Selected Poems, 1956-1968 Page 11
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,
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