Earlier Poems (6 page)

sane and refreshed— …

And my bright yellow spider hiding in the apricot leaves.

Just one more time. Only one—
the small rose of blood blooming in the syringe—
one to compel haunted speech to the lips,
sure. Some immense seconds pass. Dusk's
prow slowly glides right up Avenue B;
the young Schumann's two personalities
continue discussing each other
in the diary. Your eyes
move to the warning
on a pack of cigarettes—
good thing you're not pregnant!
Still no speech, but no pain either:
no New York,
nothing,
sweet.
You happen to know that you're home.
And how simple it was, and how smart
to come back: in the moon
on its oak branch
the owl slowly opens
its eyes like a just-severed head
that hears its name called out,
and spreads its wings
and disappears;
and the moth leaves the print of its lips on the glass, lights on the lamp's still-warm bulb, the napper's forehead, his hand, where it rests down the chair arm, fingers slowly opening.

Sicklemoon between thunderheads in the blue of four in the afternoon

And when the first star occurred to the sky— …

Why did one write
such things? Not
to describe them—
they don't need us to describe them.
But to utter them
into existence,

just as they
hokedat us into existence …

To give back to them
the existence perceiving them
bestows on us—

just to say them:

to say and feel said,
feel somehow at home here.

This time I dreamed I was writing a dream down

And later on that gray April morning—an out-of-the-house experience!—

the cemetery blanketed with robins

I held my shadow's hand (he leadeth me)

Hour when each human reports to the mirror

Leafprints in the sidewalk

unidentified flowering

lavender shrubs

in an otherwise black-and-white

landscape, I pass

through an evil rainbow

A pair of glasses found in a pile of dead leaves: one of the stations of my day

(Orders, orders, orders: yes, Your Absence—no, Your Nonexistence …)

And inevitable night again i a.m. leaves' sounds the empty moth still clinging to the screen

Shape of leaf mouth eye—the spider in the iris—

And the great trees rustle the moon staring into the sockets in the grass

And 2 o'clock streets filled with teenagers in fascist drag

And in five years you see them collecting at bus stops like dust

And still the hand will sleep in its glass ship— …

I took a long walk
that night in the rain.
It was fine.
Bareheaded, shirt open: in love
nobody gives a shit about the rain.
I suddenly realized that I would hitchhike
the
Go
or so miles into Kent—
it was so late
I could make it by dawn,
and see the leaf-light in late April
called your eyes. The evil
we would do
had not yet come. No one but me
knows what you were at that time, with
a loveliness to make men cry
out, haunting beyond beauty.
We had what everyone is dying
for lack of, and let it
finally just slip away.
I will never understand this.
I was at the time a relatively intelligent
person. Only
terrorstricken already
at what my life would be—that what I longed for most
would be exactly what I'd get
at the price, sooner or later, little by little,
of everything else,
every last fucking thing.
Yet that morning exists, it must,
it happened. And the years we had—
those almost endless summer afternoons and nights,
a solitary hawk sleeping on the wind, your
incandescent whiteness emerging from the water
in the moon, or snow
beginning, horizontally, to fall as you fall
asleep with your head on my shoulder while I drive …
where are they? They exist, the way the world will
when I'm dead. I won't be there
but another nineteen-year-old idiot will be
and to him I say: Don't do it!
But he will—blinded, spellbound, destroyed
by the search for something
he can never see or touch,
when all the while he holds it in his arms.

{for my friend Joseph Kahn: born ipso, drowned 1982
}

Walking the floor after midnight I leaf through your pharmacopoeia or a book on stars.

How I love the night.

It should always be
night, and the living with their TVs, vacuum cleaners
and giggling inanities
silenced.

With here and there a window lit a low golden mysterious light.

I love the night world,

the word night.
Book & door. Joseph. Death's haves
— …

I'm never going to get this right.

And I can't go on forming
and tasting your name
or biting down in blinding pain forever—no,

from now on I have entered

and live in our unspoken words.

And the space I took up in the world scarlessly closes like water.

I walk, neverendingly walk

hating the sleet

the odd million gray disgraced looks you will meet on the subways

the streets everything that will hurt you today …

As I have walked these after-midnight

streets so many

years, unwelcome and alone

stopping a minute at some frozen pay phone

gagged on my pride

and moved on

Moonset, dawn:

Konocti

Venus-lit greenish horizon

apples

shadow-dappled in the early wind…

It might have been, somehow

Not now

Eating fear, shitting fear, convulsed with tedium and horror every time I went

to touch a pen to paper
Crying

in a downtown porno theater

But in our own eyes we are never lost

Looking at the skyline, late
some see the site of triumphant
far-off celebrations
to which they weren't invited
some see a little light
left on for them
and some
the final abrupt unendurable radiance blooming

Local bar of deceased revelers

Special subway station for distinguished lunatics

Cold stars beyond the Charles,

ward of bandaged eyes that turn and stare in my direction as I pass

Bhck wind and distant lights

I prayed

that I might disappear

Unfather, unsay me I asked irreparably here

But why are we drawn walking at ni to certain unfamiliar solitary places

Why this interest in a stranger's lights Whose ghosts are we

What happened to our faces

The wind moves shwly, fingers

read my forehead

eyelids

lips

The constant sight
of what might have been
aged them
Their million mute
unnoticed acts of insubordination
and inconsequential
cruelty changed them—

Yellow window
in the blue dawn
lost is lost
and gone is gone but
be there
if I wake again, don't abandon me
defend me.

Konocti's summit
sunlit
on the other shore …

To sleep in the mountains
(when have I
ever slept) blissfully
sown

through an infinite imageless brightness—

inspected and forgotten by a grass-green dragonfly.

The hawk rises
into the sun;
the lizard goes testing the dust
with its tongue—

stationary
hour, above
the windless
blond and shadow of the hill.

And I am
here to say this,

my mysterious
privilege and joy.

I embarrass you, don't I— whining for change and making you quicken your pace; or worse staring as you pass by,

without the tact to disappear and die.

I don't understand any more
than you do. I only know
he stays here
like some huge wounded animal—
open the door and he will gaze at you and
linger Close the door and he will break it down

{in memory of Marguerite Young
}

Decay of a tone, decay of the sun

Green eyes unseen among the leaves

The reader's lips

the dreamer's lids

Moon dissolving under the tongue

Messenger from a word a noun with an imaginary corresponding entity in space

The human face about to come

Midnight's world-altering name

And someone gives birth to a child

And laboring someone gives death to himself

The objects in the room lit up with pain

No one loves them because they are ugly

They are ugly because no one loves them …

One of the racists of beauty

I feel three green voices

gazing at me—

My very existence inexpiable—

the gardener at the tomb.

—
the reality of the imagination
—
KEATS

In 4 o'clock in the morning insomnia's eeriest men's room—dropped in on while driving alone around town—after catching a glimpse of my face in the minutely blood-spattered mirror, suddenly into my mind, God knows from where, comes the vivid thought of transformations the face undergoes when it is crying: its ugliness. How ugly it is. When it ought to become beautiful to whoever looks on— not just any stranger's, but even the most beloved face grows ugly! How can this be? Aren't we most human when crying; and if we are most human, then aren't we approaching (we can only approach) a condition beyond what is human? I think the angels must look something like this, like somebody weeping—only
there
this expression is seen as one of great beauty and a sign of unsurpassable happiness. And yet
can one speak of the angel at all?
The angel is a word. This
sound of human breath exists:
thus to the mind rendering visible
a being. And whether this being
occupies a place in space
is irrelevant, of no concern
to the physical being crying alone
and the unsayable solitude
of a grief for which I would like to envision
an unseen companion without
whom—let him be a word,
a sob, a thing imagined—
we are the ones who do not really exist.

What do I care about walking erect,

the fingers freed
to clutch large sticks, the hand
to hide behind the back—

bared teeth
slowly learning to form
an expression of welcome and pleasure …

Man was born when an animal wept.

Going to enter the aged horizontal cellar door

(the threshing leaves, the greenish light of the approaching storm)

you suddenly notice you're opening the cover of an enormous book.

One that's twice as big as you are—

but you know all about that:

the groping descent alone in total darkness,

toward—what ?

You know what you're looking for, and you forget; and maybe you have no idea

yet. But you know something is down there, and a light you need to find,

before you can even begin to search.

And not to feel bad about dying. Not to take it so personally—

it is only

the force we exert all our lives

to exclude death from our thoughts which confronts us, when it does arrive,

as the horror of being excluded— … something like that, the Canadian wind

coming in off Lake Erie

rattling the windows, horizontal snow

appearing out of nowhere

across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.

The poem seeks not to depict a place but to become one—

synonymous

summer and loneliness …

Mute child-ghost
of yourself
at the screen door

Skirting such thick undulating underwater hair, the unseen

crevice-haunting eel, the handlike crab

and moon-dilated anemones, I remember

hunting the tremendous boulders' undersides—, how then

armed with these long knives we pried

the abalone's unrelenting

nursing from its stone.

1969

I have to sleep to think sometimes—
waking into sleep
where you find a world reversed
where muteness is speech, blindness
sight, deafness music
that haunts you alone, and that place
exists where the poem is not
written;
it is the wrong
word; where the need to write
is not.
And the tedious prose of the world vanishes
from its ruined page leaving nothing
but the effortlessness of a window
looking out on precisely what is, i.e.
the unsayable mystery
pronouncing itself;
text one has long sought to translate,
even if poorly, only to read it—
here for some moments
weirdly improved on.
Without wearing out one's knees
or gnashing of teeth
or pulling out of hair
or disappointment, or terror
or life darkened, permanently;
but with a return
to the original
gratitude:
as once at fifteen
for perhaps half an hour—
I remember and await

We can always be found
seated at a bar
the glass before us
empty, with our halos
of drunk flies—
or standing
in the dark across the street
from the Sacramento
Coroner's. (And my friend
we're all in there
floating along
the ceiling, tethered
to our laughing gas canisters.) We are
old people shopping,
next winter's ghosts,
the prostitute
in her mortician's makeup
strolling York Avenue at 3 a.m.,
the fellow in Atlantic City
furtively pawning a doll.
Quick suture,
lightning,
hush-finger—
cheap eeriness of wind chimes—
summer thunder
from a cloudless sky …
The abandoned abandon.
There are no adults.
You're dead,
but look who's talking.