Poems 1959-2009 (12 page)

But clear-eyed in my contact lenses,

Following no doubt a slightly different line than the others,

Seeking sexual pleasure above all else,

Despairing of art and of life,

Seeking protection from death by seeking it

On a racebike, finding release and belief on two wheels,

Having read a book or two,

Having eaten well,

Having traveled not everywhere in sixty-seven years but far,

Up the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa

And the World Trade Center Twin Towers

Before they fell,

Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Accra,

Tokyo, Berlin, Teheran under the Shah,

Cairo, Bombay, L.A., London,

Into the jungles and the deserts and the cities on the rivers

Scouting locations for the movie,

A blue-eyed white man with brown hair,

Here I am, a worldly man,

Looking around the room.

Any foal in the kingdom

The Shah of Iran wanted

He had brought to him in a military helicopter

To the palace.

This one was the daughter of one of his ministers, all legs, a goddess.

She waited in a room.

It was in the afternoon.

I remember mounds of caviar before dinner

In a magnificent torchlit tent,

An old woman's beautiful house, a princess,

Three footmen for every guest,

And a man who pretended to get falling-down drunk

And began denouncing the Shah,

And everyone knew was a spy for the Shah.

A team of New York doctors (mine among them)

Was flown to Mexico City to consult.

They were not allowed to examine the Shah.

They could ask him how he felt.

The future of psychoanalysis

Is a psychology of surface.

Stay on the outside side.

My poor analyst

Suffered a stroke and became a needy child.

As to the inner life: let the maid.

How pathetic is a king who died of cancer

Rushing back after all these years to consult more doctors.

Escaped from the urn of his ashes in his pajamas.

Except in Islam you are buried in your body.

The Shah mounts the foal.

It is an honor.

He is in and out in a minute.

She later became my friend

And married a Texan.

I hurry to the gallery on the last day of the show

To a line stretching around the block in the rain—

For the Shah of sculptors, sculpture's virile king,

And his cold-rolled steel heartless tons.

The blunt magnificence stuns.

Cruelty has a huge following.

The cold-rolled steel mounts the foal.

The future of psychoanalysis is it has none.

I carry a swagger stick.

I eat a chocolate.

I eat brown blood.

When we drove with our driver on the highways of Ghana

To see for ourselves what the slave trade was,

Elmina was Auschwitz.

The slaves from the bush were marched to the coast

And warehoused in dungeons under St. George's Castle,

Then FedExed to their new jobs far away.

One hotel kept a racehorse as a pet.

The owner allowed it the run of the property.

Very shy, it walked standoffishly

Among the hotel guests on the walkways and under the palms.

The Shah had returned as a racehorse dropping mounds of caviar

Between a coconut grove and the Gulf of Guinea.

An English royal is taught to strut

With his hands clasped behind his back.

A racehorse in West Africa kept as a pet

Struts the same way the useless royals do,

Nodding occasionally to indicate he is listening.

His coat has been curried until he is glistening.

Would you rather be a horse without a halter

Than one winning races being whipped?

The finish line is at the starting gate, at St. George's Castle.

The starting gate is at the finish line for the eternal life.

God rears and whinnies and gives a little wave.

He would rather be an owner than a slave.

Someone fancy says

How marvelous money is.

Here I am, an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi,

Ready to praise making pots of money

And own a slave.

I am looking in the mirror as I shave the slave.

I shave the Shah.

I walk into the evening and start being charming.

A counterfeiter prints me.

(The counterfeiter
is
me.)

He prints Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

I call him Nancy.

He is so fancy.

It is alarming

He is so charming.

It is the thing he does and knows.

It is the fragrance of a rose.

It is the nostrils of his nose.

It is the poetry and prose.

It is the poetry.

It is a horse cab ride through Central Park when it snows.

It is Jackie Kennedy's hairpiece that came loose,

That a large Secret Service agent helped reattach.

I remember the Duck and Duckess of Windsor.

You could entertain them in your house.

Here I am, looking around the room

At everyone getting old except the young,

Discovering that I am lacking in vanity,

Not that I care, being debonair,

Delighted by an impairment of feeling

That keeps everything away,

People standing around in a display case

Even when they are in bed with you,

And laser-guided bombs destroy the buildings

Inside the TV, not that I care,

Not that I do not like it all,

Not that I am short or tall,

Not that I do not like to be alive,

And I appeal to you for pity,

Having in mind that you will read this

Under circumstances I cannot imagine

A thousand years from now.

Have pity on a girl, perdurable, playful,

And delicate as a foal, dutiful, available,

Who is waiting on a bed in a room in the afternoon for God.

His Majesty is on his way, who long ago has died.

She is a victim in the kingdom, and is proud.

Have pity on me a thousand years from now when we meet.

Open the mummy case of this text respectfully.

You find no one inside.

 

 

Into the emptiness that weighs

More than the universe

Another universe begins

Smaller than the last.

Begins to smaller

Than the last.

Dimensions

Do not yet exist.

My friend, the darkness

Into which the seed

Of all eleven dimensions

Is planted is small.

Travel with me back

Before it grows to more.

The church bell bongs,

Which means it must be noon.

Some are playing hopscotch

Or skipping rope during recess,

And some are swinging on swings,

And seesaws are seesawing.

That she is shy,

Which means it must be May,

Turns into virgin snow

And walking mittened home with laughing friends.

And the small birds singing,

And the sudden silence,

And the curtains billow,

And the spring thunder will follow—

And the rush of freshness,

And the epileptic fit that foams.

The universe does not exist

Before it does.

 

A can of shaving cream inflates

A ping-pong ball of lather,

Thick, hot, smaller than an atom, soon

The size of the world.

This does take time to happen.

Back at the start

Again, a pinprick swells so violently

It shoots out

Hallways to other worlds,

But keeps expanding

Till it is all

There is. The universe is all there is.

Don't play with matches.

The candle flame follows her

With its eyes. The night sky is a mirror

On a wall.

What she stands in front of are the roaring afterburners

Of the distant stars a foot away

Leaving for another world. They have been summoned

To leave her

For another girl

In another world who stands there looking

In a mirror full of stars

At herself in her room.

The room is not really,

But it might be. If there is

Something else as beautiful

As this snow softly falling outside, say.

The universe begins

With a hot ball of lather expanding

In a hand

That should be in her bed asleep.

 

The opposite of everything

That will be once

The universe begins

Is who it is.

Laws do not apply

To the pre-universe.

None of it

Does not make sense.

Puffs to the size

Of an orange in one single stunned

Instant

From smaller than a proton.

Morning coffee black

Happiness so condensed

Had to expand to this,

Had to expand to this,

Had to expand to this

Universe of love

Of freezing old

Invisible dark matter

To give it gravity.

If the hot unbelievable

Nothingness feeds

Itself into a hole and starts,

None of this does not make sense

Once you understand

The stars are who it is,

The sisters and the brothers.

Set the toaster setting between Light and Dark

And the unimaginable

Pre-universe will pop up a slice of strings

In eleven dimensions which balloons.

 

Think of the suckers on the tentacles

Without the tentacles. A honeycomb

Of space writhing in the dark.

Time deforming it, time itself deformed.

Fifteen billion light-years later a president

Of the United States gives the Gettysburg Address.

Two minutes. The solar system

Star beams down on him.

Other special stars express themselves,

Not shy at all, particles

Of powder floating on the swirl, each

Vast—each a vast pillow covering

A hidden speck it murderously

Attempts to suffocate.

The speck will eat it up.

The speck of gravity is a hole.

Through that hole there is a way.

There are as many of these, there are as many of these

Invisible black caviar

Specks as it would take

To fill the inside of St. Peter's to the roof.

It is the number

Of grains of sand on the shores

Surrounding the continent of Africa times ten.

Each invisible eyelet is a black hole

Highway out of time.

Think of the universe as a beanbag

On a bobsled on a run under lights at night.

Inside are universes.

It is incompletely dark inside.

There is motion.

There is the possibility.

 

The wobbly flesh of an oyster

Out of its shell on the battlefield is the feel

Of spacetime

In the young universe.

The petals of the rose

Of time invaded

The attitude of zero and made it

Soften its attitude.

Lincoln's black stovepipe hat

Was dusty when he sat down

To scant applause. Many in the crowd did not know

He had just delivered

The Gettysburg Address, but it is over,

And the stars keep on redshifting,

The universe keeps on expanding

The petals of the rose.

U. S. Grant's cigar's red tip

Pulsed the primal fireball out

Through the new universe

It was the creator of with shock waves.

Speckles of the stars

And baby's breath (the flower)

Activate infinity

And decorate the parlor.

Baby's breath is counting on the roses

With it in the vases.

It is difficult to understand

Why the universe began.

It is difficult to be

Robert E. Lee.

Why does the cosmos have to happen?

What is another way?

 

Blessed is the childhood sunlight

The solar star emotes.

Darkly filled-up emptiness

And galaxies too far away

Are what we feel inside ourselves

That make us want to walk somewhere,

And then we run and jump and sing.

The universe is not enough,

We rock 'n' roll to other ones

Through black hole wormhole timeways,

But here right now the rain has stopped,

The air is warm.

The parking lot washed clean smells sweet,

And even has a rainbow that

A little girl tiptoes toward,

Hoping not to frighten it.

The neighbor's dog that won't go home

Is watching her—which she can't see—

With naked eyes of love and awe.

She feels that way herself sometimes.

When you are sure that you're alone,

Tell yourself to not be sure.

This universe is not the first.

The other ones are not the same.

Or anyway no one can know.

At night when she should be asleep

She lights a match and blows it out

To show she has the power to.

Computers crunch the numbers and

The other stars lie down and say

The sun exhausts itself with light.

So good night.

 

And isn't it

The presence of a thing

That can't be seen

More massive than the universe?

And isn't it the strings