Poems 1959-2009 (15 page)

So many women

I touched.

The voyage to outer space parties forever.

The reading material is

Incinerated and

The mind gets so old cold

I ache but

Yes, those are stars.

Yes, in the vicinity of zero, the grape's now

Nearly fleshless face lifts

A trumpet to its lips.

American eternity

Swooningly crooning ballads on the red vinyl LP

From the 1950s on earth

Turns away wrath, swords into songs, undying rebirth.

 

Thinner than a fingerprint

And smaller than a postage stamp,

It looks like brains

Or softly scrambled eggs.

It moves in waves,

The latest Stealth technology.

It gets there fast.

The galaxies do the parallel processing.

Another miracle, the stars.

They give their lives when they fall.

The others pick up after them.

The implant keeps the bad things out.

It shocks the heart, restores the rhythm.

The operating system loves it.

The stars become so meek and mighty.

Sometimes things don't always crash.

A woman is a wingless angel flying.

The last remaining angel joined her.

The entire known universe

Is their high-wire act.

Everything there is is the trapeze, no net.

And now abideth faith, hope, gravity,

These three, but the greatest of these

Is the ground.

The universe is taking off

Its clothes and taking

Off in a hailstorm. The runway

Looks like brains. It looks like love

Is everything there is.

Things in boots

Are murdering the Jews on Mars

And other galaxies don't know.

 

Into the emptiness that weighs

More than the universe

Another universe is born

Smaller than the last.

Good tidings of great joy.

Adonai.

Glory be to God in the highest and likewise

To those of us who don't believe.

For Buddha

Is the advice

Of the stand-up comic

Hooded cobra god of the young, serene.

Unleashing the nourishing rain,

My lord Monsoon lashes the delta.

They sing from the Torah

The beginning of the universe

At the young woman's bat mitzvah. Behold.

I bring you good

Tidings of great joy.

Adonai.

My friend, the darkness

Into which the seed

Of all eleven dimensions

Is planted is small.

That she is shy,

Which means it must be May,

Turns into green and June

And the seedling synagogue in Bennington.

And the small birds singing,

And the sudden silence,

And the curtains of the Ark billow open,

And the Tibetan tubas in the echoing Green Mountains roar.

 

 

Is there intelligent life in the universe?

No glass

In the windows of the bus

In from the airport, only air and perfume.

Every porch in the darkness was lighted

With twinkling oil lamps

And there was music

At 2 a.m., the gamelan.

I hear the cosmos

And smell the Asian flowers

And there were candles

Mental as wind chimes in the soft night.

Translucency the flames showed through,

The heavy makeup the little dancers wore,

The scented sudden and the nubile slow

Lava flow of the temple troupe performing for the hotel guests.

Her middle finger touches her thumb in the
vitarkamudra
,

While her heavily made-up eyes shift wildly,

Facial contortions silently acting out the drama,

And the thin neck yin-yangs back and forth to the music.

Announcing the gods,

The room jerked and the shower curtain swayed.

All the water in the swimming pool

Trampolined out, and in the mountains hundreds died.

The generals wanted to replace Sukarno.

Because of his syphilis he was losing touch

With the Communist threat and getting rather crazy.

So they slaughtered the Communists and the rich Chinese.

Gentle Balinese murdered gentle Balinese,

And, in the usual pogrom, killed

The smart hardworking Chinese,

Merchants to the poor, Jews in paradise.

 

Drinking and incest and endless ease

Is paradise and child abuse

And battered wives.

There are no other jobs.

Everything else is either

Food or bulimia.

The melon drips with this.

It opens and hisses happiness.

A riderless horse sticks out,

Pink as an earthworm, standing on the beach.

Fish, fish, fish,

I feel fishish.

I develop

When I get below my depth.

I splinter into jewels, Cadillac-finned balls,

Chromed mercury no one can grab.

I care below the surface.

Veils in

Colors I haven't seen in fifty years nibble

Coral.

Easter Sunday in Papeete.

Launched and dined at L'Acajou.

The Polynesians set off for outer space

In order to be born, steering by the stars.

Specialists in the canoes chant

The navigation vectors.

Across the universe,

A thousand candles are lighted

In the spaceships and the light roars

And the choir soars. A profusion

Of fruit and flowers in tubs being offered

Forms foam and stars.

 

Three hundred steps down

From the top

Pilgrims are

Looking up.

The temple is above

In a cave.

The stairs to it start next

To the standard frantic street.

Monkeys beg on

The stairs

All the way

Up to the entrance.

Vendors sell treats

To the pilgrims to feed to them.

Some people are afraid of monkeys

Because they think they might get bitten.

When you finally reach the top, somewhat

Out of breath, you enter

The heavy cold darkness

And buy a ticket.

The twenty-foot gilded figures recline.

There are trinkets you can buy to lay at their smiling feet.

They use up the universe with their size.

Their energy is balm and complete.

Everything in the cosmos

Is in the cave, including the monkeys

Outside. Everything is

The opposite of a dark dungeon. And so

A messenger from light arrived.

Of course they never know that they're a messenger.

Don't know they carry a message.

And then they stay awhile and then they leave.

 

The story goes one day

A messenger from light arrived.

Of course they never know that they're a messenger.

Don't know they carry a message.

The submarine stayed just

Below the surface with its engines off near the shore observing.

One day the world took off its shoes and disappeared

Inside the central mosque

And never came back out. Outside the periscope the rain

Had stopped, the fires on shore were

Out. Outside the mosque

The vast empty plaza was the city's outdoor market till

The satellite observed the changing

Colors of the planet

And reported to the submarine that

No one was alive.

A messenger from light arrived.

Of course they never know that they're a messenger.

Don't know they carry a message.

And then they stay awhile and then they leave.

Arrived, was ushered in,

Got in a waiting car and drove away.

Was ushered in,

Kowtowed to the Sacred Presence the required ten times

And backed away from the Sacred Presence blind,

And turned back into light.

Good night,

Blind light.

Far star, star bright.

And though they never know that they're a messenger,

Never know they carry a message,

At least they stay awhile before they leave.

 

In paradise on earth each angel has to work.

Jean-Louis de Gourcuff and his wife spend hours

Spreading new gravel in the courtyard and the drive.

The château swan keeps approaching its friend Jean-Louis to help.

Monsieur le Comte et Madame la Comtesse

Have faith, give hope, show charity.

This is the Château of Fontenay.

And this is the Gourcuffs' ancient yellow Lab, Ralph.

It's de rigueur for French aristocrats to name their dogs in English.

Something about happiness is expressed

By the swan's leaving the safety of its pond,

Given the number of English names around.

Ralph smiles and says
woof
and the swan smiles and says
hiss

In a sort of Christian bliss.

What is more Christian than this?

You have entered the kingdom of the kind.

Old Count de Gourcuff lives in another wing, the father,

Tall big-boned splendor of an English gentleman, but French.

His small wife is even more grand and more France.

One has a whisky with him in the library.

Something about goodness is being expressed

At a neighbor's château nearby.

In the marble reception hall, ghosts are drinking champagne.

The host will be shot right afterward by the Nazis for something.

Blind Ralph barks at the hissing swan he waddles behind and adores.

It is left to the childlike to lead the sick and the poor.

Jean-Louis de Gourcuff, the saintly mayor of Fontenay,

Dons his sash of office, white, blue, and red.

Dominique de Gourcuff makes regular

Pilgrimages with the infirm, to refresh her heart, to Lourdes.

Dinosaurs on their way to being birds

Are the angels down here in heaven.

 

Even her friends don't like her.

Tears roll out of

Her tear ducts,

Boulders meant to crush.

She feels

Her own emptiness but oddly

It feels like love

When you have no insight at all

Except that you are good.

The tears crush even

That thought out and she is left happily

Undressed with her stupidity.

Nobody wants her

On their side in games at school

So the retard

Is wired to explode.

She smokes, gets drunk,

Gets caught, gets thrown out

As the ringleader when she was not since

She has no followers, this most innocent

Who is completely

Emptiness,

Who is a thrill no one wants and

Whom the cowed will kill.

The “Goddamns” (as the invading English are

Called) get in her France.

It made the Maid of Orleans a man and God

Hears her crewcut rapture screaming at the stake in pants.

For God's sake, the food is burning

On the stove!

You are the only one in the world.

You are my good girl.

 

It was a treatment called

Doctor Love
, after the main character.

One of the producers discovered

To our horror a real

Dr. Love who, eerily, by

Pure coincidence, was also a woman

Oncologist trying to identify the gene that causes

Breast cancer. My

Fiction trampolined

Herself right off the treatment page,

Landing not on a movie set or a screen at the multiplex,

But at a teaching hospital in Los Angeles directing

Her lab. If you could identify the gene

That turns the cancer on,

Then maybe you could find a way to turn it off—

And make somebody rich.

She found a gene.

The villain needed to learn which.

He sets the innocent doctor up to

Commit a murder. The story was in such bad taste.

It never made sense.

I was doing rounds in a long white coat

To write the screenplay—playing doctor, doctor love.

Till death us do part, Dr. Catharine Hart,

I will remember you

On the street kissing me hello.

The cherry blossom petals blow—

White coats on rounds

In a soft East River breeze—like glowing fireflies of snow.

Dear Hart, it is spring.

Cutting a person open

Is possible without pain.

 

Your pillow is pouring

You like a waterfall

You sleep through

In the middle of.

You shiver sweat

In the middle of

The rain forest chattering in

Darkness at midday.

You like heat because

It makes a reptile warm.

On the raft with you

Is your life.

You have everything

You have.

The crocodiles choo-chooing around

And around are the snouts

Of your ancestors

Which split and jaggedly yawn

Because it is time to

Read aloud

The story

Of the African slaves walking on water

In chains all the way to the United States

In 1776.

Two hundred–plus years later,

Islam overthrows the Shah.

NO MENSTRUATION WOMEN ALLOW,

A temple sign had said on Bali.

The temple monkeys had not been friendly.

The president of the rubber-stamp Iranian senate,