Way More West
Page 7
to yearn for,
the cutting of it
cutting off the world
the thorn however
remains, in the desert
in the throat of our national hypocrisy
strewn we are along all the pathways
of our exclusively gelding mentality
we stride in
our gelding culture,
oh rose
of priceless beauty
refrain from our shores
suffocate the thin isthmus
of our mean land,
cast us back
into isolation
FROM THE NORTH ATLANTIC TURBINE
Thesis
Only the Illegitimate are beautiful
and only the Good
proliferate only the Illegitimate
Oh Aklavik only you are beautiful
Ah Aklavik your main street is dead
only the blemished are beautiful only
the deserted have life made
of whole, unsurpassable night
only Aklavik is life inside life inside
itself.
They have gone who walk stiltedly
on the legs of life. All life is
in the northern hemisphere turning around
the radicals of gross pain and great joy
the poles of pure life move
into the circle of
our north, oh Aklavik only
the outcast and ab
andoned to the night are faultless
only the faultless have fallen only
the fallen are the pure Children of the Sun
only they move West, only they are expected,
in the virgin heat
by those who wait intensely
for the creatures from the East, only
Aklavik, our Aklavik, is North
and lovely, always abandoned
always dark, whose warp is light.
Simple fear compels Inuvik, her liquor store
lifts the darkness
by the rotation of a false summer.
The Children of the Sun never go
to Inuvik, on bloody feet, half starved,
or suffering the absolute intrusion
of any food oh Aklavik they vomit
on your remote and insupportably obscure streets
which run antiseptically into the wilderness
and if blackflies inhabit with the insistence
of castanets the delta of Inuvik in you Aklavik
around you Aklavik they form a core
and critical shell of inflexible lust, only
in the permafrost
is the new home of the Children
of the Sun in whose nakedness
is the desire not desire
in whose beauty is the flame of red
permafrost a thousand feet deep in whose
frail buildings
the shudder of total winter in whose
misshapened sun the Children bathe
On the Nature of Communication, September 7, 1966
As Dr. Verwoerd one day
sat at his appointed desk
in the parliament at Capetown
there came to him a green
and black messenger.
(who did not, in fact, disagree with him)
and Dr. Verwoerd looked up
as the appropriately colored man
approached. He expected
a message. What he received
was a message. Nothing else.
That the message was delivered
to his thick neck
and his absolute breast
via a knife,
that there was a part tied
to the innate evil of the man
is of no consequence
and as the condolences, irrelevant.
Thus, in the nature of communication
Dr. Robert Kennedy is deeply shocked
and Dr. Wilson shocked
Dr. Portugal, that anonymous transvestite
is “with” the gentle people of
South Africa in this their moment
of grief
and wishes them well
in their mischief. A practical
and logical communication. Pope
Johnson also deplored etc.
Dr. Mennen Williams said something about “africa”.
By its nature communication
ignores quality and opts for accuracy:
come on, tell us how many nigger’s balls
tonight. Do not fold bend spindle or mutilate,
I needn’t tell anyone
who has received a paycheck,
is each man’s share in the plan.
Wait by the door awhile Death, there are others
Is this the inch of space in time I have
I awoke just now
I don’t know from what
I could suppose a certain gas
it could have been
thinking of myself
Is this thing made
with the end built-in
the component of death hidden only
in the youthful machine
but discoverable if the wrench
of feeling
is turned near forty when the doors
shut with a less smooth click
and biological delinquescence
a tooth broken and unrecoverable
ah news from the Great Manufacturer.
This afternoon someone, an american
from new york, spoke
to me knitting his brows, of
“the american situation” like
wasn’t it deplorable, a malignancy
of the vital organs say News
from nowhere. A mahogany sideboard of tastes.
I knitted my brows too
an old response
and tried to look serious
Look like I was thinking of quote back home.
Look like I have a home, pretend
like anyone in the world
I know where that is. And could
if I chose, go there.
I thought sure as hell
he is going down
the whole menu
Civil rights cocktail
Vietnam the inflexible entree
oh gawd what will there be for pudding
(not another bombe
I shifted deftly out the window
of the new university, the english workers
saunter easily building this thing.
What has been my stride
My body remains younger
than I am. I let part of my beard grow
in September and touching it
with my hand when I turned in bed
I woke up. Hair on the face is death
it is that repels the people gets
a sociological explanation. Disaffection
is in our day the fear of death
the bare face is thought permanent,
a rock. But not clean.
The cat is cleaner when he licks
his hair and claws following a meal.
I nearly died the other day, without intention.
And when I thought Death had come for me
before My Time I was in a fright
to know what to do last
in what city to meet my gunner Meg
be beside me
and laughed
like a tired runner at the end of hurrying.
It was dry.
The laughter a hiss at environment.
And just now, reconsidering this
I hear the crows, I have
not seen augurous birds since we moved
away from the rookery in Lexden churchyard
they rise with the dawn now and flutter
in hoarse astonishment
around the top of the sycamore in the garden
the mists from the North Sea move rapidly by.
The wind r
ushes and turns. “A blackening train
Of clamorous rooks thick urge their weary flight.
I have no more sense of death than
the imitations the starlings
bring and no cold wish to be there
in that place. The rot of finger tips
and an old fern grown full inside my skull
are the passing, dull
presentments I have.
I have felt already the reality
of the last breath I draw in.
I want to say something.
I want to talk
turn myself into a tongue
It was a short exhalation
rose from me as the smoke
from a blown out candle
thick with the first vacuum
then suddenly thin, the intention
of a whisper and smile.
The question of the child
“what is it” is only possible
from the neuter distance of the child
when a stranger walks alone
far out on the quay
or, as there are no estuaries
where I come from
across an open field
The crossection of the monument of Death
involves the shadow of
the rushing spider
when it is crushed
but the intersection of the moon
is absolute
the human presence
and the power to be
is that small
our time and
place
is that limited
our cry for god
that weak
our religion
that constructed
There was a Saturday gathering
of people
Stones outside shop near Pound’s
london residence, Kensington walk
a mews. My dream
had me pound stone. A woman agent
of the university of texas was there
didn’t meet her, and another awful creature
from new york.
We drank small glasses of bubbly wine
said to be from Spain, tasting suspiciously
morocco. Headstone.
How we inscribe our days
to boredom. The next week I sat
while a harmless collagist
drew my portrait.
But I was bored past the threat of
Death. It took a double shot of whiskey
in Liverpool street to revive me.
It is difficult enough to sit still for love
and now the price of the time for that
rises like the hem, or goes down
as some predictable opposite. April
is my month, I learn the 6th card
of the major arcana. But so is March
the zodiac cuts me that way, the ram
and the bull, it is love I am
or the 5th, and mediate the material
and divine, a simple sign the ram
the reflection of Isis. I wear
a tiara. I can think of people
who won’t believe that.
The body. I am
however, the host of my body.
I invite myself to enter myself.
I have gone there sometimes with great pleasure.
We are not in God’s name. At the end,
when the dreaming of the dream
came I “thought” I was Sophia Loren
a mature venus. I don’t resemble her.
She could be Mama Courage.
In God’s name I do not seek an end.
The imitation of life is more vivid
than life
(Paul, here is your
name
as cool as anything
So there is a dream story
of a true enough man named Pedro
“a man without a country”
in the cowering simplicity of the newspaper phrase
it is reported he was a stowaway
on the English cargo ship Oakbank 2 years ago
but he has no papers and every country
rejects him. He says he is Brazilian.
He will ply the seas, a captive there
until he dies. His references do not exist.
No Deans will welcome him. No housewives
have come forth with a cup of coffee
no workers will welcome him upon the job
no greeting of any kind seems forthcoming.
He shall ply the seas until he dies.
His references do not exist. Notice.
No one will recommend him. His first name
is all he has, always the sign of
an acutely luckless man, his first name
can be used by anyone, indeed only
his first name, the excuse for abandoning him
is complete. Even the crew of the Oakbank
I should imagine
are waiting for the day he, idling about the ship
washes over and saves them the handling
of his body against the rail and into the foam
where he at last must be and even now is
as he walks the decks, no nation possesses
the apparatus to fix another identity
or any identity for this man who is without one.
He is the man we all are and yet he doesn’t exist.
He is the man we would all save with our tongues
because we are secretly him. His references of course
do not exist. He may recall as we do
the uncertain days on shore
when they did, when once, remember that time
the world seemed open what a satisfying meal
that was. The body outlives
in Pedro too, its lighted parts. The rest
is application, qualified and eager young man
or woman, fluent french and english
would travel . . .
A Notation on the evening of November 27, 1966
The moon is a rough coin tonight
full but screened by lofty moisture
bright enough to make sure
of the addresses
on the letters I drop in the red pillar box
Frost is on the streets. A soft winter breeze
comes from the North Sea into my nostrils
I am at home here only in my mind
that’s what heritage is.
Turning the corner, only our windows
along the ribbon of road are lit
I know my wife has gone to bed
and that the gas is burning
and that my heart and my veins
are burning for home. Yet those abrupt times
I hear the harsh voice of home
I am shocked, the hair on my neck
crawls.
This evening we all went to see
an old classic flick at the Odeon.
The magnificent seven introducing
Horst Buchholst, I’d seen it before
and had not got it that a german
played a mexican, of course!
An American foreigner is every body
navajoes play iroquois
the American myth is only “mental” a foreigner
is Anybody. Theoretically at least
an Italian could play
an English man or a London jew
if nobody knew.
Tom and Jenny were there
and Nick Sedgwick.
Tom remarked, on the evidence of
the last scene when the Mexican-
Japanese said Vaya con Dios
and Yul said a simple adios,
“that was philosophical.”
Then the five of us went home
singing Frijoles!
twirling our umbrellas
and walking like wooden legged men in a file
one foot in the gutter
the other on the sidewalk.
>
Song
Again, I am made the occurrence
Of one of her charms. Let me
Explain. An occupier
Of one of the waves of her intensity.
One meeting
Behind the back
of the world
Brief and fresh
And then
Nothing.
Winter nights
The crush of fine snow
A brilliancy of buildings around us
Brief warmth
In the cold air, the cold temperament
Of a place I can’t name
Now what is it. Turning into
A shadowed corridor half the earth away
And deep inside an alien winter
I remember her laugh
The strange half step she took
And I would not believe it
If Europe or England
Could in any sense evoke her without me,
The guitar of her presence the bearer of her scent
Upon my wrist
The banding of her slightsmiling lassitude . . .
The Sundering U.P. Tracks
(the end of the North Atlantic
Turbine poem
I never hear the Supremes
but what I remember Leroy.
McLucas came
to Pocatello the summer of 1965
one dark night he was there
in a brilliant white shirt, one
dark evening the U.P.
brought him, the most widely luminous
and enchorial smile
I ever saw.
He had taken rooms
with the Reverend Buchanan
over in that part of town owned
by Bistline, the famous exploiter.
I was hurt to discover he had come
to what I thought was my town in my fair country
three days before. I had thought
he would stay with me.
How many thousand years too late now