Poems 1959-2009 (28 page)

The Colorado looks up in awe at the Grand Canyon

It has made. Hitler.

European clouds. 1934. Empty

Thought-balloons high above Lascaux

Without a thought inside. The Führer

Is ice that's fire, physically small.

They all were. Stalin.

Trotsky's little glasses

Disappear behind a cloud

From which he won't emerge alive.

The small plane carrying

The Grail to Nuremberg got Wagnerian clouds

To fly through, enormous, enormous. Mine eyes have seen the glory, it

Taxis to a stop. The cabin door swings open.

Leni schussed from motion pictures

To still photography after the war. From the Aryan ideal, climbed out

In Africa to shoot the wild shy people of Kau,

Small heads, tall, the most beautiful animals in the world.

Artistically mounted them into ideal

Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl! Riefenstahl! Riefenstahl! Really,

From blonds in black-and-white to blacks in color.

Now Pol Pot came to power.

Now in London Sylvia Plath

Nailed one foot to the floor;

And with the other walked

And walked and walked through the terrible blood.

 

The instrument is priceless.

You can't believe it happened.

The restoration flawless.

The voice is almost human.

The sound is almost painful.

The voice is almost human.

I close my eyes to hear it.

The restoration flawless.

The beauty is inhuman.

The terrifying journey.

O strange new final music.

The strange new place I've gone to.

The blinding light is music.

The starless warm night blinding.

The odor of a musk rose

Presents itself as secrets.

Paralysis can't stop them.

The afterburners kick in.

The visitors are going.

I dreamed that I was sleeping.

Physiatry can't say it.

I can't believe it happened.

A handshake is the human

Condition of bereavement.

A thixotropic sol is

A shaken-up false body.

I know another meaning.

A life was last seen living.

A life was last seen leaving.

The summit of Mount Sinai,

The top of their new tower,

The stark New North Pavilion,

Looks out on New York City,

The miles of aspiration,

The lonely devastation.

I listen to the music

Nine years before 2000.

 

The takeoff of the Concorde in a cathedral.

Ninety seconds into it they cut

The afterburners and the deathly silence

Was like a large breast as we banked steeply left.

 

A fall will come that's damp and delicate,

A geisha voice, a male ventriloquist.

The dummy on his knee will coo she'll get

The other woman ready to be kissed.

The garter belt–and-stockings one will crawl

For him, will crawl on all fours down the hall,

His voice between her teeth. She'll show him all.

He'll want to see. He'll walk behind. She'll call.

 

Her lighting all the candles late at night,

Hours after he had turned out every light,

Was her preparing to be left alone

Once she had pushed aside the heavy stone

And left the tomb and their apartment where

She'd leave herself behind to not be there.

 

(René Char's last poem
, L'Amante)

I'd been so seized by passion for this delectable lover.

I not exactly exempt from feeling, from tremblors of lust.

It meant I must, meant I absolutely must not,

Just fade away quietly, mildly changed,

Recognized only by the eyelids of my lover.

Nights of savage newness found for me again

The flaming saliva that connects, and perfumed the fevered connection.

A thousand precautions gave way thirstily

To the most voluptuous flesh there could be.

In our hands desire that transcends.

What fear on our lips tomorrow?

 

The poem as a human torch. I burn. Burns out.

 

I don't believe in anything, I do

Believe in you, vanished particles of vapor,

Field of force,

Undressed, undimmed Invisible,

Losing muons and gaining other ones,

Counterrotations with your

Robed arms raised out straight to each side

In a dervish dance of eyes closed ecstasy,

Tireless, inhuman,

Wireless technology

Of a ghost,

Of a spinning top on its point,

Of a tornado perspiring forward a few miles an hour

Uprooting everything and smelling sweetly like a lawn.

It's that time of year.

It's that time of year a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day,

A thousand times a day,

You are reborn flying to out-ski

The first avalanche each spring,

And buried alive.

I went to sleep last night so I could see you.

I went to see the world destroyed. It was a movie.

I went to sleep that night so I could see you.

And then a drink and then to sleep.

That's Vermont.

The universe hung like a flare for a while and went out,

Leaving nothing, long ago.

Each galaxy at war exhaled

A firefly glow, a tiny quiet, far away …

On and off … worlds off and on—and then

The universe itself brightened, stared and went out.

I cannot see.

I will not wake though it's a dream.

I move my head from side to side.

I cannot move.

The nights are cold, the sun is hot,

The air is alcohol at that altitude

Three thousand miles from here—is here

Today a thousand times.

You haven't changed.

There is a room in the Acropolis Museum.

The kouroi smile silence.

The way a virus sheds. The way

A weave of wind shear

And the willingness to share is the perfect friend

Every child invents for his very own. I don't know.

The Parthenon suddenly made me cry.

I saw it and I sobbed,

And
it doesn't share.

I was so out of it

You came too close. I got too near

The temple, flying low. I got too near

The power, past the ropes. I touched the restoration work.

It could mean a loss of consciousness

In the right-hand seat to be with God.

The Early Warning Ground Proximity Indicator is flashing.

Never mind. I knew it was.

The alarm ah-oooga ah-oooga and the computer-generated

Voice says

And says and says Pull Up Pull Up Pull Up Pull Up.

You say come closer.

You say come closer.

I cannot move.

You say I have to whisper this. Come closer.

I want to hear.

There also is the way a virus sheds.

I want to see. And the ground whispers

Closer. In the Littré the other day and you were there

In the Petit Robert. Grévisse—Larousse—

Ten million years from now, will there be anything?

The rain came down convulsively on the dry land,

As if it would have liked to come down even harder,

Big, kind, body temperature

Shudderings, and on the far bank of the newborn river,

The joyous drumming of the native drums,

Making a tremendous sound twelve feet beneath the snow

Without an avalanche beeper in those days. It's true—

I don't believe in anything I
do

Believe in, but I do believe in you

Moving your face from side to side to make a space to breathe.

I think I am crying on all my legs

From a dark place to a dark place like a roach.

I am running on the ground with my wings folded—

But now I am extending them,

Running across my kitchen floor and

Running down the rue Barbet-de-Jouy,

Trying historically before it's too late to get into the air.

I have on my ten Huntsman suits,

And many shining shoes made to my last.

I believe in one Lobb.

Faites sur mesure. Everything

Fits my body perfectly now that I'm about to disappear.

I don't believe in anything.

Lightning touches intimately the sable starless. Thunder.

It starts to rain, in your intoxication.

Communism and capitalism go up in flames

And come back down as rain—I'm coming now—

But Greece stays parched.

I'm coming now.

I'm being thrown violently at the sky,

The deck of the carrier shrinking to a dot,

Thirty-some years ago

Suddenly catching sight of Chartres Cathedral miles away;

Horizon to horizon, a molten ocean

The beautiful urine color of vermeil,

Color and undercolor as with a fur;

Soaring stock-still above the windblown waves of wheat,

Dialing on the seemingly inexhaustible power.

Break it.

I swim over to the sealed

Aquarium window of the TV screen to try.

President of the United States descending the stairs

Of his helicopter pixels snap a salute at the American flag

Pixels. I turn the sound off

And the Marine band explodes.

I'm coming now.

I can't breathe.

I'm coming now to the conclusion that

Without a God. I'm coming now to the conclusion.

 

Half Japanese, half Jewish.

Hemispheres of a one-night stand in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

God instantly appeared.

Nine months later born in Rome.

Put up for adoption after four days.

Half Jewish, half Japanese.

Imagine the solitude that is.

Imagine how beautiful she is.

How powerful and pale.

The courier arrives.

The millennium begins.

 

Moshi-moshi. (Hello.)

Money is being made.

Money was being made.

Make more make more make more consumer goods.

But the shelves were empty.

The snow was deep.

At Lenin's Tomb the Honor Guard

Stood there actually asleep.

Red Square was white.

Snow was falling dreamily on Beijing.

This was global warming.

Twenty-four hours passed and it was still snowing.

In New York the homeless

Reify the rich.

The homeless in the streets.

The car alarms go off.

The cherry blossoms burst

Into Imperial bloom. The handheld fax machine has something

Coming in. This spring our Western eyes are starting to slant.

They caution you composites can't.

O O O Ochanomizu,

You are my station.

The polished businessman warrior bowed

Cool as a mountain forest of pine.

And the adolescent schoolgirls like clouds of butterflies

On the subway in their black school uniforms

At all hours of the day going somewhere,

Daughters of the Rising Sun.

New York is an electrical fire.

People are trapped on the top floor, smoking

With high-rise desire

And becoming Calcutta.

Tokyo is low

And manic as a hive.

For the middle of the night they have silent jackhammers.

Elizabethan London with the sound off. Racially pure with no poor.

Mishima himself designed the stark far-out uniform

His private army wore, madly haute couture. He stabbed the blade in wrong

And was still alive while his aide tried in vain

To cut his head off as required.

Moshi-moshi I can't hear you. I'm going blind.

Don't let me abandon you, you're all I have.

Hello, hello. My Tokyo, hello.

Hang up and I'll call you back.

You say to the recyclable person of your dreams
Je t'aime
,

And the voice recognition system,

Housed in a heart made from seaweed,

Murmurs in Japanese
Moi aussi
.

 

How many breasts a woman has depends.

But not on how much need for them you have.

A woman with no breasts applied the salve.

The modem won't receive, it only sends.

What hasn't happened isn't everything

Until in middle age it starts to be.

I woke up wrinkled underneath a tree.

The breasts above me swayed, not listening.

Drought. Ethiopia. We circle low.

Each parachute a breast. Blind mouths look up.

Each breast is liquid living in a cup,

A nippled Nobel Peace Prize Stockholm snow.

The famine's everywhere there's UNICEF.

The Red Cross carpet-bombs the dead with food.

We hear, Zaire, you're in a bitter mood.

(We do have better hearing than the deaf!)

I had a radical mastectomy.

Crack troops flew in at once with extra breasts.

Big Bang of AIDS in Africa invests

The dark with vaster stars than I can see.

It is the role of government to rule

The Congo crocodile who likes blond curls.

The lab discovered undigested girls

Inside the humid darkness of his stool.

I swing from tree to tree and beat my chest.

I beat my breast and cling from tree to tree.

I'm going back. I start to squat to pee.

You were my partner and I liked you best.

 

A stag lifts his nostrils to the morning