Waiting look of someone
Waiting to be introduced,
Without wings but without weight, oh light!
As the fist which has learned how
Waving goodbye, opening and closing up to the air
To breathe. The child
Stares past his hand. The blank stares at the child.
Goodbye.
SUNRISE
FOR BLAIR FOX
The gold watch that retired free will was constant dawn.
Constant sunrise. But then it was dawn. Christ rose,
White-faced gold bulging the horizon
Like too much honey in a spoon, an instant
Stretching forever that would not spill; constant
Sunrise blocked by the buildings opposite;
Constant sunrise before it was light. Then it
Was dawn. A shoe shined dully like liquorice.
A hand flowed toward the silent clock radio.
Bicentennial April, the two hundredth
Lash of the revolving lighthouse wink,
Spread out on the ceiling like a groundcloth.
Whole dream: a child stood up. Dream 2: yearning,
Supine, head downhill on a hill. Dream: turning
And turning, a swan patrols his empty nest,
Loops of an eighteenth-century signature, swan crest,
Mother and cygnet have been devoured by the dogs.
The dogs the dogs. A shadow shivered with leaves.
Perth, Denpasar, Djakarta, Bangkok, Bom
Bombom bay. Dogs are man’s greatest invention. Dogs.
They were nice dogs. Find a bottle of Dom
Pérignon in Western Australia.
Find life on Mars. Find Jesus. “You are a failya,”
The president of the United States said.
He was killed, and she became Bob’s. His head,
Robert Kennedy’s, lay as if removed
In the lap of a Puerto Rican boy praying.
Ladies and gentlemen, the president
Of the United States, fall in the air,
A dim streetlight past dawn not living to repent,
Ghostwalks by the canal, the blood still dry
Inside soaked street shoes, hands washed clean that try
To cup the rain that ends the drought. No one
Spoke. Blindfolds, plus the huge curtains had been drawn.
Because of his back he had to be on his back.
Neither woman dreamed a friend was the other.
Innocence. Water particles and rainbow
Above the sweet smell of gasoline—hiss of a hose
Drumming the suds off the town car’s whitewalls, which glow!
Pink-soled gum boots, pink gums of the ebony chauffeur,
Pink summer evenings of strontium 90, remember?
Vestal black panther tar stills the street.
The coolness of the enormous lawns. Repeat.
O innocent water particles and rainbow
Above the sweet smell of gas, hiss of the hose!
When you are little, a knee of your knickers torn,
The freshness of rain about to fall is what
It would be like not to have been born.
Believe. Believed they were lined up to take showers
Dies illa, that April, which brought May flowers.
Safer than the time before the baby
Crawls is the time before he smiles, maybe.
Stalin’s merry moustache, magnetic, malignant,
Crawls slowly over a leaf which cannot move.
If the words sound queer and funny to your ear,
A little bit jumbled and jivey, it must be
Someone in 1943 you hear:
Who like a dog looking at a doorknob
Does not know why. Slats of daylight bob
On the wall softly, a gentle knocking, a breeze.
A caterpillar fills the bed which is
Covered with blood. 1943.
The stools in the toilet bowl, are they alive?
Harlem on fire rouged the uptown sky.
But the shot squeezed off in tears splashes short.
But bullets whizzing through hell need no alibi
Before they melt away. Intake. Compression,
Ignition, explosion. Expansion. Exhaust. Depression
Reddens the toilet paper. That black it feels.
Endomorphic round-fendered automobiles
Slow, startle each other, and bolt in herds across
Spuyten Duyvil for the fifties and Westchester.
The cob stayed on the pond, perfect for Westchester,
Circling a nonexistent pen. Polly
Urethane sat on his face, Polly Esther
Sat on his penis. Protecting the non-cygnet.
Walking one day through the Piney Woods, he met
Three dogs in that peculiar light, strays. Two
Were shitting, looking off in that way dogs do,
Hunchbacked, sensitive, aloof, and neither
Male nor female. The third sat licking its teeth.
At the Institute they are singing On Human
Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes
of Individuation. Light of the One—
A summer sidewalk, a shadow shivered with leaves.
The mother smiles, fa, so, the mother grieves,
Beams down on the special bed for spinal
Injuries love that is primary and final,
Clear crystal a finger flicked that will ring a lifetime.
Plastic wrap refuse in the bare trees means spring.
And clouds blowing across empty sky.
A gay couple drags a shivering fist-sized
Dog down Broadway, their parachute brake. “Why
Robert Frost?” the wife one pleads, nearly
In tears; the other sniffs, “Because he
Believed in Nature and I believe in Nature.”
Pacing his study past a book-lined blur,
A city dweller saw breasts, breast; their sour
And bitter smell is his own smoker’s saliva.
The call had finally arrived from Perth:
He would live. C-4, a very high cervical
Lesion, but breathing on his own—rebirth
Into a new, another world, just seeing,
Without losing consciousness, and being,
Like being on the moon and seeing Earth,
If you could breathe unaided. God, in Perth,
Twelve hours’ time difference, thus day for night,
It was almost winter and almost Easter.
So accepting life is of the incredible.
2 a.m., the reeking silky monsoon
Air at Bombay Airport is edible,
Fertile, fecal, fetal—thunder—divine
Warm food for Krishna on which Krishna will dine.
The service personnel vacuum barefooted,
Surely Untouchables. Thunder. The booted
Back down the aisles spraying disinfectant,
By law, before disembarkation in Perth.
Down Under thunder thunder in formation
Delta wing Mach 2 dots time-warp to dust
Motes, climb and dissolve high above the one
Couple on the beach not looking up,
In the direction of Arabia, Europe,
Thunder, thunder, military jets,
Mars. The man smokes many cigarettes.
The man was saying to the woman, “Your son
Has simply been reborn,” but can’t be heard.
All is new behind their backs, or vast.
House lots link up like cells and become house,
Shade tree and lawn, the frontier hypoblast
Of capitalism develops streets in minutes
Like a Polaroid. The infinite’s
Sublime indifference to the mile—Mao
On nuclear war. Inches; dust motes; they go bow wow
At the heels of history. The dust
Imitates the thunder that will bring ra
in.
By the Indian Ocean, he sat down
And wept. Snarl suck-suck-suck waaah. It was the Grand
Hôtel et de Milan. It was a gown
Of moonlight, moving, stirring a faint breeze,
Gauze curtains hissing softly like nylons please
Please crossing and uncrossing. Who—how had
The shutters opened? and the heavy brocade
Curtain? How far away the ceiling was.
The bedlamp. One floor below, Verdi died.
How far away Australia was, years.
A man asleep listened while his throat
Tried to cry for help. He almost hears
The brayed, longing, haunting whale song the deaf speak,
Almost words. Out of silence, sounds leak
Into silence, years. He lay there without
Love, in comfort, straining to do without,
And dreamed. A spaceship could reach the ceiling, the special
Theory of relativity says.
Leave love, comfort, not even masturbate,
Not even love justice, not even want to kill,
O to be sterile, and to rise and wait
On the ceiling at sunrise, for dawn! stainless blond
Ceiling, the beginning of the beyond!
But the TV showed outstretched hands—a revolver
Blocked the open door of the last chopper,
Struggling to get airborne. The ditto sheet served
With espresso began: Good morning! Here are the news.
Phosphorescent napkins don’t make a bomb;
Under the parasols of Bicè’s, Via
Manzoni, chitchat chased the firefly of Vietnam.
The courtyard flickered; the tablecloth glowed like lime.
Corrado Agusta’s chow chow took its time
Turning its head to look at one, very
Refined and inhuman and dark as a mulberry,
Not a dog. Its blue tongue was not on view.
It had a mane and wore a harness, unsmiling.
Being walked and warmed up, they roared like lions on leashes.
The smell of castor oil. Snarl suck-suck-suck waaah
A racing motorcycle running through
The gears, on song; the ithyphallic faired
Shape of speed waaah an Italian’s glans-bared
Rosso di competizione. The Counts
Agusta raced these Stradivarius grunts
As genteelly as horse farms race horses—helicopter
Gunships, Agusta Aeronautiche.
The communists organized. Domenico
Agusta reigned. Of course the one who knew
Kennedys was the cold white rose Corrado.
The boss nailed each picket by name with a nod,
While Ciudad Trujillo and Riyadh
Kept unrolling more terror dollars for Corrado.
The iron and pious brother saw God go;
The salesman brother settled for everything:
Small arms fire, new nations; splits of brut, dry tears.
Domenico Agusta saw God go
Backwards like a helicopter in
A film he saw in Rome—i.e., in tow
With a helicopter. Sunbathers on Rome’s
Roofs looked sideways from their cradled arms.
Just outside the window Jesus appears.
He faces us and steadily disappears.
The audience applauded. So odd to be
Agusta lifting off in your Agusta.
Goodbye. Goodbye. The stuck door was freed
And thrown open, and then closed and sealed.
The moviegoers of the world recede,
The White House and the tiny Marine band
Were wheeled away. A bulbously gloved hand
Frees the faulty door. Thrown open. Into
The countdown, and counting. –9. When you
Are no longer what you were. Thrown open.
–8. O let me out nor in.
Forty stories stock still like a boy
Whose height is being measured stands on smoke
As they withdraw the gantry, wheeled awoy,
Away. Perth Denpasar Djakarta Bangkok
Bombay in the capsule at the extreme tock,
La la, in the minute head above
The rest, eye movement peck peck like a dove,
A man sits on his back strapped down reading
Off numbers and getting younger, counting, cooing.
Millions of pounds of propellants make one dream,
Even more than psychoanalysis,
Of getting somewhere. Eyes glow in the gleam
Of the fuel gauges. Liquid oxygen
And kerosene. Check. Liquid oxygen
And liquid hydrogen—liquid in a freeze
Of –420°
F. Smoke boils off the ice that sheathes
The stainless steel building beneath him, forty floors.
Blue as the winder sapphire of the Cartier
Watch he has no use for now, goodbye,
The diodes of the digital display—
Information the color of his eyes,
As if his life were passing before his eyes,
–7. Fin de race face Louis
Cartier designed, inside a chewy
Candy of gold; face in a diver’s helmet
Glassed in, prickles of the gold rivets and screws.
For everyday use, but by a Tutankhamen.
It would look feminine on a girl. The first
Wristwatch amused the sports of 1907.
The sport who commissioned the original,
The Brazilian Santos-Dumont, for a while
In 1906 believed he was the first man
To fly. Who says he did? None other than
The National Air and Space Museum says
Fernando Hippolyto da Costa does—
Believes Santos was. How could—but then
Who cares? Santos did not. Santos was not.
The watch was 1908, some say seven.
–6. What is there to believe in?
–6. What kind of god is not even
Immortal! –6. Nothing lasts.
A block of hieroglyphics trumpets, blasts
A golden long upended riff of silence,
It says for whom, whose name has been effaced.
To speak the name of the dead is to make them live
Again. O pilgrim, restore the breath of life
To him who has vanished. But the names they give.
No one can pronounce the hieroglyphs.
Then they had vowels to breathe with their bare midriffs,
Yes which? No one’s known how to vocalize
The consonants. The kings don’t recognize
Their names, don’t recognize our names for them;
The soft parts that could not be embalmed are life.
One simply stares at the autistic face,
Charred rock-hard paper, a god. Stares at the stared-at.
Ramesses II in an exhibit case.
The Mummy Room is packed with Japanese
And German tours there to take in Ramesses.
The guides call in their languages, “This way please.”
It seems one stares until one hardly sees.
It seems the room is empty. Like a dog
Looking at a doorknob, one stares at the stared-at.
As at a beetle rolling a ball of dung.
As at a large breast, with its nipple erect.
–5, soft and hard together among
The million things that go together one
Will lift away from, everything under the sun,
Everything—dog and doorknob—combustion to vapor
Lock—scissors cut paper, rock breaks scissors, paper
Covers rock. Everything is looking
For something softer than itself to eat.
Think of the energy required to get
Away from this hunt and peck for energy
That’s running out. This need to lo
ok! O let
Your spirit rise above the engines below you.
Prepare for launch. O let a new way know you
Helmeted and on your back strapped down.
The moisture of the viscera, the blown
Coral rose of the brain on its stem—in this
Container, soft will never be exposed.
And leave behind the ancient recipes,
That cookbook for cannibals the Old Testament,
Bloody contemporary of course of Ramesses.
Cuisine minceur, urging one to eat less
But well. O Egypt! O Israel’s salt sweetness!
From going soft and hard, from going up
And down, deliver us: struggling up
The steep path as Abraham with fire and knife,
And struggling down as Moses bent under the Law.
O let me go. O Israel! O Egypt!
The enemy’s godless campfire at night, meat roasting
As you breathed near, sword drawn. Cut. Juice that dripped—
Later—from the dates from the hand of your daughter
Placed on your tongue in joy. Salute the slaughter.
O let me go. Salute the screenwriter,
DNA. Salute the freedom fighter
Kalishnikov machine pistol. A spider
Oiling the weapon spreads its legs and sighs.
TERROR OUR PLEASURE. O let me go. Logo
Of the age of ass—this age of movements—
Members and dismembers is our motto.
Oiling her weapon while in the mirror eyeing
Herself, turbaned in a black howli, sighing,
Is our muse It feels good, the spider. Mothers,
The children must die with dignity. Brothers,
Die. Mothers, calm the children. Squirt the poison
Far back in your child’s throat. Stanza thirty-five.
Seated on your back strapped tight, tighter,
Feeling the contoured chair’s formfitting
Love—no more hunt and peck on the typewriter
For energy that’s running out. Stable
Fireproof love ideally comfortable!
You stare up at the gauges’ radiance.
The mummy priest stares back in a trance,
And places beside you the silent clock radio,
And on the floor shoes for the long journey.
To lie on the horizon unable to rise—
How terrible to be the horizon! be
The expression in the quadriplegic’s eyes,
Constant sunrise of feelings but no feeling.
The patient on the couch cow-eyes the ceiling.
Under his broken armor is a flower
Pinned down, that cannot reach its dagger, a flower.
Tongs in his skull, and dreams, not every man
Will wake. Can stand to look down at his penis and urine.
I am less than a man and less than a woman,
Wave after wave of moonlight breaks
Poems 1959-2009 Page 27