New and Selected Poems (10 page)

I left parts of myself everywhere
The way absent-minded people leave
Gloves and umbrellas
Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck.

 

I was on a park bench asleep.
It was like the Art of Ancient Egypt.
I didn't wish to bestir myself.
I made my long shadow take the evening train.

 

“We give death to a child when we give it a doll,”
Said the woman who had read Djuna Barnes.
We whispered all night. She had traveled to darkest Africa.
She had many stories to tell about the jungle.

 

I was already in New York looking for work.
It was raining as in the days of Noah.
I stood in many doorways of that great city.
Once I asked a man in a tuxedo for a cigarette.
He gave me a frightened look and stepped out into the rain.

 

Since “man naturally desires happiness,”
According to St. Thomas Aquinas,
Who gave irrefutable proof of God's existence and purpose,
I loaded trucks in the Garment Center.
Me and a black man stole a woman's red dress.
It was of silk; it shimmered.

 

Upon a gloomy night with all our loving ardors on fire,
We carried it down the long empty avenue,
Each holding one sleeve.
The heat was intolerable, causing many terrifying human faces
To come out of hiding.

 

In the Public Library Reading Room
There was a single ceiling fan barely turning.
I had the travels of Herman Melville to serve me as a pillow.
I was on a ghost ship with its sails fully raised.
I could see no land anywhere.
The sea and its monsters could not cool me.

 

I followed a saintly-looking nurse into a doctor's office.
We edged past people with eyes and ears bandaged.
“I am a medieval philosopher in exile,”
I explained to my landlady that night.
And, truly, I no longer looked like myself.
I wore glasses with a nasty spider crack over one eye.

 

I stayed in the movies all day long.
A woman on the screen walked through a bombed city
Again and again. She wore army boots.
Her legs were long and bare. It was cold wherever she was.
She had her back turned to me, but I was in love with her.
I expected to find wartime Europe at the exit.

 

It wasn't even snowing! Everyone I met
Wore a part of my destiny like a carnival mask.
“I'm Bartleby the Scrivener,” I told the Italian waiter.
“Me too,” he replied.
And I could see nothing but overflowing ashtrays
The human-faced flies were busy examining.

Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think.
Is it the same with you?
Just as I'm about to sink my teeth into the noumenon,
Some old girlfriend comes to distract me.
“She's not even alive!” I yell to heaven.

 

The wintry light made me go out of my way.
I saw beds covered with identical gray blankets.
I saw grim-looking men holding a naked woman
While they hosed her with cold water.
Was that to calm her nerves, or was it punishment?

 

I went to visit my friend Bob who said to me:
“We reach the real by overcoming the seduction of images.”
I was overjoyed, until I realized
Such abstinence will never be possible for me.
I caught myself looking out the window.

 

Bob's father was taking their dog for a walk.
He moved with pain; the dog waited for him.
There was no one else in the park,
Only bare trees with an infinity of tragic shapes
To make thinking difficult.

The machines were gone, and so were those who worked them.
A single high-backed chair stood like a throne
In all that empty space.
I was on the floor making myself comfortable
For a long night of little sleep and much thinking.

 

An empty birdcage hung from a steam pipe.
In it I kept an apple and a small paring knife.
I placed newspapers all around me on the floor
So I could jump at the slightest rustle.
It was like the scratching of a pen,
The silence of the night writing in its diary.

 

Of rats who came to pay me a visit
I had the highest opinion.
They'd stand on two feet
As if about to make a polite request
On a matter of great importance.

 

Many other strange things came to pass.
Once a naked woman climbed on the chair
To reach the apple in the cage.
I was on the floor watching her go on tiptoe,
Her hand fluttering in the cage like a bird.

 

On other days, the sun peeked through dusty windowpanes
To see what time it was. But there was no clock,
Only the knife in the cage, glinting like a mirror,
And the chair in the far corner
Where someone once sat facing the brick wall.

for M. Follain

 

Poet of the dead leaves driven like ghosts,
Driven like pestilence-stricken multitudes,
I read you first
One rainy evening in New York City,

 

In my atrocious Slavic accent,
Saying the mellifluous verses
From a battered, much-stained volume
I had bought earlier that day
In a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue
Run by an initiate of the occult masters.

 

The little money I had being almost spent,
I walked the streets my nose in the book.
I sat in a dingy coffee shop
With last summer's dead flies on the table.
The owner was an ex-sailor
Who had grown a huge hump on his back

While watching the rain, the empty street.
He was glad to have me sit and read.
He'd refill my cup with a liquid dark as river Styx.

 

Shelley spoke of a mad, blind, dying king;
Of rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know;
Of graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.

 

I too felt like a glorious phantom
Going to have my dinner
In a Chinese restaurant I knew so well.
It had a three-fingered waiter
Who'd bring my soup and rice each night
Without ever saying a word.

 

I never saw anyone else there.
The kitchen was separated by a curtain
Of glass beads which clicked faintly
Whenever the front door opened.
The front door opened that evening
To admit a pale little girl with glasses.

 

The poet spoke of the everlasting universe
Of things . . . of gleams of a remoter world
Which visit the soul in sleep . . .
Of a desert peopled by storms alone . . .

 

The streets were strewn with broken umbrellas
Which looked like funereal kites
This little Chinese girl might have made.
The bars on MacDougal Street were emptying.

There had been a fistfight.
A man leaned against a lamppost arms extended as if crucified,
The rain washing the blood off his face.

 

In a dimly lit side street,
Where the sidewalk shone like a ballroom mirror
At closing time—
A well-dressed man without any shoes
Asked me for money.
His eyes shone, he looked triumphant
Like a fencing master
Who had just struck a mortal blow.

 

How strange it all was . . . The world's raffle
That dark October night . . .
The yellowed volume of poetry
With its Splendors and Glooms
Which I studied by the light of storefronts:
Drugstores and barbershops,
Afraid of my small windowless room
Cold as a tomb of an infant emperor.

You were a “victim of semiromantic anarchism
In its most irrational form.”
I was “ill at ease in an ambiguous world

 

Deserted by Providence.” We drank gin
And made love in the afternoon. The neighbors'
TVs were tuned to soap operas.

 

The unhappy couples spoke little.
There were interminable pauses.
Soft organ music. Someone coughing.

 

“It's like Strindberg's Dream Play,” you said.
“What is?” I asked and got no reply.
I was watching a spider on the ceiling.

 

It was the kind St. Veronica ate in her martyrdom.
“That woman subsisted on spiders only,”
I told the janitor when he came to fix the faucet.

 

He wore dirty overalls and a derby hat.
Once he had been an inmate of a notorious state institution.
“I'm no longer Jesus,” he informed us happily.

 

He believed only in devils now.
“This building is full of them,” he confided.
One could see their horns and tails

 

If one caught them in their baths.
“He's got Dark Ages on his brain,” you said.
“Who does?” I asked and got no reply.

 

The spider had the beginnings of a web
Over our heads. The world was quiet
Except when one of us took a sip of gin.

for Ira

 

Monk at the Five Spot
        late one night.
“Ruby, My Dear,” “Epistrophy.”
        The place nearly empty
Because of the cold spell.
One beautiful black transvestite
        alone up front,
Sipping his drink demurely.

 

The music Pythagorean,
        one note at a time
Connecting the heavenly spheres,
While I leaned against the bar
        surveying the premises
Through cigarette smoke.

 

All of a sudden, a clear sense
        of a memorable occasion . . .
The joy of it, the delicious melancholy . . .
This very strange man bent over the piano
        shaking his head, humming . . .

 

“Misterioso.”

 

Then it was all over, thank you!
Chairs being stacked up on tables,
        their legs up.
The prospect of the freeze outside,
        the long walk home,
Making one procrastinatory.

 

Who said Americans don't have history,
        only endless nostalgia?
And where the hell was Nellie?

for Charles and Holly

 

An old dog afraid of his own shadow
In some Southern town.
The story told me by a woman going blind,
One fine summer evening
As shadows were creeping
Out of the New Hampshire woods,
A long street with just a worried dog
And a couple of dusty chickens,
And all that sun beating down
In that nameless Southern town.

 

It made me remember the Germans marching
Past our house in 1944 .
The way everybody stood on the sidewalk
Watching them out of the corner of the eye,
The earth trembling, death going by . . .
A little white dog ran into the street
And got entangled with the soldiers' feet.
A kick made him fly as if he had wings.
That's what I keep seeing!
Night coming down. A dog with wings.

Everything you didn't understand
Made you what you are. Strangers
Whose eye you caught on the street
Studying you. Perhaps they were the all-seeing
Illuminati? They knew what you didn't,
And left you troubled like a strange dream.

 

Not even the light stayed the same.
Where did all that hard glare come from?
And the scent, as if mythical beings
Were being groomed and fed stalks of hay
On these roofs drifting among the evening clouds.

 

You didn't understand a thing!
You loved the crowds at the end of the day
That brought you so many mysteries.
There was always someone you were meant to meet
Who for some reason wasn't waiting.
Or perhaps they were? But not here, friend.

 

You should have crossed the street
And followed that obviously demented woman
With the long streak of blood-red hair
Which the sky took up like a distant cry.

I found a key
In the street, someone's
House key
Lying there, glinting,

 

Long ago; the one
Who lost it
Is not going to remember it
Tonight, as I do.

 

It was a huge city
Of many dark windows,
Columns and domes.
I stood there thinking.

 

The street ahead of me
Shadowy, full of peril
Now that I held
The key. One or two

 

Late strollers
Unhurried and grave
In view. The sky above them
Of an unearthly clarity.

 

Eternity jealous
Of the present moment,
It occurred to me!
And then the moment was over.

History practicing its scissor-clips
In the dark,
So everything comes out in the end
Missing an arm or a leg.

 

Still, if that's all you've got
To play with today . . .
This doll at least had a head,
And its lips were red!