Or will I bind the roots
across my head and chest
and see the stars as heaven’s warts
visiting the sinner’s flesh?
1957
I wonder if my brother will ever read this. He would no doubt repudiate it, gently I hope, he would say perhaps the sea is all the things you’ve said, dream machine, a glass eye and so forth, but even if it’s true it’s better left unsaid. Now I could tell him something which I never knew when I lived so close to him, that it is a luxury, this being able to leave things unsaid, a luxury enjoyed by very few. Children of the wind and water need not elaborate on what their blood knows, but how many can command this economy, how many more must scratch and paw the world in a thousand different ways just to establish the slightest connection with their true lives. Heroes and near-heroes, anointed children aimed at their waiting constellations, they may disdain to implore the horizontal world with words and organizing metaphors, but I do not have their balance, how many do, I am not aimed at anything, I am not about to ascend toward my glory, so I must blunder among my tetherings, I must bargain for what love I’ll get, outside my brief particular story no passion will unfold me, no particular has claimed me so I must indulge myself in the seedy politics of the general, and cry at gods to prove gods unreal, just as my brother and I used to cloud windowpanes with our breath so that we could draw on them with our fingers. He drew profiles for which I designed complicated eyes, and no one asks you to decide which of our efforts was the more significant.
I see you on a Greek mattress
reading the Book of Changes,
Lebanese candy in the air.
On the whitewashed wall I see
you raise another hexagram
for the same old question:
how can you be free?
I see you cleaning your pipe
with the hairpin
of somebody’s innocent night.
I see the plastic Evil Eye
pinned to your underwear.
Once again you throw the pennies,
once again you read
how the pieces of the world
have changed around your question.
Did you get to the Himalayas?
Did you visit that monk in New Jersey?
I never answered any of your letters.
Oh Steve, do you remember me?
1963
Suzanne wears a leather coat.
Her legs are insured by many burnt bridges.
Her calves are full as spinnakers
in a clean race, hard from following music
beyond the maps of any audience.
Suzanne wears a leather coat
because she is not a civilian.
She never walks casually down Ste Catherine
because with every step she must redeem
the clubfoot crowds and stalk the field
of huge hail-stones that never melted,
I mean the cemetery.
Stand up! stand!
Suzanne is walking by.
She wears a leather coat. She won’t stop
to bandage the fractures she walks between.
She must not stop, she must not
carry money.
Many are the workers in charity.
Few serve the lilac,
few heal with mist.
Suzanne wears a leather coat.
Her breasts yearn for marble.
The traffic halts: people fall out
of their cars. None of their most drooling
thoughts are wild enough
to build the ant-full crystal city
she would splinter with the tone of her step.
1963
Desperate sexual admirals
have captured Ste Catherine Street
In my naked pyjamas
I led them through the secret pass
Shelves of staircase people
feed their transistors
They have let the night into
their open shirts
three nipples at a time
And who lit that black star
with profound inflammable juices
and tuned my backbone
to a high wire moan
And listen everybody
just whose side am I on
Steered by the sticky dreams
of hairsome cabinboys
the boats slip through the rosejam night
into houses into white beds
Helen will leave her family tonight
She will climb away
for the sake of love only
My backbone whines like a siren
but nobody moves
The black star has sunk its spokes
it controls us like a sail
Lifetime staircase people
we’re drifting together
There’s nothing in store
for the doomed armada of wooden steps
steaming in the sweet black fire
of her guilt her promises
her royal raw impatience
July, 1964
Nancy lies in London grass
and George in Marco Polo’s Pass
Leonard hasn’t been the same
since he wandered from his name
Michael slowly dips his toe
in bathtubs filled with Turkish snow
Robert always loves to tell
how he became invisible
And all my friends are fast asleep
in places that are high and steep
their bodies torn on crosses
that their visions meant to leap
And in between their dreams they hate
the company they keep
1966
You broke the thin highway
where I drove drunk
in a souped-up tank
broke it
with your iron hairpin
Do you ever wonder
what these forests
are doing under my wheels
Crash crash the trees
sing as they fall
scraping against each other
like the hairy legs of crickets
Where was I going when
you snapped it
like a thread in mother’s teeth
I’ll never know
Crash crash sing the trees
What a big forest
What a great tank
What strange pieces of a highway
snarled in my treads
1963
Two went to sleep
almost every night
one dreamed of mud
one dreamed of Asia
visiting a zeppelin
visiting Nijinsky
Two went to sleep
one dreamed of ribs
one dreamed of senators
Two went to sleep
two travellers
The long marriage
in the dark
The sleep was old
the travellers were old
one dreamed of oranges
one dreamed of Carthage
Two friends asleep
years locked in travel
Goodnight my darling
as the dreams waved goodbye
one travelled lightly
one walked through water
visiting a chessgame
visiting a booth
always returning
to wait out the day
One carried matches
one climbed a beehive
one sold an earphone
one shot a German
Two went to sleep
every sleep went together
wandering away
from an operating table
one dreamed of grass
one dreamed of spokes
one bargained nicely
one was a snowman
one counted medicine
one tasted pencils
one was a child
o
ne was a traitor
visiting heavy industry
visiting the family
Two went to sleep
none could foretell
one went with baskets
one took a ledger
one night happy
one night in terror
Love could not bind them
Fear could not either
they went unconnected
they never knew where
always returning
to wait out the day
parting with kissing
parting with yawns
visiting Death til
they wore out their welcome
visiting Death til
the right disguise worked
1964
What did I do with my breath
before your lies appointed me
detective of love?
Did I smell wine in little restaurants?
Did I bend over gardens?
Did I know where I was?
How many times did one of my friends
fall asleep his lips bright
with your slippery perfume?
Tell me how many times exactly
or I can’t catch my breath.
Did I used to open the window
and think about the lilacs?
Did I detect hot-dogs
on St Lawrence Boulevard?
Did I like books?
Did I have a career?
How many times in what holes
exactly did you unfurl his
swimming flag of tiny stars?
I want to catch my breath
I want my old hay fever.
Did I have leisure time
before I started to reconstruct
every one of your nights?
Did I yawn?
Did I take walks without
looking for bodies?
Did I believe conversation?
Was music as necessary?
Did I love Euclid?
Was the air big?
Did I like surprises?
What did I do with my life before
your lies leaked the legend
of the fountain of s–t
which I had to see for myself?
Did I sleep much?
Was there a menu tomorrow?
Did we have a dog?
Were horror movies fun?
Was I a freedom-rider
was I approximately a socialist
was I a prince in Canada
in the days before I followed
you and one of my friends?
Exactly where did you feel nothing?
Where are his eyes continuing?
How does it all continue?
Are reasons nice?
Is there any air in
the observation tower?
Does time fumigate?
Does detective of love
resign ever is detective bribed
with a huge sunset?
Are there lies which don’t waste?
What did I do often in
the orchard with your name and
a great bouquet of raw pencils?
July 12, 1964
I met Doc Dog The Poker Hound
in a clean cafeteria
All the farms of the country
were dark at that hour
I thought of wood and sleeping people
as we slurped the coffee
What with the tile and neon
it was like some sidewalk cafe at noon
in a European capital city
Doc Dog saw my face get sloppy
with a few old recollections
of farmhouses and foreign cities
being the traveller that I am
and he said
One of these days
I’m going to open up a cafeteria
that serves coffee in thin cups
bone thin China cups
What we lose in cups we make up
in gratitude
You have a big mouth you Poker Hound
Where the hell are you
I’ve been here for twenty years
and I never heard of you again
or your famous cafeteria
Found once again shamelessly ignoring the swans who inflame the spectators on the shores of American rivers; found once again allowing the juicy contract to expire because the telephone has a magic correspondence with my tapeworm; found once again leaving the garlanded manhood in danger of long official repose while it is groomed for marble in seedily historic back rooms; found once again humiliating the bank clerk with eye-to-eye wrestling, art dogma, lives that loaf and stare, and other stage whispers of genius; found once again the chosen object of heavenly longing such as can ambush a hermit in a forest with visions of a busy parking lot; found once again smelling mothball sweaters, titling home movies, untangling Victorian salmon rods, fanatically convinced that a world of sporty order is just around the corner; found once again planning the ideal lonely year which waits like first flesh love on a calendar of third choices; found once again hovering like a twine-eating kite over hands that feed me, verbose under the influence of astrology; found once again selling out to accessible local purity while Pentagon Tiffany evil alone can guarantee my power; found once again trusting that my friends grew up in Eden and will not harm me when at last I am armourless and absolutely silent; found once again at the very beginning, veteran of several useless ordeals, prophetic but not seminal, the purist for the masses of tomorrow; found once again sweetening life which I have abandoned, like a fired zoo-keeper sneaking peanuts to publicized sodomized elephants; found once again flaunting the rainbow which demonstrates that I am permitted only that which I urgently need; found once again cleansing my tongue of all possibilities of all possibilities but my perfect one.
1964
The stars turn their noble stories,
turn their heroes upside-down;
the moon, obsessed calm moth
pursues its private candle past the dawn—
All these marvels happen
while I keep silent on my love
and say nothing for her beauty.
How can I use the gull’s perfect orbit
round and round the hidden fish,
is there something to do as the sun
seizes and hardens the ridge of rocks?
Distant face, like an icon’s
disciplined to tenderness,
my silence, it is for you?
May I survey the emptiness
that serves as field for the complete embrace?
1960
When I hear you sing
Solomon
animal throat, eyes beaming
sex and wisdom
My hands ache from
I left blood on the doors of my home
Solomon
I am very alone from aiming songs
at G-d for
I thought that beside me there was no one
Solomon
My secret fell on a language
It might have fallen like rust
on a tractor
It might have fallen on a trip
like manna
It fell like a drunk
into an elephant trap
Some of the spikes whispered:
Secrets do not bleed
Some of the spikes whispered:
Secrets which do not bleed
are selfish.
1964
A goldfish died in a cloudy bowl
which I left on the pulpit while I—
never mind: my absence was not
justified.
Belly up, soggy as wet
Kleenex, the wrong fins soft.
Greed purifies in the way
it burns the world,
balancing wish with loss until
we own nothing but our perfect longing.
The Fish Strikes Again
with its tiny crosses,
its mist
y sperm ocean past.
1964
O G-d as I called you before
when I was my father’s father
It is thy world again
O G-d you are a souvenir of Lourdes
I am not ashamed to be a tourist
in the milky world
You are a plastic seashell
in which I hear a honeymoon
I am a souvenir of creation
You sank like a fish hook
through the layered mirrors of self love
O g-d change your name in my heart
Buy me buy me cries
the April sun bomb
Buy me cries the wind coming
in uneven kisses as the white summer
wears it to shreds
And me and me cry the khaki lovers
who saunter by in a game of shove and trip
You send me away with a vision of tunnels
that I can shake for snow and all aboard
Come back by a longer route
the thousand year dash
You beg me hoarsely
in a voice that sounds too much like books
Child rest
and that is a souvenir
of where you will not call me back from
1965
Here was the Harbour, crowded with white ships, the gulls showing how much silver there was in the sunlight as they fell out of the sky like handfuls of polished rice, or climbed in smoky squadrons at the sun until their wings turned silver and they descended again to astonish the floating garbage.
Who doesn’t give his heart to things that soar, kites or jet planes or a sharp distant sail? I tried to give more than my heart, I tried to yield my loathing, my ambition, all my tiny sicknesses, I tried to give away a new desire which I had hardly suspected but which was growing violently in the metal sunlight, like a germ culture suddenly surrounded by its own ideal conditions.
The gulls continued their cold acrobatics and refused to bear the smudges of my uneasiness. I think that more than hunger the sky was their master, they performed for the endless blue sky, confetti for some vast ceremony, an eternal wedding.
Give what you want to the gulls, the sky is not satisfied with the smudges of your character. It demands stories; of men the sky demands all manner of stories, entertainments, embroideries, just as it does of its stars and constellations. The sky does not care for this trait or that affliction, it wants the whole man lost in his story, abandoned in the mechanics of action, touching his fellows, leaving them, hunting the steps, dancing the old circles. The sky wants diagrams of our lives, it stores them like little curious wrist-watches, they are our wedding gifts.