And knowing is enough
for mountains such as these
where nothing long remains
houses walls or trees
FINALLY I CALLED
Finally I called the people I didn’t want to hear from
After the third ring I said
I’ll let it ring five more times then what will I do
The telephone is a fine instrument
but I never learned to work it very well
Five more rings and I’ll put the receiver down
I know where it goes I know that much
The telephone was black with silver rims
The booth was cozier than the drugstore
There were a lot of creams and scissors and tubes
I needed for my body
I was interested in many coughdrops
I believe the drugstore keeper hated
his telephone and people like me
who ask for change so politely
I decided to keep to the same street
and go into the fourth drugstore
and call them again
STYLE
I don’t believe the radio stations
of Russia and America
but I like the music and I like
the solemn European voices announcing jazz
I don’t believe opium or money
though they’re hard to get
and punished with long sentences
I don’t believe love
in the midst of my slavery I
do not believe
I am a man sitting in a house
on a treeless Argolic island
I will forget the grass of my mother’s lawn
I know I will
I will forget the old telephone number
Fitzroy seven eight two oh
I will forget my style
I will have no style
I hear a thousand miles of hungry static
and the old clear water eating rocks
I hear the bells of mules eating
I hear the flowers eating the night
under their folds
Now a rooster with a razor
plants the haemophilia gash across
the soft black sky
and now I know for certain
I will forget my style
Perhaps a mind will open in this world
perhaps a heart will catch rain
Nothing will heal and nothing will freeze
but perhaps a heart will catch rain
America will have no style
Russia will have no style
It is happening in the twenty eighth year
of my attention
I don’t know what will become
of the mules with their lady eyes
or the old clear water
or the giant rooster
The early morning greedy radio eats
the governments one by one the languages
the poppy fields one by one
Beyond the numbered band
a silence develops for every style
for the style I laboured on
an external silence like the space
between insects in a swarm
electric unremembering
and it is aimed at us
(I am sleepy and frightened)
it makes toward me brothers
GOEBBELS ABANDONS HIS NOVEL AND JOINS THE PARTY
His last love poem
broke in the harbour
where swearing blondes
loaded scrap
into rusted submarines.
Out in the sun
he was surprised
to find himself lustless
as a wheel.
More simple than money
he sat in some spilled salt
and wondered if he would find again
the scars of lampposts
ulcers of wrought iron fence.
He remembered perfectly
how he sprung
his father’s heart attack
and left his mother
in a pit
memory white from loss of guilt.
Precision in the sun
the elevators
the pieces of iron
broke whatever thous
his pain had left
like a whistle breaks
a gang of sweating men.
Ready to join the world
yes yes ready to marry
convinced pain a matter of choice
a Doctor of Reason
he began to count the ships
decorate the men.
Will dreams threaten
this discipline
will favourite hair favourite thighs
last life’s sweepstake winners
drive him to adventurous cafés?
Ah my darling pupils
do you think there exists a hand
so bestial in beauty so ruthless
that can switch off
his religious electric exlax light?
WHY COMMANDS ARE OBEYED
My father pulls the curtains: the Mother Goose wallpaper goes black. He insists the spaghetti is snakes and the bench a sheer cliff.
“Then why lead me, Father, if they are true snakes, if it is a sheer cliff?”
“Higher! Be brave!”
“But I was brave outside; yesterday, outside, I was very brave.”
“That? That was no ordeal. This is the ordeal, this familiar room where I say the bench is dangerous.”
“It’s true!” I shouted twenty years later, pulling him out of his dirty bed. “Poor little Father, you told me true.”
“Let me be. I am an old Father.”
“No! Lift up thy nose. The window is made of axes. What is that grey matter in the ashtrays? Not from cigarettes, I’ll bet. The living room is a case for relics!”
“Must I look?”
“I’ll say you must. One of your young, hardly remembered legs is lodged between the pillows of the chesterfield, decaying like food between teeth. This room is a case for stinking relics!”
Yes, yes, we wept down the Turkish carpet, entangled in the great, bloodwarm, family embrace, reconciled as the old story unfolded.
It happens to everyone. For those with eyes, who know in their hearts that terror is mutual, then this hard community has a beauty of its own.
Once upon a time my father pulls the curtains: the Mother Goose wallpaper goes black it began. We heard it in each other’s arms.
IT USES US!
Come upon this heap
exposed to camera leer:
would you snatch a skull
for midnight wine, my dear?
Can you wear a cape
claim these burned for you
or is this death unusable
alien and new?
In our leaders’ faces
(albeit they deplore
the past) can you read how
they love Freedom more?
In my own mirror
their eyes beam at me:
my face is theirs, my eyes
burnt and free.
Now you and I are mounted
on this heap, my dear:
from this height we thrill
as boundaries disappear.
Kiss me with your teeth.
All things can be done
whisper museum ovens of
a war that Freedom won.
THE FIRST MURDER
I knew it never happened
There was no murder in the field
The grass wasn’t red
The grass was green
I knew it never happened
I’ve come home tired
My boots are streaked with filth
What good to preach
it never happened
to the bodies murdered in the field
Tell the truth I’ve smoked myself
into love this innocent night
It n
ever happened
It never happened
There was no murder in the field
There was a house on the field
The field itself was large and empty
It was night
It was dead of night
There were lights in the little windows
MY TEACHER IS DYING
Martha they say you are gentle
No doubt you labour at it
Why is it I see you
leaping into unmade beds
strangling the telephone
Why is it I see you
hiding your dirty nylons
in the fireplace
Martha talk to me
My teacher is dying
His laugh is already dead
that put cartilage
between the bony facts
Now they rattle loud
Martha talk to me
Mountain Street is dying
Apartment fifteen is dying
Apartment seven and eight are dying
All the rent is dying
Martha talk to me
I wanted all the dancers’ bodies
to inhabit like his old classroom
where everything that happened
was tender and important
Martha talk to me
Toss out the fake Jap silence
Scream in my kitchen
logarithms laundry lists anything
Talk to me
My radio is falling to pieces
My betrayals are so fresh
they still come with explanations
Martha talk to me
What sordid parable
do you teach by sleeping
Talk to me
for my teacher is dying
The cars are parked
on both sides of the street
some facing north
some facing south
I draw no conclusions
Martha talk to me
I could burn my desk
when I think how perfect we are
you asleep me finishing
the last of the Saint Emilion
Talk to me gentle Martha
dreaming of percussions massacres
hair pinned to the ceiling
I’ll keep your secret
Let’s tell the milkman
we have decided
to marry our rooms
MONTREAL 1964
Can someone turn off the noise?
Pearls rising on the breath of her breasts
grind like sharpening stones:
my fingernails wail as they grow their fraction
I think they want to be claws:
the bed fumes like a quicksand hole
we won’t climb on it for love:
the street yearns for action nobler than traffic
red lights want to be flags
policemen want their arms frozen in loud movies:
ask a man for the time
your voice is ruined with static:
What a racket! What strange dials!
Only Civil War can fuse it shut—
the mouth of the glorious impatient
ventriloquist performing behind our daily lives!
Canada is a dying animal
I will not be fastened to a dying animal
That’s the sort of thing to say, that’s good,
that will change my life.
And when my neighbour is broken for his error
and my blood guaranteed by Law against
an American failure
I dread the voice behind the flag I drew
on the blank sky
for my absolute poems will be crumpled
under a marble asylum
my absolute flight snarled like old fishing line:
What will I have in my head
to serve against logic brotherhood destiny?
WHY EXPERIENCE IS NO TEACHER
Not mine – the body you were promised
is buried at the heart
of an unusable machine
no one can stop or start.
You’ll lie with it? You might dig deep –
escape a Law or two – see a dart
of light. You
won’t get near the heart.
I tried – I am the same – come the same.
I wanted my senses to rave.
The dart was ordinary light.
Will nothing keep you here, my love, my love?
FOR MY OLD LAYTON
His pain, unowned, he left
in paragraphs of love, hidden,
like a cat leaves shit
under stones, and he crept out in day,
clean, arrogant, swift, prepared
to hunt or sleep or starve.
The town saluted him with garbage
which he interpreted as praise
for his muscular grace. Orange peels,
cans, discarded guts rained like ticker-tape.
For a while he ruined their nights
by throwing his shadow in moon-full windows
as he spied on the peace of gentle folk.
Once he envied them. Now with a happy
screech he bounded from monument to monument
in their most consecrated plots, drunk
to know how close he lived to the breathless
in the ground, drunk to feel how much he loved
the snoring mates, the old, the children of the town.
Until at last, like Timon, tired
of human smell, resenting even
his own shoe-steps in the wilderness,
he chased animals, wore live snakes, weeds
for bracelets. When the sea
pulled back the tide like a blanket
he slept on stone cribs, heavy,
dreamless, the salt-bright atmosphere
like an automatic laboratory
building crystals in his hair.
THE ONLY TOURIST IN HAVANA
TURNS HIS THOUGHTS HOMEWARD
Come, my brothers,
let us govern Canada,
let us find our serious heads,
let us dump asbestos on the White House,
let us make the French talk English,
not only here but everywhere,
let us torture the Senate individually
until they confess,
let us purge the New Party,
let us encourage the dark races
so they’ll be lenient
when they take over,
let us make the CBC talk English,
let us all lean in one direction
and float down
to the coast of Florida,
let us have tourism,
let us flirt with the enemy,
let us smelt pig-iron in our backyards,
let us sell snow
to under-developed nations,
(Is it true one of our national leaders
was a Roman Catholic?)
let us terrorize Alaska,
let us unite
Church and State,
let us not take it lying down,
let us have two Governor Generals
at the same time,
let us have another official language,
let us determine what it will be,
let us give a Canada Council Fellowship
to the most original suggestion,
let us teach sex in the home
to parents,
let us threaten to join the U.S.A.
and pull out at the last moment,
my brothers, come,
our serious heads are waiting for us somewhere
like Gladstone bags abandoned
after a coup d’état,
let us put them on very quickly,
let us maintain a stony silence
on the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Havana
April 1961
THE INVISIBLE TROUBLE
Too fevered to insi
st:
“My world is terror,”
he covers his wrist
and numbers of the war.
His arm is unburned
his flesh whole:
the numbers he learned
from a movie reel.
He covers his wrist
under the table.
The drunkards have missed
his invisible trouble.
A tune rises up.
His skin is blank!
He can’t lift his cup
he can’t! he can’t!
The chorus grows.
So does his silence.
Nothing, he knows
there is nothing to notice.
SICK ALONE
Nursery giant hordes return
wading in the clue taste of bile
You ate too much kitchen
went green on the lone looptheloop
It will not let you off to sleep
It is too fast It is too steep
Crash past a squashed group
of bible animals lion child kitten
Where where is your demonic smile
You vomit when you want to burn
MILLENNIUM
This could be my little
book about love
if I wrote it –
but my good demon said:
“Lay off documents!”
Everybody was watching me
burn my books –
I swung my liberty torch
happy as a gestapo brute;
the only thing I wanted to save
was a scar
a burn or two –
but my good demon said:
“Lay off documents!
The fire’s not important!”
The pile was safely blazing.
I went home to take a bath.
I phoned my grandmother.
She is suffering from arthritis.
“Keep well,” I said, “don’t mind the pain.”
“You neither,” she said.
Hours later I wondered
did she mean
don’t mind my pain
or don’t mind her pain?
Whereupon my good demon said:
“Is that all you can do?”
Well was it?
Was it all I could do?
There was the old lady
eating alone, thinking about
Prince Albert, Flanders Field,
Kishenev, her fingers too sore