He married a writer just like—yes exactly.
He shaved his beard off just like—et cetera.
It is a problem in America.
You never know who’s dreaming about you.
They must do something to try to shift the weight
They wear—painted and smiling like gold the lead!
No wonder he walked staidly. They’ve time to dream.
Oh hypocrites in hell dying to catch up!
Oh in etterno faticoso manto!
And if you hail one and stop—he’s coming—he’ll stutter,
“Costui par vivo all’atto della gola,”
“This man seems alive, by the working of his throat.”
The dreaming envying third-rate writhe in America.
He sucked his pipe. He skied he fished he published.
He fucked his wife’s friends. Touching himself he murmured
He was not fit to touch his wife’s hem.
He dreamed of running away with his sister-in-law!
Of doing a screenplay. Him the guest on a talk show—
Wonderful—who has read and vilifies Freud!
How he’d have liked to put Freud in his place,
So really clever Freud was, but he was lies.
It was autumn. It rained. His lies drooped down.
It was a Year of the Pig in Vietnam,
In Vietnam our year the nth, the Nixonth,
Sometimes one wants to cut oneself in two
At the neck. The smell. The gore. To kill! There was
The child batting her head against the wall,
Beating back and forth like a gaffed fish.
There was the wife who suspected they were nothing.
There’s the head face-up in the glabrous slop.
You feel for him, the man was miserable.
It’s mad t-tooh be so ad hominem!
And avid, when the fellow was in Vermont,
For Southeast Asia. Was he miserable?
Another creative couple in Vermont,
The wife toasts the husband’s trip to New York,
The little evening he’s planning. In less than a day
He will enter my poem. He picks at her daube.
There’s the head face-up in the glabrous slop.
Voilà donc quelqu’un de bien quelconque!
Ah Vermont! The artists aggregate,
A suburb of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
Except no blacks with no ability.
I am looking down at you, at you and yours,
Your stories and friends, your banal ludicrous dreams,
Dear boy, the horror, mouth uncreating,
Horror, horror, I hear it, head chopped off,
The stuttering head face-up in a pile of slop.
Just stay down there dear boy it is your home.
The unsharpened knives stuck to the wall
Magnet-bar dully. The rain let off the hush
Of a kettle that doesn’t sing. Each leaf was touched,
Each leaf drooped down, a dry palm and thin wrist.
His beautifully battered sweet schoolboy satchel walked
With him out the door into scrutiny,
The ears for eyes of a bat on the wings of a dove.
Art won’t forgive life, no more than life will.
HOMAGE TO CICERO
Anything and everyone is life when two
Radios tune to the news on different stations while
A bass recorder pulses familiar sequences of sound waves,
An old sad sweet song, live. A computer
On stage listens to it all and does a printout
Of it in Fortran, after a microsecond lag, and adds its own
Noise. The printout piles up in folds
On the stage, in a not quite random way.
“Plaisir d’Amour” was the song.
Balls of cement shaped by a Vassar
Person, “majored in art at Vassar,”
Each must weigh a hundred pounds, fill a gallery.
They are enough alike to be perhaps
The look of what? The weight the person was
When she first was no longer a child—
Her planet lifeless after the Bomb—an anorexic image.
The hideous and ridiculous are obsessed
By the beautiful which they replace.
It is an age we may not survive.
The sciences know. We do believe in art
But ask the computer to hear and preserve our cry.
O computer, hear and preserve our cry.
Mortem mihi cur consciscerem
Causa non visa est, cur optarem multae causae.
Vetus est enim, “ubi non sis qui fueris,
Non esse cur velis vivere.” Or, in English:
We are no longer what we were.
DESCENT INTO THE UNDERWORLD
A woman watches the sunrise in her martini,
And drinks—and drinks darkness.
She is in a dark room,
Tubes in her nostrils and arms.
She is in her childhood bed.
Suddenly she is awake. Orpheus,
A big person, is about to do
Something to a little.
Floating in darkness, connected
To tubes like a diver … Eurydice.
Her breath-bubbles rise. Backing out of her throat
One by one, the Valiums rise.
Sweets to the sweet, yellow pills for a princess—
Orpheus holds out a bouquet
Of yellow tulips like a torch,
And shines it on her, and stares down at her.
She drinks his syrup, drooling in her sleep.
She lisps in a happy little girl’s voice:
“The man is bad—I hate him.
The little girl is bad. She loves him.”
A BEAUTIFUL DAY OUTSIDE
I still lived, and sat there in the sun,
Too depressed to savor my melancholia.
I wore a cardboard crown. I held
A sceptre with a star on top.
I was on a hill, looking over at a mountain.
The sky was bald blue above.
Pine needles made
Something softer than a breast beneath the fits-all royal hose.
I was like an inmate of Charenton
Dully propped up on a throne outdoors, playing
“Fatigue of the Brave”—fatigue such as of a fireman holding
A still warm baby, waiting for the body bag.
Professional depression,
In an age of revolutionary fire
And having to grow up. This king did not wish to—
Still declined to be beheaded at forty-three.
But that I was depressed,
I had diagnosed the depression thus:
Ambivalence at a standstill—
Party-favor crown, real-life guillotine.
I still lived. I sat there in the sun:
Just water and salt conducting a weak current
Between the scent of pine and the foot smell
Of weeds reeking in the hot sun.
The children’s party crown I wore
Dazzled my thinning hair like a halo.
The crown was crenellated like a castle wall.
A leper begged outside the wall.
In an upper gallery of the castle,
A young woman curtsied to the king and said: “Sire,
You are a beautiful day outside.”
The king stuck his stick down her throat to shut her up.
Children, of all things bad, the best is to kill a king.
Next best: to kill yourself out of fear of death.
Next best: to grovel and beg. I took for my own motto
I rot before I ripen.
YEARS HAVE PASSED
Seeing you again.
Your glide, your gaze.
Your very quiet voice.
Your terror. Your quiet eyes.
THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR
Oh never to be yourself,
Never to let be
And simply be there.
The same
Morning ink blot in the mirror
Making a face up,
Making up a face. You need
All your strength
Never to be yourself.
Skirt, boots, and sweater
Green as a stem.
I’ll wear them.
Take me down from the shelf.
Oh never to be yourself
And always to be the same.
Like the air and the wind,
The wind and the air.
I hear a very quiet voice,
Emphatic like a flower,
Saying
It is I.
FEVER
The soft street canyon was silent. In silence the new snow
Layered a rolling swell. The greatest evening
Tilted and rose against the tiny window:
Like her juggled soaking fishbowl swinging
A wave that burst into suds. A feeler of ice,
See-through and frail, scaled the whitening lace
Of the window guard, now more visible,
As if a vine were growing its own trellis.
The warm room watched it whiten, counting the minutes.
Think fast! (Still dreaming?) The boy had caught his friend
Flush with a lobbed cannonball of snow.
But then they crossed the closed street hand in hand.
Their dog sprinted in zigzags like a minnow,
Or wallowing in too deep, leapt out like a deer,
Folded forepaws leaping, then his rear.
From two floors up, two floors below is deep.
They don’t know it, but sometime someone will come
And take her hand and feed her to the moon.
ERATO
Suddenly the pace
Quickens, chill air dusts the air.
The leaves shrink
To a fawn color, held by their tails like mice,
The color of twine.
The fifty o’clock moon
Laid its cheek against the window,
Lay like snow on the carpet.
Outside the window,
Harlem in moonlight.
You walked outside.
Everyone knows
About the would-be suicide: you walk—
A step, a heartbeat—
Heartbeats. Sobsob, in the noon park,
The nannies were white,
Seated like napkins on the benches,
Starched and folded to sit up.
The babies did not choose the carriages,
Limousine coffers, blackly London;
They did not choose the rayless Tartar sun,
Sterile as the infected
Industrial steppes of Calvin—of
Bayonne. The reservoir banks were a purple socket
Like a black tulip.
Anything would do now
That inspired you
Below the Ninth Sphere, below the fixed stars
With fall, the electric cattle prod,
The cold juice that shocked you from your sleep
Lovelorn: slight,
Frizzy, sweating animal with feelings.
For fall, dawn rises in combers
Above the radiator shield’s metal caning,
The sill flows like a pennant.
You smell the back-to-school,
Steam and rain on wool,
The tears not learning
And learning to write
With the sharp new chalk
Jacobean black and white,
The fantastic wrong and right, now dissolving
In Jamesian gray. You want to be a child—
You want to find the way
To either more or less than you are.
If you could choose.
Everywhere changes or fades.
Her hair streams like a willow’s
As it leans to the river
When she leans toward you
Her anodyne, her healing face,
Eurasian, gypsy ease
(You have your memories),
Lovely lost love;
Erato’s dark hair.
DE SADE
So now you’ve fettered that sweet bride,
The boy you’ve toyed with awhile and gelded,
And still not come, wretched sod.
Suck yourself off, like in your dream.
Innocents, white and fresh, bless ’em,
They belonged down in your love grotto;
They hiccup and honk on the slick flags
Looped with turds and the squashed-flat intestine.
Nothing helps, Marquis. Oh try
The scaffold again, with your bald pregnant nun.
The hired child caresses the ripped breasts;
She fingers herself, and releases the pretend-drop—
Nothing helps! At least, at least—
Sade save our republican mistress, France.
Kiss the Courrèges boot, de Sade,
The stockingful up to the stocking top.
Beyond you lies the shrine, between
The slopes of Zion, past the alehouse.
Refresh yourself, drink deep. The brine!
The salt and gall, your honey and wine!
THE NEW FRONTIER
Never again to wake up in the blond
Hush and gauze of that Hyannis sunrise.
Bliss was it
In that dawn to be alive
With our Kool as breakfast,
Make-do pioneers. Like politicians
Headed for a back room,
Each minute lived when it arrived,
And was the future. To be our age
Was very heaven. The fresh print
On the leaves dabbed
The windowscreen leaf-green;
A nestling’s wing of a breeze that
Could not have stirred a cobweb
Eased through the air
And swept the room clean.
We could love politics for its mind!
All seemed possible,
Though it was barely a breeze.
The spirey steel-wool tuft in the map
Spreading apart, the city’s
Wild wire and grease-rot,
Must be redeemed. When we returned
We would begin.
The city was our faith—
Ah we knew now the world need not end.
The flagpole out on the common actually
Seemed to tense,
Attentive as a compass needle,
Seemed caught in the open
Sniffing the breeze,
The little flag quivering like a sprig.
Alas. We could almost see
Cloth milk flying in place of blood and stars:
A nationless white flag colorlessly
Compounded of all colors, for peace.
But the pitcher and turned-down tumbler
On their doily summed up
The trim smell of dill,
We would begin.
It was new Eden.
And there was the young light,
There the feathery sapling—our tree priest,
Let us say, stuck with glued leaves.
Eden’s one anthill bred
A commune honey pallor on the lawn
Uncurbed, yet innocent
Of any metaphor.
A pipe snaking around the baseboard rose
And stood silent in the corner like a birch.
Perhaps only innocence was keeping
The common still asleep
While we overreached, and touched so easily
What we were. We were
Awake while the world slept.
We overweened. Yes, yes,
We opened the patched screen
And plucked a leaf and stem,
And chewed the stem,
And tasted its green.
NOVEMBER 24, 1963
The trees breathe in like show dogs, stiffening
Under the silver leashes of light rain
To spines. A Cyclone fence that guards the moire
Embankment of the shrunken reservoir
Bristles with rain barbs, each a milk tooth, sting
Of stings, where fall began. The park’s a stain,
The black paths shimmer under cellophane.
It is so real. Shy ghosts of taxis sniff
And worry in the empty park streets, lost
And misted lights, and down Fifth Avenue:
The flags soak at half-staff, bloodshed and blue;
Bloodletting stripes repeating their mute riff;
Gray stars, wet Union sky of stars, crisscrossed
With petrifying folds and sparks of frost.
The rain points prick the lake and touch the drought,
The dusk blue of a sterile needletip.
The brightness and the light has been struck down.
FREEDOM BOMBS FOR VIETNAM (1967)
The bald still head is filled with that grayish milk—
It’s a dentist’s glass door. It turns heavily—
There may be a weight in it. It weighs one ton.
Very even light diffuses through the globe.
But this surprise: life-squiggles, fishhooks,
Minnowhooks, surround the mineral eyes.
Someone like Muzak is burbling slant rhymes—
-om and -am, -om and -am—and holds up a telltale map
Of rice swimming in blood like white flies.
Ears almost as large as the president’s
And more eloquent than lips,
That swallow toothlessly like polyps.
A spit glob and naked flashbulbs pop in Rusk’s ear
And go down with whole heads, whole fields of heads
Of human hair, jagged necks attached.
Tangled unwashed bangs lengthening and cut, lengthening and cut,
The civilian population knows no more
Than a cellar of pocked Georgia potatoes.
This Press Talk is like a ham discussing pigs—
They need our help. He’s a cracker showing the kids
The funny human shapes his potatoes have.
They must be scrubbed and eaten in their skins.
That’s the nourishment. Rusk sets no other condition.
Rusk’s private smile that looks like incest.
ROBERT KENNEDY
I turn from Yeats to sleep, and dream of Robert Kennedy,
Assassinated ten years ago tomorrow.
Ten years ago he was alive—
Asleep and dreaming at this hour, dreaming
Poems 1959-2009 Page 29