Selected Poems, 1956-1968 Read online

  You restless bullets

  lost in swarms

  from undecided wars:

  fasten on

  these nude throats

  that need some

  decoration

  I've done my own work:

  I had 3 jewels

  no more

  and I have placed them

  on my choices

  jewels

  although they performed

  like bullets:

  an instant of ruby

  before the hands

  came up

  to stem the mess

  I 1 73

  And you over there

  my little acrobat:

  swing fast

  After me

  there is no care

  and the air

  is heavily armed

  and has

  the wildest aim

  T H E B I G W O R L D

  The big world will find out

  about this farm

  the big world will learn

  the details of what

  I worked out in the can

  And your curious life with me

  will be told so often

  that no one will believe

  you grew old

  • 74 I

  F R O N T L A W N

  The snow was falling

  over my penknife

  There was a movie

  in the fireplace

  The apples were wrapped

  in 8-year-old blond hair

  Starving and dirty

  the janitor's daughter never

  turned up in November

  to pee from her sweet crack

  on the gravel

  I'll go back one day

  when my cast is off

  Elm leaves are falling

  over my bow and arrow

  Candy is going bad

  and Boy Scout calendars

  are on fire

  My old mother

  sits in her Cadillac

  laughing her Danube laugh

  as I tell her that we own

  all the worms

  under our front lawn

  Rust rust rust

  in the engines of love and time

  I 175

  K E R E N S K Y

  My friend walks through our city this winter night,

  fur-hatted, whistling, anti-mediterranean,

  stricken with seeing Eternity in all that is seasonal.

  He is the Kerensky of our Circle

  always about to chair the last official meeting

  before the pros take over, they of the pure smiling eyes

  trained only for Form.

  He knows there are no measures to guarantee

  the Revolution, or to preserve the row of muscular icicles

  which will chart Winter's decline like a graph.

  There is nothing for him to do but preside

  over the last official meeting.

  It will all come round again: the heartsick teachers

  who make too much of poetry, their students

  who refuse to suffer, the cache of rilles in the lawyer's attic:

  and then the magic, the So-year comet touching

  the sturdiest houses. The Elite Corps commits suicide

  in the tennis-ball basement. Poets ride buses free.

  The General insists on a popularity poll. Troops study satire.

  A strange public generosity prevails.

  Only too well he knows the tiny moment when

  everything is possible, when pride is loved, beauty held

  in common, like having an exquisite sister,

  and a man gives away his death like a piece of advice.

  Our Kerensky has waited for these moments

  over a table in a rented room

  when poems grew like butterflies on the garbage of his life.

  How many times? The sad answer is: they can be counted.

  Possible and brief: this is his vision of Revolution.

  Who will parade the shell today?

  Who will kill in the name

  of the husk? Who will write a Law to raise the corpse

  176 I

  which cries now only for weeds and excrement?

  See him walk the streets, the last guard, the only idler

  on the square. He must keep the wreck of the Revolution

  the debris of public beauty

  from the pure smiling eyes of the trained visionaries

  who need our daily lives perfect.

  The soft snow begins to honour him with epaulets, and

  to provoke the animal past of his fur hat. He wears a death,

  but he allows the snow, like an ultimate answer, to forgive

  him, just for this jewelled moment of his coronation. The

  carved gargoyles of the City Hall receive the snow as bibs

  beneath their drooling lips. How they resemble the men of

  profane vision, the same greed, the same intensity as they

  who whip their minds to recall an ancient lucky orgasm,

  yes, yes, he knows that deadly concentration, they are the

  founders, they are the bankers-of History! He rests in his

  walk as they consume of the generous night everything that

  he does not need.

  I 177

  A N O T H E R N I G H T W I T H

  T E L E S C O P E

  Come back to me

  brutal empty room

  Thin Byzantine face

  preside over this new fast

  I am broken with easy grace

  Let me be neither

  father nor child

  but one who spins

  on an eternal unimportant loom

  patterns of wars and grass

  which do not last the night

  I know the stars

  are wild as dust

  and wait for no man's discipline

  but as they wheel

  from sky to sky they rake

  our lives with pins of light

  IV / Parasites of Heaven

  T H E N I G H T M A R E S D O N O T S U D D E N L Y

  The nightmares do not suddenly

  develop happy endings

  I merely step out of them

  as a live-year-old scientist

  leaves the room

  where he has dissected an alarm clock

  Love wears out

  like overused mirrors unsilvering

  and parts of your faces

  make room for the wall behind

  If terror needs my round green eyes

  for a masterpiece

  let it lure them with nude keyholes

  mounted on an egg

  And should Love decide

  I am not the one

  to stand scratching his head

  wondering what wall to lean on

  send King Farouk to argue

  or come to me dressed as a fast

  A C R O S S D I D N ' T F A L L O N M E

  A cross didn't fall on me

  when I went for hot-dogs

  and the all-night Greek

  slave in the Silver Gameland

  didn't think I was his brother

  Love me because nothing happens

  I believe the rain will not

  make me feel like a feather

  when it comes tonight after

  the streetcars have stopped

  because my size is definite

  Love me because nothing happens

  Do you have any idea how

  many movies I had to watch

  before I knew surely

  that I would love you

  when the lights woke up

  Love me because nothing happens

  Here is a headline July 14

  in the city of Montreal

  Intervention decisive de Pearson

  a Ia conference du Commonwealth

  That was yesterday

  Love me because nothing h
appens

  Stars and stars and stars

  keep it to themselves

  Have you ever noticed how private

  a wet tree is

  a curtain of razor blades

  Love me because nothing happens

  Why should I be alone

  if what I say is true

  I confess I mean to find

  a passage or forge a passport

  or talk a new language

  Love me because nothing happens

  I confess I meant to grow

  wings and lose my mind

  I confess that I've

  forgotten what for

  Why wings and a lost mind

  Love me because nothing happens

  S O Y O U ' R E T H E K I N D O F V E G E T A R I A N

  So you're the kind of vegetarian

  that only eats roses

  Is that what you mean

  with your Beautiful Losers

  N O T H I N G H A S B E E N B R O K E N

  Nothing has been broken

  though one of the links of the chain

  is a blue butterfly

  Here he was attacked

  They smiled as they came and retired

  baffled with blue dust

  The banks so familiar with metal

  they made for the wings

  The thick vaults fluttered

  The pretty girls advanced

  their fingers cupped

  They bled from the mouth as though struck

  The jury asked for pity

  and touched and were electrocuted

  by the blue antennae

  A thrust at any link

  might have brought him down

  but each of you aimed at the blue butterfly

  H E R E W E A R E A T T H E W I N D O W

  Here we are at the window. Great unbound sheaves of

  rain wandering across the mountain, parades of wind and

  driven silver grass. So long I've tried to give a name to

  freedom, today my freedom lost its name, like a student's

  room travelling into the morning with its lights still on.

  Every act has its own style of freedom, whatever that means.

  Now I'm commanded to think of weeds, to worship the

  strong weeds that grew through the night, green and wet,

  the white thread roots taking lottery orders from the coils

  of brain mud, the permeable surface of the world. Did you

  know that the brain developed out of a fold in the epidermis? Did you? Falling ribbons of silk, the length of rivers, cross the face of the mountain, systems of grass and cable.

  Freedom lost its name to the style with which things happen.

  The straight trees, the spools of weed, the travelling skeins

  of rain floating through the folds of the mountain-here

  we are at the window. Are you ready now? Have I dismissed

  myself? May I fire from the hip? Brothers, each at your

  window, we are the style of so much passion, we are the

  order of style, we are pure style called to delight a fold of

  the sky.

  C L E A N A S T H E G R A S S F R O M W H I C H

  Clean as the grass from which

  the sun has burned the little dew

  I come to this page

  in the not so early morning

  with a picture of him

  whom I could not be for long

  not wanting to return or begin

  again the idolatry of terror

  He was burned away from me

  by needles by ashes

  by various shames I

  engineered against his innocence

  by documenting the love of one

  who gathered my first songs,

  and gave her body to my wandering

  With a picture of him

  grooming her thighs for a journey

  with a picture of him

  buying her a staring peacock feather

  with a picture of him

  knighted by her smile her soft fatigue

  I begin the hopeless formula

  she already had the gold from

  Live for him huge black eyes

  He never understood their purity

  or how they watched him prepare

  to ditch the early songs and say goodbye

  Sleep beside him uncaptured darling

  while I fold into a kite

  1 86 1

  the long evenings he scratched with

  experiments the empty dazzling mornings

  that forbid me to recall your name

  With a picture of him

  standing by the window while she slept

  with a picture of him

  wondering what adventure is

  wondering what cruelty is

  with a picture of him

  waking her with an angry kiss

  leading her body into use and time

  I bargain with the fire

  which must ignore the both of them

  W H E N I P A I D T H E S U N T O R U N

  When I paid the sun to run

  It ran and I sat down and cried

  The sun I spent my money on

  Went round and round inside

  The world all at once

  Charged with insignificance

  I S E E Y O U O N A G R E E K M A T T R E S S

  I see you on a Greek mattress

  reading the Book of Changes,

  Lebanese candy in the air.

  On the whitewashed wall I see

  you raise another hexagram

  for the same old question:

  how can you be free?

  I see you cleaning your pipe

  with the hairpin

  of somebody's innocent night.

  I see the plastic Evil Eye

  pinned to your underwear.

  Once again you throw the pennies,

  once again you read

  how the pieces of the world

  have changed around your question.

  Did you get to the Himalayas?

  Did you visit that monk in New Jersey?

  I never answered any of your letters.

  Oh Steve, do you remember me?

  188 1

  S U Z A N N E W E A R S A L E A T H E R C O A T

  Suzanne wears a leather coat.

  Her legs are insured by many burnt bridges.

  Her calves are full as spinnakers

  in a clean race, hard from following music

  beyond the maps of any audience.

  Suzanne wears a leather coat

  because she is not a civilian.

  She never walks casually down Ste Catherine

  because with every step she must redeem

  the clubfoot crowds and stalk the field

  of huge hail-stones that never melted,

  I mean the cemetery.

  Stand upl standi

  Suzanne is walking by.

  She wears a leather coat. She won't stop

  to bandage the fractures she walks between.

  She must not stop, she must not

  carry money.

  Many are the workers in charity.

  Few serve the lilac,

  few heal with mist.

  Suzanne wears a leather coat.

  Her breasts yearn for marble.

  The traffic halts: people fall out

  of their cars. None of their most drooling

  I I8g

  thoughts are wild enough

  to build the ant-full crystal city

  she would splinter with the tone of her step.

  O N E N I G H T I B U R N E D T H E H O U S E

  I L O V E D

  One night I burned the house I loved,

  It lit a perfect ring

  In which I saw .�orne weeds and stone

  Beyond-not anything.

  Certain creatures of the air

  Frightened by the night,
/>   They came to see the world again

  And perished in the light.

  Now I saii from sky to sky

  And all the blackness sings

  Against the boat that I have made

  Of mutilated wings.

  Igo I

  T W O W E N T T O S L E E P

  Two went to sleep

  Two went to sleep

  almost every night

  every sleep went together

  one dreamed of mud

  wandering away

  one dreamed of Asia

  from an operating table

  visiting a zeppelin

  one dreamed of grass

  visiting Nijinsky

  one dreamed of spokes

  Two went to sleep

  one bargained nicely

  one dreamed of ribs

  one was a snowman

  one dreamed of senators

  one counted medicine

  Two went to sleep

  one tasted pencils

  two travellers

  one was a child

  The long marriage

  one was a traitor

  in the dark

  visiting heavy industry

  The sleep was old

  visiting the family

  the travellers were old

  Two went to sleep

  one dreamed of oranges

  none could foretell

  one dreamed of Carthage

  one went with baskets

  Two friends asleep

  one took a ledger

  years locked in travel

  one night happy

  Good night my darling

  one night in terror

  as the dreams waved goodbye Love could not bind them

  one travelled lightly

  Fear could not either

  one walked through water

  they went unconnected

  visiting a chess game

  they never knew where

  visiting a booth

  always returning

  always returning

  to wait out the day

  to wait out the day

  parting with kissing

  One carried matches

  parting with yawns

  one climbed a beehive

  visiting Death till

  one sold an earphone

  they wore out their welcome

  one shot a German

  visiting Death till

  the right disguise worked

  I N T H E B I B L E G E N E R A T I O N S P A S S . . .

  In the Bible generations pass in a paragraph, a betrayal

  . is disposed of in a phrase, the creation of the world consumes a page. I could never pick the important dynasty out of a multitude, you must have your forehead shining

  to do that, or to choose out of the snarled network of daily

  evidence the denials and the loyalties. Who can choose what

  olive tree the story will need to shade its lovers, what tree

  out of the huge orchard will give them the particular view

  of branches and sky which will unleash their kisses. Only