Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame (4 page)

nothing matters

but flopping on a mattress

with cheap dreams and a beer

as the leaves die and the horses die

and the landladies stare in the halls;

brisk the music of pulled shades,

a last man’s cave

in an eternity of swarm

and explosion;

nothing but the dripping sink,

the empty bottle,

euphoria,

youth fenced in,

stabbed and shaven,

taught words

propped up

to die.

hooray say the roses, today is blamesday

and we are red as blood.

hooray say the roses, today is Wednesday

and we bloom where soldiers fell,

and lovers too,

and the snake ate the word.

hooray say the roses, darkness comes

all at once, like lights gone out,

the sun leaves dark continents

and rows of stone.

hooray say the roses, cannons and spires,

birds, bees, bombers, today is Friday

the hand holding a medal out the window,

a moth going by, half a mile an hour,

hooray hooray

hooray say the roses

we wave empires on our stems,

the sun moves the mouth:

hooray hooray hooray

and that is why you like us.

I have been painting these last two Sundays;

it’s not much, you’re correct,

but in this tournament great dreams break:

history removes her dress and becomes a harlot,

and I have awakened in the morning

to see eagles flapping their wings like shades;

I have met Montaigne and Phidias

in the flames of my wastebasket,

I have met barbarians on the streets

their heads rocking with rodents;

I have seen wicked infants in blue tubs

wanting stems as beautiful as flowers,

and I have seen the barfly sick

over his last dead penny;

I have heard Domenico Theotocopoulos

on nights of frost, cough in his grave;

and God, no taller than a landlady,

hair dyed red, has asked me the time;

I have seen grey grass of lovers in my mirror

while lighting a cigarette to a maniac’s applause;

Cadillacs have crawled my walls like roaches,

goldfish whirl my bowl, hand-tamed tigers;

yes, I have been painting these Sundays—

the grey mill, the new rebel; it’s terrible really:

I must ram my fist through cleanser and chlorine,

through Andernach and apples and acid,

but, then, I really should tell you that I have a

woman around mixing waffle flour and singing,

and the paint sticks to my plan like candy.

I would, of course, prefer to be with the fox in the ferns

instead of with a photograph of an old Spad in my pocket

to the sound of the anvil chorus and legs legs legs

girls kicking high, showing everything but the pisser,

but I might as well be dead right now

everywhere the ill wind blows

and Keats is dead

and I am dying too.

for there is nothing as crappy dissolute

as an old poet gone sour

in body and mind

and luck, the horses running nothing but out,

the Vegas dice cancer to the thin green wallet,

Shostakovich heard too often

and cans of beer sucked through a straw,

with mouth and mind broken in

young men’s alleys.

in the hot noon window

I swing and miss a razzing fly,

and ho, I fall heavy as thunder

but downstairs they’ll understand:

he’s either drunk or dying,

an old poet nodding vaguely in halls,

cracking his stick across the backs

of innocent dogs

and spitting out

what’s left of his sun.

the mailman has some little thing for him

which he takes to his room

and opens like a rose,

only to scream loudly and vainly,

and his coffin is filled

with notes from hell.

but in the morning you’ll see him

packing off little envelopes,

still worried about

rent

cigarettes

wine

women

horses,

still worried about

Eric Coates, Beethoven’s 3rd and

something Chicago has held for three months

and his paper bag of wine

and Pall Malls.

42 in August, 42,

the rats walking his brain

eating up the thoughts before they

can make the keys.

old poets are as bad as old queers:

there’s something quite unacceptable:

the editors wish to thank you for

submitting but

regret…

down

down

down

the dark hall

into a womanless hall

to peel a last egg

and sit down to the keys:

click click a click,

over the television sounds

over the sounds of springs,

click clack a clack:

another old poet

going off.

it is like this

when you slip down,

done like a wound-up victrola

(you remember those?)

and you go downtown

and watch the boys punch

but the big blondes sit with

someone else

and you’ve aged like a punk in a movie:

cigar in skull, fat gut,

but only no money,

no wiseness of way, no worldliness,

but as usual

most of the fights are bad,

and afterwards

back in the parking lot

you sit and watch them go,

light the last cigar,

and then start the old car,

old car, not so young man

going down the street

stopped by a red light

as if time were no problem,

and they come up to you:

a car full of young,

laughing,

and you watch them go

until

somebody behind you honks

and you are shaken back

into what is left

of your life.

pitiful, self-pity,

and your foot is to the floor

and you catch the young ones,

you pass the young ones

and holding the wheel like all love gone

you race to the beach

with them

brandishing your cigar and your steel,

laughing,

you will take them to the ocean

to the last mermaid,

seaweed and shark, merry whale,

end of flesh and hour and horror,

and finally they stop

and you go on

toward your ocean,

the cigar biting your lips

the way love used to.

there was a frozen tree that I wanted to paint

but the shells came down

and in Vegas looking across at a green sunshade

at 3:30 in the morning,

I died without nails, without a copy of the
Atlantic Monthly,

the windows screamed like doves moaning the bombing of Milan

and I went out to live with the rats

but the lights were too bright

and I thought maybe I’d better go back and sit in a

poetry class:

a marvelous description of a gazelle

is hell;

the cross sits like a fly on my window,

my mother’s breath stirs small leaves

in my mind;

and I hitch-hiked back to L.A. through hangover clouds

and I pulled a letter from my pocket and read it

and the truckdriver said, what’s that?

and I said, there’s some gal up North who used to

sleep with Pound, she’s trying to tell me that H.D.

was our greatest scribe; well, Hilda gave us a few pink

Grecian gods in with the chinaware, but after reading her

I still have 140 icicles hanging from my bones.

I’m not going all the way to L.A., the truckdriver said.

it’s all right, I said, the calla lilies nod to our minds

and someday we’ll all go home

together.

in fact, he said, this is as far

as we go.

so I let him have it; old withered whore of time

your breasts taste the sour cream of dreaming…

he let me out

in the middle of the desert;

to die is to die is to die,

old phonographs in cellars,

joe di maggio,

magazines in with the onions…

an old Ford picked me up

45 minutes later

and, this time,

I kept my mouth

shut.

they are building a house

half a block down

and I sit up here

with the shades down

listening to the sounds,

the hammers pounding in nails,

thack thack thack thack,

and then I hear birds, and

thack thack thack

and I go to bed,

I pull the covers to my throat;

they have been building this house

for a month, and soon it will have

its people…sleeping, eating,

loving, moving around,

but somehow

now

it is not right,

there seems a madness,

men walk on its top with nails in their mouths

and I read about Castro and Cuba,

and at night I walk by

and the ribs of house show

and inside I can see cats walking

the way cats walk,

and then a boy rides by on a bicycle,

and still the house is not done

and in the morning the men

will be back

walking around on the house

with their hammers,

and it seems people should not build houses

anymore,

it seems people should stop working

and sit in small rooms

on second floors

under electric lights without shades;

it seems there is a lot to forget

and a lot not to do

and in drugstores, markets, bars,

the people are tired, they do not want

to move, and I stand there at night

and look through this house and the

house does not want to be built;

through its sides I can see the purple hills

and the first lights of evening,

and it is cold

and I button my coat

and I stand there looking through the house

and the cats stop and look at me

until I am embarrassed

and move North up the sidewalk

where I will buy

cigarettes and beer

and return to my room.

the bulls are grand as the side of the sun

and although they kill them for the stale crowds,

it is the bull that burns the fire,

and although there are cowardly bulls as

there are cowardly matadors and cowardly men,

generally the bull stands pure

and dies pure

untouched by symbols or cliques or false loves,

and when they drag him out

nothing has died

something has passed

and the eventual stench

is the world.

the boy walks with his muddy feet across my

soul

talking about recitals, virtuosi, conductors,

the lesser known novels of Dostoevsky;

talking about how he corrected a waitress,

a hasher
who didn’t know that French dressing

was composed of
so and so;

he gabbles about the Arts until

I hate the Arts,

and there is nothing cleaner

than getting back to a bar or

back to the track and watching them run,

watching things go without this

clamor and chatter,

talk, talk, talk,

the small mouth going, the eyes blinking,

a boy, a child, sick with the Arts,

grabbing at it like the skirt of a mother,

and I wonder how many tens of thousands

there are like him across the land

on rainy nights

on sunny mornings

on evenings meant for peace

in concert halls

in cafes

at poetry recitals

talking, soiling, arguing.

it’s like a pig going to bed

with a good woman

and you don’t want

the woman any more.