Flowers for Hitler Read online

  And knowing is enough

  for mountains such as these

  where nothing long remains

  houses walls or trees

  FINALLY I CALLED

  Finally I called the people I didn’t want to hear from

  After the third ring I said

  I’ll let it ring five more times then what will I do

  The telephone is a fine instrument

  but I never learned to work it very well

  Five more rings and I’ll put the receiver down

  I know where it goes I know that much

  The telephone was black with silver rims

  The booth was cozier than the drugstore

  There were a lot of creams and scissors and tubes

  I needed for my body

  I was interested in many coughdrops

  I believe the drugstore keeper hated

  his telephone and people like me

  who ask for change so politely

  I decided to keep to the same street

  and go into the fourth drugstore

  and call them again

  STYLE

  I don’t believe the radio stations

  of Russia and America

  but I like the music and I like

  the solemn European voices announcing jazz

  I don’t believe opium or money

  though they’re hard to get

  and punished with long sentences

  I don’t believe love

  in the midst of my slavery I

  do not believe

  I am a man sitting in a house

  on a treeless Argolic island

  I will forget the grass of my mother’s lawn

  I know I will

  I will forget the old telephone number

  Fitzroy seven eight two oh

  I will forget my style

  I will have no style

  I hear a thousand miles of hungry static

  and the old clear water eating rocks

  I hear the bells of mules eating

  I hear the flowers eating the night

  under their folds

  Now a rooster with a razor

  plants the haemophilia gash across

  the soft black sky

  and now I know for certain

  I will forget my style

  Perhaps a mind will open in this world

  perhaps a heart will catch rain

  Nothing will heal and nothing will freeze

  but perhaps a heart will catch rain

  America will have no style

  Russia will have no style

  It is happening in the twenty eighth year

  of my attention

  I don’t know what will become

  of the mules with their lady eyes

  or the old clear water

  or the giant rooster

  The early morning greedy radio eats

  the governments one by one the languages

  the poppy fields one by one

  Beyond the numbered band

  a silence develops for every style

  for the style I laboured on

  an external silence like the space

  between insects in a swarm

  electric unremembering

  and it is aimed at us

  (I am sleepy and frightened)

  it makes toward me brothers

  GOEBBELS ABANDONS HIS NOVEL AND JOINS THE PARTY

  His last love poem

  broke in the harbour

  where swearing blondes

  loaded scrap

  into rusted submarines.

  Out in the sun

  he was surprised

  to find himself lustless

  as a wheel.

  More simple than money

  he sat in some spilled salt

  and wondered if he would find again

  the scars of lampposts

  ulcers of wrought iron fence.

  He remembered perfectly

  how he sprung

  his father’s heart attack

  and left his mother

  in a pit

  memory white from loss of guilt.

  Precision in the sun

  the elevators

  the pieces of iron

  broke whatever thous

  his pain had left

  like a whistle breaks

  a gang of sweating men.

  Ready to join the world

  yes yes ready to marry

  convinced pain a matter of choice

  a Doctor of Reason

  he began to count the ships

  decorate the men.

  Will dreams threaten

  this discipline

  will favourite hair favourite thighs

  last life’s sweepstake winners

  drive him to adventurous cafés?

  Ah my darling pupils

  do you think there exists a hand

  so bestial in beauty so ruthless

  that can switch off

  his religious electric exlax light?

  WHY COMMANDS ARE OBEYED

  My father pulls the curtains: the Mother Goose wallpaper goes black. He insists the spaghetti is snakes and the bench a sheer cliff.

  “Then why lead me, Father, if they are true snakes, if it is a sheer cliff?”

  “Higher! Be brave!”

  “But I was brave outside; yesterday, outside, I was very brave.”

  “That? That was no ordeal. This is the ordeal, this familiar room where I say the bench is dangerous.”

  “It’s true!” I shouted twenty years later, pulling him out of his dirty bed. “Poor little Father, you told me true.”

  “Let me be. I am an old Father.”

  “No! Lift up thy nose. The window is made of axes. What is that grey matter in the ashtrays? Not from cigarettes, I’ll bet. The living room is a case for relics!”

  “Must I look?”

  “I’ll say you must. One of your young, hardly remembered legs is lodged between the pillows of the chesterfield, decaying like food between teeth. This room is a case for stinking relics!”

  Yes, yes, we wept down the Turkish carpet, entangled in the great, bloodwarm, family embrace, reconciled as the old story unfolded.

  It happens to everyone. For those with eyes, who know in their hearts that terror is mutual, then this hard community has a beauty of its own.

  Once upon a time my father pulls the curtains: the Mother Goose wallpaper goes black it began. We heard it in each other’s arms.

  IT USES US!

  Come upon this heap

  exposed to camera leer:

  would you snatch a skull

  for midnight wine, my dear?

  Can you wear a cape

  claim these burned for you

  or is this death unusable

  alien and new?

  In our leaders’ faces

  (albeit they deplore

  the past) can you read how

  they love Freedom more?

  In my own mirror

  their eyes beam at me:

  my face is theirs, my eyes

  burnt and free.

  Now you and I are mounted

  on this heap, my dear:

  from this height we thrill

  as boundaries disappear.

  Kiss me with your teeth.

  All things can be done

  whisper museum ovens of

  a war that Freedom won.

  THE FIRST MURDER

  I knew it never happened

  There was no murder in the field

  The grass wasn’t red

  The grass was green

  I knew it never happened

  I’ve come home tired

  My boots are streaked with filth

  What good to preach

  it never happened

  to the bodies murdered in the field

  Tell the truth I’ve smoked myself

  into love this innocent night

  It n
ever happened

  It never happened

  There was no murder in the field

  There was a house on the field

  The field itself was large and empty

  It was night

  It was dead of night

  There were lights in the little windows

  MY TEACHER IS DYING

  Martha they say you are gentle

  No doubt you labour at it

  Why is it I see you

  leaping into unmade beds

  strangling the telephone

  Why is it I see you

  hiding your dirty nylons

  in the fireplace

  Martha talk to me

  My teacher is dying

  His laugh is already dead

  that put cartilage

  between the bony facts

  Now they rattle loud

  Martha talk to me

  Mountain Street is dying

  Apartment fifteen is dying

  Apartment seven and eight are dying

  All the rent is dying

  Martha talk to me

  I wanted all the dancers’ bodies

  to inhabit like his old classroom

  where everything that happened

  was tender and important

  Martha talk to me

  Toss out the fake Jap silence

  Scream in my kitchen

  logarithms laundry lists anything

  Talk to me

  My radio is falling to pieces

  My betrayals are so fresh

  they still come with explanations

  Martha talk to me

  What sordid parable

  do you teach by sleeping

  Talk to me

  for my teacher is dying

  The cars are parked

  on both sides of the street

  some facing north

  some facing south

  I draw no conclusions

  Martha talk to me

  I could burn my desk

  when I think how perfect we are

  you asleep me finishing

  the last of the Saint Emilion

  Talk to me gentle Martha

  dreaming of percussions massacres

  hair pinned to the ceiling

  I’ll keep your secret

  Let’s tell the milkman

  we have decided

  to marry our rooms

  MONTREAL 1964

  Can someone turn off the noise?

  Pearls rising on the breath of her breasts

  grind like sharpening stones:

  my fingernails wail as they grow their fraction

  I think they want to be claws:

  the bed fumes like a quicksand hole

  we won’t climb on it for love:

  the street yearns for action nobler than traffic

  red lights want to be flags

  policemen want their arms frozen in loud movies:

  ask a man for the time

  your voice is ruined with static:

  What a racket! What strange dials!

  Only Civil War can fuse it shut—

  the mouth of the glorious impatient

  ventriloquist performing behind our daily lives!

  Canada is a dying animal

  I will not be fastened to a dying animal

  That’s the sort of thing to say, that’s good,

  that will change my life.

  And when my neighbour is broken for his error

  and my blood guaranteed by Law against

  an American failure

  I dread the voice behind the flag I drew

  on the blank sky

  for my absolute poems will be crumpled

  under a marble asylum

  my absolute flight snarled like old fishing line:

  What will I have in my head

  to serve against logic brotherhood destiny?

  WHY EXPERIENCE IS NO TEACHER

  Not mine – the body you were promised

  is buried at the heart

  of an unusable machine

  no one can stop or start.

  You’ll lie with it? You might dig deep –

  escape a Law or two – see a dart

  of light. You

  won’t get near the heart.

  I tried – I am the same – come the same.

  I wanted my senses to rave.

  The dart was ordinary light.

  Will nothing keep you here, my love, my love?

  FOR MY OLD LAYTON

  His pain, unowned, he left

  in paragraphs of love, hidden,

  like a cat leaves shit

  under stones, and he crept out in day,

  clean, arrogant, swift, prepared

  to hunt or sleep or starve.

  The town saluted him with garbage

  which he interpreted as praise

  for his muscular grace. Orange peels,

  cans, discarded guts rained like ticker-tape.

  For a while he ruined their nights

  by throwing his shadow in moon-full windows

  as he spied on the peace of gentle folk.

  Once he envied them. Now with a happy

  screech he bounded from monument to monument

  in their most consecrated plots, drunk

  to know how close he lived to the breathless

  in the ground, drunk to feel how much he loved

  the snoring mates, the old, the children of the town.

  Until at last, like Timon, tired

  of human smell, resenting even

  his own shoe-steps in the wilderness,

  he chased animals, wore live snakes, weeds

  for bracelets. When the sea

  pulled back the tide like a blanket

  he slept on stone cribs, heavy,

  dreamless, the salt-bright atmosphere

  like an automatic laboratory

  building crystals in his hair.

  THE ONLY TOURIST IN HAVANA

  TURNS HIS THOUGHTS HOMEWARD

  Come, my brothers,

  let us govern Canada,

  let us find our serious heads,

  let us dump asbestos on the White House,

  let us make the French talk English,

  not only here but everywhere,

  let us torture the Senate individually

  until they confess,

  let us purge the New Party,

  let us encourage the dark races

  so they’ll be lenient

  when they take over,

  let us make the CBC talk English,

  let us all lean in one direction

  and float down

  to the coast of Florida,

  let us have tourism,

  let us flirt with the enemy,

  let us smelt pig-iron in our backyards,

  let us sell snow

  to under-developed nations,

  (Is it true one of our national leaders

  was a Roman Catholic?)

  let us terrorize Alaska,

  let us unite

  Church and State,

  let us not take it lying down,

  let us have two Governor Generals

  at the same time,

  let us have another official language,

  let us determine what it will be,

  let us give a Canada Council Fellowship

  to the most original suggestion,

  let us teach sex in the home

  to parents,

  let us threaten to join the U.S.A.

  and pull out at the last moment,

  my brothers, come,

  our serious heads are waiting for us somewhere

  like Gladstone bags abandoned

  after a coup d’état,

  let us put them on very quickly,

  let us maintain a stony silence

  on the St. Lawrence Seaway.

  Havana

  April 1961

  THE INVISIBLE TROUBLE

  Too fevered to insi
st:

  “My world is terror,”

  he covers his wrist

  and numbers of the war.

  His arm is unburned

  his flesh whole:

  the numbers he learned

  from a movie reel.

  He covers his wrist

  under the table.

  The drunkards have missed

  his invisible trouble.

  A tune rises up.

  His skin is blank!

  He can’t lift his cup

  he can’t! he can’t!

  The chorus grows.

  So does his silence.

  Nothing, he knows

  there is nothing to notice.

  SICK ALONE

  Nursery giant hordes return

  wading in the clue taste of bile

  You ate too much kitchen

  went green on the lone looptheloop

  It will not let you off to sleep

  It is too fast It is too steep

  Crash past a squashed group

  of bible animals lion child kitten

  Where where is your demonic smile

  You vomit when you want to burn

  MILLENNIUM

  This could be my little

  book about love

  if I wrote it –

  but my good demon said:

  “Lay off documents!”

  Everybody was watching me

  burn my books –

  I swung my liberty torch

  happy as a gestapo brute;

  the only thing I wanted to save

  was a scar

  a burn or two –

  but my good demon said:

  “Lay off documents!

  The fire’s not important!”

  The pile was safely blazing.

  I went home to take a bath.

  I phoned my grandmother.

  She is suffering from arthritis.

  “Keep well,” I said, “don’t mind the pain.”

  “You neither,” she said.

  Hours later I wondered

  did she mean

  don’t mind my pain

  or don’t mind her pain?

  Whereupon my good demon said:

  “Is that all you can do?”

  Well was it?

  Was it all I could do?

  There was the old lady

  eating alone, thinking about

  Prince Albert, Flanders Field,

  Kishenev, her fingers too sore