of the lips
Produces the bloated drawl of the upper class.
You hear it in a certain set, you see it in a certain scene,
Which has equivalents abroad who sound incredibly the same,
And bong the same aristocrat gong in their own languages.
The stag hunting gang in France who hunt on horseback.
Most aquiline being the honorary hunt servants
In livery and wearing tricorns, always
Dukes and such and others who
The very back of the throat without using the lips much.
It is an accent you can see—
That you could hear through soundproof glass from what you saw.
It is a sound you see in the Sologne when
The huntsman blows his haunting horn.
The hounds open their mouths. Silence. The servants in their
White breeches and long blue coats dismount. The
Stag stands in the water dropping tears of terror and exhaustion.
They do that when the hunt has them at bay.
The king is in his counting-house counting out his money.
His head will be hacked off and saved;
The carcass goes to the dogs—after the servants drink the blood
And defecate. There is another accent, that goes to Harvard,
That anyone who does can have. My babysitter
Harold Brodkey will. One day I, too, I will.
The servants dip their fingers in
The blood and paint themselves, and smear each other’s blouses,
With all the time in the world apparently until it’s time. It’s time
To pass the chalice and drink. They defecate
In their breeches, but their coats are quite long,
The flecks on their boots are only mud,
Everything I’ve written here is lies.
The flecks could be flecks of blood,
But the coattails completely hide the other. There’s a smell.
Though there’s the smell rising in silence
From the page, but that’s a lie. Brodkey knows. Lies that rise.
Now my unseen neighbor in New York four blocks away.
He is finishing the novel, he knows
Il miglior fabbro means a bigger liar. Lies that rise.
Ab lo dolchor qu’al cor mi vai
Pound catches the thermals in every language, and soars.
Eliot rises in the pew to kneel.
When he opens his mouth it is a choir.
Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse
Dont meurt le bruit parmi les vents.
The cockpit voice recorder in its crashproof case remembers and sings.
Flesh and juice of the refreshing and delicious.
Inside a crashproof housing. But I don’t recognize the voice.
This is your captain. In the unisex soprano of children his age.
We are trying to restart the engines
On wings of song. The pilot giggles posthumously—
“You may kiss my hond,” he drawls, for the last time
Holding a hond out to be kissed from this page. (Sound of crash.)
MORPHINE
What hasn’t happened isn’t everything
Until in middle age it starts to be.
Night-blooming jasmine, dreams—and when they bring
You out on stage there’s silence. Now I see,
You tell the darkness which is watching you.
Applause. Then instantly a hush, a cough.
It was another darkness once you knew
You had a blindfold on. You took it off,
But this is darker—down an unlit street,
An unmarked street, the three blocks to the shore.
They call it Banyan Street, night air so sweet.
Too much increasingly turns into more—
This is the martyr’s grove on Banyan Street.
You breathe a perfumed darkness, numberless
Perfumes. The glistening as wet as meat
Deliciousness of sinking in. The S
OS of it. But it’s too late. You reach
The can’t stop trembling yes oh yes of it—
Already when you’re two blocks from the beach
You start to drown. Love ruled your White House. Sit,
You named your dog. Come, Sit; sit, Sit; was love.
Your head explodes although you hear a shot.
Then archaeology … below above—
Beneath amnesia, Troy. But you forgot.
ELMS
It sang without a sound: music that
The naive elm trees loved. They were alive.
Oh silky music no elm tree could survive.
The head low slither of a stalking cat,
Black panther darkness pouring to the kill,
Entered every elm—they drank it in.
Drank silence. Then the silence drank. Wet chin,
Hot, whiskered darkness. Every elm was ill.
What else is there to give but joy? Disease.
And trauma. Lightning, or as slow as lava.
Darkness drinking from a pool in Java,
Black panther drinking from a dream. The trees
Around the edge are elms. Below, above,
Man-eater drinking its reflection: love.
THE FINAL HOUR
Another perfect hour of emptiness.
The final hour, calm as a candle flame.
The evening, enlarging as it neared, became
A sudden freshness, stillness, then the yes,
The fragrant falling yes of summer rain.
The huge grew larger as it neared, the smile,
The smell of rain, and waited for a while,
And went away. Time spilled. It left no stain.
JANE CANFIELD (1897–1984)
“The speed of light is not the limit. We
Are free. We glide. Our superluminous
Velocity will take us far. For us,
The superluminous is only the
Beginning of our birth. How born we are.
Compared to how we started. Vast, oh vast.
A lifetime as the measure couldn’t last,
The nearest destinations were too far:
A billion years to reach the one inside
You if you could—who holds you, whom you hold.
You kick the covers off asleep, a
re cold,
And someone covers you, is all. And glide
Off into space. Is all. Space curved by speed—
We really leave the light behind. But hark.
The infinite beginning in the dark
To sigh the universe out of its seed.
The speck that weighs more than the world. Before
The universe—which has no meaning—was
Before the singularity which does.
Invisible nonzero, and we soar.
We sigh from the beginning, and we soar.
We leave the light behind and soar. And soar.”
THE LITTLE WHITE DOG
The way the rain won’t fall
Applies a velvet pressure, voice-off.
The held-back heaviness too sweet, the redolence,
Brings back the memory.
Life watches, watches,
From the control room, through the soundproof window,
With the sound turned off,
The orchestra warming up, playing scales.
It listens to the glistening.
The humidity reels, headier than methanol.
Treelined sidestreets, prick up your leaves.
The oboe is giving the la to the orchestra.
Someone shoots his cuffs to show his cufflinks,
Yellow gold to match his eyes, and pays the check.
Someone else is eight years old.
Her humility is volatile.
And when they kiss, he can’t quite breathe.
The electric clouds perspire.
It’s meteorology, it’s her little dress, it’s her violin,
It’s unafraid. It’s about to.
A sudden freshness stirs then stills the air, the century.
The new jet-black conductor raises her baton.
The melody of a little white dog,
Dead long ago, starts the soft spring rain.
AIDS DAYS
I
“Perfection Eludes Us”
The most beautiful power in the world has buttocks.
It is always a dream come true.
They are big. They are too big.
Kiss them and spank them till they are scalding.
Till she can’t breathe saying oh.
Till your hand is in love.
Till your eyes are raw.
Stockings and garter belt without underpants are
The secret ceremony but who would imagine
She is wearing a business suit. She is in her office. She merely touches
The high-tech phone. Without a word,
She lies down across the hassock and eases her skirt up.
How big it is.
Her eyes are closed … She has the votes.
They know she does. They’re waiting for her now next door.
The number is ringing.
She squeezes them together. She squeezes them together.
She presses herself against the hassock.
She starts to spank herself.
II
The American Sonnet
She has the votes; they know she does;
They’re waiting for her now next door.
Her eyes are closed.
We were discussing the arms race when the moderator died,
Presumably a performance piece, was
What it’s called. He said it is.
It actually wasn’t so political was only
Broadcast without a live audience.
The telephone is warbling.
The secretary has allowed the call through which means the president
Herself is on the line.
Her dreams are calling her. The press will be there.
Her skirt is all the way up.
I am the epopt. Thou art the secret ceremony.
III
Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth …
A man sits memorizing a naked woman—
A slot cut in a wall
Which has a metal slide which opens
When he puts a quarter in
Lets him look for hours.
It seems like hours.
He keeps forgetting what he sees.
He pays and stares
Into the brightly lit beyond
Dancing on a stage just beyond the wall, bare feet
On a level with his chin.
He looks up at it,
Without the benefit of music
Just standing there.
And then the music starts again.
The wall in which the slot is cut is curved.
So when the slot is open, besides a dance he sees
Curving away from him to either side an ocean liner row
Of little windows.
Prisoners in solitary confinement
Might get their meals through one of these—
Presumably behind each one a booth like his.
The open slots are dark.
A slot of darkness in the wall
Is someone.
Someone hidden is hunching there.
From some slots money waves.
The woman ripples over and squats
In front of it, her knees spread wide.
She takes the bill—
Sometimes she presses herself against the slot.
A man stays in a booth.
The door stays locked. The slot stays open.
He can’t remember what he memorized.
It seems like hours.
It is too late.
IV
L’Hallali
Serve me the ice cream bitterer than vinegar
Beneath a royal palm covered with needles.
Tell me a love story that ends with acyclovir
Five times a day for five days.
You never had it so good.
He made me my dog which He took.
Houseflies and herpes He brings.
Buttery ice cream smooth as Vaseline.
Florida. Dawn. Five hundred clouds.
Anal chocolate turning pink.
Oxygen-rich, from an opened artery
In the warm water
In the claw-footed tub. Dawn
Spreads from Gorbachev these arms talks AIDS days.
Will it spread?
Venus on the half-shell, moist and pink rose of salt—
Belons 000 when they’re freshest are as sweet.
Chincoteagues from the bay are as plump.
Freshly squeezed is as sweet.
This is your life. You live in France,
Klaus Barbie, in 1983, and ’84, and ’85, and ’86, and ’87.
And every day is the bissextus.
And every dawn is Hiroshima.
Hallali!
GETHSEMANE
My life.
I live with it.
I look at it.
My spied on, with malice.
It’s my wife. It’s my husband.
It sleeps with me.
I wake with it.
It doesn’t matter.
If I’m unfaithful—if I drank too much—
It’s me. It’s mine. It’s all legal.
I smell the back of my hand,
And like the smell.
Twenty-five years ago when I was still alive.
I was twenty-five.
My penis pants. My penis
Rises, hearing its name, like a dog.
I ought to cut it off
And feed it to itself.
Like the young bride in the Babel story
Forced to eat her husband’s penis
By the peasant who has cut it off.
A railroad telegrapher and a peasant
On the White Army side have found some Jews.
Russia 1918.
Interior railroad boxcar.
The boxcar door is slid open from the outside
Like a slowly lifted guillotine blade.
There they are.
I am fifty today. I hold the little cape and sword.
I dedicate this bull
<
br /> That I’m about to kill
To the crowd.
To the crowd.
To the crowd.
To the crowd.
To the crowd. To the crowd. To the.
STANZAS
I don’t want to remember the Holocaust.
I’m thick of remembering the Holocaust.
To the best of my ability, I wasn’t there anyway.
And then I woke.
My hands were showing me how they wash themselves.
They’re clean. The heart is too. The hands are too.
They flush in unison like a row of urinals
Every few hours automatically. Two minutes Cockfosters.
My heart was pure. And stood on a subway platform in London
Staring at the sign. One minute Cockfosters.
I wasn’t there anyway.
I don’t believe in anything.
I was somewhere else
Screaming beneath an avalanche.
Skiers wearing miners’ headlamps were not
Skiing down the mountain in the dark,
It would be beautiful. Seeds of light floating slowly on the dark
Downward without a prayer
Of finding any elephants to save because
The International Red Cross and the Roman Catholic Church had not.
I cannot move.
I move my face from side to side
To make a space to breathe. I cannot breathe.
The screaming stops.
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING IN THE CHER
The solemn radiance
On the radio is Poulenc.
The boy soprano seems to dream
He doesn’t breathe.
And then the much shyer wings,
Of new materials, that add enormous range.
Oh, the power of the perfume!
The boys choir glides high above
The airborne orchestra.
Sweetness poured calmly and with innocent
Translucency blown
Into a glass.
While it’s still warm it cools.
The glass is warped
On purpose, beautifully.
Poulenc, Auric, Milhaud, et cetera. Les Six.
A champagne flute contains the tears of Christ.
For this is France.
The radio predicts the weather for the region with such charm.
Charm followed by more rain will crucify the harvest.
And it is cold. So far,
The summer day is pure
Boy soprano blue without a cloud.
The naive fields of sunflowers don’t know they suffer.