Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame (3 page)

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,

the potted plants yellow as corn;

my woman was gone

and the empty bottles like bled corpses

surrounded me with their uselessness;

the sun was still good, though,

and my landlady’s note cracked in fine and

undemanding yellowness; what was needed now

was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester

with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd

because it exists, nothing more;

I shaved carefully with an old razor

the man who had once been young and

said to have genius; but

that’s the tragedy of the leaves,

the dead ferns, the dead plants;

and I walked into a dark hall

where the landlady stood

execrating and final,

sending me to hell,

waving her fat, sweaty arms

and screaming

screaming for rent

because the world had failed us

both.

some say we should keep personal remorse from the

poem,

stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,

but jezus;

twelve poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have

my

paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling:

are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?

why didn’t you take my money? they usually do

from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.

next time take my left arm or a fifty

but not my poems:

I’m not Shakespeare

but sometime simply

there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise;

there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards

down to the last bomb,

but as God said,

crossing his legs,

I see where I have made plenty of poets

but not so very much

poetry.

I am watching a girl dressed in a

light green sweater, blue shorts, long black stockings;

there is a necklace of some sort

but her breasts are small, poor thing,

and she watches her nails

as her dirty white dog sniffs the grass

in erratic circles;

a pigeon is there too, circling,

half dead with a tick of a brain

and I am upstairs in my underwear,

3 day beard, pouring a beer and waiting

for something literary or symphonic to happen;

but they keep circling, circling, and a thin old man

in his last winter rolls by pushed by a girl

in a catholic school dress;

somewhere there are the Alps, and ships

are now crossing the sea;

there are piles and piles of H- and A-bombs,

enough to blow up fifty worlds and Mars thrown in,

but they keep circling,

the girl shifts buttocks,

and the Hollywood Hills stand there, stand there

full of drunks and insane people and

much kissing in automobiles,

but it’s no good:
che sera, sera:

her dirty white dog simply will not shit,

and with a last look at her nails

she, with much whirling of buttocks

walks to her downstairs court

trailed by her constipated dog (simply not worried),

leaving me looking at a most unsymphonic pigeon.

well, from the looks of things, relax:

the bombs will never go off.

slipping keenly into bright ashes,

target of vanilla tears

your sure body lit candles for men

on dark nights,

and now your night is darker

than the candle’s reach

and we will forget you, somewhat,

and it is not kind

but real bodies are nearer

and as the worms pant for your bones,

I would so like to tell you

that this happens to bears and elephants

to tyrants and heroes and ants

and frogs,

still, you brought us something,

some type of small victory,

and for this I say: good

and let us grieve no more;

like a flower dried and thrown away,

we forget, we remember,

we wait. child, child, child,

I raise my drink a full minute

and smile.

the next time you listen to Borodin

remember he was just a chemist

who wrote music to relax;

his house was jammed with peor e:

students, artists, drunkards, bur s,

and he never knew how to say: no.

the next time you listen to Borodin

remember his wife used his compositions

to line the cat boxes with

or to cover jars of sour milk;

she had asthma and insomnia

and fed him soft-boiled eggs

and when he wanted to cover his head

to shut out the sounds of the house

she only allowed him to use the sheet;

besides there was usually somebody

in his bed

(they slept separately when they slept

at all)

and since all the chairs

were usually taken

he often slept on the stairway

wrapped in an old shawl;

she told him when to cut his nails,

not to sing or whistle

or put too much lemon in his tea

or press it with a spoon;

Symphony #2, in B Minor

Prince Igor

On the Steppes of Central Asia

he could sleep only by putting a piece

of dark cloth over his eyes;

in 1887 he attended a dance

at the Medical Academy

dressed in a merrymaking national costume;

at last he seemed exceptionally gay

and when he fell to the floor,

they thought he was clowning.

the next time you listen to Borodin,

remember…

this babe in the grandstand

with dyed red hair

kept leaning her breasts against me

and talking about Gardena

poker parlors

but I blew smoke into

her face

and told her about a Van Gogh

exhibition

I’d seen up on the hill

and that night

when I took her home

she said

Big Red was the best horse

she’d ever seen—

until I stripped down. Though I

think on the Van Gogh thing

they charged

50 cents.

I met her somehow through correspondence or poetry or magazines

and she began sending me very sexy poems about rape and lust,

and this being mixed in with a minor intellectualism

confused me somewhat and I got in my car and drove North

through the mountains and valleys and freeways

without sleep, coming off a drunk, just divorced,

jobless, aging, tired, wanting mostly to sleep

for five or ten years, I finally found the motel

in a small sunny town by a dirt road,

and I sat there smoking a cigarette

thinking, you must really be insane,

and then I got out an hour late

to meet my date; she was pretty damned old,

almost as old as I, not very sexy

and she gave me a very hard raw apple

which I chewed on with my remaining teeth;

she was dying of some unnamed disease

something like asthma, and she said,

I want to tell you a secret, and I said,

I know: you are a virgin, 35 years old.

and she got out a notebook, ten or twelve poems:

a life’s work and I had to read them

and I tried to be kind

but they were very bad.

and I took her somewhere, the boxing matches,

and she coughed in the smoke

and kept looking around and around

at all the people

and then at the fighters

clenching her hands.

you never get excited, do you? she asked.

but I got pretty excited in the hills that night,

and met her three or four more times

helped her with some of her poems

and she rammed her tongue halfway down my throat

but when I left her

she was still a virgin

and a very bad poetess.

I think that when a woman has kept her legs closed

for 35 years

it’s too late

either for love

or for

poetry.

he hinted at times that I was a bastard and I told him to listen

to Brahms, and I told him to learn to paint and drink and not be

dominated by women and dollars

but he screamed at me, For Christ’s Sake remember your mother,

remember your country,

you’ll kill us all!…

I move through my father’s house (on which he owed $8,000 after 20

years on the same job) and look at his dead shoes

the way his feet curled the leather, as if he was angrily planting roses,

and he was, and I look at his dead cigarette, his last cigarette

and the last bed he slept in that night, and I feel I should remake it

but I can’t, for a father is always your master even when he’s gone;

I guess these things have happened time and again but I can’t help

thinking

to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o’clock in the morning

while other people are frying eggs

is not so rough

unless it happens to you.

I go outside and pick an orange and peel back the bright skin;

things are still living: the grass is growing quite well,

the sun sends down its rays circled by a Russian satellite,

a dog barks senselessly somewhere, the neighbors peek behind blinds.

I am a stranger here, and have been (I suppose) somewhat the rogue,

and I have no doubt he painted me quite well (the old boy and I

fought like mountain lions) and they say he left it all to some woman

in Duarte but I don’t give a damn—she can have it: he was my old

man

and he died.

inside, I try on a light blue suit

much better than anything I have ever worn

and I flap the arms like a scarecrow in the wind

but it’s no good:

I can’t keep him alive

no matter how much we hated each other.

we looked exactly alike, we could have been twins

the old man and I: that’s what they

said. he had his bulbs on the screen

ready for planting

while I was lying with a whore from 3rd street.

very well. grant us this moment: standing before a mirror

in my dead father’s suit

waiting also

to die.

the jew bent over and

died. 99 machine guns

were shipped to France. somebody won the 3rd race

while I inspected

the propeller of an old monoplane

a man came by with a patch over his eye. it began to

rain, it rained and it rained and the ambulances ran

together

in the streets, and although

everything was properly dull

I enjoyed the moment

like the time in New Orleans

living on candy bars

and watching the pigeons

in a back alley with a French name

as behind me the river became

a gulf

and the clouds moved sickly through

a sky that had died

about the time Caesar was knifed,

and I promised myself then

that someday I’d remember it

as it was.

a man came by and coughed.

think it’ll stop raining? he said.

I didn’t answer. I touched the

old propeller and listened to the

ants on the roof rushing over

the edge of the world, go away, I said,

go away or I’ll call

the guard.