Poems 1959-2009 (34 page)

One simply stares at the autistic face,

Charred rock-hard paper, a god. Stares at the stared-at.

Ramesses II in an exhibit case.

The Mummy Room is packed with Japanese

And German tours there to take in Ramesses.

The guides call in their languages, “This way please.”

It seems one stares until one hardly sees.

It seems the room is empty. Like a dog

Looking at a doorknob, one stares at the stared-at.

As at a beetle rolling a ball of dung.

As at a large breast, with its nipple erect.

–
5
, soft and hard together among

The million things that go together one

Will lift away from, everything under the sun,

Everything—dog and doorknob—combustion to vapor

Lock—scissors cut paper, rock breaks scissors, paper

Covers rock. Everything is looking

For something softer than itself to eat.

Think of the energy required to get

Away from this hunt and peck for energy

That's running out. This need to look! O let

Your spirit rise above the engines below you.

Prepare for launch. O let a new way know you

Helmeted and on your back strapped down.

The moisture of the viscera, the blown

Coral rose of the brain on its stem—in this

Container, soft will never be exposed.

And leave behind the ancient recipes,

That cookbook for cannibals the Old Testament,

Bloody contemporary of course of Ramesses.

Cuisine minceur
, urging one to eat less

But well. O Egypt! O Israel's salt sweetness!

From going soft and hard, from going up

And down, deliver us: struggling up

The steep path as Abraham with fire and knife,

And struggling down as Moses bent under the Law.

O let me go. O Israel! O Egypt!

The enemy's godless campfire at night, meat roasting

As you breathed near, sword drawn.
Cut
. Juice that dripped—

Later—from the dates from the hand of your daughter

Placed on your tongue in joy. Salute the slaughter.

O let me go. Salute the screenwriter,

DNA. Salute the freedom fighter

Kalishnikov machine pistol. A spider

Oiling the weapon spreads its legs and sighs.

TERROR OUR PLEASURE. O let me go. Logo

Of the age of ass—this age of movements—

Members and dismembers is our motto.

Oiling her weapon while in the mirror eyeing

Herself, turbaned in a black howli, sighing,

Is our muse
It feels good
, the spider. Mothers,

The children must die with dignity. Brothers,

Die. Mothers, calm the children. Squirt the poison

Far back in your child's throat. Stanza thirty-five.

Seated on your back strapped tight, tighter,

Feeling the contoured chair's formfitting

Love—no more hunt and peck on the typewriter

For energy that's running out. Stable

Fireproof love ideally comfortable!

You stare up at the gauges' radiance.

The mummy priest stares back in a trance,

And places beside you the silent clock radio,

And on the floor shoes for the long journey.

To lie on the horizon unable to rise—

How terrible to be the horizon! be

The expression in the quadriplegic's eyes,

Constant sunrise of feelings but no feeling.

The patient on the couch cow-eyes the ceiling.

Under his broken armor is a flower

Pinned down, that cannot reach its dagger, a flower.

Tongs in his skull, and dreams, not every man

Will wake. Can stand to look down at his penis and urine.

I am less than a man and less than a woman,

Wave after wave of moonlight breaks

On the trembling beach, dogs howl everywhere. One

Heave, and the water of the swimming pool

Sprang up, turning on its side like a pole-

Vaulter as it rose –
4

In impossible slow motion. Whisper. Roar.

Because the stirred-up air only smells sweeter.

Because on Bali the earthquake toll is this sweet.

The Ketjak dancers roar and whisper
ketjak

In ecstasy, the monkey dancers, k-
tchuck
.

They sway, but stayed seated,
ketjak
,
ketjak
.

–
3
, C-4, we have ignition.

Lit up, the streets of Cairo are singing of urine,

The streets of Bombay are quiring human faeces.

–
2
is the sea anemones

Which elsewhere are galaxies. Time-space is the amoeba's

Pouring motion into itself to move.

Organizations of gravity and light,

Supremely mass disappears and reappears

In an incomprehensible –
1
of might.

Sat up at last, the quadriplegic boy

Feels beyond pain, feels beyond joy—

Still, stately as the Christ of Resurrection.

I wake beneath my hypnopompic erection,

Forty stanzas, forty Easters of life,

And smile, eyes full of tears, shaking with rage.

 

Your face swims to my window, beautiful

Translucence, a pearl, the fetal teardrop, little

Sea horse unswaying as time flows by. You nose

The glass, forever about to have a soul.

New York flows by, not now flows by, not now,

The traffic flows by. Moonlit dunes of amnesia

Flow by, flow by. In the rearview mirror dawn

The messenger sent back without a reply

Turning back into the Sahara.

O idea swimming on the blue,

Your face swims to the window, beautiful

Translucence against the blinding id of blue,

A leaf, the afterimage of a leaf,

Almost enough shade. I breathe in

Your breath and breathe a million miles away.

A mirror is backing through a blinding desert,

Autoroute to the end. Already there—

Still waiting! It is too late to be yourself.

 

I look out the window: spring is coming.

I look out the window: spring is here.

The shuffle and click of the slide projector

Changing slides takes longer.

I like the dandelion—

How it sticks to the business of briefly being.

Shuffle and click, shuffle and click—

Life, more life, more life.

The train that carried the sparkling crystal saxophone

Osip Mandelstam into exile clicketyclicked

Through suds of spring flowers,

Cool furrowed-earth smells, sunshine like freshly baked bread.

The earth was so black it looked wet,

So rich it had produced Mandelstam.

He was last seen alive

In 1938 at a transit camp near Vladivostok

Eating from a garbage pile,

When I was two, and Robert Lowell was twenty-one,

Who much later would translate Mandelstam,

And now has been dead two years himself.

I sometimes feel I hurry to them both,

Stand staring at the careworn spines

Of their books in my bookshelf,

Only in order to walk away.

The wish to live is as unintentional as love.

Of course the future always is,

Like someone just back from England

Stepping off a curb, I'll look the wrong way and be nothing.

Heartbeat, heartbeat, the heart stops—

But shuffle and click, it's spring!

The arterial branches disappearing in the leaves,

Swallowed like a tailor's chalk marks in the finished suit.

We are born.

We grow old until we're all the same age.

They are as young as Homer whom they loved.

They are writing a letter, not in a language I know.

I read: “It is one of those spring days with a sky

That makes it worthwhile being here.

The mailbox in which we'll mail this

Is slightly lighter than the sky.”

 

A fat girl bows gravely like a samurai

On a bank of the Charles touching her toes,

Her tights in time with a sunrise sculler's stroke,

Then stroke, then stroke, dipped in pink, until

He crabs an oar, a burst of sudden white.

Four winters of grinding away then freaking on this

Soft-focus air not quite body temperature!

It feels pristine as the sweet-smelling world

Near a lawn sprinkler felt to a child.

Expulsion into Paradise for finals!

A red dome, and a green, a blue, a gold,

Veritas
just above the leafiness.

The locked iron gates on Memorial Drive—

The eyes of a bachelor waiting for water to boil.

 

Her name I may or may not have made up,

But not the memory,

Sandy Moon with her lion's mane astride

A powerful motorcycle waiting to roar away, blipping

The throttle, a roar, years before such a sight

Was a commonplace,

And women had won,

And before a helmet law, or

Wearing their hair long, had made all riders one

Sex till you looked again; not that her chest

Wasn't decisive—breasts of Ajanta, big blue-sky clouds

Of marble, springing free of her unhooked bra

Unreal as a butterfly-strewn sweet-smelling mountainside

Of opium poppies in bloom.

It was Union Square. I remember. Turn a corner

And in a light-year

She'd have arrived

At the nearby inky, thinky offices of
Partisan Review
.

Was she off to see my rival Lief,

Boyfriend of girls and men, who cruised

In a Rolls convertible?

The car was the
caca
color a certain

Very grand envoy of Franco favored for daytime wear—

But one shouldn't mock the innocent machinery

Of life, nor the machines we treasure. For instance,

Motorcycles. What definition of beauty can exclude

The MV Agusta racing 500-3,

From the land of Donatello, with blatting megaphones?

To see Giacomo Agostini lay the MV over

Smoothly as a swan curves its neck down to feed,

At ninety miles an hour—entering a turn with Hailwood

On the Honda, wheel to wheel, a foot apart—

The tromboning furor of the exhaust notes as they

Downshifted, heard even in the photographs!

Heroes glittering on the summit before extinction

Of the air-cooled four-strokes in GP.

Agostini—Agusta! Hailwood—Honda!

I saw Agostini, in the Finnish Grand Prix at Imatra,

When Hailwood was already a legend who'd moved on

To cars. How small and pretty Ago was,

But heavily muscled like an acrobat. He smiled

And posed, enjoying his own charming looks,

While a jumpsuited mechanic pushed his silent

Racer out of the garage, and with a graceful

Sidesaddle run-and-bump started its engine.

A lion on a leash being walked in neutral

Back and forth to warm it up, it roared and roared;

Then was shut off; releasing a rather heady perfume

Of hot castor oil, as it docilely returned to the garage.

Before a race, how would Hailwood behave?

Racers get killed racing.

The roped-off crowd hushed outside the open door.

I stood in awe of Ago's ease—

In his leathers, like an animal in nature—

Inhumanly unintrospective, now smiling less

Brilliantly, but by far the brightest being in the room.

I feared finding his fear,

And looked for it,

And looked away so as not to mar the perfect.

There was an extraordinary girl there to study

Instead; and the altar piece, the lily

Painted the dried blood MV racing red,

Slender and pure—one hundred eighty miles an hour.

A lion which is a lily,

From the land of Donatello: where else could they design

Streamlined severe elegance in a toy color?

A phallus which was musical when it roared? By contrast,

Hailwood's Honda had been an unsteerable monster,

Only a genius could have won on it,

All engine and no art.

A lily that's a lion: handmade with love

By the largest helicopter manufacturer in Europe,

Whose troop carriers shielded junta and emir from harm,

And cicatriced presidents clutching

A golden ceremonial fly whisk and CIA dollars.

How storybook that a poor country boy

Should ride the Stradivarius of a count—

The aristocrat industrialist Agusta—against

The middle-class son of a nicely well-off businessman;

English; and weekly wallowing near death

On the nearly ungovernable Japanese horsepower.

A clone of Detroit, Honda Company, in going for power,

Empire-building

In peacetime displaced to motorcycle sales.

Honda raced no more. No need to to

Sell Hondas now. The empire flourished elsewhere

Than glory. I swooned in the gray even indoor air

Of a garage in Finland, as racetime neared.

Daylight blinded the doorway—the day beyond,

The crowd outside, were far away. I studied

The amazing beauty, whom Ago seemed determined to ignore.

Seated like Agostini in skintight racing leathers.

Her suit looked sweet, like Dr. Denton's on a child;

Until—as she stood up—the infant's-wear blue-innocence

Swelled violently to express

The breasts and buttocks of a totem, Magna Mater,

Overwhelming and almost ridiculous,

Venus in a racing suit,

Built big as Juno—out of place but filling up

The room, if you looked at her, which no one else did;