Poems 1959-2009 (36 page)

In an upper gallery of the castle,

A young woman curtsied to the king and said: “Sire,

You are a beautiful day outside.”

The king stuck his stick down her throat to shut her up.

Children, of all things bad, the best is to kill a king.

Next best: to kill yourself out of fear of death.

Next best: to grovel and beg. I took for my own motto

I rot before I ripen
.

 

Seeing you again.

Your glide, your gaze.

Your very quiet voice.

Your terror. Your quiet eyes.

 

Oh never to be yourself,

Never to let be

And simply be there.

The same

Morning ink blot in the mirror

Making a face up,

Making up a face. You need

All your strength

Never to be yourself.

Skirt, boots, and sweater

Green as a stem.

I'll wear them.

Take me down from the shelf.

Oh never to be yourself

And always to be the same.

Like the air and the wind,

The wind and the air.

I hear a very quiet voice,

Emphatic like a flower,

Saying

It is I.

 

The soft street canyon was silent. In silence the new snow

Layered a rolling swell. The greatest evening

Tilted and rose against the tiny window:

Like her juggled soaking fishbowl swinging

A wave that burst into suds. A feeler of ice,

See-through and frail, scaled the whitening lace

Of the window guard, now more visible,

As if a vine were growing its own trellis.

The warm room watched it whiten, counting the minutes.

Think fast! (Still dreaming?) The boy had caught his friend

Flush with a lobbed cannonball of snow.

But then they crossed the closed street hand in hand.

Their dog sprinted in zigzags like a minnow,

Or wallowing in too deep, leapt out like a deer,

Folded forepaws leaping, then his rear.

From two floors up, two floors below is deep.

They don't know it, but sometime someone will come

And take her hand and feed her to the moon.

 

Suddenly the pace

Quickens, chill air dusts the air.

The leaves shrink

To a fawn color, held by their tails like mice,

The color of twine.

The fifty o'clock moon

Laid its cheek against the window,

Lay like snow on the carpet.

Outside the window,

Harlem in moonlight.

You walked outside.

Everyone knows

About the would-be suicide: you walk—

A step, a heartbeat—

Heartbeats. Sobsob, in the noon park,

The nannies were white,

Seated like napkins on the benches,

Starched and folded to sit up.

The babies did not choose the carriages,

Limousine coffers, blackly London;

They did not choose the rayless Tartar sun,

Sterile as the infected

Industrial steppes of Calvin—of

Bayonne. The reservoir banks were a purple socket

Like a black tulip.

Anything
would do now

That inspired you

Below the Ninth Sphere, below the fixed stars

With fall, the electric cattle prod,

The cold juice that shocked you from your sleep

Lovelorn: slight,

Frizzy, sweating animal with feelings.

For fall, dawn rises in combers

Above the radiator shield's metal caning,

The sill flows like a pennant.

You smell the back-to-school,

Steam and rain on wool,

The tears not learning

And learning to write

With the sharp new chalk

Jacobean black and white,

The fantastic wrong and right, now dissolving

In Jamesian gray. You want to be a child—

You want to find the way

To either more or less than you are.

If you could choose.

Everywhere changes or fades.

Her hair streams like a willow's

As it leans to the river

When she leans toward you

Her anodyne, her healing face,

Eurasian, gypsy ease

(You have your memories),

Lovely lost love;

Erato's dark hair.

 

So now you've fettered that sweet bride,

The boy you've toyed with awhile and gelded,

And still not come, wretched sod.

Suck yourself off, like in your dream.

Innocents, white and fresh, bless 'em,

They belonged down in your love grotto;

They hiccup and honk on the slick flags

Looped with turds and the squashed-flat intestine.

Nothing helps, Marquis. Oh try

The scaffold again, with your bald pregnant nun.

The hired child caresses the ripped breasts;

She fingers herself, and releases the pretend-drop—

Nothing helps! At least, at least—

Sade save our republican mistress, France.

Kiss the Courrèges boot, de Sade,

The stockingful up to the stocking top.

Beyond you lies the shrine, between

The slopes of Zion, past the alehouse.

Refresh yourself, drink deep. The brine!

The salt and gall, your honey and wine!

 

Never again to wake up in the blond

Hush and gauze of that Hyannis sunrise.

Bliss was it

In that dawn to be alive

With our Kool as breakfast,

Make-do pioneers. Like politicians

Headed for a back room,

Each minute lived when it arrived,

And was the future. To be our age

Was very heaven. The fresh print

On the leaves dabbed

The windowscreen leaf-green;

A nestling's wing of a breeze that

Could not have stirred a cobweb

Eased through the air

And swept the room clean.

We could love politics for its mind!

All seemed possible,

Though it was barely a breeze.

The spirey steel-wool tuft in the map

Spreading apart, the city's

Wild wire and grease-rot,

Must be redeemed. When we returned

We would begin.

The city was our faith—

Ah we knew now the world need not end.

The flagpole out on the common actually

Seemed to tense,

Attentive as a compass needle,

Seemed caught in the open

Sniffing the breeze,

The little flag quivering like a sprig.

Alas. We could almost see

Cloth milk flying in place of blood and stars:

A nationless white flag colorlessly

Compounded of all colors, for peace.

But the pitcher and turned-down tumbler

On their doily summed up

The trim smell of dill,

We would begin.

It was new Eden.

And there was the young light,

There the feathery sapling—our tree priest,

Let us say, stuck with glued leaves.

Eden's one anthill bred

A commune honey pallor on the lawn

Uncurbed, yet innocent

Of any metaphor.

A pipe snaking around the baseboard rose

And stood silent in the corner like a birch.

Perhaps only innocence was keeping

The common still asleep

While we overreached, and touched so easily

What we were. We were

Awake while the world slept.

We overweened. Yes, yes,

We opened the patched screen

And plucked a leaf and stem,

And chewed the stem,

And tasted its green.

 

The trees breathe in like show dogs, stiffening

Under the silver leashes of light rain

To spines. A Cyclone fence that guards the moire

Embankment of the shrunken reservoir

Bristles with rain barbs, each a milk tooth, sting

Of stings, where fall began. The park's a stain,

The black paths shimmer under cellophane.

It is so real. Shy ghosts of taxis sniff

And worry in the empty park streets, lost

And misted lights, and down Fifth Avenue:

The flags soak at half-staff, bloodshed and blue;

Bloodletting stripes repeating their mute riff;

Gray stars, wet Union sky of stars, crisscrossed

With petrifying folds and sparks of frost.

The rain points prick the lake and touch the drought,

The dusk blue of a sterile needletip.

The brightness and the light has been struck down.

 

The bald still head is filled with that grayish milk—

It's a dentist's glass door. It turns heavily—

There may be a weight in it. It weighs one ton.

Very even light diffuses through the globe.

But this surprise: life-squiggles, fishhooks,

Minnowhooks, surround the mineral eyes.

Someone like Muzak is burbling slant rhymes—

-om
and
-am
,
-om
and
-am
—and holds up a telltale map

Of rice swimming in blood like white flies.

Ears almost as large as the president's

And more eloquent than lips,

That swallow toothlessly like polyps.

A spit glob and naked flashbulbs pop in Rusk's ear

And go down with whole heads, whole fields of heads

Of human hair, jagged necks attached.

Tangled unwashed bangs lengthening and cut, lengthening and cut,

The civilian population knows no more

Than a cellar of pocked Georgia potatoes.

This Press Talk is like a ham discussing pigs—

They need our help. He's a cracker showing the kids

The funny human shapes his potatoes have.

They must be scrubbed and eaten in their skins.

That's the nourishment. Rusk sets no other condition.

Rusk's private smile that looks like incest.

 

I turn from Yeats to sleep, and dream of Robert Kennedy,

Assassinated ten years ago tomorrow.

Ten years ago he was alive—

Asleep and dreaming at this hour, dreaming

His wish-fulfilling dreams.

He reaches from the grave.

Shirtsleeves rolled up, a boy's brown hair, ice eyes

Softened by the suffering of others, and doomed;

Younger brother of a murdered president,

Senator and candidate for president;

Shy, compassionate and fierce

Like a figure out of Yeats;

The only politician I have loved says
You're dreaming
and says

The gun is mightier than the word.

 

“Have the bristles at an angle and gently

Work them in between the tooth and gum

Back and forth,” a woman says.

Her breast is next to my ear.

She moves a set of teeth four inches high

And a foot-long toothbrush.

Breast; and then the teeth; and then

The window without a shade or curtains—then the day,

Twelve floors above the street;

And the empty lighted office windows always

On the other side of a street

From the drill,

Since childhood,

The obsolete slow drill that now only polishes.

 

Alive. Yes and awake. Flowers

Fall through his mind, in one slant, like snow.

The electric toothbrush flames in his hand.

Mozart sweetens the small room.

LSD tears he wept all night,

One hundred for a dead father.

LSD tears, they roll heavy

And burn like molten metal drops.

Now as the drug wears off he waits.

For a mother has remarried.

Oh the man swelled, supple bitch,

And smiled as if he might give birth.

Completely to be shut of both,

Purged pure and bare to all in one's fate,

The drug makes possible at last

[
The curtain stirs
], out of the shell,

The old self, new and neat as a chick.

This dew, haze softness on waking has opened

His window on the street a crack.

Midnight tolls. The curtain stirs.

 

Fifth Avenue has the flickers, heat

Lightning lit. A voodoo doll's

Whey little bursts of breath stare,

And fits of fluttering like an eye;

A Haitian nurse at her window altar

Tutoyers the hatpin. The terrified trees'

Bursts of breath stare, as though Fifth

Were lined with dandelion clocks.

Scree in the void, Sinai is snuffed,

Half re-created. Parting the black:

Arrow one-way signs plunged through,

The twitched buildings dancing and chalk-white.

It is too late for people but

A rag barfs on a curb. But it's

A sandwich board mouldering there

Draws the nose of his tetchy chow:

Seen in a sheet-flap of sight just now

And gone now. In the blinded dark;

Streetlights, stars sapped—repeated blows

That leave unstirred the humid silence.

Silence … Even Harlem is still—

Harlem is near. The galaxies,

The brainstorms of zero, gasp the fainter

And fainter last breaths of the future.

This time we may go out for good.

Blacked out after the zillionth stroke.

This may be a good time not to wake.

Fifth Ave. The white man's night-light, the future.

 

Pictures of violins in the Wurlitzer collection

Were my bedroom's one decoration,

Besides a blue horse and childish tan maiden by Gauguin—

Backs, bellies, and scrolls,

Stradivarius, Guarnerius, Amati,