Collected Poems
Page 21
7/13/68
The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit,
saw differently from us, who breathed thin air and kept walking.
Sleeping back-to-back, man and woman, we were more conscious
than either of us awake and alone in the world.
These words are vapor-trails of a plane that has vanished;
by the time I write them out, they are whispering something else.
Do we still have to feel jealous of our creations?
Once they might have outlived us; in this world, we’ll die together.
Don’t look for me in the room I have left;
the photograph shows just a white rocking-chair, still rocking.
7/14/68: I
In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.
How many times a day, in this city, are those words spoken?
The tears of the universe aren’t all stars, Danton;
some are satellites of brushed aluminum and stainless steel.
He, who was temporary, has joined eternity;
he has deserted us, gone over to the other side.
In the Theatre of the Dust no actor becomes famous.
In the last scene they all are blown away like dust.
“It may be if I had known them I would have loved them.”
You were American, Whitman, and those words are yours.
7/14/68: II
Did you think I was talking about my life?
I was trying to drive a tradition up against the wall.
The field they burned over is greener than all the rest.
You have to watch it, he said, the sparks can travel the roots.
Shot back into this earth’s atmosphere
our children’s children may photograph these stones.
In the red wash of the darkroom, I see myself clearly;
when the print is developed and handed about, the face is
nothing to me.
For us the work undoes itself over and over:
the grass grows back, the dust collects, the scar breaks open.
7/16/68: I
Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—
five green hours and forty violet minutes.
A cold spring slowed our lilacs, till a surf broke
violet/white, tender and sensual, misread it if you dare.
I tell you, truth is, at the moment, here
burning outward through our skins.
Eternity streams through my body:
touch it with your hand and see.
Till the walls of the tunnel cave in
and the black river walks on our faces.
7/16/68: II
When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed
as if by snow, or fire, or physical desire.
First snow. Death of the city. Ghosts in the air.
Your shade among the shadows, interviewing the mist.
The mail came every day, but letters were missing;
by this I knew things were not what they ought to be.
The trees in the long park blurring back
into Olmsted’s original dream-work.
The impartial scholar writes me from under house arrest.
I hope you are rotting in hell, Montaigne you bastard.
7/17/68
Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon.
Flower cast in metal, Picasso-woman, sister.
Two hesitant Luna moths regard each other
with the spots on their wings: fascinated.
To resign yourself—what an act of betrayal!
—to throw a runaway spirit back to the dogs.
When the ebb-tide pulls hard enough, we are all starfish.
The moon has her way with us, my companion in crime.
At the Aquarium that day, between the white whale’s loneliness
and the groupers’ mass promiscuities, only ourselves.
7/23/68
When your sperm enters me, it is altered;
when my thought absorbs yours, a world begins.
If the mind of the teacher is not in love with the mind of the student,
he is simply practicing rape, and deserves at best our pity.
To live outside the law! Or, barely within it,
a twig on boiling waters, enclosed inside a bubble
Our words are jammed in an electronic jungle;
sometimes, though, they rise and wheel croaking above the treetops.
An open window; thick summer night; electric fences trilling.
What are you doing here at the edge of the death-camps, Vivaldi?
7/24/68: I
The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature.
In the woods I have a vision of asphalt, blindly lingering.
I hardly know the names of the weeds I love.
I have forgotten the names of so many flowers.
I can’t live at the hems of that tradition—
will I last to try the beginning of the next?
Killing is different now: no fingers round the throat.
No one feels the wetness of the blood on his hands.
When we fuck, there too are we remoter
than the fucking bodies of lovers used to be?
How many men have touched me with their eyes
more hotly than they later touched me with their lips.
7/24/68: II
The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.
The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.
At the drive-in movie, above the PanaVision,
beyond the projector beams, you project yourself, great Star.
The eye that used to watch us is dead, but open.
Sometimes I still have a sense of being followed.
How long will we be waiting for the police?
How long must I wonder which of my friends would hide me?
Driving at night I feel the Milky Way
streaming above me like the graph of a cry.
7/26/68: I
Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.
Today you needn’t write; the wall has tumbled down.
We were taught to respect the appearance behind the reality.
Our senses were out on parole, under surveillance.
A pair of eyes imprisoned for years inside my skull
is burning its way outward, the headaches are terrible.
I’m walking through a rubble of broken sculpture, stumbling
here on the spine of a friend, there on the hand of a brother.
All those joinings! and yet we fought so hard to be unique.
Neither alone, nor in anyone’s arms, will we end up sleeping.
7/26/68: II
A dead mosquito, flattened against a door;
his image could survive our comings and our goings.
LeRoi! Eldridge! listen to us, we are ghosts
condemned to haunt the cities where you want to be at home.
The white children turn black on the negative.
The summer clouds blacken inside the camera-skull.
Every mistake that can be made, we are prepared to make;
anything less would fall short of the reality we’re dreaming.
Someone has always been desperate, now it’s our turn—
we who were free to weep for Othello and laugh at Caliban.
I have learned to smell a conservateur a mile away:
they carry illustrated catalogues of all that there is to lose.
7/26/68: III
So many minds in search of bodies
groping their way among artificial limbs.
Of late they write me how they are getting on:
desertion, desertion, is the story of those pages.
A chewed-up nail, the past, splitting yet growing,
the same and not the same; a nervous habit never shaken.
Those stays of tooled whale
bone in the Salem museum—
erotic scrimshaw, practical even in lust.
Whoever thought of inserting a ship in a bottle?
Long weeks without women do this to a man.
8/1/68
The order of the small town on the riverbank,
forever at war with the order of the dark and starlit soul.
Were you free then all along, Jim, free at last,
of everything but the white boy’s fantasies?
We pleaded guilty till we saw what rectitude was like:
its washed hands, and dead nerve, and sclerotic eye.
I long ago stopped dreaming of pure justice, your honor—
my crime was to believe we could make cruelty obsolete.
The body has been exhumed from the burnt-out bunker;
the teeth counted, the contents of the stomach told over.
And you, Custer the Squaw-killer, hero of primitive schoolrooms—
where are you buried, what is the condition of your bones?
8/4/68
For Aijaz Ahmad
If these are letters, they will have to be misread.
If scribblings on a wall, they must tangle with all the others.
Fuck redsBlack PowerAngel loves Rosita
—and a transistor radio answers in Spanish: Night must fall.
Prisoners, soldiers, crouching as always, writing,
explaining the unforgivable to a wife, a mother, a lover.
Those faces are blurred and some have turned away
to which I used to address myself so hotly.
How is it, Ghalib, that your grief, resurrected in pieces,
has found its way to this room from your dark house in Delhi?
When they read this poem of mine, they are translators.
Every existence speaks a language of its own.
8/8/68: I
From here on, all of us will be living
like Galileo turning his first tube at the stars.
Obey the little laws and break the great ones
is the preamble to their constitution.
Even to hope is to leap into the unknown,
under the mocking eyes of the way things are.
There’s a war on earth, and in the skull, and in the glassy spaces,
between the existing and the non-existing.
I need to live each day through, have them and know them all,
though I can see from here where I’ll be standing at the end.
8/8/68: II
For A.H.C.
A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,
some weaving figured as magic against oppression.
I’m speaking to you as a woman to a man:
when your blood flows I want to hold you in my arms.
How did we get caught up fighting this forest fire,
we, who were only looking for a still place in the woods?
How frail we are, and yet, dispersed, always returning,
the barnacles they keep scraping from the warship’s hull.
The hairs on your breast curl so lightly as you lie there,
while the strong heart goes on pounding in its sleep.
POEMS
(1967–1969)
POSTCARD
Rodin’s Orpheus, floodlit, hacked,
clawing I don’t know what
with the huge toes of an animal,
gripping the air
above the mitered floors
of the Musée …
This comes in the mail and I wonder
what it is to be cast in bronze
like the sender;
who wouldn’t live, thirsty, drifting,
obscure, freaked-out
but with a future
still lapping at the door
and a dream of language
unlived behind the clouds?
Orpheus hurts all over
but his throat hurts worst of all.
You can see it: the two knobs
of bronze pain in his neck,
the paralysis of his floodlit lips.
1967
WHITE NIGHT
From the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky.
White night, my painful joy,
your light is brighter than the dawn.
A white ship is sailing from East Broadway
where I see no sail by day.
A quiet star hands me a ticket
open for all the seas.
I put on my time-worn jacket
and entrust myself to the night.
Where are you taking me, ship?
Who charted us on this course?
The hieroglyphs of the map escape me,
and the arrows of your compass.
I am the one who sees and does not see.
I go along on your deck of secrets,
squeeze shut my baggage on the wreath of sorrows
from all my plucked-out homes.
—Pack in all my blackened pots,
their split lids, the chipped crockeries,
pack in my chaos with its gold-encrusted buttons
since chaos will always be in fashion.
—Pack the letters stamped Unknown at This Address—
vanished addresses that sear my eyes,
postmarked with more than years and days;
sucked into my bones and marrow.
—Pack up my shadow that weighs more than my body,
that comes along with its endless exhortations.
Weekdays or holidays, time of flowers or withering,
my shadow is with me, muttering its troubles.
Find me a place of honey cakes and sweetness
where angels and children picnic together
(this is the dream I love best of all),
where the sacred wine fizzes in bottles.
Let me have one sip, here on East Broadway,
for the sake of those old Jews crying in the dark.
I cry my heretic’s tears with them,
their sobbing is my sobbing.
I’m a difficult passenger, my ship
is packed with the heavy horns, the shofars of grief.
Tighten the sails of night as far as you can,
for the daylight cannot carry me.
Take me somewhere to a place of rest,
of goats in belled hats playing on trombones—
to the Almighty’s fresh white sheets
where the hunter’s shadow cannot fall.
Take me … Yes, take me … But you know best
where the sea calmly opens its blue road.
I’m wearier than your oldest tower;
somewhere I’ve left my heart aside.
1968
THE DAYS: SPRING
He writes: Let us bear
our illusions together …
I persist in thinking:
every fantasy I have
comes true; who am I
to bear illusions?
He writes: But who can be
a saint?—The woman in #9
is locked in the bathroom.
She screams for five hours,
pounds the walls, hears voices
retreating in the hall.
The lock is broken.
The lovers pass and go out to lunch,
boredom sets in by 2 o’clock.
Emptiness of the mirror, and
the failure of the classics.
A look at the ceiling
in pauses of lovemaking:
that immense, scarred domain.
He writes: The depth of pain
grows all the time.
We marched and sat down in the street,
she offered her torn newspaper.
Who will survive Amerika?
they sang on Lenox Avenue.
This early summer weekend.
The chance of beginning again.
From always fewer chances
the future plots itself.
I walk Third Avenue,
Later the stars come out like facts,
my constellation streams at my head,
a woman’s body nailed with stars.
1969
TEAR GAS
October 12, 1969: reports of the tear-gassing of demonstrators protesting the treatment of G.I. prisoners in the stockade at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
This is how it feels to do something you are afraid of.
That they are afraid of.
(Would it have been different at Fort Dix, beginning
to feel the full volume of tears in you, the measure
of all you have in you to shed, all you have held