Parasites of Heaven Read online

  He was lame

  as a 3 legged dog

  screamed as he came

  through the fog

  If you are the Light

  give me a light

  buddy

  1965

  I am too loud when you are gone

  I am John the Baptist, cheated by mere water

  and merciful love, wild but over-known

  John of honey, of time, longing not for

  music, longing, longing to be Him

  I am diminished, I peddle versions of Word

  that don’t survive the tablets broken stone

  I am alone when you are gone

  1963

  You know where I have been

  Why my knees are raw

  I’d like to speak to you

  Who will see what I saw

  Some men who saw me fall

  Spread the news of failure

  I want to speak to them

  The dogs of literature

  Pass me as I proudly

  Passed the others

  Who kneel in secret flight

  Pass us proudly Brothers

  Somewhere in my trophy room the crucifixion and other sacrifices were still going on, but the flesh and nails were grown over with rust and I could not tell where the flesh ended and the wood began or on which wall the instruments were hung.

  I passed by limbs and faces arranged in this museum like hanging kitchen tools, and some brushed my arm as the hallway reeled me in, but I pocketed my hands along with some vulnerable smiles, and I continued on.

  I heard the rooms behind me clamour an instant for my brain, and once the brain responded, out of habit, weakly, as if thinking someone else’s history, and somewhere in that last tune it learned that it was not the Queen, it was a drone.

  There ahead of me extended an impossible trophy: the bright, great sky, where no men lived. Beautiful and empty, now luminous with a splendour emanating from my own flesh, the tuneless sky washed and washed my lineless face and bathed in waves my heart like a red translucent stone. Until my eyes gave out I lived there as my home.

  Today I know the only distance that I came was to the threshold of my trophy room. Among the killing instruments again I am further from sacrifice than when I began. I do not stare or plead with passing pilgrims to help me there. I call it discipline but perhaps it is fallen pride alone.

  I’m not the one to learn an exercise for dwelling in the sky. My trophy room is vast and hung with crutches, ladders, braces, hooks. Unlike the invalid’s cathedral, men hang with these instruments. A dancing wall of molecules, changing nothing, has cleared a place for me and my time.

  1959, 1966

  I guess it’s time to say goodbye to all the secret clubs I wanted to command, it’s time to end the signature I stretched from line to line. Come here, darling, I want to read your little hand. If it’s all right to love you still I’d really like to see the sign.

  That’s a man, they said, a man we’ll have to see

  when we’re ready to raise the final infantry

  I told you where I’ve been and what I’ve lost and why. When I start to talk about my soul you always seem to smile and you ask if I got enough of the blanket that you made me buy and I don’t know who’s got who figured out as we plunge in ancient whispers down some river like the Nile.

  I studied the departures of some fancy air-o-planes, I walked the airport corridors and I broke into a run. The signals that I scratched for you on frosty windowpanes, they melted when I barely missed the sun.

  You saw me once too often climbing down the stairs that lead from the lip of your pedestal. I don’t like the way I look from behind, and I wish you’d turn your marble head every time I fall. You said you wanted me naked so I hung my skin in the wind. Ah, the whole world felt so new. I didn’t think when I tiptoed up those stairs that you’d treat me like a piece of meat on your barbeque.

  That’s a man, they said, a man we’ll have to see

  when we’re ready to raise the final infantry.

  For a long while I have been watching the city

  push its fiery bones and organs through

  the immense fluoroscope of night.

  The King’s yacht, like a swallowed brooch,

  gleams digested in the fjord;

  the harbour concentrates its light

  like the result of a luminous internal test.

  Where is the disease I was so sure about?

  Where apply the ruthless amputations I had planned?

  The organism thrives, the skeleton lives,

  has never lost its youth.

  The notion of decay is my own secretion

  which I stretch on every view

  like the network of windows in spit.

  An airliner’s lights blink over the moon,

  soft as the footprints of a man moving in thought or devotion.

  Is there work for every mind?

  Lead me, technical fire, into families, cities, congregations:

  I want to stroll down the arteries invisible

  as the multitudes I cannot see from here.

  Oslo, 1961

  I was standing on the stairs

  in the middle of the night,

  the wind was filled with silver

  the moon was out of sight.

  And maybe I was waiting

  but I knew you wouldn’t come,

  the night was soft as ashes

  that a moth leaves on your thumb.

  My birthday travelled through me

  like a thread goes through a bead,

  when it frayed and parted

  I floated like a seed.

  I was standing on the stairs

  in the middle of the night,

  the dandelions were yellow

  the dandelions were white.

  And are you really lucky

  and are you really hexed

  and how does love distract you

  from one moment to the next?

  I waited all the morning

  and all the afternoon,

  my flower it is the dandelion

  my window is the moon.

  Snow is falling.

  There is a nude in my room.

  She surveys the wine-coloured carpet.

  She is eighteen.

  She has straight hair.

  She speaks no Montreal language.

  She doesn’t feel like sitting down.

  She shows no gooseflesh.

  We can hear the storm.

  She is lighting a cigarette

  from the gas range.

  She holds back her long hair

  1958

  Here was the Market, entering it was like turning over a dry stone and discovering a bright wet colony of worms, for me it was too soon to encounter the harbour’s private parts, learning too soon the price of the feast. The structure was high and vast and somehow makeshift, sunlight poured through openings in the corrugated roof from a stained sun, not the same light outside, it must have been another sun with veins and suicide jugular, the light in the market was red and purple, before us stretched a corridor of meat, great torsos of meadow animals strung in glistening flayed exhibitions, heads with limp exhausted comic-book tongues dangling at too sharp an angle, heads with dull-eyed slaughter-greeting looks, heads smiling and winking, perhaps the subtlest camouflage this severed coyness, heads piled in pyramids like park cannonballs, some of them cruelly facing a sausage display of their missing extremities, a thick and thin suspended rain of sausages, a storm of jellied blood, and further down the corridor no recognizable animal shapes but chunks of their bodies, shaped not by hide or muscle but by cleaver, knife and appetite. It was damp in there, the air itself had a different texture from the outside, here it was some translucent matter, and what was in the trash barrels was too small and hairy for this requiem, the smell had hands to keep you back, you breathed through your mouth. The men who sold and hosed the hanging meat were wet and bloody, painted like meat th
emselves, they seemed not so much vendors as kapos, prison trustees, favourites of the slaughter house who had been spared for their capacity to work, and they had a hundred sweets to bark at us as we moved in the crowd but not part of the crowd, down the corridor between the dripping walls, the staring fortresses, watching out for the black puddles underfoot, for who knows how deep they went.

  I am anointed with directions

  Trees and ships

  see me stagger

  like a fish in a shock of underwater dynamite

  Blessed by the end of the world

  I spin without wobbling

  among the weathervanes

  which hover like homeless helicopters

  over the endless landing feast

  1964

  I met a woman long ago,

  hair black as black can go.

  Are you a teacher of the heart?

  Soft she answered No.

  I met a girl across the sea,

  hair the gold that gold can be.

  Are you a teacher of the heart?

  Yes, but not for thee.

  I knew a man who lost his mind

  in some lost place I wished to find.

  Follow me, he said,

  but he walked behind.

  I walked into a hospital

  Where none was sick and none was well.

  When at night the nurses left,

  I could not walk at all.

  Not too slow, not too soon

  morning came, then came noon.

  Dinner time a scalpel blade

  lay beside my spoon.

  Some girls wander by mistake

  into the mess that scalpels make.

  Are you teachers of the heart?

  We teach old hearts to break.

  One day I woke up alone,

  hospital and nurses gone.

  Have I carved enough?

  You are a bone.

  I ate and ate and ate,

  I didn’t miss a plate.

  How much do these suppers cost?

  We’ll take it out in hate.

  I spent my hatred everyplace,

  on every work, on every face.

  Someone gave me wishes.

  I wished for an embrace.

  Several girls embraced me, then

  I was embraced by men.

  Is my passion perfect?

  Do it once again.

  I was handsome, I was strong,

  I knew the words of every song.

  Did my singing please you?

  The words you sang were wrong.

  Who are you whom I address?

  Who takes down what I confess?

  Are you a teacher of the heart?

  A chorus answered Yes.

  Teachers, are my lessons done,

  or must I do another one?

  They laughed and laughed:

  Child, you’ve just begun.

  1965

  You are The Model. This is how you walk home, leaving once and for all the table of minor American Buddhists in the Aegean who are very sweet but who will keep you back. Excuse yourself, leave the port, the kindly foreign colony, they are not the world, visit them someday on a yacht and remember names. Now in the darker town, star ache through the wide screen blue, the girl beside Vadim in a Paris rumour, solemn child body with surprising breasts in Elle net bathing suits, career in fashion elegance must must end in real power movies. Not if you stay with people who want so little, thin 19 blond, tipping moon foam off your white canvas thighs, get home and think, homesick, it’s a beautiful night, penknife carved initials done out of love for you, where somewhere in the huge blue horoscope, is it a mistake, are you ordinary? Thin fame driven deer Vadim maybe new blond generation, stretchy sweater of tight pressed moons invisible bra moon nipple haze, 19, five years to do it. Walking home without autograph disciples for the last time, the last time that’s a promise G-d, climbing white moon blunted steps, the Greeks are asleep and poor, unfashionable Greek island fine for little Buddhist kings. Smile for Vadim spies possibly scouting you out of the sparkling vast astrology right now, threaten Paris, threaten Jean Shrimpton, sleep with Vadim don’t do everything the first time or do maybe, O G-d the night is so soft and beautiful, climb to the freshly made hotel, knowing how you look from behind, lemon scented sweater, long angles of leg lost unphotograph, homesick, 19, lying down, sometimes you have to be alone to be alone, saying prayers naked carefully, remembering every name, that’s why you won’t be punished, is Vadim on the way down, can any girl be discovered after Bardot?

  1965

  I’ve seen some lonely history

  The heart cannot explore

  I’ve scratched some empty blackboards

  They have no teachers for

  I trailed my meagre demons

  From Jerusalem to Rome

  I had an invitation

  But the host was not at home

  There were contagious armies

  That spread their uniform

  To all parts of my body

  Except where I was warm

  And so I wore a helmet

  With a secret neon sign

  That lit up all the boundaries

  So I could toe the line

  My boots got very tired

  Like a sentry’s never should

  I was walking on a tightrope

  That was buried in the mud

  Standing at the drugstore

  It was very hard to learn

  Though my name was everywhere

  I had to wait my turn

  I’m standing here before you

  I don’t know what I bring

  If you can hear the music

  Why don’t you help me sing

  No disease or age makes the flesh unwind

  but some strange unity of flesh and mind.

  Your body’s like those ships men must empty

  of gold and oil to ride an unweaned sea,

  boat of rib and skin, nothing that can bleed

  or seas can suck or even death could need,

  proving through the stark holds you bear and bring

  that the voyage itself was everything.

  1962

  These notebooks, these notebooks!

  Poetry is no substitute for survival.

  In the books beside my bed

  I used up my will like an alphabet.

  Something mechanical and obsolete

  is sawing up my heart with the blades

  of those invisible wheels which kept

  our grandfathers’ airplanes aloft.

  Is it a g-d who punishes,

  is it a woman who pleases?

  I admire riders of the immaculate molecule,

  I crash in a heavy machine.

  Arrogant as a farmer who won’t

  follow his children into the slums,

  sometimes I believe I alone colonize

  the sky with a handful of seeds.

  I don’t like the price of a belief.

  Every g-d is jealous.

  I am no parliamentarian

  and there are no favourites of the Queen.

  1966

  Created fires I cannot love

  lest I lose the ones above.

  Poor enough, then I’ll learn

  to choose the fires where they burn.

  O G-d, make me poor enough

  to love your diamond in the rough,

  or in my failure let me see

  my greed raised to mystery.

  Do you hate the ones who must

  turn your world all to dust?

  Do you hate the ones who ask

  if Creation wears a mask?

  G-d beyond the G-d I name,

  if mask and fire are the same,

  repair the seam my love leaps through,

  uncreated fire to pursue.

  Network of created fire,

  maim my love and my desire.

  Make me poor so I may be

  servant in the world I see,r />
  Or, as my love leaps wide,

  confirm your servant in his pride:

  if my love can’t burn,

  forbid a sickening return.

  Is it here my love will train

  not to leap so high again?

  No praise here? no blame?

  From my love you tear my name.

  Unmake me as I’m washed

  far from the fiery mask.

  Gather my pride in the coded pain

  which is also your domain.

  Claim me, blood, if you have a story

  to tell with my Jewish face,

  you are strong and holy still, only

  speak, like the Zohar, of a carved-out place

  into which I must pour myself like wine,

  an emptiness of history which I must seize

  and occupy, calm and full in this confine,

  becoming clear ‘like good wine on its lees.’

  1965

  When a world is being born

  all men labour at the birth

  except the few here and there

  who laboured long before.

  At last they taste water

  out of stones they broke,

  honey from their bees

  that yesterday were wild.

  Honour them, but honour more

  the early rarer labourers

  who let their hunger wander

  among ten million minds.

  O love, we are not fed

  with courage or with bread.

  Commandeer my hunger

  for the borning world

  1965

  He was beautiful when he sat alone, he was like me, he had wide lapels, he was holding the mug in the hardest possible way so that his fingers were all twisted but still long and beautiful, he didn’t like to sit alone all the time, but this time, I swear, he didn’t care one way or the other.

  I’ll tell you why I like to sit alone, because I’m a sadist, that’s why we like to sit alone, because we’re the sadists who like to sit alone.

  He sat alone because he was beautifully dressed for the occasion and because he was not a civilian.

  We are the sadists you don’t have to worry about, you think, and we have no opinion on the matter of whether you have to worry about us, and we don’t even like to think about the matter because it baffles us.