Flowers for Hitler Read online

  each in his joy

  each in his fire

  Of one another

  they have no need

  they have the deepest need

  The great ones pass

  Recorded in some multiple sky

  inlaid in some endless laughter

  they pass

  like stars of different seasons

  like meteors of different centuries

  Fire undiminished

  by passing fire

  laughter uncorroded

  by comfort

  they pass one another

  without touching without looking

  needing only to know

  the great ones pass

  WAITING FOR MARIANNE

  I have lost a telephone

  with your smell in it

  I am living beside the radio

  all the stations at once

  but I pick out a Polish lullaby

  I pick it out of the static

  it fades I wait I keep the beat

  it comes back almost asleep

  Did you take the telephone

  knowing I’d sniff it immoderately

  maybe heat up the plastic

  to get all the crumbs of your breath

  and if you won’t come back

  how will you phone to say

  you won’t come back

  so that I could at least argue

  WHY I HAPPEN TO BE FREE

  They all conspire to make me free

  I tried to join their arguments

  but there were so few sides

  and I needed several

  Forsaking the lovely girl

  was not my idea

  but she fell asleep in somebody’s bed

  Now more than ever

  I want enemies

  You who thrive

  in the easy world of modern love

  look out for me

  for I have developed a terrible virginity

  and meeting me

  all who have done more than kiss

  will perish in shame

  with warts and hair on their palms

  Time was our best men died

  in error and enlightenment

  Moses on the lookout

  David in his house of blood

  Camus beside the driver

  My new laws encourage

  not satori but perfection

  at last at last

  Jews who walk

  too far on Sabbath

  will be stoned

  Catholics who blaspheme

  electricity applied

  to their genitals

  Buddhists who acquire property

  sawn in half

  Naughty Protestants

  have governments

  to make them miserable

  Ah the universe returns to order

  The new Montreal skyscrapers

  bully the parking lots

  like the winners of a hygiene contest

  a suite of windows lit here and there

  like a First Class ribbon

  for extra cleanliness

  A girl I knew

  sleeps in some bed

  and of all the lovely things

  I might say I say this

  I see her body puzzled

  with the mouthprints

  of all the kisses of all the men

  she’s known

  like a honky-tonk piano

  ringed with years of cocktail glasses

  and while she cranks and tinkles

  in the quaint old sinful dance

  I walk through

  the blond November rain

  punishing her with my happiness

  THE TRUE DESIRE

  The food that will not obey. It longs for its old shape. The grapes dream of the tight cluster, resume their solidarity. The meat, in some rebellious collusion with the stomach, unchews itself, unites into the original butcher’s slab, red, defiant, recalling even the meadow life of the distant dead animal. But perhaps the stomach is guiltless, for here is cheese, mauled and in disarray, but refusing absolutely to interact with gastric juices. The food has no hope of real life, but still, in these regained, however mutilated shapes, it resists, and for its victories claims the next day’s hunger and the body’s joy.

  There is a whitewashed hotel waiting for me somewhere, in which I will begin my fast and my new life.

  Oh to stand in the Ganges wielding a yard of intestine.

  THE WAY BACK

  But I am not lost

  any more than leaves are lost

  or buried vases

  This is not my time

  I would only give you second thoughts

  I know you must call me traitor

  because I have wasted my blood

  in aimless love

  and you are right

  Blood like that

  never won an inch of star

  You know how to call me

  although such a noise now

  would only confuse the air

  Neither of us can forget

  the steps we danced

  the words you stretched

  to call me out of dust

  Yes I long for you

  not just as a leaf for weather

  or vase for hands

  but with a narrow human longing

  that makes a man refuse

  any fields but his own

  I wait for you at an

  unexpected place in your journey

  like the rusted key

  or the feather you do not pick up

  until the way back

  after it is clear

  the remote and painful destination

  changed nothing in your life

  THE PROJECT

  Evidently they need a lot of blood for these tests. I let them take all they wanted. The hospital was cool and its atmosphere of order encouraged me to persist in my own projects.

  I always wanted to set fire to your houses. I’ve been in them. Through the front doors and the back. I’d like to see them burn slowly so I could visit many and peek in the falling windows. I’d like to see what happens to those white carpets you pretended to be so careless about. I’d like to see a white telephone melting.

  We don’t want to trap too many inside because the streets have got to be packed with your poor bodies screaming back and forth. I’ll be comforting. Oh dear, pyjama flannel seared right on to the flesh. Let me pull it off.

  It seems to me they took too much blood. Probably selling it on the side. The little man’s white frock was smeared with blood. Little men like that keep company with blood. See them in abatoirs and assisting in human experiments.

  – When did you last expose yourself?

  – Sunday morning for a big crowd in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth.

  – Funny. You know what I mean.

  – Expose myself to what?

  – A woman.

  – Ah.

  I narrowed my eyes and whispered in his yellow ear.

  – You better bring her in too.

  – And it’s still free?

  Of course it was still free. Not counting the extra blood they stole. Prevent my disease from capturing the entire city. Help this man. Give him all possible Judeo-Christian help.

  Fire would be best. I admit that. Tie firebrands between the foxes and chase them through your little gardens. A rosy sky would improve the view from anywhere. It would be a mercy. Oh, to see the roofs devoured and the beautiful old level of land rising again.

  The factory where I work isn’t far from the hospital. Same architect as a matter of fact and the similarities don’t end there It’s easier to get away with lying down in the hospital. However we have our comforts in the factory.

  The foreman winked at me when I went back to my machine He loved his abundant nature. Me new at the job and he’d actually given me time off. I really enjoy the generosity of slaves. He came over to inspect my work.

  – But this
won’t do at all.

  – No?

  – The union said you were an experienced operator.

  – I am. I am.

  – This is no seam.

  – Now that you mention it.

  – Look here.

  He took a fresh trouser and pushed in beside me on the bench He was anxious to demonstrate the only skill he owned. He arranged the pieces under the needle. When he was halfway down the leg and doing very nicely I brought my foot down on the pedal beside his. The unexpected acceleration sucked his fingers under the needle.

  Another comfort is the Stock Room.

  It is large and dark and filled with bundles and rolls of material.

  – But shouldn’t you be working?

  – No, Mary, I shouldn’t.

  – Won’t Sam miss you?

  – You see he’s in the hospital. Accident.

  Mary runs the Cafeteria and the Boss exposes himself to her regularly. This guarantees her the concession.

  I feel the disease raging in my blood. I expect my saliva to be discoloured.

  – Yes, Mary, real cashmere. Three hundred dollar suits.

  The Boss has a wife to whom he must expose himself every once in a while. She has her milkmen. The city is orderly. There are white bottles standing in front of a million doors. And there are Conventions. Multitudes of bosses sharing the pleasures of exposure.

  I shall go mad. They’ll find me at the top of Mount Royal impersonating Genghis Khan. Seized with laughter and pus.

  – Very soft, Mary. That’s what they pay for.

  Fire would be best. Flames. Bright windows. Two cars exploding in each garage. But could I ever manage it. This way is slower. More heroic in a way. Less dramatic of course. But I have an imagination.

  HYDRA 1963

  The stony path coiled around me

  and bound me to the night.

  A boat hunted the edge of the sea

  under a hissing light.

  Something soft involved a net

  and bled around a spear.

  The blunt death, the cumulus jet –

  I spoke to you, I thought you near!

  Or was the night so black

  that something died alone?

  A man with a glistening back

  beat the food against a stone.

  ALL THERE IS TO KNOW

  ABOUT ADOLPH EICHMANN

  EYES: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medium

  HAIR: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medium

  WEIGHT: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medium

  HEIGHT: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medium

  DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . None

  NUMBER OF FINGERS: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ten

  NUMBER OF TOES: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ten

  INTELLIGENCE: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medium

  What did you expect?

  Talons?

  Oversize incisors?

  Green saliva?

  Madness?

  THE NEW LEADER

  When he learned that his father had the oven contract, that the smoke above the city, the clouds as warm as skin, were his father’s manufacture, he was freed from love, his emptiness was legalized.

  Hygienic as a whip his heart drove out the alibis of devotion, free as a storm-severed bridge, useless and pure as drowned alarm clocks, he breathed deeply, gratefully in the polluted atmosphere, and he announced: My father had the oven contract, he loved my mother and built her houses in the countryside.

  When he learned his father had the oven contract he climbed a hillock of eyeglasses, he stood on a drift of hair, he hated with great abandon the king cripples and their mothers, the husbands and wives, the familiar sleep, the decent burdens.

  Dancing down Ste Catherine Street he performed great surgery on a hotel of sleepers. The windows leaked like a broken meat freezer. His hatred blazed white on the salted driveways. He missed nobody but he was happy he’d taken one hunded and fifty women in moonlight back in ancient history.

  He was drunk at last, drunk at last, after years of threading history’s crushing daisy-chain with beauty after beauty. His father had raised the thigh-shaped clouds which smelled of salesmen, gypsies and violinists. With the certainty and genital pleasure of revelation he knew, he could not doubt, his father was the one who had the oven contract.

  Drunk at last, he hugged himself, his stomach clean, cold and drunk, the sky clean but only for him, free to shiver, free to hate, free to begin.

  HOW IT HAPPENED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY

  Hate jumped out of the way.

  Sorrow left with a squashed somersault

  like a cripple winning candy from rich ladies.

  Angels of reason and joy

  plus other Apollonian yes-men at home

  on account of sunstroke

  contributed their absence to the miracle.

  The demons of adulterers, everyday drunks,

  professional irrationalists, the fatuous possessed,

  these cheap easy demons so common

  to the courting procedure,

  refused to appear due to insufficient publicity.

  No shark put its fin on the lips

  of the little waves

  like a schoolmistress demanding silence

  lest drama threaten the miracle.

  Someone began over again and failed –

  noting not a single alien tremor

  in the voices crying: tomatoes, onions, bread.

  FOR E.J.P.

  I once believed a single line

  in a Chinese poem could change

  forever how blossoms fell

  and that the moon itself climbed on

  the grief of concise weeping men

  to journey over cups of wine

  I thought invasions were begun for crows

  to pick at a skeleton

  dynasties sown and spent

  to serve the language of a fine lament

  I thought governors ended their lives

  as sweetly drunken monks

  telling time by rain and candles

  instructed by an insect’s pilgrimage

  across the page – all this

  so one might send an exile’s perfect letter

  to an ancient hometown friend

  I chose a lonely country

  broke from love

  scorned the fraternity of war

  I polished my tongue against the pumice moon

  floated my soul in cherry wine

  a perfumed barge for Lords of Memory

  to languish on to drink to whisper out

  their store of strength

  as if beyond the mist along the shore

  their girls their power still obeyed

  like clocks wound for a thousand years

  I waited until my tongue was sore

  Brown petals wind like fire around my poems

  I aimed them at the stars but

  like rainbows they were bent

  before they sawed the world in half

  Who can trace the canyoned paths

  cattle have carved out of time

  wandering from meadowlands to feasts

  Layer after layer of autumn leaves

  are swept away

  Something forgets us perfectly

  THE GLASS DOG

  Let me renew my sell

  in the midst of all the things of the world

  which cannot be connected.

  The sky is empty at last,

  the stars stand for themselves,

  heroes and their history passed

  like talk on the wind, like bells.

  Flowers do not stand for love,

  or if they do – not mine.

  The white happens beside the mauve.

  I have no laws to bind

  their hu
nger to my own.

  The same, the same, the doctors say,

  for they find themselves alone:

  the bread of law is dry.

  *

  I walked over the mountain with my glass dog.

  The mushrooms trembled and balls of rain

  fell off their roofs.

  I whistled at the trees to come closer:

  they jumped at the chance:

  apples, acorns popped through the air.

  Dandelions by the million

  staggered into parachutes. A white jewelled

  wind in the shape of an immense spool of gauze

  swaddled every moving limb.

  I collapsed slowly over the water-filled pebbles.

  *

  “Lambs in bags are borne by mules.

  Rough bags bruise live necks,

  three in a bag.

  It only hurts when they laugh.

  “They’ll hang with chickens, head down,

  white chicks in blood shops,

  block shops, cut shops.

  It only hurts when they bleed.

  “Boats named for George and Barbara,

  sterns faded rose and blue,

  do their simple business

  in the bottle of the sea.

  “Thalassa, thalassa, in the blackest

  weather still you keep somewhere

  among your million mirrors

  the fact of the highest gull.

  “Mules flirt with brother slave brick boats.”

  Give the man who said all that

  an evil shiny eggplant.

  Give him a mucous-hued octopus.

  Glory bells, boys in the towers

  flying the huge bells like kites,

  tear the vespers out of the stoned heart.

  A man has betrayed everything!

  *

  Creature! Come! One more chance. The Sea of Tin Cans. The Sea of Ruined Laboratory Eyes. The Sea of Luminous Swimmers. The Sea of Rich Tackle. The Sea of Garbage Flowers. The Sea of Sun Limbs. The Sea of Blood Jellyfish. The Sea of Dynamite. Our Lady of the Miraculous Tin Ikon. Our Blue Lady of Boats. Our Beloved Lady of Holiday Flags. Our Supreme Girl of Enduring Feathers. Bang Bang bells Bang in iron simple blue.