Flowers for Hitler Read online

  I am the country you meant

  I am the chalk snake

  fading in the remote village

  I am the smiling man

  who gave you water

  I am the shoemaker

  you could not speak to

  but whom you believed could love you

  I am the carver of the moon-round breasts

  I am the flesh teacher

  I am the demon

  who laughs himself to death

  I am the country you meant

  As the virgin places the garland

  on the soft river

  I can put a discipline

  across your bellies

  I do not know all my knowledge

  and I know that this is my strength

  I am the country

  you will love and hate

  I am the policeman

  floating on Upanishads

  The epidemic burns

  village after village

  in a tedious daily fire

  The white doctors sweat

  the black doctors sweat

  I am the epidemic

  I am the teacher

  whom the teachers hate

  I am the country you meant

  I am the snake beaten out of silver

  I am the black ornament

  The ivory bridge

  leaps over the thick stream

  I bring it down with a joke

  I whistle it into ruins

  The sunlight gnaws at it

  The moonlight gives it leprosy

  I am the agent

  I am the disease

  The world stiffens suddenly

  and gravity sinks its teeth

  into village balloons

  and water injures the red of blood

  and pebbles surrender

  their rough little mouths

  and you secret loving names

  turn up in dossiers

  when I show in black and white

  exactly where your thumbs

  and tickets aim

  THE MUSIC CREPT BY US

  I would like to remind

  the management

  that the drinks are watered

  and the hat-check girl

  has syphilis

  and the band is composed

  of former SS monsters

  However since it is

  New Year’s Eve

  and I have lip cancer

  I will place my

  paper hat on my

  concussion and dance

  THE TELEPHONE

  Mother, the telephone is ringing in the empty house.

  It rang all Wednesday

  Sometimes the people next door thought it was their phone,

  A rusty sound, if ringing has a colour

  as if, whatever the message, it would be obsolete,

  news already acted on, or ignored

  like an anecdote about McCarthy or

  the insurance man about the cheque which has already been mailed.

  or a wedding of old people

  Did we ever use these battered pots, I wondered once

  while rummaging in the basement. We must have been poor

  or deliberately austere, but I was not told.

  A rusty sound, a touch of violence in it

  rather than urgency, as if the message demanded a last resource

  from the instrument.

  Harbour of floating incidental information

  our telephone was feminine

  an ugly girl who had cultivated a good nature

  slightly promiscuous

  A rusty sound, like the old girl,

  never “fatale,” trying to spread for a childhood chum

  just for auld lang syne.

  Mother, someone is trying to get through,

  probably to remind you of Daylight Saving Time

  Someone must compose your number

  to remind you of Daylight Saving Time

  even though you’ve changed all the clocks you can reach

  Answer the phone, dust

  Answer the phone, plastic Message-Riter

  Answer the phone, darlings who lived in the house

  even before us

  Answer the phone, another family

  Someone wants to say hello about nothing

  Answer the phone, you who followed your career

  past the comfort of gossip

  who listen to the banal regular ringing

  and give your venom to it

  enforce it with your hatred

  until the walls are marked by its dentist’s persistence

  like a negro’s house

  with obscenities and crosses

  You are a little boy

  lying in bed in the early summer

  the telephone is ringing

  your parents are in the garden

  and they rush to get it

  before it wakes you up

  you who used your boyhood as a discipline

  against the profane –

  your moulding discipline

  you: single, awake, contemptuous even of exile

  Your parents rush to stop the ringing

  which would let you rejoice in Daylight Saving Time

  or how the project is coming along

  and you shall not alter your love

  assailed as it is by your nature, your insight,

  Time or the World,

  though the ringing brocade your contempt like a royal garment

  you shall set aside a hiding place

  you shall not alter your love

  DISGUISES

  I am sorry that the rich man must go

  and his house become a hospital.

  I loved his wine, his contemptuous servants,

  his ten-year-old ceremonies.

  I loved his car which he wore like a snail’s shell

  everywhere, and I loved his wife,

  the hours she put into her skin,

  the milk, the lust, the industries

  that served her complexion.

  I loved his son who looked British

  but had American ambitions

  and let the word aristocrat comfort him

  like a reprieve while Kennedy reigned.

  I loved the rich man: I hate to see

  his season ticket for the Opera

  fall into a pool for opera-lovers.

  I am sorry that the old worker must go

  who called me mister when I was twelve

  and sir when I was twenty

  who studied against me in obscure socialist

  clubs which met in restaurants.

  I loved the machine he knew like a wife’s body.

  I loved his wife who trained bankers

  in an underground pantry

  and never wasted her ambition in ceramics.

  I loved his children who debate

  and come first at McGill University.

  Goodbye old gold-watch winner

  all your complex loyalties

  must now be borne by one-faced patriots.

  Goodbye dope fiends of North Eastern Lunch

  circa 1948, your spoons which were not

  Swedish Stainless, were the same colour

  as the hoarded clasps and hooks

  of discarded soiled therapeutic corsets.

  I loved your puns about snow

  even if they lasted the full seven-month

  Montreal winter. Go write your memoirs

  for the Psychedelic Review.

  Goodbye sex fiends of Beaver Pond

  who dreamed of being jacked-off

  by electric milking machines.

  You had no Canada Council.

  You had to open little boys

  with a pen-knife.

  I loved your statement to the press:

  “I didn’t think he’d mind.”

  Goodbye articulate monsters

  Abbot and Costello have met Frankenstein.

  I am sorr
y that the conspirators must go

  the ones who scared me by showing me

  a list of all the members of my family.

  I loved the way they reserved judgement

  about Genghis Khan. They loved me because

  I told them their little beards

  made them dead-ringers for Lenin.

  The bombs went off in Westmount

  and now they are ashamed

  like a successful outspoken Schopenhauerian

  whose room-mate has committed suicide.

  Suddenly they are all making movies.

  I have no one to buy coffee for.

  I embrace the changeless:

  the committed men in public wards

  oblivious as Hassidim

  who believe that they are someone else.

  Bravo! Abelard, viva! Rockefeller,

  have these buns, Napoleon,

  hurrah! betrayed Duchess.

  Long live you chronic self-abusers!

  you monotheists!

  you familiars of the Absolute

  sucking at circles!

  You are all my comfort

  as I turn to face the beehive

  as I disgrace my style

  as I coarsen my nature

  as I invent jokes

  as I pull up my garters

  as I accept responsibility.

  You comfort me

  incorrigible betrayers of the self

  as I salute fashion

  and bring my mind

  like a promiscuous air-hostess

  handing out parachutes in a nose dive

  bring my butchered mind

  to bear upon the facts.

  LOT

  Give me back my house

  Give me back my young wife

  I shouted to the sunflower in my path

  Give me back my scalpel

  Give me back my mountain view

  I said to the seeds along my path

  Give me back my name

  Give me back my childhood list

  I whispered to the dust when the path gave out

  Now sing

  Now sing

  sang my master as I waited in the raw wind

  Have I come so far for this

  I wondered as I waited in the pure cold

  ready at last to argue for my silence

  Tell me master

  do my lips move

  or where does it come from

  this soft total chant that drives my soul

  like a spear of salt into the rock

  Give me back my house

  Give me back my young wife

  ONE OF THE NIGHTS I DIDN’T KILL MYSELF

  You dance on the day you saved

  my theoretical angels

  daughters of the new middle-class

  who wear your mouths like Bardot

  Come my darlings

  the movies are true

  I am the lost sweet singer whose death

  in the fog your new high-heeled boots

  have ground into cigarette butts

  I was walking the harbour this evening

  looking for a 25-cent bed of water

  but I will sleep tonight

  with your garters curled in my shoes

  like rainbows on vacation

  with your virginity ruling

  the condom cemeteries like a 2nd chance

  I believe I believe

  Thursday December 12th

  is not the night

  and I will kiss again the slope of a breast

  little nipple above me

  like a sunset

  THE BIG WORLD

  The big world will find out

  about this farm

  the big world will learn

  the details of what

  I worked out in the can

  And your curious life with me

  will be told so often

  that no one will believe

  you grew old

  NARCISSUS

  You don’t know anyone

  You know some streets

  hills, gates, restaurants

  The waitresses have changed

  You don’t know me

  I’m happy about the autumn

  the leaves the red skirts

  everything moving

  I passed you in a marble wall

  some new bank

  You were bleeding from the mouth

  You didn’t even know the season

  CHERRY ORCHARDS

  Canada some wars are waiting for you

  some threats

  some torn flags

  Inheritance is not enough

  Faces must be forged under the hammer

  of savage ideas

  Mailboxes will explode

  in the cherry orchards

  and somebody will wait forever

  for his grandfather’s fat cheque

  From my deep café I survey the quiet snowfields

  like a U.S. promoter

  of a new plastic snowshoe

  looking for a moving speck

  a troika perhaps

  an exile

  an icy prophet

  an Indian insurrection

  a burning weather station

  There’s a story out there boys

  Canada could you bear some folk songs

  about freedom and death

  STREETCARS

  Did you see the streetcars

  passing as of old

  along Ste Catherine Street?

  Golden streetcars

  passing under the tearful

  Temple of the Heart

  where the crutches hang

  like catatonic divining twigs.

  A thin young priest

  folds his semen in a kleenex

  his face glowing

  in the passing gold

  as the world returns.

  A lovely riot gathers the citizenry

  into its spasms

  as the past comes back

  in the form of golden streetcars.

  I carry a banner:

  “The Past is Perfect”

  my little female cousin

  who does not believe

  in our religious destiny

  rides royally on my nostalgia.

  The streetcars curtsy

  round a corner

  Firecrackers and moths

  drip from their humble wires.

  BULLETS

  Listen all you bullets

  that never hit:

  a lot of throats are growing

  in open collars

  like frozen milk bottles

  on a 5 a.m. street

  throats that are waiting

  for bite scars

  but will settle

  for bullet holes

  You restless bullets

  lost in swarms

  from undecided wars:

  fasten on

  these nude throats

  that need some

  decoration

  I’ve done my own work:

  I had 3 jewels

  no more

  and I have placed them

  on my choices

  jewels

  although they performed

  like bullets:

  an instant of ruby

  before the hands

  came up

  to stem the mess

  And you over there

  my little acrobat:

  swing fast

  After me

  there is no care

  and the air

  is heavily armed

  and has

  the wildest aim

  HITLER

  Now let him go to sleep with history,

  the real skeleton stinking of gasoline,

  the mutt and jeff henchmen beside him:

  let them sleep among our precious poppies.

  Cadres of SS waken in our minds

  where they began before we ransomed them

&nb
sp; to that actual empty realm we people

  with the shadows that disturb our inward peace.

  For a while we resist the silver-black cars

  rolling in slow parade through the brain.

  We stuff the microphones with old chaotic flowers

  from a bed which rapidly exhausts itself.

  Never mind. They turn up as poppies

  beside the tombs and libraries of the real world.

  The leader’s vast design, the tilt of his chin

  seem excessively familiar to minds at peace.

  FRONT LAWN

  The snow was falling

  over my penknife

  There was a movie

  in the fireplace

  The apples were wrapped

  in 8-year-old blonde hair

  Starving and dirty

  the janitor’s daughter never

  turned up in November

  to pee from her sweet crack

  on the gravel

  I’ll go back one day

  when my cast is off

  Elm leaves are falling

  over my bow and arrow

  Candy is going bad

  and Boy Scout calendars

  are on fire

  My old mother

  sits in her Cadillac

  laughing her Danube laugh

  as I tell her that we own

  all the worms

  under our front lawn

  Rust rust rust

  in the engines of love and time

  KERENSKY

  My friend walks through our city this winter night,

  fur-hatted, whistling, anti-mediterranean,

  stricken with seeing Eternity in all that is seasonal.

  He is the Kerensky of our Circle

  always about to chair the last official meeting

  before the pros take over, they of the pure smiling eyes

  trained only for Form.

  He knows there are no measures to guarantee

  the Revolution, or to preserve the row of muscular icicles

  which will chart Winter’s decline like a graph.

  There is nothing for him to do but preside

  over the last official meeting.

  It will all come round again: the heartsick teachers

  who make too much of poetry, their students

  who refuse to suffer, the cache of rifles in the lawyer’s attic:

  and then the magic, the 80-year comet touching

  the sturdiest houses. The Elite Corps commits suicide

  in the tennis-ball basement. Poets ride buses free.

  The General insists on a popularity poll. Troops study satire.