Poems 1959-2009 (37 page)

Colored like a calabash-and-meerschaum pipe bowl's

Warmed, matured body—

The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then.

I used to dream about her often,

In sheets she'd have to change the day after.

I was thirteen, had just been bar mitzvah.

My hero, once I'd read about him,

Was the emperor Hadrian; my villain, Bar Kokhba,

The Jew Hadrian had crushed out at Jerusalem:

Both in the
Cambridge Ancient History
's Hadrian chapter (1936

Edition), by some German. (The Olympics

Year of my birth and Jesse Owens's
putsch
it had appeared.)

Even then, in '49, my mother was dying.

Dressed in her fresh-air blue starched uniform,

The maid would come from Mother's room crying

With my mother's tears shining on her arm,

And run to grab her beads and crucifix and missal,

I to find my violin and tuning whistle

To practice my lessons. Mendelssohn. Or Bach,

Whose Lutheran fingering had helped pluck

The tonsured monks like toadstools from their lawns,

And now riddled the armor I would have to shuck:

His were life-sized hands behind his puppet Mendelssohn's.

One night, by the blue of her nitelite, I watched the maid

Weaving before her mirror in the dark, naked.

Her eyes rolled, whiskey-bright; the glass was black, dead.

“Will you come true? It's me, it's me,” she said.

Her hands and her hips clung to her rolling pelvis.

Her lips smacked and I saw her smile, pure lead

And silver, like a child, and shape a kiss.

All night I tossed. I saw the face,

The shoulders and the slight breasts—but a boy's face,

A soft thing tangled, singing, in his arms,

Singing and foaming, while his blinding pelvis,

Scooped out, streamed. His white eyes dreamed,

While the black face pounded with syncope and madness.

And then, in clear soprano, we both screamed.

What a world of mirrored darkness! Agonized, elated,

Again years later I would see it with my naked

Eye—see Harlem: doped up and heartless,

Loved up by heroin, running out of veins

And out of money and out of arms to hold it—where

I saw dead saplings wired to stakes in lanes

Of ice, like hair out cold in hair straightener.

And that wintry morning, trudging through Harlem

Looking for furnished rooms, I heard the solemn

Pedal-toned bowing of the Bach Chaconne.

I'd played it once! How many tears

Had shined on Mother's maids since then?

Ten years! I had been trying to find a room ten years,

It seemed that day, and been turned down again and again.

No violin could thaw

The rickety and raw

Purple window I shivered below, stamping my shoes.

Two boys in galoshes came goose-stepping down

The sheer-ice long white center line of Lenox Avenue.

A blue-stormcoated Negro patrolman,

With a yellowing badge star, bawled at them. I left too.

I had given up violin and left St. Louis,

I had given up being Jewish,

To be at Harvard just another

Greek nose in street clothes in Harvard Yard.

Mother went on half dying.

I wanted to live in Harlem. I was almost unarmored …

Almost alone—like Hadrian crying

As his death came on, “Your Hadrianus

Misses you, Antinous,

Misses your ankles slender as your wrists,

Dear child. We want to be alone.

His back was the city gates of Rome.

And now Jerusalem is dust in the sun,

His skies are blue. He's coming, child, I come.”

 

She loves me? She loves me not?

I wring

My hands and scatter the broken-off fingers.

Like petals you pluck from some

White little flower along your way.

You hold them up to the breeze,

They've told your fortune,

They drift off into May.

Though

Now a haircut

Lays bare thorns of gray,

Though my morning shave shows me

On the bib the salt of age,

I hope, I believe

I will never weaken.

Never be caught

Showing good sense.

•

Past one o'clock. You must have gone to sleep.

Or do

You feel, perhaps you feel the same as I?

I'm in no hurry.

Is

There no point

In a telegram that would only

Wake you? And disturb you.

•

The tide ebbs.

The sea too

Is going to sleep.

The incident as they say

Is closed.

Love's skiff

Has stove

In on the daily grind.

It would be useless

Making a list

Of who did what to whom.

We shared

Weapons

And wounds.

•

Past one. Like a

Silent moonlit Oka', the Milky Way

Streams into the night. I'm in no hurry.

As they say: the incident is closed.

A telegram would wake you.

How still it is.

Night, night sky, and stars.

What stillness there is in the world!

What stillness we are capable of!

In hours like these one rises

To address the Ages—History—the Universe!

•

I know

The power of words.

(Not the gas

The loges applaud.)

That make

Coffins rear up and break loose

And clomp off

Robotlike, rocked forward like a crate.

So we are rejected,

So we go unpublished

But the word gallops on, cinching the saddle tighter,

The word rings for centuries—a tocsin!

And steam engines creep up to lick

Poetry's calloused hands.

I know

The power of words.

It is nothing!

A fallen

Petal under

A dancer's heel.

But man

In his soul, his lips, in his bones …

 

The woman in love with him

Pleads with him, “Why

Must there be such misery?

What is there in you that wants this?”

And still he does not feel it,

Feels nothing, sealed in his self.

The beach house is filled up.

The guests drift in and out

Talking in wafts, sozzled,

Sunburns moonlit; dappled fluttering

Shirts at summery games. But

Now near dawn it's cold. He sees

The clock ticks swimming through the air,

Swimming eyelashed eyelets tiny as rotifers.

A warped smile is everywhere,

Half in, half out of water.

In youth more delicate than the boy Rimbaud's,

The sunset nose, lips like blood sausages.

Course of the day's

Lost, unsought breaths, uncounted,

Each separate as a life, a guest.

His life had purposes!

The hall clock ticks.

Oh the heresies, Oh each distinct,

Blue and bright and trite and evil, each,

Those efforts to see the light

Chasing each other's tails—

Whirled into moral butter like Black Sambo's tigers,

As the phonograph spins Ravel's “Bolero.”

A glance—a snipe's beak—

Opens, he sees

The scorched

Tobacco-y nerve ends.

They are wandering through the sumac,

Wondering if it is poisonous,

Blondes and brunettes.

“Who belongs to you?” she whispers.

His life is falling.

His butched unruly hair boils

Through her fingers like the ocean.

The sun beats lightning on the waves,

The waves fold thunder on the sand.

She is afraid.

Raising his cigar and drink,

He gives a toast: “To the dying

Wildlife of Mexico—myself!

Ah, to Lorenzo,

Of course, too.

At forty-five, at his noon eclipsed—

Our former neighbor, up there

In heaven with Beiderbecke.

The famous style was just the life,

He handed you the books blade first,

Keen as a castaway's thirst.

His spirit,

Like a little straight stick,

A little straight stick,

So set and separate, so free,

Wrestled verse by verse

Favorite flowers, birds and beasts.”

He barely finishes.

With a roar the surf razes

Last night's sand castle

And seizes her sailor's cap

As she gasps for breath,

Fighting back tears.

The white dot wags on the water

Like candlelight in a draft,

Flickers, dips, and reappears—

As if, someone says, on an altar offered to

The anchored white United Fruit ship,

A hospital ship,

Which it seems to want to draw near.

“Why, it reverences United Fruit”

(Up goes his glass),

“Our brilliantined

Hustler queen, our Muse.

But our Muse keeps his pitch to himself now,

From me anyway—that white lie,

Inspirer of my verse, my

Sermon on San Juan Hill
The Bridge
,

That hemorrhaged,

Flowing out under the Morgan boardroom doors

Like a ray stalking, a gliding

Opera cape of blood.

“Sweetheart, don't cry. Let's see.

Tolstoy is like the sea.

Shakespeare is like the sea. Or let's say

Whitman is like a spar

Off the
America
,

Wooed by the
Pequod
, the
Patna
, the
Lusitania
,

The
Titanic
, the maniacs,

The siren idealists—America

Weltering in her element

Like ambergris. Slick sightless mass,

Clung to by a sweet smell.

The old fag as he drowns still acting

The little girl

Who can come to no harm.”

He still has his charm.

Her childless troubled soul quiets,

Glows like a flame in Vermeer;

Her startled little vices

Twinkle off like swallows.

“Don't cry, sweetheart.

Keep my kisses in your pocket

Till I get back. Oh, wouldn't you like to see

Ohio with me

On my trip!

But if I come back,

Who will put up with me?

Who will put me up?

Sunshine, I've no place to go,

And no place to go

Is easy enough to find.”

On the desk

The paper is blank,

Freezing to sleep

In the snowfield cast by the lamp.

He tries to think;

Tries to remember the evening.

Faceless

Spondee and iamb couples kick by

In a conga line.

The baker, the breadline,

The Communist and Capitalist,

To them poetry is

A saint's temptation

And his desert, both.

The wide dry heartland sky,

The teetotaling Sahara

Over Chagrin Falls,

When he was last there,

Ideally white as Moby-Dick,

Devoured him like a drop.

From the bed,

Through her jiggling cigarette

She recites: “Then you downed

The other bottle of tequila.

You said you were Baudelaire—

Or was it Marlowe?—

You said you were Blake

Talking English with the angels,

And said you were Christ, of course,

But
never
would say

You were yourself. And the voice!

The steady inhuman horror

Making my heart contract!

You cursed me, my makeup,

Cursed the moon, its light,

Cursed that boyfriend,

All your other friends, all the guests.

My God, you cursed the elements!

And separately, by name,

The heliotrope, the heaven-tree,

The star jessamine, the sweet-by-night;

And even the spring pool

With the small ducks, the lily pad;

And even the air we breathed together,

Because I breathed it and the flowers.

You wept. You said,

‘There
is
goodness,

That from bayberry made modest candles

And rose jam from hips and haws.

And Blake talked English with the angels.'

And you wanted to make love to me,

Though I can't imagine how.”

When morning breaks, he takes

His first drink of water in a day.

Petite veille d'ivresse, sainte!

His orange fireball eye sees,

Dried yolk yellow like a slicker,

The faded fire hydrant

Pop from the grass like a bird's note,

And its black beak tweets

Me! Me!

 

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,

Colored like a calabash-and-meerschaum pipe bowl's

Warmed, matured body—

The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then.

I used to dream about her often,

In sheets she'd have to change the day after.

I was thirteen, had just been bar mitzvah.

My hero, once I'd read about him,

Was the emperor Hadrian; my villain, Bar Kokhba,

The Jew Hadrian had crushed out at Jerusalem:

Both in the
Cambridge Ancient History
's Hadrian chapter (1936

Edition), by some German. (The Olympics