Collected Poems (3 page)

The oxen have voices

the flowers are wounds

you never recover from Tuscany noons

    they cripple with beauty

    and butcher with love

    sing folly, sing flee, sing going down

the moon is corroding

the deer have gone lame

(but you never escape the incurably sane

    uncrippled by beauty

    unbutchered by love)

    sing folly, flee, sing going down

now it rains in your bowels

it rains though you weep

with terrible tameness it rains in your sleep

    and cripples with beauty

    and butchers with love

you never recover

you never escape

and you mustn’t endeavor to find the mistake

    that cripples with beauty

    that butchers as love

    sing folly, sing flee, sing going down

sing maidens and towns, oh maidens and towns

folly, flee, sing going down

For Sue

How could they think women a recreation?

Or the repetition of bodies of steady interest?

Only the ignorant or the busy could. That elm

of flesh must prove a luxury of primes;

be perilous and dear with rain of an alternate earth.

Which is not to damn the forested China of touching.

I am neither priestly nor tired, and the great knowledge

of breasts with their loud nipples congregates in me.

The sudden nakedness, the small ribs, the mouth.

Splendid. Splendid. Splendid. Like Rome. Like loins.

A glamour sufficient to our long marvelous dying.

I say sufficient and speak with earned privilege,

for my life has been eaten in that foliate city.

To ambergris. But not for recreation.

I would not have lost so much for recreation.

Nor for love as the sweet pretend: the children’s game

of deliberate ignorance of each to allow the dreaming.

Not for the impersonal belly nor the heart’s drunkenness

have I come this far, stubborn, disastrous way.

But for relish of those archipelagoes of person.

To hold her in hand, closed as any sparrow,

and call and call forever till she turn from bird

to blowing woods. From woods to jungle. Persimmon.

To light. From light to princess. From princess to woman

in all her fresh particularity of difference.

Then oh, through the underwater time of night,

indecent and still, to speak to her without habit.

This I have done with my life, and am content.

I wish I could tell you how it is in that dark,

standing in the huge singing and the alien world.

Three days I sat

bewildered by love.

Three nights I watched

the gradations of dark.

Of light. Saw

three mornings begin,

and was taken each time

unguarded

of the loud bells.

My heart split open

as a melon.

And will not heal.

Gives itself

senselessly

to the old women

carrying milk.

The clumsy men sweeping.

To roofs.

God protect me.

What pleasure hath it, to see in a mangled carcase?

—The Confessions of Saint Augustine

I am old of this ravening.

Poisoned of their God-damned flesh.

The ugly man-flesh.

And the fat woman-flesh.

I am tired and sick and old of it.

But the precise addiction is unrelenting.

Even now

it rouses sluggishly in me

and soon the imperious iron bells

bells

will begin

and the knowledge of the next one

will enter me

the realization of her walking peacefully

somehow toward our somewhere meeting.

The realization will come

and the need will be on me

and I must begin again.

Seeking along the great river of Fillmore

or the quiet river of Pacific Heights

with its birds.

Or through the cities of Market Street.

Perhaps this time it will be back

at the beginning

in North Beach.

In Vesuvio’s maybe

where they come like deer.

Or The Place where they come like

ugly deer

laughing

and telling me

all intense

how they want to experience

everything.

Till the shouting begins in my head.

Asking me if I believe in Evil.

And the power climbs in me like Kong.

In the morning

it will be like every morning.

The filthy taste in my mouth

of old, clotting blood

the vomiting

and the murderous, stupid labor

with the stupid, open body.

The night comes every day to my window.

The serious night, promising, as always,

age and moderation. And I am frightened

dutifully, as always, until I find

in the bed my three hearts and the cat

in my stomach talking, as always now,

of Gianna. And I am happy through the dark

with my feet singing of how she lies

warm and alone in her dark room

over Umbria where the brief and only

paradise flowers white by white.

I turn all night with the thought of her mouth

a little open, and hunger to walk

quiet in the Italy of her head, strange

but no tourist on the streets of her childhood.

(after Waley)

    Meelee’s away in Lima.

    No one breeds flowers in my head.

Of course, women do breed flowers in my head

    but not like Meelee’s—

    So fragile, so pale.

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German

tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.

A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.

And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question

the bravery. Say it’s not courage. Call it a passion.

Would say courage isn’t that. Not at its best.

It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.

Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.

Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.

The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.

It is too near the whore’s heart: the bounty of impulse,

and the failure to sustain even small kindness.

Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.

Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.

Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.

Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.

The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.

The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.

Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,

not the month’s rapture. Not the exception. The beauty

that is of many days. Steady and clear.

It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

I carried my house to Tijuana.

I carried my house through moonlight.

Through dirt streets of cribs

and faces clustered at dark windows.

Past soft voices and foolish calls

I carried my house.

To a bright room

with its nine girls,

the projector whirring,

and steady traffic to the wooden stalls.

Sleepy and sad,

I sat all night with the absurd young

listening to the true jungle in my house

where lions ate roses of blood

and sang of Alcibiades.

It is foolish for Rubens to show her

simpering. They were clearly guilty

and did her much sorrow. But this poem

is not concerned with justice.

It concerns itself with fear.

If it could, it would force you to see

them at the hedge with their feeble eyes,

the bodies, and the stinking mouths.

To see the one with the trembling hands.

The one with the sun visor.

It would show through the leaves

all the loveliness of the world

compacted. The lavish gleaming.

Her texture. The sheen of water on her

brightness. The moon in sunlight.

Not only the choir of flesh.

Nor the intimacy of her inner mouth.

A meadow of warmth inhabited.

Personal. And the elders excluded

forever. Forever in exile.

It would show you their inexact hands

till you acknowledged how it comes on you.

I think of them pushing to the middle

of Hell where the pain is strongest.

To see at the top of the chimney,

far off, the small coin of color.

And, sometimes, leaves.

The four perfectly tangerines were a

clue

as they sat

singing

(three to one)

in that ten-thirty

a.m. room

not unhappily of death

singing of how they were tangerines

against white

but how

against continuous orange

they were only

fruit.

One sang of God

of his eight thousand green faces

and the immediate glory of his

pavilioned

dancing.

Three sang of how you can’t go back.

One sang of the seeds in his heart

of how

inside the tangerine-colored skin

inside his flesh

(which was the color of

tangerines)

were little

seeds

which were

inside

green.

So

I opened the one

and the odor of his breaking

was the sweet breasts

of being no longer

only.

For Doris

The provisional and awkward harp

of me

makes nothing of you now.

I labor to constrain it

but am unschooled and cannot.

One learns to play the harp,

said Aristotle, by playing.

But I do not. Such a harp

grows always more dear

and I manage always less truly

well. Each visitor offhand

does better. While I with this year

of loss can do nothing.

Can say nothing of the smell

of rain in the desert

and the cottonwoods blowing

above us. If it would tell

even so little of Council Bluffs.

But it will not.

I can make it mourn

but not celebrate the River

nor my happiness in having been

of you.

I’ll try to explain about the fear

again

since you think my trouble with the whales

and elephants is a question of size.

I’m on the other inhabited island

of the Tremiti group,

looking across evening on the water

and up the enormous cliffs

to San Nicola.

I’ve been watching the few weak lights

begin,

thinking of Alcibiades

and those last years at Trebizond.

I’ve been looking at San Nicola

huddled behind the great, ruined

fortifications,

and thinking how the dark is leaking

out of the broken windows.

How the doors on those stone houses

are banging and banging and banging.

I’ve been remembering the high grass

in the piazza.

And Rimbaud in the meaningless jungle.

I know the business of the whales

may bring me there.

That trying to understand about the elephants,

about my stunned heart,

may require it.

May choose that for the last years.

A bare white room

overlooking the cathedral.

High up there

with the pure light

and the lust.

Now come the bright prophets across my life.

The solemn flesh, the miracles, and the pain.

Across the simple meadows of my heart,

splendidly you come promising sorrow.

And knowing, I bless your coming with trees of love,

singing, singing even to the night.

The princely mornings will fail when you go, and night

will come like animals. Yet I open my cautious life

and sing thanksgiving of yes, oh yes to love,

even while the tireless crows of pain

and the diligent fever-ticks of sorrow

are somehow privileged in my flowering heart.

For you fashion such rivers in my soon unable heart

as are focused to paradise by the crippling night.

Such terraced waters as are cheap at only sorrow.

And to have cargoes of hyacinths sail once more my life

I will freely undertake any debt of pain.

I will break these hands for tokens, oh my love.

I’d walk her home after work,

buying roses and talking of Bechsteins.

She was full of soul.

Her small room was gorged with heat,

and there were no windows.

She’d take off everything

but her pants,

and take the pins from her hair,

throwing them on the floor

with a great noise.

Like Crete.

We wouldn’t make love.

She’d get on the bed

with those nipples,

and we’d lie

sweating

and talking of my best friend.

They were in love.

When I got quiet,

she’d put on usually Debussy,

and,

leaning down to the small ribs,

bite me.

Hard.