for TV knobs;
but how could I get there?
The books were gone
my address lists –
My good demon said again:
“Lay off documents!
You know how to get there!”
And suddenly I did!
I remembered it from memory!
I found her
pouring over the royal family tree,
“Grandma,”
I almost said,
“you’ve got it upside down –”
“Take a look,” she said,
“it only goes to George V.”
“That’s far enough
you sweet old blood!”
“You’re right!” she sang
and burned the
London Illustrated Souvenir
I did not understand
the day it was
till I looked outside
and saw a fire in every
window on the street
and crowds of humans
crazy to talk
and cats and dogs and birds
smiling at each other!
HITLER THE BRAIN-MOLE
Hitler the brain-mole looks out of my eyes
Goering boils ingots of gold in my bowels
My Adam’s Apple bulges with the whole head of Goebbels
No use to tell a man he’s a Jew
I’m making a lampshade out of your kiss
Confess! confess!
is what you demand
although you believe you’re giving me everything
DEATH OF A LEADER
Anxious to break a journey’s back,
dismiss itself in ash,
the sun invaded noon:
like a bomb seen
falling from below
it widened its circumference
in the middle of the sky.
He stood on his shadow
Like a dead sundial.
Children hunting a balloon
beside a monument
blended with the figures
striving on the pedestal.
Clash of gold and light
etched the Capitol dome in black.
His speeches returned,
his hours of applause,
weight of foreign medals,
white clothes of too many summers,
girls with whom he shared his power
now old and powerful.
His strategies returned
diagrammed like a geodesic sphere,
He balanced them on his forehead
weaving like a seal.
He was heavy and hot.
He’d had enough.
Let his colleagues
balance the state.
They were so distinguished
eagle-like, silver-grey.
Let him fall where his shoes were,
where his striped trousers led,
where the dove-coloured waistcoat pointed:
let him fall down in the sun.
He fell near the balloon.
Children hushed back
as if their toy
could catch the disease.
Secret Service men,
ex-athletes chosen for their height,
made a ring around the body.
At attention they stood
while their shadows began as pools,
lengthened into spikes.
At any moment you thought
they might join hands and dance.
The city attended, still at its monuments.
Everyone was waiting.
They knew it was being prepared,
polished, painted gleaming white.
But when was it coming?
When was it coming?
The ambulance!
Havana
April 1961
ALEXANDER TROCCHI, PUBLIC JUNKIE, PRIEZ POUR NOUS
Who is purer
more simple than you?
Priests play poker with the burghers,
police in underwear
leave Crime at the office,
our poets work bankers’ hours
retire to wives and fame-reports.
The spike flashes in your blood
permanent as a silver lighthouse.
I’m apt to loaf
in a coma of newspapers,
avoid the second-hand bodies
which cry to be catalogued.
I dream I’m
a divine right Prime Minister,
I abandon plans for bloodshed in Canada,
I accept an O.B.E.
Under hard lights
with doctors’ instruments
you are at work
in the bathrooms of the city,
changing The Law.
I tend to get distracted
by hydrogen bombs,
by Uncle’s disapproval
of my treachery
to the men’s clothing industry.
I find myself
believing public clocks,
taking advice
from the Dachau generation.
The spike hunts
constant as a compass.
You smile like a Navajo
discovering American oil
on his official slum wilderness,
a surprise every half hour.
I’m afraid I sometimes forget
my lady’s pretty little blonde package
is an amateur time-bomb
set to fizzle in my middle-age.
I forget the Ice Cap, the pea-minds,
the heaps of expensive teeth.
You don a false nose
line up twice for the Demerol dole;
you step out of a tourist group
shoot yourself on the steps of the White House,
you try to shoot the big arms
of the Lincoln Memorial;
through a flaw in their lead houses
you spy on scientists,
stumble on a cure for scabies;
you drop pamphlets from a stolen jet:
“The Truth about Junk”;
you pirate a national tv commercial
shove your face against
the window of the living-room
insist that healthy skin is grey.
A little blood in the sink
Red cog-wheels
shaken from your arm
punctures inflamed
like a roadmap showing cities
over 10,000 pop.
four arms tell me
you have been reaching into the coke machine
for strawberries,
you have been humping the thorny crucifix
you have been piloting Mickey Mouse balloons
through the briar patch,
you have been digging for grins in the tooth-pile.
Bonnie Queen Alex Eludes Montreal Hounds
Famous Local Love Scribe Implicated
Your purity drives me to work.
I must get back to lust and microscopes,
experiments in enbalming,
resume the census of my address book.
You leave behind you a fanatic
to answer RCMP questions.
THREE GOOD NIGHTS
Out of some simple part of me
which I cannot use up
I took a blessing for the flowers
tightening in the night
like fists of jealous love
like knots
no one can undo without destroying
The new morning gathered me
in blue mist
like dust under a wedding gown
Then I followed the day
like a cloud of heavy sheep
after the judas
up a blood-ringed ramp
into the terror of every black building
Ten years sealed journeys unearned dreams
Laughter meant to tempt me into old age
spilled for friends stars unknown flesh mul
es Sea
Instant knowledge of bodies material and spirit
which slowly learned would have made death smile
Stories turning into theories
which begged only for the telling and retelling
Girls sailing over the blooms of my mouth
with a muscular triangular kiss
ordinary mouth to secret mouth
Nevertheless my homage sticky flowers
rabbis green and red serving the sun like platters
In the end you offered me the dogma you taught
me to disdain and I good pupil disdained it
I fell under the diagrammed fields like the fragment
of a perfect statue layers of cities build upon
I saw you powerful and I saw you happy
that I could not live only for harvesting
that I was a true citizen of the slow earth
Light and Splendour
in the sleeping orchards
entering the trees
like a silent movie wedding procession
entering the arches of branches
for the sake of love only
From a hill I watched
the apple blossoms breathe
the silver out of the night
like fish eating the spheres
of air out of the river
So the illumined night fed
the sleeping orchards
entering the vaults of branches
like a holy procession
Long live the Power of Eyes
Long live the invisible steps
men can read on a mountain
Long live the unknown machine
or heart
which by will or accident
pours with victor’s grace
endlessly perfect weather
on the perfect creatures
the world grows
Montreal
July 1964
TO A MAN WHO THINKS HE IS MAKING AN ANGEL
Drop the angel out of your silver spoon
You’ll never get it to your mouth
You’re not dealing with the moon anymore
or corkscrew unicorns
The moon you kept in a cup
herds of magic beasts in your pocket
but this real angel knocks down factories
with a wisp of hair
Do you think your arms are wide enough
to cramp her in your heritage
you with your iron maidens
brimstone ponds where only sufferers sing
Do you think she’s from Chartres you turd
From Notre Dame out of any church you know
or even out of some humble inflamed mystic’s mind
She is from a service you have never heard
Ah but she stops my mouth from further curses
covering my whole heaving body with one of her molecules
ON THE SICKNESS OF MY LOVE
Poems! break out!
break my head!
What good’s a skull?
Help! help!
I need you!
She is getting old.
Her body tells her everything.
She has put aside cosmetics.
She is a prison of truth.
Make her get up!
dance the seven veils!
Poems! silence her body!
Make her friend of mirrors!
Do I have to put on my cape?
wander like the moon
over skies & skies of flesh
to depart again in the morning?
Can’t I pretend
she grows prettier?
be a convict?
Can’t my power fool me?
Can’t I live in poems?
Hurry up! poems! lies!
Damn your weak music!
You’ve let arthritis in!
You’re no poem
you’re a visa.
CRUEL BABY
Where did you learn mouthfuls for everything,
O Dweller in Childsmelling Cloakrooms?
Chief, do I have to come down and identify
the bodies I loved?
I forget, I said I forget which breast it was.
Hers? Yes. Good. Ask her many questions,
find out, do her horoscope.
Hooray! she has a family name.
Hooray! she looks like her grandmother.
Doctor Reich call surgery:
show anal slides of blue come.
Cruel Baby, you lost the world:
you ate dictionaries of flowers:
you fell for particular beauty.
FOR MARIANNE
It’s so simple
to wake up beside your ears
and count the pearls
with my two heads
It takes me back to blackboards
and I’m running with Jane
and seeing the dog run
It makes it so easy
to govern this country
I’ve already thought up the laws
I’ll work hard all day
in Parliament
Then let’s go to bed
right after supper
Let’s sleep and wake up
all night
THE FAILURE OF A SECULAR LIFE
The pain-monger came home
from a hard day’s torture.
He came home with his tongs.
He put down his black bag.
His wife hit him with an open nerve
and a cry the trade never heard.
He watched her real-life Dachau,
knew his career was ruined.
Was there anything else to do?
He sold his bag and tongs,
went to pieces. A man’s got to be able
to bring his wife something.
MY MENTORS
My rabbi has a silver buddha,
my priest has a jade talisman.
My doctor sees a marvellous omen
in our prolonged Indian summer.
My rabbi, my priest stole their trinkets
from shelves in the holy of holies.
The trinkets cannot be eaten.
They wonder what to do with them.
My doctor is happy as a pig
although he is dying of exposure.
He has finished his big book
on the phallus as a phallic symbol.
My zen master is a grand old fool.
I caught him worshipping me yesterday,
so I made him stand in a foul corner
with my rabbi, my priest, and my doctor.
HYDRA 1960
Anything that moves is white,
a gull, a wave, a sail,
and moves too purely to be aped.
Smash the pain.
Never pretend peace.
The consolumentum has not,
never will be kissed. Pain
cannot compromise this light.
Do violence to the pain,
ruin the easy vision,
the easy warning, water
for those who need to burn.
These are ruthless: rooster shriek,
bleached goat skull.
Scalpels grow with poppies
if you see them truly red.
LEVIATHAN
I learn nothing
because my mind is stuffed with bodies:
blurred parades, hosts of soft lead wings,
tragic heaped holes of the starved,
the tangled closer than snakes,
swarming gymnasiums,
refuse of hospitals compose my mind:
no neat cells,
limbs, rumps, fetuses compose my mind.
It reels like Leviathan in oldtime cuts,
a nation writhing:
mothers, statues, madonnas, ruins –
I’m stripped, suckled, weaned,
I leap, love, anonymous as insect.
There is no beauty to choose here:
some m
utilated, some whole, some perfect severed thighs
embryos, dried skin:
the mass so vast some scales, some liquid never meeting.
Language is gone,
squeezed out in food, kisses.
Arithmetic, power, cities never were.
God knows what they’ve built today.
Only the echo I cast in world offices
returns to damn me ignorant –
as if I can hear in the screech of flesh
or talk back with mouth of hair.
HEIRLOOM
The torture scene developed under a glass bell
such as might protect an expensive clock.
I almost expected a chime to sound
as the tongs were applied
and the body jerked and fainted calm.
All the people were tiny and rosy-cheeked
and if I could have heard a cry of triumph or pain
it would have been tiny as the mouth that made it
or one single note of a music box.
The drama bell was mounted
like a gigantic baroque pearl
on a wedding ring or brooch or locket.
I know you feel naked, little darling.
I know you hate living in the country
and can’t wait until the shiny magazines
come every week and every month.
Look through your grandmother’s house again.
There is an heirloom somewhere.
PROMISE
Your blond hair
is the way I live –
smashed by light!
Your mouth-print
is the birthmark
on my power.
To love you
is to live
my ideal diary
which I have
promised my body
I will never write!
SKY
The great ones pass
they pass without touching
they pass without looking