I got a colonel, a major and 3 lieutenants
before the band stopped playing;
and now it’s like a war, uniforms
everywhere, behind cars and brush,
and plang plang plang
my cellar is all fireworks, and I
fire back, the colt as hot as a
baked potato, I fire back and sing
sing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord; He is
tramping out the vintage…”
these things
these things that we support most well
have nothing to do with us,
and we do with them
out of of boredom or fear or money
or cracked intelligence;
our circle and our candle of light
being small,
so small we cannot bear it,
we heave out with Idea
and lose the Center:
all wax without the wick,
and we see names that once meant wisdom,
like signs into ghost towns,
and only the graves are real.
poem for personnel managers:
An old man asked me for a cigarette
and I carefully dealt out two.
“Been lookin’ for job. Gonna stand
in the sun and smoke.”
He was close to rags and rage
and he leaned against death.
It was a cold day, indeed, and trucks
loaded and heavy as old whores
banged and tangled on the streets…
We drop like planks from a rotting floor
as the world strives to unlock the bone
that weights its brain.
(God is a lonely place without steak.)
We are dying birds
we are sinking ships—
the world rocks down against us
and we
throw out our arms
and we
throw out our legs
like the death kiss of the centipede:
but they kindly snap our backs
and call our poison “politics.”
Well, we smoked, he and I—little men
nibbling fish-head thoughts…
All the horses do not come in,
and as you watch the lights of the jails
and hospitals wink on and out,
and men handle flags as carefully as babies,
remember this:
you are a great-gutted instrument of
heart and belly, carefully planned—
so if you take a plane for Savannah,
take the best plane;
or if you eat chicken on a rock,
make it a very special animal.
(You call it a bird; I call birds
flowers.)
And if you decide to kill somebody,
make it anybody and not somebody:
some men are made of more special, precious
parts: do not kill
if you will
a president or a King
or a man
behind a desk—
these have heavenly longitudes
enlightened attitudes.
If you decide,
take us
who stand and smoke and glower;
we are rusty with sadness and
feverish
with climbing broken ladders.
Take us:
we were never children
like your children.
We do not understand love songs
like your inamorata.
Our faces are cracked linoleum,
cracked through with the heavy, sure
feet of our masters.
We are shot through with carrot tops
and poppyseed and tilted grammar;
we waste days like mad blackbirds
and pray for alcoholic nights.
Our silk-sick human smiles wrap around
us like somebody else’s confetti:
we do not even belong to the Party.
We are a scene chalked-out with the
sick white brush of Age.
We smoke, asleep as a dish of figs.
We smoke, dead as a fog.
Take us.
A bathtub murder
or something quick and bright; our names
in the papers.
Known, at last, for a moment
to millions of careless and grape-dull eyes
that hold themselves private
to only flicker and flame
at the poor cracker-barrel jibes
of their conceited, pampered correct comedians.
Known, at last, for a moment,
as they will be known
and as you will be known
by an all-gray man on an all-gray horse
who sits and fondles a sword
longer than the night
longer than the mountain’s aching backbone
longer than all the cries
that have a-bombed up out of throats
and exploded in a newer, less-planned
land.
We smoke and the clouds do not notice us.
A cat walks by and shakes Shakespeare off of his back.
Tallow, tallow, candle like wax: our spines
are limp and our consciousness burns
guilelessly away
the remaining wick life has
doled out to us.
An old man asked me for a cigarette
and told me his troubles
and this
is what he said:
that Age was a crime
and that Pity picked up the marbles
and that Hatred picked up the
cash.
He might have been your father
or mine.
He might have been a sex-fiend
or a saint.
But whatever he was,
he was condemned
and we stood in the sun and
smoked
and looked around
in our leisure
to see who was next in
line.
ice for the eagles
I keep remembering the horses
under the moon
I keep remembering feeding the horses
sugar
white oblongs of sugar
more like ice,
and they had heads like
eagles
bald heads that could bite and
did not.
The horses were more real than
my father
more real than God
and they could have stepped on my
feet but they didn’t
they could have done all kinds of horrors
but they didn’t.
I was almost 5
but I have not forgotten yet;
o my god they were strong and good
those red tongues slobbering
out of their souls.
plea to a passing maid
girl in shorts, biting your nails, revolving your ass,
the boys are looking at you—
you hold more, it seems,
than Gauguin or Brahma or Balzac,
more, at least, than the skulls that swim at our feet,
your swagger breaks the Eiffel tower,
turns the heads of old newsboys long ago gone
sexually to pot;
your caged malarkey, your idiot’s dance,
mugging it, delightful—don’t ever wash stained under-
wear or chase your acts of love
through neighborhood alleys—
don’t spoil it for us,
putting on weight and weariness,
settling for TV and a namby-pamby husband;
don’t give up that absurd dispossessed wiggle
to water a Saturday’s front lawn—
don’t send us back to Balzac or introspection
or Pa
ris
or wine, don’t send us back
to the incubation of our doubts or the memory
of death-wiggle, bitch, madden us with love
and hunger, keep the sharks, the bloody sharks,
from the heart.
waste basket
spoor and anemia and deviltry
and what can we make of this?:
a belly in the trash…
down by Mr. Saunders’ beer cans
curled up like a cat;
life can be no less ludicrous
than rain
and as I take the lift
up to 3
I pass Mrs. Swanson
in the grate
powdered and really dead
but walking on
buying sweets and fats
and mailing Christmas cards;
and opening the door to my room
a fat damsel scrambles my vision
bottles fall
and a voice says
why are all your poems
personal?
::: the old movies
were best, the French F. Legion
every man with a bitch and the Arabs charging down
on white parade ponies, and the Sarge’t holding the
fort by propping up dead men until re’forcemnts arriv’l.
And the ones with the boys flying around in the Spads
full of wire and one plat. blonde who seemed to symbolize
everything. Maybe it was just because I was a kid
or maybe it isn’t the same any more. All the angles,
the cautious patriots, the air-raid wardens, cigarettes
for sex, and even the enemy seeming to play a game.
Or the time they found the Jap nurse in the shell-hole
who had been hit in the breast and wanted some sulfa
and one of the boys said, “Hey, you think we can fuck
her before she dies?”
peace
I thought the dove was the bird of peace
but here they were shooting them out
of the brush
and climbing up the sides of mountains
and banging them down;
and everywhere the doves went
there were the hunters
blasting and beaming and blasting,
and one man who didn’t
in the slightest
resemble a dove
was shot in the shoulder;
and there were many complaints
that the doves
were smaller and scarcer
than last year,
but the way they fell
through the air
when you stung the life
out of them
was the same;
and I was there too
but I couldn’t shoot anything
with a paintbrush;
and a couple of them
came over to my canvas
and stood and stood and stood
until I finally said,
for God’s sake
go look at Picasso and Rembrandt,
go look at Klee and Gauguin,
listen to a symphony by Mahler,
and if you get anything
out of that
come back
and stare at my canvas!
what the hell’s wrong with
him? the one guy
said.
he’s nuts. they’re all nuts,
the other guy said. anyhow,
I got my 10 doves.
me too, his buddy said, let’s
go home: we can have them
in the pan
by 2:30.
I taste the ashes of your death
the blossoms shake
sudden water
down my sleeve,
sudden water
cool and clean
as snow—
as the stem-sharp
swords
go in
against your breast
and the sweet wild
rocks
leap over
and
lock us in.
for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough:—
I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak
to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean upon this,
I lean on all of this
and I know:
her dress upon my arm:
but
they will not
give her back to me.
Uruguay or hell
it should have been Mexico
she always liked Mexico
and Arizona and New Mexico
and tacos,
but not the flies
and so there I was
standing there—
durable
visible
clothed
waiting.
the priest was angry:
he had been arguing with the boy
for several days
over his mother’s right to have a
Catholic burial
and they finally settled
that it could not be in
church
but he would say the
thing at the grave.
the priest cared about
technicalities
the son did not care
except about the
bill.
I was the
lover
and I cared but what I cared for
was dead.
there were just 3 of
us: son,
landlady,
lover. it was
hot. the priest waved his words
in the air and
then he was
done. I walked to the
priest and thanked him for the
words.
and we walked
off
we got into the car
we drove away.
it should have been Mexico
or Uruguay or hell.
the son let me out at my
place and said he’d write me about a
stone but I knew he was lying—
that if there was to be a stone
the lover would
put it there.
I went upstairs and turned on the
radio and pulled down the
shades.
notice
the swans drown in bilge water,
take down the signs,
test the poisons,
barricade the cow
from the bull,
the peony from the sun,
take the lavender kisses from my night,
put the symphonies out on the streets
like beggars,
get the nails ready,
flog the backs of the saints,
stun frogs and mice for the cat,
burn the enthralling paintings,
piss on the dawn,
my love
is dead.
for Jane
225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your bl
ood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.
when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.
what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.
conversation on a telephone
I could tell by the crouch of the cat,
the way it was flattened,
that it was insane with prey;
and when my car came upon it,
it rose in the twilight
and made off
with bird in mouth,
a very large bird, gray,
the wings down like broken love,
the fangs in,
life still there
but not much,
not very much.
the broken love-bird
the cat walks in my mind
and I cannot make him out:
the phone rings,
I answer a voice,
but I see him again and again,
and the loose wings
the loose gray wings,
and this thing held
in a head that knows no mercy;
it is the world, it is ours;
I put the phone down