Earlier Poems (4 page)

You do look a little ill.

But we can do something about that, now.

Can't we.

The fact is you're a shocking wreck.

Do you hear me.

You aren't all alone.

And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair …

I was always waiting, always here.

Know anyone else who can say that?

My advice to you is think of her for what she is: one
more name cut in the scar of your tongue.

What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than
harm is not abject.”

Please.

Can we be leaving now.

We like bus trips, remember. Together

we could watch these winter fields slip past, and
never care again,

think of it.

I don't have to be anywhere.

Under Konocti
the long eucalyptus-lined
road in the moon,
wind of November,
the now hawkless
hills

turning green—
it was always here, not yet remembered.

Whatever it is

I was seeking, with my tactless despair:
it has already happened.
And I'm on my way now,
the pages too heavy to turn,
the first morning lights coming on
over the lake. How happy I am!
There's no hope for me.

Drowsy with the rain
and late October sun, remember,
we stopped to read the names.
A mile across the valley

a little cloud of sheep
disappeared over a hill,
a little crowd of sleep—
time to take a pill

and wake up,
and drive through the night.
Once I spoke your name,
but you slept on and on.

Morning arrives
unannounced
by limousine: the tall
emaciated chairman

of sleeplessness in person
steps out on the sidewalk
and donning black glasses, ascends
the stairs to your building

guided by a German shepherd.
After a couple faint knocks
at the door, he slowly opens
the book of blank pages

pointing out
with a pale manicured finger
particular clauses,
proof of your guilt.

Do you still know these early leaves, translucent, shining, spreading on their branches like green flames?

And the hair-raising stars flowing over the ridge late at night.

No one home in the house by itself on the pine-hidden road,

or the 4-story barn up the road, leaning on its hill.

The two horses who've opened the gate to their field, old, wandering around on the lawn.

The sky becoming ominous.

Which is more awful, a sentient or endlessly presenceless sky?

I make my way down the back stairs
in the dark. I know
it sounds crude to admit it,
but I like to piss in the backyard.

You can be alone for a minute
and look up at the stars,
and when you return
everyone is there.

You get drunker, and listen to records.
Everyone agrees.
The dead singers have the best voices.
At four o'clock in the morning

the dead singers have the best voices.
And I can hear them now,
as I climb the stairs
in the dark I know.

{for CD.}

Summer is summer remembered;

a light on upstairs at the condemned orphanage,

an afternoon storm coming on.

She heard a gun go off and one hair turned gray.

Somehow I will still know you.

Aged a lot during our talk
(you were gone).
Left and wandered the streets for some hours—
melodramatic, I know—
poor, crucified by my teeth.

And yet, how we talked
for a while.
All those things we had wanted to say for so long,
yes—I sat happily nodding
my head in agreement,
but you were gone.
In the end it gets discouraging.

I had let myself in;
I'd sat down in your chair.
I could just see you reading late
in the soft lamplight—
looking at a page,

listening to its voice:

yellow light shed in circles, in stillness,
all about your hair.

Leaves stir overhead;
I write what I'm given to write.

The extension cord to the black house.

Then I went out among the dead
a pint of whiskey in my head
and lay on a mound
covered with snow,
and closing my eyes to the blowing snow

looked into his face.

Smiling and wincing,
reading his shoes,
holding out a ruined hand;
wishing for a way to disappear—
all the poor formalities of the mad.

As if I had met him years later,
an accident—something is wrong with his face.
Thinner, perhaps, the eyes cruel
with pain, my own
reflection in a knife.

The look of love gives the face beauty.

We look at him
as if he were a stain.

We look at him.

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.
By some inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this room. I am not asked to explain my presence anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank— you'd think my name meant nothing to them. Nonchalantly they hand me the sum I've requested,

but I know them. It's like this everywhere—

they think they are going to surprise me: I, who do nothing but wait.

Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up— very clever.

They think that they can scare me.

I am always scared.

And how much courage it requires to get up in the morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates you!

At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and refuse to go on, it's not done.

I go on

dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,

accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white laughter and applause,

past a million unlighted windows, peered out at by the retired and their aged attack dogs—

toward my place,

the one at the end of the counter,

the scalpel on the napkin.

On the sill
the blown-out candle

burning
in the past.

Frozen clouds
passing over

the border
north. Listen

to the end,
listen with me.

From a phrase by Hermann Broch

In the gray temples of business

In the famine of the ant-bewitched seed

Wolves attacking people in the half-deserted suburbs

And kings dead with their hands crossed on their genitals a thousand years from now

In sunlight shining on your vacant place at the table

In the sneer and the kick in the face world without end

In my crouched shadow loping beside me

In the imbecilic prose of my thoughts

In the voice of the one fingerprinted blindfolded and shot

World of dead parents unconsciously aped without end

In the hand above the rainbow horses of the Peche-Merle cave walls

We interrupt this program to bring you the announcement that enemy ICBMs will begin to arrive in ten minutes

In the strangeness which corridors and stairwells have for children

Death of the weekday

In their parties alone in a sip from an empty cup

In the little grass toad beating in your palm

The spider spinning in the dust the barren worm

The death of tears

In the gashed vivid colors of gas station restrooms at three in the morning

(And we thank Thee for destroying the destroyers of the world)

In the unaccompanied boy on the Greyhound the old woman with a balloon

World no longer or not yet

In the moon which goes dragging the ocean and turning its chalky steppes away

Unsummonable world

In the white stars in the black sky shining in the past

The black words in the white page uttered long ago

Death of tears

In the storm of wordless voices the hand abruptly shocked into dictation

(Envelop me clothe me in blackness book closed)

In early March crocuses pushing deafly through soil

While you quietly turn between dreams like a page

The morning light standing in the room like someone who has returned after long absence younger

World no longer or not yet

The leaved wind,

the leaved wind in the mirror

and windows, perceived by the one-week-old.

Forever, we weren't here-

The light was getting bad;
he wished the rain would stop.

He'd try again tomorrow—
anyway, he had to walk.

Brain-sick. Wet pavement. Green neon.

The light was getting awful—
had to walk the ghost.

He'd try again, he wished.

He'd try again.

My mother picks me up at school. Strange. I leave the others playing, walk to where she's parked— and why are we driving so slowly?

You have to turn right here, she whispers. When we get there the whole house is silent. Why's that? Does this mean I can watch
The Three Stooges}

Evidently. She's driving away now, and he's not in his basement typing: he isn't there at all, I've checked. This must be my lucky day.

The sound of someone crying in the next apartment.

In an unfamiliar city, where I find myself once more,

unprepared for this specific situation

or any situation whatsoever, now—

frozen in the chair,

my body one big ear.

A big ear crawling up a wall.

In the room where I quietly rave and gesticulate— and no one must hear me!— alone until sleep:

my life a bombed site turning green again.

The sound of someone crying

{for Thomas Frank}

Let it start to rain, the streets are empty now. Over the roof hear the leaves coldly conversing in whispers; a page turns in the book left open on the table. The streets are empty, now it can begin.

Like you
I wasn't present
at the burial. This morning

I have walked out for the first time and wander here among the blind flock of names standing still in the grass—

(the one on your stone
will remain
listed in telephone books
for a long time, I guess, light
from a disappeared star …)
—just to locate the place,
to come closer, without knowing where you are
or if you know I am there.

[for Frank Bidart
}

Per each dweller
one grass blade, one leaf
one apartment
one shadow
one rat

By itself, defending a lost position,

the poem

writing the poet—

Anvil of solitude

So diminish the city's population
by one, and go
add your tear to the sea

Heart that wonderfully lasted until I harned how to write what it so hnged to say
Nothing of the kind.

A day comes
when it has always been winter,
will always be winter.
Witnesses said the crowd fled
through the park, chased by policemen on horseback
past the Tomb of the Unknown
Celebrity as the guard
was being changed,
but they are gone.
The witnesses are gone.
A day comes
when the planet stops turning.
It is February here,
late afternoon.
It will always be late afternoon,
neither dark nor light out.
But we cannot be bothered,
because we are asleep;
the door is locked.
Now and then somebody comes and knocks
and goes away again
back down the hall,
back down the stairs.
But we cannot be bothered,
because we are asleep
and listening,
listening.
Do you hear the wind?
We have always been asleep,
will always be asleep—
turning over
like pages on fire.
Where were we?
We were listening. No, I don't hear it either.
The wind, the marching
boots, the burning
names.

From the notebooks of Rilke

Who can say, when I go to a window, that someone near death doesn't turn his eyes in my direction and stare and, dying, feed on me. That in this very building the forsaken face isn't lifted, that needs me now

*

That smile, for a long time I couldn't describe it— the velvet depression left by a jewel…

*

A child's soul like a leaf light still shines through

On it lives one bird
who commences singing, for some reason best
known to itself, at precisely 4 a.m.

Each day I listen for it in the night.

I too have a song to say alone,

but can't begin. On it, surrounded by blocks of black warehouses,

is located this room. I say this room, but no one knows

how many rooms I have. So many rooms how will I light

This isn't working out, is it

Here's what really occurred, in my own words

I murdered my father—and if he comes back, I'll kill him again—but first I persuaded him to abandon my mother. Now you know. It was me all along. Then I got bored, held a knife to her throat, and forced her to marry the sadist who tortured my brother for ten years.

I feel bad about it, but what can I do.

I mean we're talking about a genetic predisposition here.

I
am
taking my medication. And things have gotten a lot better.

And if I ever finish writing this, I'm going to tear that bird's head off and eat it.

The way I work is strange.

For one thing, you would never call it work.