His wish-fulfilling dreams.
He reaches from the grave.
Shirtsleeves rolled up, a boy’s brown hair, ice eyes
Softened by the suffering of others, and doomed;
Younger brother of a murdered president,
Senator and candidate for president;
Shy, compassionate and fierce
Like a figure out of Yeats;
The only politician I have loved says You’re dreaming and says
The gun is mightier than the word.
THE DRILL
“Have the bristles at an angle and gently
Work them in between the tooth and gum
Back and forth,” a woman says.
Her breast is next to my ear.
She moves a set of teeth four inches high
And a foot-long toothbrush.
Breast; and then the teeth; and then
The window without a shade or curtains—then the day,
Twelve floors above the street;
And the empty lighted office windows always
On the other side of a street
From the drill,
Since childhood,
The obsolete slow drill that now only polishes.
HAMLET
Alive. Yes and awake. Flowers
Fall through his mind, in one slant, like snow.
The electric toothbrush flames in his hand.
Mozart sweetens the small room.
LSD tears he wept all night,
One hundred for a dead father.
LSD tears, they roll heavy
And burn like molten metal drops.
Now as the drug wears off he waits.
For a mother has remarried.
Oh the man swelled, supple bitch,
And smiled as if he might give birth.
Completely to be shut of both,
Purged pure and bare to all in one’s fate,
The drug makes possible at last
[The curtain stirs], out of the shell,
The old self, new and neat as a chick.
This dew, haze softness on waking has opened
His window on the street a crack.
Midnight tolls. The curtain stirs.
THE FUTURE
Fifth Avenue has the flickers, heat
Lightning lit. A voodoo doll’s
Whey little bursts of breath stare,
And fits of fluttering like an eye;
A Haitian nurse at her window altar
Tutoyers the hatpin. The terrified trees’
Bursts of breath stare, as though Fifth
Were lined with dandelion clocks.
Scree in the void, Sinai is snuffed,
Half re-created. Parting the black:
Arrow one-way signs plunged through,
The twitched buildings dancing and chalk-white.
It is too late for people but
A rag barfs on a curb. But it’s
A sandwich board mouldering there
Draws the nose of his tetchy chow:
Seen in a sheet-flap of sight just now
And gone now. In the blinded dark;
Streetlights, stars sapped—repeated blows
That leave unstirred the humid silence.
Silence … Even Harlem is still—
Harlem is near. The galaxies,
The brainstorms of zero, gasp the fainter
And fainter last breaths of the future.
This time we may go out for good.
Blacked out after the zillionth stroke.
This may be a good time not to wake.
Fifth Ave. The white man’s night-light, the future.
WANTING TO LIVE IN HARLEM
Pictures of violins in the Wurlitzer collection
Were my bedroom’s one decoration,
Besides a blue horse and childish tan maiden by Gauguin—
Backs, bellies, and scrolls,
Stradivarius, Guarnerius, Amati,
Colored like a calabash-and-meerschaum pipe bowl’s
Warmed, matured body—
The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then.
I used to dream about her often,
In sheets she’d have to change the day after.
I was thirteen, had just been bar mitzvah.
My hero, once I’d read about him,
Was the emperor Hadrian; my villain, Bar Kokhba,
The Jew Hadrian had crushed out at Jerusalem:
Both in the Cambridge Ancient History’s Hadrian chapter (1936
Edition), by some German. (The Olympics
Year of my birth and Jesse Owens’s putsch it had appeared.)
Even then, in ’49, my mother was dying.
Dressed in her fresh-air blue starched uniform,
The maid would come from Mother’s room crying
With my mother’s tears shining on her arm,
And run to grab her beads and crucifix and missal,
I to find my violin and tuning whistle
To practice my lessons. Mendelssohn. Or Bach,
Whose Lutheran fingering had helped pluck
The tonsured monks like toadstools from their lawns,
And now riddled the armor I would have to shuck:
His were life-sized hands behind his puppet Mendelssohn’s.
One night, by the blue of her nitelite, I watched the maid
Weaving before her mirror in the dark, naked.
Her eyes rolled, whiskey-bright; the glass was black, dead.
“Will you come true? It’s me, it’s me,” she said.
Her hands and her hips clung to her rolling pelvis.
Her lips smacked and I saw her smile, pure lead
And silver, like a child, and shape a kiss.
All night I tossed. I saw the face,
The shoulders and the slight breasts—but a boy’s face,
A soft thing tangled, singing, in his arms,
Singing and foaming, while his blinding pelvis,
Scooped out, streamed. His white eyes dreamed,
While the black face pounded with syncope and madness.
And then, in clear soprano, we both screamed.
What a world of mirrored darkness! Agonized, elated,
Again years later I would see it with my naked
Eye—see Harlem: doped up and heartless,
Loved up by heroin, running out of veins
And out of money and out of arms to hold it—where
I saw dead saplings wired to stakes in lanes
Of ice, like hair out cold in hair straightener.
And that wintry morning, trudging through Harlem
Looking for furnished rooms, I heard the solemn
Pedal-toned bowing of the Bach Chaconne.
I’d played it once! How many tears
Had shined on Mother’s maids since then?
Ten years! I had been trying to find a room ten years,
It seemed that day, and been turned down again and again.
No violin could thaw
The rickety and raw
Purple window I shivered below, stamping my shoes.
Two boys in galoshes came goose-stepping down
The sheer-ice long white center line of Lenox Avenue.
A blue-stormcoated Negro patrolman,
With a yellowing badge star, bawled at them. I left too.
I had given up violin and left St. Louis,
I had given up being Jewish,
To be at Harvard just another
Greek nose in street clothes in Harvard Yard.
Mother went on half dying.
I wanted to live in Harlem. I was almost unarmored …
Almost alone—like Hadrian crying
As his death came on, “Your Hadrianus
Misses you, Antinous,
Misses your ankles slender as your wrists,
Dear child. We want to be alone.
His back was the city gates of Rome.
And now Jerusalem is du
st in the sun,
His skies are blue. He’s coming, child, I come.”
THE LAST ENTRIES IN MAYAKOVSKY’S NOTEBOOK
She loves me? She loves me not?
I wring
My hands and scatter the broken-off fingers.
Like petals you pluck from some
White little flower along your way.
You hold them up to the breeze,
They’ve told your fortune,
They drift off into May.
Though
Now a haircut
Lays bare thorns of gray,
Though my morning shave shows me
On the bib the salt of age,
I hope, I believe
I will never weaken.
Never be caught
Showing good sense.
•
Past one o’clock. You must have gone to sleep.
Or do
You feel, perhaps you feel the same as I?
I’m in no hurry.
Is
There no point
In a telegram that would only
Wake you? And disturb you.
•
The tide ebbs.
The sea too
Is going to sleep.
The incident as they say
Is closed.
Love’s skiff
Has stove
In on the daily grind.
It would be useless
Making a list
Of who did what to whom.
We shared
Weapons
And wounds.
•
Past one. Like a
Silent moonlit Oka’, the Milky Way
Streams into the night. I’m in no hurry.
As they say: the incident is closed.
A telegram would wake you.
How still it is.
Night, night sky, and stars.
What stillness there is in the world!
What stillness we are capable of!
In hours like these one rises
To address the Ages—History—the Universe!
•
I know
The power of words.
(Not the gas
The loges applaud.)
That make
Coffins rear up and break loose
And clomp off
Robotlike, rocked forward like a crate.
So we are rejected,
So we go unpublished
But the word gallops on, cinching the saddle tighter,
The word rings for centuries—a tocsin!
And steam engines creep up to lick
Poetry’s calloused hands.
I know
The power of words.
It is nothing!
A fallen
Petal under
A dancer’s heel.
But man
In his soul, his lips, in his bones …
HART CRANE NEAR THE END
1
The woman in love with him
Pleads with him, “Why
Must there be such misery?
What is there in you that wants this?”
And still he does not feel it,
Feels nothing, sealed in his self.
The beach house is filled up.
The guests drift in and out
Talking in wafts, sozzled,
Sunburns moonlit; dappled fluttering
Shirts at summery games. But
Now near dawn it’s cold. He sees
The clock ticks swimming through the air,
Swimming eyelashed eyelets tiny as rotifers.
A warped smile is everywhere,
Half in, half out of water.
In youth more delicate than the boy Rimbaud’s,
The sunset nose, lips like blood sausages.
Course of the day’s
Lost, unsought breaths, uncounted,
Each separate as a life, a guest.
His life had purposes!
The hall clock ticks.
Oh the heresies, Oh each distinct,
Blue and bright and trite and evil, each,
Those efforts to see the light
Chasing each other’s tails—
Whirled into moral butter like Black Sambo’s tigers,
As the phonograph spins Ravel’s “Bolero.”
2
A glance—a snipe’s beak—
Opens, he sees
The scorched
Tobacco-y nerve ends.
They are wandering through the sumac,
Wondering if it is poisonous,
Blondes and brunettes.
“Who belongs to you?” she whispers.
His life is falling.
His butched unruly hair boils
Through her fingers like the ocean.
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand.
She is afraid.
3
Raising his cigar and drink,
He gives a toast: “To the dying
Wildlife of Mexico—myself!
Ah, to Lorenzo,
Of course, too.
At forty-five, at his noon eclipsed—
Our former neighbor, up there
In heaven with Beiderbecke.
The famous style was just the life,
He handed you the books blade first,
Keen as a castaway’s thirst.
His spirit,
Like a little straight stick,
A little straight stick,
So set and separate, so free,
Wrestled verse by verse
Favorite flowers, birds and beasts.”
He barely finishes.
With a roar the surf razes
Last night’s sand castle
And seizes her sailor’s cap
As she gasps for breath,
Fighting back tears.
The white dot wags on the water
Like candlelight in a draft,
Flickers, dips, and reappears—
As if, someone says, on an altar offered to
The anchored white United Fruit ship,
A hospital ship,
Which it seems to want to draw near.
“Why, it reverences United Fruit”
(Up goes his glass),
“Our brilliantined
Hustler queen, our Muse.
But our Muse keeps his pitch to himself now,
From me anyway—that white lie,
Inspirer of my verse, my
Sermon on San Juan Hill The Bridge,
That hemorrhaged,
Flowing out under the Morgan boardroom doors
Like a ray stalking, a gliding
Opera cape of blood.
“Sweetheart, don’t cry. Let’s see.
Tolstoy is like the sea.
Shakespeare is like the sea. Or let’s say
Whitman is like a spar
Off the America,
Wooed by the Pequod, the Patna, the Lusitania,
The Titanic, the maniacs,
The siren idealists—America
Weltering in her element
Like ambergris. Slick sightless mass,
Clung to by a sweet smell.
The old fag as he drowns still acting
The little girl
Who can come to no harm.”
He still has his charm.
Her childless troubled soul quiets,
Glows like a flame in Vermeer;
Her startled little vices
Twinkle off like swallows.
“Don’t cry, sweetheart.
Keep my kisses in your pocket
Till I get back. Oh, wouldn’t you like to see
Ohio with me
On my trip!
But if I come back,
Who will put up with me?
Who will put me up?
Sunshine, I’ve no place to go,
And no place to go
Is easy eno
ugh to find.”
4
On the desk
The paper is blank,
Freezing to sleep
In the snowfield cast by the lamp.
He tries to think;
Tries to remember the evening.
Faceless
Spondee and iamb couples kick by
In a conga line.
The baker, the breadline,
The Communist and Capitalist,
To them poetry is
A saint’s temptation
And his desert, both.
The wide dry heartland sky,
The teetotaling Sahara
Over Chagrin Falls,
When he was last there,
Ideally white as Moby-Dick,
Devoured him like a drop.
5
From the bed,
Through her jiggling cigarette
She recites: “Then you downed
The other bottle of tequila.
You said you were Baudelaire—
Or was it Marlowe?—
You said you were Blake
Talking English with the angels,
And said you were Christ, of course,
But never would say
You were yourself. And the voice!
The steady inhuman horror
Making my heart contract!
You cursed me, my makeup,
Cursed the moon, its light,
Cursed that boyfriend,
All your other friends, all the guests.
My God, you cursed the elements!
And separately, by name,
The heliotrope, the heaven-tree,
The star jessamine, the sweet-by-night;
And even the spring pool
With the small ducks, the lily pad;
And even the air we breathed together,
Because I breathed it and the flowers.
You wept. You said,
‘There is goodness,
That from bayberry made modest candles
And rose jam from hips and haws.
And Blake talked English with the angels.’
And you wanted to make love to me,
Though I can’t imagine how.”
6
When morning breaks, he takes
His first drink of water in a day.
Petite veille d’ivresse, sainte!
His orange fireball eye sees,
Dried yolk yellow like a slicker,
The faded fire hydrant
Pop from the grass like a bird’s note,
And its black beak tweets
Me! Me!
FINAL SOLUTIONS (1963)
WANTING TO LIVE IN HARLEM
Pictures of violins in the Wurlitzer collection
Were my bedroom’s one decoration,
Poems 1959-2009 Page 30