Parasites of Heaven Read online

  Or will I bind the roots

  across my head and chest

  and see the stars as heaven’s warts

  visiting the sinner’s flesh?

  1957

  I wonder if my brother will ever read this. He would no doubt repudiate it, gently I hope, he would say perhaps the sea is all the things you’ve said, dream machine, a glass eye and so forth, but even if it’s true it’s better left unsaid. Now I could tell him something which I never knew when I lived so close to him, that it is a luxury, this being able to leave things unsaid, a luxury enjoyed by very few. Children of the wind and water need not elaborate on what their blood knows, but how many can command this economy, how many more must scratch and paw the world in a thousand different ways just to establish the slightest connection with their true lives. Heroes and near-heroes, anointed children aimed at their waiting constellations, they may disdain to implore the horizontal world with words and organizing metaphors, but I do not have their balance, how many do, I am not aimed at anything, I am not about to ascend toward my glory, so I must blunder among my tetherings, I must bargain for what love I’ll get, outside my brief particular story no passion will unfold me, no particular has claimed me so I must indulge myself in the seedy politics of the general, and cry at gods to prove gods unreal, just as my brother and I used to cloud windowpanes with our breath so that we could draw on them with our fingers. He drew profiles for which I designed complicated eyes, and no one asks you to decide which of our efforts was the more significant.

  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?

  1963

  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 up! stand!

  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

  thoughts are wild enough

  to build the ant-full crystal city

  she would splinter with the tone of her step.

  1963

  Desperate sexual admirals

  have captured Ste Catherine Street

  In my naked pyjamas

  I led them through the secret pass

  Shelves of staircase people

  feed their transistors

  They have let the night into

  their open shirts

  three nipples at a time

  And who lit that black star

  with profound inflammable juices

  and tuned my backbone

  to a high wire moan

  And listen everybody

  just whose side am I on

  Steered by the sticky dreams

  of hairsome cabinboys

  the boats slip through the rosejam night

  into houses into white beds

  Helen will leave her family tonight

  She will climb away

  for the sake of love only

  My backbone whines like a siren

  but nobody moves

  The black star has sunk its spokes

  it controls us like a sail

  Lifetime staircase people

  we’re drifting together

  There’s nothing in store

  for the doomed armada of wooden steps

  steaming in the sweet black fire

  of her guilt her promises

  her royal raw impatience

  July, 1964

  Nancy lies in London grass

  and George in Marco Polo’s Pass

  Leonard hasn’t been the same

  since he wandered from his name

  Michael slowly dips his toe

  in bathtubs filled with Turkish snow

  Robert always loves to tell

  how he became invisible

  And all my friends are fast asleep

  in places that are high and steep

  their bodies torn on crosses

  that their visions meant to leap

  And in between their dreams they hate

  the company they keep

  1966

  You broke the thin highway

  where I drove drunk

  in a souped-up tank

  broke it

  with your iron hairpin

  Do you ever wonder

  what these forests

  are doing under my wheels

  Crash crash the trees

  sing as they fall

  scraping against each other

  like the hairy legs of crickets

  Where was I going when

  you snapped it

  like a thread in mother’s teeth

  I’ll never know

  Crash crash sing the trees

  What a big forest

  What a great tank

  What strange pieces of a highway

  snarled in my treads

  1963

  Two went to sleep

  almost every night

  one dreamed of mud

  one dreamed of Asia

  visiting a zeppelin

  visiting Nijinsky

  Two went to sleep

  one dreamed of ribs

  one dreamed of senators

  Two went to sleep

  two travellers

  The long marriage

  in the dark

  The sleep was old

  the travellers were old

  one dreamed of oranges

  one dreamed of Carthage

  Two friends asleep

  years locked in travel

  Goodnight my darling

  as the dreams waved goodbye

  one travelled lightly

  one walked through water

  visiting a chessgame

  visiting a booth

  always returning

  to wait out the day

  One carried matches

  one climbed a beehive

  one sold an earphone

  one shot a German

  Two went to sleep

  every sleep went together

  wandering away

  from an operating table

  one dreamed of grass

  one dreamed of spokes

  one bargained nicely

  one was a snowman

  one counted medicine

  one tasted pencils

  one was a child

  o
ne was a traitor

  visiting heavy industry

  visiting the family

  Two went to sleep

  none could foretell

  one went with baskets

  one took a ledger

  one night happy

  one night in terror

  Love could not bind them

  Fear could not either

  they went unconnected

  they never knew where

  always returning

  to wait out the day

  parting with kissing

  parting with yawns

  visiting Death til

  they wore out their welcome

  visiting Death til

  the right disguise worked

  1964

  What did I do with my breath

  before your lies appointed me

  detective of love?

  Did I smell wine in little restaurants?

  Did I bend over gardens?

  Did I know where I was?

  How many times did one of my friends

  fall asleep his lips bright

  with your slippery perfume?

  Tell me how many times exactly

  or I can’t catch my breath.

  Did I used to open the window

  and think about the lilacs?

  Did I detect hot-dogs

  on St Lawrence Boulevard?

  Did I like books?

  Did I have a career?

  How many times in what holes

  exactly did you unfurl his

  swimming flag of tiny stars?

  I want to catch my breath

  I want my old hay fever.

  Did I have leisure time

  before I started to reconstruct

  every one of your nights?

  Did I yawn?

  Did I take walks without

  looking for bodies?

  Did I believe conversation?

  Was music as necessary?

  Did I love Euclid?

  Was the air big?

  Did I like surprises?

  What did I do with my life before

  your lies leaked the legend

  of the fountain of s–t

  which I had to see for myself?

  Did I sleep much?

  Was there a menu tomorrow?

  Did we have a dog?

  Were horror movies fun?

  Was I a freedom-rider

  was I approximately a socialist

  was I a prince in Canada

  in the days before I followed

  you and one of my friends?

  Exactly where did you feel nothing?

  Where are his eyes continuing?

  How does it all continue?

  Are reasons nice?

  Is there any air in

  the observation tower?

  Does time fumigate?

  Does detective of love

  resign ever is detective bribed

  with a huge sunset?

  Are there lies which don’t waste?

  What did I do often in

  the orchard with your name and

  a great bouquet of raw pencils?

  July 12, 1964

  I met Doc Dog The Poker Hound

  in a clean cafeteria

  All the farms of the country

  were dark at that hour

  I thought of wood and sleeping people

  as we slurped the coffee

  What with the tile and neon

  it was like some sidewalk cafe at noon

  in a European capital city

  Doc Dog saw my face get sloppy

  with a few old recollections

  of farmhouses and foreign cities

  being the traveller that I am

  and he said

  One of these days

  I’m going to open up a cafeteria

  that serves coffee in thin cups

  bone thin China cups

  What we lose in cups we make up

  in gratitude

  You have a big mouth you Poker Hound

  Where the hell are you

  I’ve been here for twenty years

  and I never heard of you again

  or your famous cafeteria

  Found once again shamelessly ignoring the swans who inflame the spectators on the shores of American rivers; found once again allowing the juicy contract to expire because the telephone has a magic correspondence with my tapeworm; found once again leaving the garlanded manhood in danger of long official repose while it is groomed for marble in seedily historic back rooms; found once again humiliating the bank clerk with eye-to-eye wrestling, art dogma, lives that loaf and stare, and other stage whispers of genius; found once again the chosen object of heavenly longing such as can ambush a hermit in a forest with visions of a busy parking lot; found once again smelling mothball sweaters, titling home movies, untangling Victorian salmon rods, fanatically convinced that a world of sporty order is just around the corner; found once again planning the ideal lonely year which waits like first flesh love on a calendar of third choices; found once again hovering like a twine-eating kite over hands that feed me, verbose under the influence of astrology; found once again selling out to accessible local purity while Pentagon Tiffany evil alone can guarantee my power; found once again trusting that my friends grew up in Eden and will not harm me when at last I am armourless and absolutely silent; found once again at the very beginning, veteran of several useless ordeals, prophetic but not seminal, the purist for the masses of tomorrow; found once again sweetening life which I have abandoned, like a fired zoo-keeper sneaking peanuts to publicized sodomized elephants; found once again flaunting the rainbow which demonstrates that I am permitted only that which I urgently need; found once again cleansing my tongue of all possibilities of all possibilities but my perfect one.

  1964

  The stars turn their noble stories,

  turn their heroes upside-down;

  the moon, obsessed calm moth

  pursues its private candle past the dawn—

  All these marvels happen

  while I keep silent on my love

  and say nothing for her beauty.

  How can I use the gull’s perfect orbit

  round and round the hidden fish,

  is there something to do as the sun

  seizes and hardens the ridge of rocks?

  Distant face, like an icon’s

  disciplined to tenderness,

  my silence, it is for you?

  May I survey the emptiness

  that serves as field for the complete embrace?

  1960

  When I hear you sing

  Solomon

  animal throat, eyes beaming

  sex and wisdom

  My hands ache from

  I left blood on the doors of my home

  Solomon

  I am very alone from aiming songs

  at G-d for

  I thought that beside me there was no one

  Solomon

  My secret fell on a language

  It might have fallen like rust

  on a tractor

  It might have fallen on a trip

  like manna

  It fell like a drunk

  into an elephant trap

  Some of the spikes whispered:

  Secrets do not bleed

  Some of the spikes whispered:

  Secrets which do not bleed

  are selfish.

  1964

  A goldfish died in a cloudy bowl

  which I left on the pulpit while I—

  never mind: my absence was not

  justified.

  Belly up, soggy as wet

  Kleenex, the wrong fins soft.

  Greed purifies in the way

  it burns the world,

  balancing wish with loss until

  we own nothing but our perfect longing.

  The Fish Strikes Again

  with its tiny crosses,

  its mist
y sperm ocean past.

  1964

  O G-d as I called you before

  when I was my father’s father

  It is thy world again

  O G-d you are a souvenir of Lourdes

  I am not ashamed to be a tourist

  in the milky world

  You are a plastic seashell

  in which I hear a honeymoon

  I am a souvenir of creation

  You sank like a fish hook

  through the layered mirrors of self love

  O g-d change your name in my heart

  Buy me buy me cries

  the April sun bomb

  Buy me cries the wind coming

  in uneven kisses as the white summer

  wears it to shreds

  And me and me cry the khaki lovers

  who saunter by in a game of shove and trip

  You send me away with a vision of tunnels

  that I can shake for snow and all aboard

  Come back by a longer route

  the thousand year dash

  You beg me hoarsely

  in a voice that sounds too much like books

  Child rest

  and that is a souvenir

  of where you will not call me back from

  1965

  Here was the Harbour, crowded with white ships, the gulls showing how much silver there was in the sunlight as they fell out of the sky like handfuls of polished rice, or climbed in smoky squadrons at the sun until their wings turned silver and they descended again to astonish the floating garbage.

  Who doesn’t give his heart to things that soar, kites or jet planes or a sharp distant sail? I tried to give more than my heart, I tried to yield my loathing, my ambition, all my tiny sicknesses, I tried to give away a new desire which I had hardly suspected but which was growing violently in the metal sunlight, like a germ culture suddenly surrounded by its own ideal conditions.

  The gulls continued their cold acrobatics and refused to bear the smudges of my uneasiness. I think that more than hunger the sky was their master, they performed for the endless blue sky, confetti for some vast ceremony, an eternal wedding.

  Give what you want to the gulls, the sky is not satisfied with the smudges of your character. It demands stories; of men the sky demands all manner of stories, entertainments, embroideries, just as it does of its stars and constellations. The sky does not care for this trait or that affliction, it wants the whole man lost in his story, abandoned in the mechanics of action, touching his fellows, leaving them, hunting the steps, dancing the old circles. The sky wants diagrams of our lives, it stores them like little curious wrist-watches, they are our wedding gifts.