Poems 1959-2009 (27 page)

Light can't escape.

It weighs more than the world.

The opposite of infinite is

WNYC's signal reaches it.

Listen …

How an angel would sing, utterly inhuman.

The ethereal cockroach music of Anton Webern.

They're playing

All his rarefied work on

The anniversary of his death.

An entire universe in less than a dot.

Faint brief frosts of breath

Fly-cast precise and chaste.

It doesn't ask to be loved.

These briefest exhalations

In the history of music are vast.

The absolutely infinite God

Of the Cabala

In the twinkling of an eyelet, Ensof.

The future of the past was the New Music.

He believed

The atonal was eternal. He believed

Fifty years

In the future children would be whistling

It on their way to school. The irresistible

Ravisher was pure

Tunelessness.

And the angel

      Raised his hand to greet her,

At the same time bowing low.

      To the woman,

Never mind her terror,

      His hand before he spoke

Seemed to sing.

      His utterly inhuman voice,

Which suddenly she heard,

      Startled her,

Was gorgeously strange.

Sang without a melody. Sang

So grand a neatness, precision, briefness.

So unnatural and severe

Would come to seem so natural

Kids would whistle it.

Stuck at a fixation point, he sings.

Where the match scratch and hiss sweetens to flame.

Where the boy soprano's eternal voice is breaking.

And the slow caterpillar turns silently into wings.

Sing a song of sealed trains

Arriving day and night.

These trains had kept it all inside.

These trains had never let their feelings out.

These train-sick trains were just dying.

These trains couldn't hold it any longer.

These trains shat uncontrollably

All over the sidings and ramps

Jews for the camps.

This century must end.

To modern art I say—

It's been real.

      
He fled Vienna with his family

For the mountain village of Mittersill to escape the bombs.

      Now with the war over,

He was standing outside

      His son-in-law's house just after curfew

Enjoying the night air.

      An American soldier who had been drinking mistook

A great composer smoking an after-dinner cigar

      For a black marketeer reaching for a gun.

I am a toupee walking toward me

With no one under it.

I put the gun to my head.

 

A slight thinness of the ankles;

The changed shape of the calf;

A place the thigh curves in

Where it didn't used to; and when he turns

A mirror catches him by surprise

With an old man's buttocks.

 

Brought to the surface from the floor of the ocean

And the crushing atmospheres of pressure there,

The thing had wings, a mouth, no eyes.

It started to speak when it exploded.

I see I have described a confessional poet.

Senator, I have no memory of that.

The car alarms go off day and night,

The sound of hard times, easy money. In the dream,

The crack dealer over and over hides his stash

Inside a parked car's hubcap just in time. Warbling police cars arrive

In rut, wearing on their heads an ecstatic whirling light show as antlers.

I have no memory of that.

I have no memory of that

Is what to say in court. Or when appearing

At a Senate Select Committee hearing

Under oath, and upon being asked

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I have no memory of that.

Thirty-five years ago I strolled through Harvard Yard.

The steps of Widener led one to the doom of reading.

I was a nose looking for the blush of blood—

Sharks glide for hours this way behind their smiles.

Dictionaries opened their mouths. I devoured them.

Girls lay face up behind their smiles.

Stylish Senator John F. Kennedy and I sat facing each other behind our smiles

In his former tutor's former rooms in Eliot House.

Nothing has been the same since the Zapruder film

Of the assassination was endlessly replayed

On television worldwide. Darkness lies behind the light

That makes home movies.

Nothing could ever be the same after the Zapruder film

Of the Dallas motorcade was endlessly replayed

On TV worldwide, assassinating the young president again and again.

In his wife's arms. His head explodes.

Darkness lies behind the light.

Blind people feel this way behind their smiles.

Two leaping dolphins stay behind their smiles

And catch treats tossed to them,

And delight a paying audience. Others out at sea on a beautiful day

Talk about everything they love in a language of clicks.

Others, trained by us, moan a kind of baby talk

And a few long whalesongy words, hauntingly unintelligible.

The U.S. Navy experimented with having

Them lay underwater mines in the mid-sixties when I was thirty.

Meanwhile, the civil rights movement I completely missed.

I was so busy doing nothing,

I had no time. They lynched and burned.

I played squash drunk.

 

Herbert Brownell was the attorney general.

Ezra Pound was reciting some Provençal. I was seventeen

Every terrifying hungover sunrise that fall.

Thanksgiving weekend 1953 I made my pilgrimage to Pound,

Who said, Kike-sucking Pusey will destroy Harvard unless you save it.

I persuaded him two words in his translation of Confucius should change.

His pal Achilles Fang led me to the empty attic of the Yenching Institute,

In the vast gloom arranged two metal folding chairs

Under the one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling,

And hating me, knee to knee,

Unsmilingly asked, What do you know?

Pound sent a message to MacLeish. Archie, wake up.

United States of America
v.
Ezra Pound.

My song will seek and detonate your heat.

Pound reciting with his eyes closed filled the alcove with glory.

My art will find and detonate your heart.

I was a freshman and everywhere in Washington, D.C.

I walked, I dreamed.

 

Native Americans were still Indians

In the Saturday afternoon double features a minute ago,

War paint and feathers still bloomed from the brain stem

Of a brave. He strode from his hogan and wickiup and tepee and wigwam

Into a politically correct text

A woman riffles through crossing Harvard Yard,

What used to be called a beautiful girl a minute ago

Rushing to an hour exam in Sever Hall.

Bison and bison calfs,

Each looking rather like Toulouse-Lautrec, snowed back and forth in black

Across the plains, so many millions they could be seen from the moon,

The only visible feature on Earth beside the Great Wall of China—

Vanished, genocide, more martyrs than in Islam! His eyesight was an arrowhead parting the air.

His silence, immensely, tiptoed forward.

He came on an enemy praying, the chant aimed at something in the sky,

The hands held out, palms up.

Silence the size of a lunar sea,

In war paint and feathers, dressed to kill,

Gazed at the million antelope a few feet away in another world,

Gazed at the prostitute named Jean,

Her pubic hair cut in a Mohawk

By a steady customer

Who was a barber, in the Empress Rialto Hotel,

The walls splashed with brains and rainbow, a minute ago.

 

An angel's on his knees in front of her.

She's watching in a mirror while she moans.

The other woman, seated, spreads her legs.

Winged light is on its knees in front of her.

She watches in the mirror while she moans.

The other, head thrown back, has spread her legs.

I have a dream!
is here in front of her.

She's staring in the mirror while she moans.

The other sister, still clothed, spreads her legs.

He's blazing on his knees in front of her.

She's praising in the mirror when she moans.

Her daughter has a dream and spreads her legs.

Death sits up like a little dog and begs:

The man who will kill King is eating eggs.

He pricks a yolk. The yellow spurts and groans.

 

They can't get close enough—there's no such thing.

Look. When they smile. Each rising like a tree

Inside the other, breathing quietly.

Two women start their hour by moistening.

The engine pulling them around the bend

Exposes irresistibly the train

They're on extending from them through the rain.

And then it's night. And it will never end.

They're in a limousine. The plane they're on

Is over water. Dawn reveals the two

Berlins becoming one. And now they knew—

The time had come. And now the rain is gone.

Two passengers aboard their lives undress

Down to their hands. They're holding guns. They stay

Behind their smiles. The guard comes in to say

The hour is over, and they tell her yes.

 

The beauty in his arms could kill him easily.

The busboy bending down to take his plate

Could stab him quickly fifteen times.

The woman in the store this afternoon

Walked toward him strangely, selling perfume.

The former governor of California,

The only candidate for president

Who studied Zen, is pitching woo

To eminent New Yorkers in someone's studio.

The group is small—he's close enough to kiss;

And close enough to kiss is close enough to blow away.

What a wilderness of empty voting booths

The curtain rises to reveal.

The scene is North America now.

I miss the dry-ice fire of Bobby Kennedy.

I met McGovern in your living room.

Hubert Humphrey simply lacked the lust.

It's hard to die. It's hard to live.

We got that way by being

Durable but delicate.

The body lasts and lasts and yet

Is half in love with death. The smiling

President-for-Life is love. The smiling

President-for-Life is love.

The smiling President-for-Life is love.

Idi Amin forces the gazelle to swallow a grenade.

Stalin isn't a psychosomatic disorder.

 

Hundreds stand strangely

In a landscape of vast emptiness on an ocean,

In a silent black-and-white sequence:

A noon of duneless desert with a seat at the U.N.,

A tribal bloodbath nation with a raw gold flag.

A Socialist, poet, murderer king is president.

I made that up.

And when the mass execution starts, one man

Raises his human hands in front of him to block

The bullets. The central character in this serious

Bringing meat to the vegetarians

Movie in ravishing color watches real footage

Of a mass execution glumly. He's trying

The arc flown by a jet for the astronauts to give

Them a few seconds' practice weightlessness.

The existential American antihero reporter of nothing

Is impersonating an international arms dealer in a desert.

He'll have to die.

He'll find he has a cause.

He'll find exchanging identities

Is a conversion. The former foreign correspondent

On the lam from himself, floating free,

Trying to float, glares at the footage glumly.

Free will is his fate.

The twentieth century made it possible

For us more and more fictional characters to see

Real human beings being killed

And leave the theater and live.

Leave and live!

Leave yourself and live!

 

The suffering in the sunlight and the smell.

And the bellowing and men weeping and screaming.

And the horses wandering aimlessly and the heat.

The living and the dead mixed, bleeding on one another.

A palm with two fingers left attached

Lying on the ground next to the hindquarters of a horse.

A dying man literally without a face

Pointed at where his face had been.

He did this without a sound.

The forty thousand dead and wounded stretched for miles

In every direction from the tower.

Not a cloud in the sky all day, the sunlight of hell.

Bodies swelled and split, erupting their insides

Like sausages on the fire.

 

The first is take the innards out when you

Do Ouagadougou. Clean with a grenade.

Thus Captain Compaoré's kitchen made

From Clément Ouedraogo human stew.

The one man who might help them disappears

And reappears in bowls. You eat or are

The eaten here. French-speaking, Muslim tar

That once sold slaves and blames the French, in tears.

 

Dawn. Leni Riefenstahl

And her cameras slowly inflate the immense Nuremberg Rally.