while we talked of things that didn’t matter
and the streetcar rocked and howled its color
which we didn’t notice except as a thing beside the eve
as we mentioned sex through palsies,
pither, the red fire, pither the eustachian tube!
gone are the days, gone is the green bugdead ivy
and the words we said tonight that didn’t matter;
X 12, Cardinal and Gold
GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD!
your eyes are gold
your hair is gold
your love is gold
your grave is gold
and the streets go past like people walking
and the bells ring like bells ringing;
your hands are gold and your voice is gold
and all the children walking
and the trees growing and the idiots selling papers
34256780000 oh while you are
eustachian tube
red fire
greenbugdead
ivy
cardinal and gold
and the words we said tonight
are going away
over the trees
down by the streetcar
and I have closed the book
with the red red lion
down by the gates of gold.
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.
for Jane
225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
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.
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 of the soul,
burn the enthralling paintings,
piss on the dawn,
my love
is dead.
my real love in Athens
and I remember the knife,
the way you touch a rose
and come away with blood
and how you touch love the same way,
and how when you want to come onto the freeway
the trucks rail you on the inner lane
moonlight and roaring
running down your bravery,
making you touch the brakes
and small pictures come to your mind:
pictures of Christ hung there
or Hiroshima,
or your last wife
frying an egg.
the way you touch a rose
is the way you lean against the coffin-sides
of the dead,
the way you touch a rose
and see the dead whirling back
underneath your fingernails;
the knife
Gettysburg, the Bulge, Flanders,
Attila, Muss—
what can I make of history
when it narrows down
to the three o’clock shadow
under a leaf?
and if the mind grows harrowed
and the rose bites
like a dog,
they say
we have love . . .
but what can I make of love
when we are all born
at a different time and place
and only meet
through a trick of centuries
and a chance three steps
to the left?
you mean
a love I have not met
is less than a selfishness
I call near?
can I say now
with rose-blood upon the edge of mind,
can I say now as the planets whirl
and they shoot tons of force into the end of space
to make Columbus look like an idiot-child,
can I say now
that because I have screamed into a night
and they have not heard,
can I say now
that I remember the knife
and I sit in a cool room
and rub my fingers to the whistle of the clock
and calmly think of
Ajax and sputum
and railroad hens across the golden rails,
and my real love is in Athens
600
A or B,
as outside my window
pigeons stumble as they fly
and through a door
that outwaits an empty room,
roses can’t get
in or out,
or love or moths or lightning—
I would neither break upon sighing
or smile; could nothings
like moths and men
exist like orange sunlight upon paper
divided by nine?
Athens is now many miles
and one death away,
and the tables are dirty as hell
and the sheets and the dishes,
but I’m laughing: that’s not real;
but it is, divided by nine
or one hundred:
clean laundry is love
that does not scratch itself
and sigh.
sleeping woman
I sit up in bed at night and listen to you
snore
I met you in a bus station
and now I wonder at your back
sick white and stained with
children’s freckles
as the lamp divests the unsolvable
sorrow of the world
upon your sleep.
I cannot see your feet
but I must guess that they are
most charming feet.
who do you belong to?
are you real?
I think of flowers, animals, birds
they all seem more than good
and so clearly
real.
yet you cannot help being a
woman. we are each selected to be
something. the spider, the cook.
the elephant. it is as if we were each
a p
ainting and hung on some
gallery wall.
—and now the painting turns
upon its back, and over a curving elbow
I can see ½ a mouth, one eye and
almost a nose.
the rest of you is hidden
out of sight
but I know that you are a
contemporary, a modern living
work
perhaps not immortal
but we have
loved.
please continue to
snore.
a party here—machineguns, tanks, an army fighting against men on rooftops
if love could go on like tarpaper
or even as far as meaning goes
but it won’t work
can’t work
there are too many snot-heads
too many women who hide their legs
except for special bedrooms
there are too many flies on the
ceiling and it’s been a hot
Summer
and the riots in Los Angeles
have been over for a week
and they burned buildings and killed policemen and
whitemen and
I am a whiteman and I guess I did not get particularly
excited because I am a whiteman and I am poor
and I pay for being poor
because I do as few handstands for somebody else as
possible
and so I’m poor because I choose it and I guess it’s
not as uncomfortable that
way
and so I ignored the riots
because I figured both the black and the white
wanted many things that did not interest
me
plus having a woman here who gets very excited about
discrimination the Bomb segregation
you know you know
I let her go on until finally the talk
wearies me
for I don’t care too much for the
standard answer
or the lonely addled creatures who like to join a
CAUSE simply because a cause lifts them out of their
dribbling
imbecility into a stream of
action. me, I like time to think, think, think . . .
but it was a party here, really, machineguns, tanks,
the army fighting against men on rooftops . . .
the same thing we accused Russia of doing. well, it’s
a lousy game, and I don’t know what to do, except
if it’s like a friend of mine said I said one night when
I was drunk: “Don’t ever kill anybody, even if it seems
like the last or the only thing to do.”
laugh. all right. it might make you happy
that I even have a stream of remorse when I kill a
fly. an ant. a flea. yet I go on. I kill them and
go on.
god, love is more strange than numerals more strange
than
grass on fire more strange than the dead body of a child
drowned in the bottom of a tub, we know so
little, we know so much, we don’t know
enough.
anyhow, we go through our movements, bowel,
sometimes
sexual, sometimes heavenly, sometimes bastardly, or
sometimes we walk through a museum to see what is
left of us or it, the sad strictured palsy of glassed
and frozen and sterile madhouse background
enough to make you want to walk out into the sun again
and look around, but in the park and on the streets
the dead keep on moving through as if they were already
in a museum. maybe love is sex. maybe love is a bowl of
mush. maybe love is a radio shut off.
anyway, it was a party.
a week ago.
today I went to the track with roses in my eyes. dollars in
my
pocket. headlines in the alley. it’s over a hundred miles by
train,
one way. a party of drunks coming back, broke again, the
dream
shot again, bodies wobbling; yakking in the barcar and I’m
in there
too, drinking, scribbling what’s left of hope in the dim light,
the
barman was a Negro and I was white. bad fix. we made
it.
no party.
the rich newspapers keep talking about “The Negro
Revolution” and
“The Breakdown of the Negro Family.” the train hit town,
finally,
and I got rid of the 2 homosexuals who were buying me
drinks, and I
went to piss and make a phonecall and as I came through
the
entranceway to the Men’s crapper here were 2 Negroes at a
shoeshine
stand shining the shoes of whitemen and the whitemen let
them do
it.
I walked down to a Mexican bar
and had a few whiskeys and when I left the barmaid gave
me a
little slip of paper with her name, address and phone
number upon
it, and when I got outside I threw it into the gutter
got into my car and drove down into Western Los
Angeles
and everything looked the same the same as it always
did
and at Alvarado and Sunset I slowed to 40
I saw a policeman fat on his cycle
looking prompt and heinous
and I was disgusted with myself and
everyone, all the little any of us
had done, love, love, love,
and the towers swayed like old stripteasers
praying for the lost magic, and I drove on in
shining the shoes of every Negro and Gringo in
America, including
my own.
for the 18 months of Marina Louise
sun sun
is my little
girl
sun
on the carpet—
sun sun
out the
door
picking a
flower
waiting for me
to rise
and
play.
an old man
emerges
from his
chair,
battle-wrecked,
and she looks
and only
sees
love, which I
become
through her
majesty
and infinite
magic
sun.
poem for my daughter
(they tell me that I am now a
responsible citizen, and through sun stuck on Northern
windows of dust
red camellias are flowers crying while
babies are crying.)
I spoon it
in: strained chicken noodle dinner
junior prunes
junior fruit dessert
spoon it in and
for Christ’s sake
don’t blame the
child
don’t blame the
govt.
don’t blame the bosses or the
working classes—
spoon it down
through these arms and chest
like electrocuted
wax
a friend phones:
“Whatya gonna do now, Hank?”
“What the hell ya mean, what am I gonna
do?”
“I mean ya got responsibility, ya gotta bring the
kid up
right.”
feed her:
spoon it
down:
a place in Be
verly Hills
and never any need for unemployment compensation
and never to sell to the highest
bidder
never to fall in love with a soldier or a killer of any
kind
to appreciate Beethoven and Jellyroll Morton and
bargain dresses
she’s got a
chance:
there was once the
Theoric Fund and now there’s the
Great Society
“Are ya still gonna play the horses? are ya still gonna
drink? are ya still gonna—”
“yes.”
telephone, waving flower in the wind & the dead bones of
my heart—
now she sleeps beautifully like
boats on the Nile
maybe some day she will
bury me
that would be very nice
if it weren’t a
responsibility.
answer to a note found in the mailbox
“love is like a bell
tell me, have you
heard it in her voice?”
love is not like a bell
that’s poetic, true,
but I’ve heard something in her voice
that in the puke of my misery
that in death’s head sitting in the window
grinning its broken yellow teeth
has risen me to a climate I have seldom
known—
“here, a flower. I bring flower.”
I hear something in her voice
that has nothing to do with sweating and tricky and
bleeding armies
that has nothing to do with the factory boss with broken
eyes
I am not picking at your words:
you have your bell
I have this and maybe you have this
too:
“I bring shoes. shoe. shoe. here is
shoe!”
it is more than learning what a shoe is
it is more than learning what I am or what she
is
it is something else
that maybe we who have lived a long time have almost
forgotten
that a child should come from the swamps of my pain
bearing flowers, actually bearing flowers,
christ, this is almost too much
that I should be allowed to see with eyes and touch and
laugh,
this knowledgeable beast of me
frowns inside
but soon finds the effort too much to hide