Collected Poems (2 page)

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,

he gave him a beautiful white elephant.

The miracle beast deserved such ritual

that to care for him properly meant ruin.

Yet to care for him improperly was worse.

It appears the gift could not be refused.

For Robert Duncan

“Perspective,” he would mutter, going to bed.

“Oh che dolce cosa è questa

prospettiva.” Uccello. Bird.

And I am as greedy of her, that the black

horse of the literal world might come

directly on me. Perspective. A place

to stand. To receive. A place to go

into from. The earth by language.

Who can imagine antelope silent

under the night rain, the Gulf

at Biloxi at night else? I remember

in Mexico a man and a boy painting

an adobe house magenta and crimson

who thought they were painting it red. Or pretty.

So neither saw the brown mountains

move to manage that great house.

The horse wades in the city of grammar.

For Jean McLean

The great foreign trees and turtles burn

as Pharos, demanding my house continue ahead.

In my blood all night the statues counsel return.

I walk my mornings in hope of tigers that yearn

for absolute orchards and the grace of rivers, but instead

the great foreign trees and turtles burn

down my life, driving my hands from the fern

of tenderness that crippled and stopped the Roman bed

in my blood. All night the statues counsel return

even so, gesturing toward Cézanne and stern

styles of voyaging broken and blessed. “It is the dead

the great foreign trees and turtles burn

to momentary brilliance,” they say. “Such as earn

their heat only from the violation they wed.”

In my blood all night the statues counsel return

to the measure that passionate Athenian dancers learn.

But though I assent, the worn elephants that bred

the great foreign trees and turtles burn

in my blood all night the statues, counsel, return.

Always I have been afraid

of this moment:

of the return to love

with perspective.

I see these breasts

with the others.

I touch this mouth

and the others.

I command this heart

as the others.

I know exactly

what to say.

Innocence has gone

out of me.

The song.

The song, suddenly,

has gone out

of me.

You know I am serious about the whales.

Their moving vast through that darkness,

silent.

It is intolerable.

Or Crivelli, with his fruit.

The Japanese.

Or the white flesh of casaba melons

always in darkness.

That darkness unopened from the beginning.

The small emptiness at the middle

in darkness.

As virgins.

The landscape unlighted.

Lighted by me.

Lighted as my hands

in the darkroom

pinching film on the spindle

in absolute dark.

The work difficult

and my hands soon large and brilliant.

Virgins.

Whales.

Darkness and Lauds.

But it may be that no one should be opened.

The deer come back to the feeding station

at the suddenly open season.

The girls find second loves.

Semele was blasted

looking on the whale

in even his lesser panoply.

It was the excellent Socrates ruined Athens.

Now you have fallen crazy

and I have run away.

It’s not the dreams.

It’s this love of you

that grows in me

malignant.

This monster inhabits no classical world.

Nor Sienese. He ranges the Village

and the Colosseum of Times Square.

Foraging heavily through Provincetown,

through the Hub, Denver, and the Vieux Carré,

He comes at last to the last city—

past the limbo of Berkeley to North Beach

and the nine parts of Market Street.

Having evaded the calm bright castle,

so beautiful, and fatal, on the nearby hill,

the beast goes persistently toward purgatory

as his special journey to salvation. No girl-

princess will kiss this dragon to prince.

And as always, the hero with the vacant face

who charges on the ignorant horse to preserve

the Aristotelian suburb is harmless.

Safe and helpless, the monster must fashion

his own blessing or doom. He goes down,

as it is in the nature of serpents to go down,

but goes down with a difference, down to the mountain

that he must and would eventually ascend.

Yet monster he is, with a taste for decay.

Who feeds by preference on novelty and shock;

on the corrupt and vulgar, the abnormal and sick.

He feeds with pleasure in the electric swamp

of Fosters with its night tribe of Saint Jude.

Delights in the dirty movies of the arcades

and the Roman crowds of blatant girls

with their fat breasts and smug faces.

The beast rejoices in fires and fanatics,

and the revelations gestured by the drunk

stunned by the incredible drug store.

Still it is a beast bent on grace.

A monster going down hoping to prove

a monster by emphasis and for a time—

knowing how many are feeding and crying

they are saintly dragons on their way to God,

looking for the breakthrough to heaven.

But the monster goes down as required. O pray

for this foolish, maybe chosen beast.

For Gianna

In Perugino we have sometimes seen our country.

Incidental, beyond the Madonna, the mild hills

and the valley we have always almost remembered,

the light which explains our secret conviction

of exile. That light, that valley, those hills,

that country where people finally touch

as we would touch, reaching with hand and body

and mouth, crying, and do not meet.

Those perfect small trees of loneliness,

dark with my longing against the light.

I

In the beginning

there were six brown dragons

whose names were

Salt, Salt, Salt, Salt,

Bafflebar

and Kenneth Rexroth.

II

They were everything and identical and formless.

Being everything, they lived, of necessity,

inside each other.

Being formless, they were, of necessity,

dull.

And the world was without savor.

III

Then the fourth dragon,

whose name was Salt,

died,

or lost interest

and stopped.

So anxiety came into the world.

IV

Which so troubled the first dragon

that he coiled his body to make space

and filled it with elm trees

and paradichlorobenzene

and moons

and a fish called Humuhumunukunukuapua’a.

V

But nothing would stay fresh.

The elm trees bore winter.

The moons kept going down.

The Humuhumunukunukuapua’a kept floating to the top of the tank.

And he found there was no end to the odor of

paradichlorobenzene.

VI

So the second and sixth dragons

decided to help

and to demonstrate the correct way

of making things.

But everything somehow came out men and women.

And the world was in real trouble.

VII

In alarm, the dragons quit.

But it was too late.

All over the world men were talking about the elms.

Or calculating about the moon.

Or writing songs about the Humuhumunukunukuapua’a.

And the women sat around repeating over and over how they absolutely could not stand the smell of paradichlorobenzene.

If you’re a dragon with nothing to do, LOOK OUT.

Suddenly this defeat.

This rain.

The blues gone gray

and yellow

a terrible amber.

In the cold streets

your warm body.

In whatever room

your warm body.

Among all the people

your absence.

The people who are always

not you.

I have been easy with trees

too long.

Too familiar with mountains.

Joy has been a habit.

Now

suddenly

this rain.

It was not impatience.

Impatient Orpheus was,

certainly, but no child.

And the provision was clear.

It was not impatience,

but despair. From the beginning,

it had gone badly.

From the beginning.

From the first laughter.

It was hell. Not a fable

of mechanical pain,

but the important made trivial.

Therefore the permission.

She had lived enough

in the always diversion.

Granted therefore.

It was not impatience,

but to have at least the face

seen freshly with loss

forever. A landscape.

It was not impatience.

He turned in despair.

And saw, at a distance, her back.

Two days ago they were playing the piano

with a hammer and blowtorch.

Next week they will read poetry

to saxophones.

And always they are building the Chinese Wall

of laughter.

They laugh so much.

So much more than I do.

And it doesn’t wear them out

as it wears me out.

That’s why your poetry’s no good,

they say.

You should turn yourself upside down

so your ass would stick out,

they say.

And they seem to know.

They are right, of course.

I do feel awkward playing the game.

I do play the clown badly.

I cannot touch easily.

But I mistrust the ways of this city

with its white skies and weak trees.

One finds no impala here.

And the birds are pigeons.

The first-rate seems unknown

in this city of easy fame.

The hand’s skill is always

from deliberate labor.

They put Phidias in prison

about his work on the Parthenon,

saying he had stolen gold.

And he probably had.

Those who didn’t try to body Athena

they stayed free.

And Orpheus probably invited the rending

by his stubborn alien smell.

Poor Orpheus

who lost so much by making the difficult journey

when he might have grieved

easily.

Who tried to go back among the living

with the smell of journey on him.

Poor Orpheus

his stubborn tongue

blindly singing all the way to Lesbos.

What if I should go yellow-stockinged

and cross-gartered?

Suppose I did smile

fantastically,

kissed my hand to novelty,

what then?

Still would they imprison me in their dark house.

They would taunt me as doctors

concerned for my health

and laugh.

Always that consuming,

unrelenting laughter.

The musk deer is beguiled down from the great mountain

by flutes

to be fastened in a box

and tortured for the smell of his pain.

Yet somehow

there is somehow

I long for my old bigotry.

What if Orpheus,

confident in the hard-

found mastery,

should go down into Hell?

Out of the clean light down?

And then, surrounded

by the closing beasts

and readying his lyre,

should notice, suddenly,

they had no ears?