The Roominghouse Madrigals (9 page)

 

I drive my car

through a valley

where

(very oddly)

young girls sit on fencerails

showing impartial leg and

haunch

in butterglory sun,

young girls painting

cows and

trees in heat

painting

old farms that sit like

pools of impossibility

on unplanted ground,

ground as still and insane

as the weathervanes

stuck northwest

in the degenerate air;

I drive on

with the girls and their brushes and

their taffy bodies stuck inside my

head like

toothache,

and I get out

much farther down the road

walk into a peeling white cafe

and am handed water in a glass as

thick as a

lip, and

4 people sit

eating,

eyes obsessed with molecules of no

urgency;

I order a veal cutlet and the

waitress walks away

trussed in white flat linen

and I sit and watch and wait

so disattached I wish I could

cry or curse or break the water glass;

instead I pour cream into the

coffee

I think of the girls and the cows,

stir the cream with a damaged and

apologetic

tinkle

then decide

not to think or feel anymore

that day.

 

 

death wants more death, and its webs are full:

I remember my father’s garage, how child-like

I would brush the corpses of flies

from the windows they had thought were escape—

their sticky, ugly, vibrant bodies

shouting like dumb crazy dogs against the glass

only to spin and flit

in that second larger than hell or heaven

onto the edge of the ledge,

and then the spider from his dank hole

nervous and exposed

the puff of body swelling

hanging there

not really quite knowing,

and then
knowing
—

something sending it down its string,

the wet web,

toward the weak shield of buzzing,

the pulsing;

a last desperate moving hair-leg

there against the glass

there alive in the sun,

spun in white;

 

 

and almost like love:

the closing over,

the first hushed spider-sucking:

filling its sack

upon this thing that lived;

crouching there upon its back

drawing its certain blood

as the world goes by outside

and my temples scream

and I hurl the broom against them:

the spider dull with spider-anger

still thinking of its prey

and waving an amazed broken leg;

the fly very still,

a dirty speck stranded to straw;

I shake the killer loose

and he walks lame and peeved

towards some dark corner

but I intercept his dawdling

his crawling like some broken hero,

and the straws smash his legs

now waving

above his head

and looking

looking for the enemy

and somehow valiant,

dying without apparent pain

simply crawling backward

piece by piece

leaving nothing there

until at last the red gut-sack splashes

its secrets,

and I run child-like

with God’s anger a step behind,

back to simple sunlight,

wondering

as the world goes by

with curled smile

if anyone else

saw or sensed my crime.

 

 

talking of death

is like talking of

money—

we neither know the

price or the

worth,

yet looking down at my hands

I can guess

a little.

 

 

man’s made for guessing and for

failure

and woman

for the rest.

 

 

when the time comes

I hope I can remember

eating a pear.

 

 

we are sick now

with so many dead

dogs

skulls

armies

flowers

continents.

 

 

there is a fight—

 

 

this is it:

against the mechanics

of the thing.

 

 

eat a good pear today

so tomorrow

you can

remember

it.

 

 

in a national magazine of repute

(yes, I was reading it)

I saw a photograph of lions

crossing a street

in some village

and taking their time;

that’s the way

it should be

and some day when

they turn out the lights

and the whole thing’s over,

I’ll be sitting here

in the chalky smoke

thinking of those 10 damned

(yes, I counted them)

lions

blocking traffic

while the roses bloomed.

we all ought to

do that

now

while there’s

t

i

m

e.

 

 

lonely as a dry and used orchard

spread over the earth

for use and surrender.

 

 

shot down like an ex-pug selling

dailies on the corner.

 

 

taken by tears like

an aging chorus girl

who has gotten her last check.

 

 

a hanky is in order your lord your

worship.

 

 

the blackbirds are rough today

like

ingrown toenails

in an overnight

jail—

wine wine whine,

the blackbirds run around and

fly around

harping about

Spanish melodies and bones.

 

 

and everywhere is

nowhere—

the dream is as bad as

flapjacks and flat tires:

 

 

why do we go on

with our minds and

pockets full of

dust

like a bad boy just out of

school—

you tell

me,

you who were a hero in some

revolution

you who teach children

you who drink with calmness

you who own large homes

and walk in gardens

you who have killed a man and own a

beautiful wife

you tell me

why I am on fire like old dry

garbage.

 

 

we might surely have some interesting

correspondence.

it will keep the mailman busy.

and the butterflies and ants and bridges and

cemeteries

the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics

will still go on a

while

until we run out of stamps

and/or

ideas.

 

 

don’t be ashamed of

anything; I guess God meant it all

like

locks on

doors.

 

 

it is quite easy to appear modern

while in reality being the biggest damnfool

            ever born;

I know: I have gotten away with some awful stuff

but not nearly such awful pot as I read in the journals;

I have an honesty self-born of whores and hospitals

that will not allow me to pretend to be

something which I am not—

which is a double failure: the failure of people

in poetry

and the failure of people

in life.

and when you fail in poetry

you fail life,

and when you fail life

you were never born

no matter what the statistics

or what your mother named you.

 

 

the grandstands are crowded with the dead

screaming for a winner

wanting a number to carry them over

into living,

but it is not as easy as that—

just as with the poem:

if you are dead

you might as well be buried

and throw the typewriter away

and stop fooling with

poems horses women life:

you are cluttering up

the exits—

so get out fast

and desist from the

precious few

pages.

 

 

I own the ticks on a horse

I own his belly and balls

I own this

the way his eyes roll

the way he eats hay

and shits and

stands up asleep

 

 

he is mine

this machine

like a blue train I used to play with

when my hands were smaller

and my mind better

 

 

I own this horse,

someday I will ride my horse

down all the streets

past the trees we will go

up the mountain

down the valley

 

 

ticks and eyes and balls

the both of us

we will go to where kings eat

dandelions

in the giant sea

where thinking is not terror

where eyes do not go out

like Saturday night children

 

 

the horse I own and the myself I own

will become blue and nice and clean

again

 

 

and I will get off and

wait for you.

 

 

I have lived in England

and I have lived in hell,

but perhaps there is nothing quite so horrible

as picking up the latest literary review

filled with the latest literary darlings;

K. teaches at L.; M. has a second volume of

poems coming out; O. has been published

in the leading journals; S. has won a

scholarship to Paris—

 

 

and you hold the pages up

to the overhead light

and still

      nothing comes through.

 

 

it is a puzzle indeed,

far more a puzzle than when a 90-to-one shot

leaps through at the last moment

along the rail.

 

 

a horse can live.

 

 

and, indeed, do you expect to find

poetry

in a poetry review?

 

 

things are not that

simple.