Poems 1959-2009 (11 page)

And he distrusts her.

And everywhere he sees

Hunchbacks and addicts and sadists

In braces in the cities,

Roosting in their filth,

Or plucking the trees,

In New York for true love,

In Boston for constancy.

You can be needed by someone

Or needy, thinks Rilke.

They clutch their loves like addicts

Embracing when they see

Hot May put out her flowers.

Or clutch themselves. They can't shake free.

He thinks of the time

He lived by her calendar

When she missed her time.

She gave the child a name.

When she bled, she laughed and gasped

Tears warm as pablum

On his wrists. But that is past.

Rilke feels his body

Moving in front of his last

Step. He sweats, and thinks

Of the rubble massed

On Creusa behind Aeneas's

White-hot shoulders and neck.

Addresses

And clothesline laundry swelled

Like pseudocyesis—

That's what he has to pass through.

His tie is her blue,

And a new lotion gives him an air

Of coolness. He combs his hair,

And tries to smooth his hair.

He'll
be there,

The husband. She'll have left him asleep—

A nap, beyond the top stair,

In darkness.

Light, light is in the trees

Pizzicato, and mica

Sizzles up to his knees.

A dozen traffic lights

Swallow and freeze

And one by one relay red red

Like runners with a blank message.

I hate her, I hate her, he said

A minute ago. Curls cluster

Rilke's dark head.

 

Do they think they are being original when they say

This is a new thing for me to ask, and ask

Do you love me?

Everyone these days keeps asking

Do you love me?

Everyone says

This is a new thing for me to ask.

The answer is yes.

This is a new thing for me to ask.

The answer is yes I don't.

Do you love me?

The answer is yes.

The eyes glisten with feeling.

The creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it.

This sudden pecking of asking, of being asked, is this.

The answer is yes I don't.

The heart got the shot but got the flu anyway,

And the body aches, and fever and chills, and can't sleep.

The forest shivers with fever.

Their mother pulls their covers up.

The whippoorwill keeps calling
whippoorwill whippoorwill
.

Do you love me? Do you love me? I don't love you.

Not everyone is afraid.

Not everyone feels vulnerable.

Everyone is afraid of the terrible joy. I do.

Each other is Mecca,

The hajj to the Other.

 

More than one woman at a time

Is the policy that got the trains running on time.

More than one at a time in those fascist days, and I climb

Into the clouds and then above—the sublime!—

And wag my wings and make it rhyme.

More than one woman at a time was enough.

On time because there were enough.

Mussolini in riding boots stood at his desk to stuff

Himself into the new secretary who was spread out on the desk. He goes
uff
.

He goes
uff wuff, uff wuff
, and even—briefly—falls in luff.

It's getting worse, and I don't like the way it sounds.

Down in the subway, while you are waiting, all those humming sounds.

In New York City, all the Lost-and-Founds.

All the towed-away-car pounds.

While you are waiting on the subway platform—God's wounds! Zounds!

Mussolini is standing on the little balcony

Above Italy, and Italy is looking up at Mussolini on the balcony,

Who is looking over at Ethiopia across a deep blue sea.

I never have enough for me.

I am getting on a girl motorcycle to go across the sea to see.

 

I saw the moon in the sky at sunset over a river pink as a ham.

I am the governess imported from England by me,

The widowed King of Siam.

I drop down on one knee.

I want to marry me.

Where you are I am.

Là où tu es je suis. Où tu es je suis.

I drop down on one knee.

I want to marry me.

I do a
saut de chat
at sunset over a silver spoon of jam.

Jam for the royal children, Felicity

And Sam.

I am the English governess imported from England by me.

I am the widowed King of Siam! The widowed King of Siam!

 

The big jet screamed and was hysterical and begged to take off,

But the brakes held it in place to force it to flower.

The runway was too short, that's why, kiddo.

Till the engines powered up to full power.

In a little school in what was then still called Burma, not yet cancered,

Carolyn was teaching English to the lovely brownish children.

The assignment was to use the word “often” in a sentence.

“Birds fly more often than airplanes,” the boy answered.

Little sudden flowers in the desert after it rains,

Bearing gifts of frankincense and myrrh …

What thou lovest well remains.

Birds fly more often than airplanes.

Meat-eating seagulls shout their little cries
myanmar myanmar
above the airport,

Dropping razor clams on the runway to break them open.

Hard is soft inside.

The big jet has soft people inside for the ride.

 

A terrorist rides the rails underwater

From one language to another in a packed train of London

Rugby fans on their way to the big match in Paris

And a flock of Japanese schoolgirls ready to be fucked

In their school uniforms in paradise.

This is all just after Madrid in the reign of terror.

This is the girls' first trip outside Japan.

The terrorist swings in the hammock of their small skirts and black socks.

The chunnel train stops in the tunnel with an announcement

That everyone now alive is already human remains.

The terrorists have seen to it that trains

Swap human body parts around with bombs.

The Japanese schoolgirls say so sorry.

Their new pubic hair is made of light.

 

Japanese schoolgirls in their school uniforms with their school chaperones

Ride underwater on a train

Every terrorist in the world would dearly love to bomb

For the publicity and to drown everybody.

The Eurostar dashes into the waves.

The other passengers are watching the Japanese girls eat

Little sweeties they bought with their own money

In London. President Bush the younger is making ice cream.

Ice cream for dessert

Is what Iraq is, without the courses that normally come before.

You eat dessert to start and then you have dessert.

One of them is a Balthus in her short school skirt standing on the seat.

She reaches up too high to get something out of her bag.

She turns around smiling because she knows where you are looking.

 

The terrorists are out of breath with success.

And cancer is eating American women's breasts.

The terrorists are bombing Madrid

And everywhere serious and nice.

They put the backpacks on

Without a word and leave

The Italian premier talking to an empty room because

They leave the TV on and leave.

One of the many networks Mr. Berlusconi owns

Carries him live denouncing terror. The man

By now has reached Milan

Who has the man in London for Miami.

Both will board the train,

As in the swollen river overthrows its banks.

 

Anything is better than this

Bliss.

Nursing on a long-stemmed bubble made of crystal.

I'm sucking on the barrel of a crystal pistol

To get a bullet to my brain.

I'm gobbling a breast, drinking myself down the drain.

I'm in such a state of Haut-Brion I can't resist.

A fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist.

You're wondering why I talk this way, so daintily!

I'll tell you after I take a pee.

Now I'm back.

Oilcoholics love the breast they attack.

I'm talking about the way poetry made me free.

It's treated me very well, you see.

I climbed up inside the Statue of Liberty

In the days when you could still go up in the torch, and that was me.

I mean every part I play.

I'm drinking my lunch at Montrachet.

I'm a case of Haut-Brion turning into tar.

I'm talking about the recent war.

It's a case of having to raise your hand in life to be

Recognized so you can ask your question.
Mr. Secretary! Mr. Secretary!

To the secretary of defense, I say:

I lift my tar to you at Montrachet!

I lift my lamp beside the golden door to pee,

And make a vow to make men free, and we will find their WMD.

Sir, I supported the war.

I believe in who we are.

I dedicate red wine to that today.

At Montrachet, near the Franklin Street stop, on West Broadway.

 

The darkness coming from the mouth

Must be the entrance to a cave.

The heart of darkness took another form

And inside is the Congo in the man.

I think the Bush administration is as crazy as Sparta was.

Sparta has swallowed Congo and is famished.

The steel Spartan abs turn to fevered slush

While it digests the good that it is doing

In the desert heat. I felt a drop of rain,

Which is the next Ice Age being born.

I stood on Madison. The sun was shining.

I felt large drops of rain as warm as tears.

I held my hand out, palm up, the way one does.

The sun was shining and the rain really started.

Maybe there must have been a rainbow somewhere.

I hailed a cab and as I hopped in

That was the first thing

The radio said:

They had beheaded an American.

There was a thunderclap and it poured.

The downpour drumming on my taxi gets the Hutu in me dancing.

Il rombo della Desmosedici makes machete music.

I crawl into a crocodile

And I go native.

The white cannibals in cowboy boots

Return to the bush

And the darkness of the brutes.

I am on all fours eating grass

So I can throw up because I like the feeling.

I crouch over a carcass and practice my eating.

The United States of America preemptively eats the world.

The doctrine of eat lest you be eaten

Is famished, roars

And tears their heads off before its own is sawed off.

The human being sawing screams
God is Great!

God is—and pours cicadas

By the tens of millions through the air.

They have risen from underground.

The voices of the risen make a summer sound.

It is pouring cicadas on Madison Avenue, making the street thick.

Every human being who has ever lived has died,

Except the living. The sun is shining and

The countless generations rise from underground this afternoon

And fall like rain.

I never thought that I would see your face again.

The savage wore a necklace made of beads,

And then I saw the beads were tiny human faces talking.

He started crying and the tears were raindrops.

The raindrops were more faces.

Everybody dies, but they come back as salt and water.

I am charmed by my taxi's sunny yellow reflection

Keeping abreast of the speeding taxi I'm in,

Playful and happy as a dolphin,

All the way down York Avenue to the hospital,

Right up to the bank of elevators to heaven.

I take an elevator to the floor.

Outside the picture window, rain is falling on the sunshine.

In the squeeze-hush silence, the ventilator keeps breathing.

A special ops comes in to check the hoses and the flow.

A visitor holds out his palm to taste the radiant rain.

The Bush administration likes its rain sunny-side up.

I feel a mania of happiness at being alive

As I write you this suicide note.

I have never been so cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel.

I am too cheery to be well.

George Bush is cheery as well.

I am cheeriest

Crawling around on all fours eating gentle grass

And pretending I am eating broken glass.

Then I throw up the pasture.

CENTCOM is drawing up war plans.

They will drop snow on Congo.

It will melt without leaving a trace, at great expense.

America will pay any price to whiten darkness.

My fellow citizen cicadas rise to the tops of the vanished Twin Towers

And float back down white as ashes

To introduce a new Ice Age.

The countless generations rise from underground this afternoon

And fall like rain.

I never thought that I would live to see the towers fall again.

 

Here I am, not a practical man,