Book of Longing Read online

  O friend who pardoned everyone who came

  to light your dark and dim your aureole,

  accept this awkward homage to your fame

  (nor Modesty supply your instant counterclaim.)

  We do not know the Will or voice that made

  you fly from high Decarie’s overpass;

  we do not know the Hebrew you obeyed

  to raise your feet so far from sand and grass

  and try the air, O faithful Anabas –

  but blessed be the One who saved you there,

  and bless His Name, His every Alias,

  Who gave you, on that insubstantial stair,

  the bravest songs we have of loss and love’s repair.

  Dear Henry, I know you will forgive these

  lines of mine, their clumsy antique tone,

  for they are true and not mere obsequies,

  and for all their rhetoric overblown

  a simple gesture to the man you own,

  whose friendship is so rare, whose art so pure,

  simplicity is dazed, then overthrown –

  alarmed and shy my love must I obscure

  behind the fallen grandiose of literature.

  I don’t know where I’m going any more.

  I find myself a table and a chair.

  I wait, I don’t know what I’m waiting for.

  I change the room, the country. I compare

  my clattering armoured blitz to your spare

  weaponry of light, your refined address –

  I know you stand where none of us would dare,

  I know you kneel where none of us would guess,

  well ordered and alone, huge heart, self-pitiless.

  WHY I LOVE FRANCE

  O France, you gave your language to my children, your lovers and your mushrooms to my wife. You sang my songs. You delivered my uncle and my auntie to the Nazis. I met the leather chests of the police in Place de la Bastille. I took money from the Communists. I gave my middle age to the milky towns of the Luberon. I ran from farm dogs on a road outside of Rousillon. My hand trembles in the land of France. I came to you with a soiled philosophy of holiness, and you bade me sit down for an interview. O France, where I was taken so seriously, I had to reconsider my position. O France, every little Messiah thanks you for his loneliness. I want to be somewhere else, but I am always in France. Be strong, be nuclear, my France. Flirt with every side, and talk, talk, never stop talking about how to live without G-d.

  ON THE PATH

  for C.C.

  On the path of loneliness

  I came to the place of song

  and tarried there

  for half my life

  Now I leave my guitar

  and my keyboards

  my friends and s-x companions

  and I stumble out again

  on the path of loneliness

  I am old but I have no regrets

  not one

  even though I am angry and alone

  and filled with fear and desire

  Bend down to me

  from your mist and vines

  O high one, long-fingered

  and deep-seeing

  Bend down to this sack of poison

  and rotting teeth

  and press your lips

  to the light of my heart

  MY REDEEMER

  I think of you all the time

  But I can’t speak about you any more

  I must love you secretly

  I must come to you when I am alone

  As I am now

  And even now I must be careful

  I want all the women

  You created in your image

  That is why I lower my eyes

  When I pass them in the street

  You can hear my prayer

  The one I have no words for

  The name that I cannot utter

  I’m twisted with love

  I’m burning with boredom

  I hate my disguise

  The mask of longing

  But what can I do

  Without my disguise

  I wouldn’t be created

  My Redeemer is a woman

  Her picture is lost

  We surrendered it

  A hundred years ago

  “Give us the Lady,” they said.

  “It is too dangerous now

  “to have her likeness on a wall.”

  So I gave her away

  And the language with her

  The happy language

  She invented for her name

  And anyone who wants

  To talk about her

  Has to become like me

  Humiliated and silent

  Twisted with love

  A specialist in boredom

  And other childish matters

  FIRST OF ALL

  First of all nothing will happen

  and a little later

  nothing will happen again

  A family will pass by in the night

  speaking of the children’s bedtime

  That will be the signal

  for you to light a cigarette

  Then comes a delicate moment

  when the backwoods men

  gather around the table

  to discuss your way of life

  Dismiss them with a glass of

  cherry juice

  Your way of life has been over

  for many years

  The moonlit mountains

  surround your heart

  and the Anointed One

  with his bag and stick

  can be picked out on a path

  He is probably thinking of what

  you said

  in the schoolyard 100 years ago

  This is a dangerous moment

  that can plunge you into silence

  for a million years

  Fortunately the sound of clarinets

  from a wandering klezmer

  ensemble

  drifts into the kitchen

  Allow it to distract you

  from your cheerless meditation

  The refrigerator will go into

  second gear

  and the cat will climb onto the

  windowsill

  For no reason at all

  you will begin to cry

  Then your tears will dry up

  and you will ache for a companion

  I will be that companion

  At first nothing will happen to us

  and later on

  it will happen to us again

  THE CROSS

  I am Theodoros

  the poet who could not read or write

  When I was too old to work

  I made religious items

  for the tourist shops

  I broke down doors

  and I put my hands on women

  women from America and Paris

  They were the ones

  who said that I was a poet

  I will not tell you about my problems

  my son’s fall

  or my life at sea

  I carved crosses

  and like everybody else

  I carried one

  I astonished women with my desire

  I fished for them

  with goggles and a spear

  and I fed them

  with what they had never eaten before

  If you are a woman

  and you follow the shavings

  of this man’s effort

  in the moonlight

  you will see my muscled ghost

  on the sea road to Vlychos

  and if you are a man

  on the same road

  you will hear women’s voices

  exactly as I heard them

  coming from the water

  coming from boats

  and from in between the boats

  and then surely

  you will understand my life

  and do a kindness to my
soul

  by forgiving me

  I pray this to the one

  who fashioned me out of myself

  I confess this

  over the wine

  to Leonardos

  my Hebrew friend

  who writes it down

  for those to come

  – Kamini, Hydra, 1980

  TIRED

  We’re tired of being white and we’re tired of being black, and we’re not going to be white and we’re not going to be black any longer. We’re going to be voices now, disembodied voices in the blue sky, pleasant harmonies in the cavities of your distress. And we’re going to stay this way until you straighten up, until your suffering makes you calm, and you can believe the word of G-d who has told you so many times, and in so many ways, to love one another, or at least not to torture and murder in the name of some stupid vomit-making human idea that makes G-d turn away from you, and darken the cosmos with inconceivable sorrow. We’re tired of being white and we’re tired of being black, and we’re not going to be white and were not going to be black any longer.

  SOMETHING FROM THE EARLY SEVENTIES

  By and all, or by and large, as you say, the reading public’s disinterest in the novel of sensibility behooves itself very well. Or to put it differently, I am very different from most of you, and the older I get, the gladder. I should have come from a different country to entertain you with the horrors of my native land, but I didn’t. I came from your very midst, or you could say, your very mist. I am your very mist. But don’t be alarmed; you are not in the presence of a verbal fidget. If I strain too easily to push a pun into a profundity, it is only because I am at the end of my tether. I’ve taken too much acid, or I’ve been too lonely, or I’ve been educated beyond my intelligence, or however you want to explain me away. It’s a pity if someone has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it. It is really amazing how famous I am to those few who truly comprehend what I am about. I am the Voice of Suffering and I cannot be comforted. Many have tried but apparently, and mercifully, I am immune to their shabby consolations. I will capture your tear without hardly trying, in the vast net of my idle prattle. I am going to tell you such a love story that will make you happy because you are not me, but who knows, you may be sobbing behind your ecstasy, as I have hinted, or even promised. I think it’s a good story. I think it’s tough. I think it’s got fibre. I’ve told it to a lot of people and they all liked it. I’m going to tell it to you. Among my credentials, I am the creator of the Black Photograph. Ask some informed commuter on the subway and he might growl scornfully: Oh yeah, he’s the guy who takes a lot of trouble setting up a picture and then holds his hand over the lens when he snaps it. I am truly amused by this fictitious traveller’s conversation and I will let his description stand for the process of my art. My art, my eternity. I will be the delight of future eyes when this grotesque parody of humanity

  has evolved into something no doubt, worse. These future monsters of the unborn seed will pass many excellent vacations of intensity immersed in the emanations of my colourless rectangles. A few years back a clever New York art dealer attempted to capitalize on the most obvious aspects of my eternity, and for a few months I was a figure on Tenth Street, and the darling of a small clique of curiously small and thin people, who were devoted to promoting a “new” form of human expression called ArtScience. Some of these fanatics tried to convince me that they understood what I was doing. Needless to say, they were barking, as was Adam of the fable, up the wrong tree. Nothing anyone has ever said about the Black Photograph has ever meant a fig to me, except, of course, for Nico. She could read them. She knew what I was doing. She knew who I was. And I long for her still. I will pick my way back through the boredom and irrelevance of the last few decades and tell you of a time when I was truly alive, in the human sense, of course. In the other sense, in the realm of the Grecian Urn, in the annals of crystal and imperishable diamond, I have remained the Absolute Creator, life itself to whatever I touched, as immediate, as irresistible, as wild and undeniable as a woman’s hand on the adolescent groin. I have been, I am, and I will remain the Ch---t of Matter, and the Redeemer of the Inert. Now you may have an inkling of the spirit in which I conceived for myself the challenge of the Black Photograph. Nico perceived me immediately through all my pathetic bullshit, as some would, and should, call it. My work, among other things, is a monument to Nico’s eyes. That there was such a pair in my own time, and that I met them, forehead to forehead; that the Black Photograph sang to other irises, and yes, corneas, retinas and optic nerves, all the way down the foul leather bag to Nico’s restless heart, another human heart; that this actually happened constitutes the sole assault on my loneliness that the Eternal has ever made, and it was her.

  Therefore I was in New York at a curtain time, in a certain place; actually it was The Chelsea Hotel. This clever art dealer, call him Ahab, possessed the sad misimpression that I would enjoy coming in and going out through a grimy lobby heaped and hung with the

  fashionable excrement of the ambitious hustlers in the studios above: enormous reproductions of cigar boxes; pillowlike canvases billowing over their innocent frames like so many beer bellies; infantile electromagnetic devices to advertise the artist’s acquaintance with technology; mobiles, so badly constructed, that they compounded their capacity for psychic offence with a physical hazard; cognac snifters of various size, painted red and enclosed in a glass cabinet; all in the name of some dreary change of perspective, as if that’s what humanity needs; and all these tricks, all these ugly motives, all this poisonous medicine chest of Gotham cunning, promoting itself as the urgent specific to a dying culture; all this profanity made flesh; quickly accumulating layer after layer of viscous grit generated on Twenty-Third Street, and in the low heavens of the neighbourhood; – a presage of the dirty treasure’s soon-to-be-unnoticed burial under the sands of time. That’s the hotel he put me in. He thought I was one of them. Also Dylan Thomas sailed out from that lobby to pierce his eye on a rose-thorn and hence or thence to assume his rightful overstuffed easy chair in the crowded pantheon of flabby heroism. It can be quickly divined I am no friend of the age.

  BUTTER DISH

  Darling, I now have a butter dish

  that is shaped like a cow

  ARGUMENT

  You might be a person who likes to argue with Eternity. A good way to begin such an Argument is:

  Why do You rule against me

  Why do You silence me now

  When will the Truth be on my lips

  And the Light be on my brow?

  After some time has passed, the answer to these questions percolating upwards from the pit of your stomach, or downwards from the crown of your hat, or having been given, at last, the right pill, you might begin to fall in love with the One who asked them; and perhaps then you will cry out, as so many of our parents did:

  Blessed be the One

  Who has sweetened

  my Argument.

  MUCH LATER

  Ray Charles singing You Win Again

  in the sunlight

  twenty years ago

  Ray Charles the singer I would never be

  and my young wife

  ‘the wife of my youth’

  smiling at me from an upstairs room

  in the old house

  Ray Charles and Marianne

  dear spirits of my Greek life

  now in the sunshine of every new summer

  Marianne coming down the steps

  ‘the woman of the house’

  Ray Charles speaking fiercely

  for our virgin humanity

  Twenty years ago

  and again in this Hollywood summer

  still companions of the heart

  as I measure myself once more

&
nbsp; against the high sweet standards

  of my youth

  – Los Angeles, 1978

  ANOTHER CHRISTOPHER

  There is another Christopher

  Guide to Broken Ways

  Rejected Christ he carries far

  Yours he cannot raise

  SEPARATED

  I was doing something

  I don’t remember what

  I was standing in a place

  I don’t remember where

  I was waiting for someone

  but I don’t remember who

  It was before or it was after

  I don’t remember when

  And suddenly or gradually

  I was removed, I was taken

  to this place of reversal

  and I was separated

  and in the place of every part

  there was the name of fear

  and for a vast memorial

  there was the name of grief

  If you know the prayer

  for one who has been so dislocated

  please say it or sing it

  and if there is among the words

  an empty space, or among the letters

  an orchard of return

  please set my name firmly there

  with a voice or hand

  which only you command

  you righteous ones

  who are concerned with such matters

  But hurry please

  for all the parts of me

  that gathered briefly around this plea

  are dispersed again

  and scattered on the Other Side

  where the angels stand upside down

  and everything is covered with dust

  and everyone burns with shame

  and no one is allowed to cry out

  ANGRY AT 11 PM

  THE THIRD INVENTION

  Blindly I worked

  at my third invention

  taking the chances

  of one who is lost,

  feeling my way

  to a cleaner expression