Poems 1959-2009 (32 page)

I made a clearing. I meditated. I made a temple.

To meet you in.

Carved the everywhere of Buddha out

Of polished quiet.

And Krishna's smile. And Krishna's

Heavenly hands pressed together in candent greeting.

Introibo ad altare Dei.

You've put my eyes out so I will see.

The heat-seeking missile desires the faraway sun.

Thy pheromones invite thy suitor.

The radio announcer on France Musique

Is speaking so melodiously his words perspire,

That professional sugar sound I abhor, but I can't hear.

I am listening to the rustle of your long black dress

On the telephone last night as you pulled it up

A thousand miles away.

Someone could have walked in.

The husky hush of your voice.

Raise your evening gown for me forever.

 

I don't believe in anything, I do

Believe in you, vanished particles of vapor,

Field of force,

Undressed, undimmed Invisible,

Losing muons and gaining other ones,

Counterrotations with your

Robed arms raised out straight to each side

In a dervish dance of eyes closed ecstasy,

Tireless, inhuman,

Wireless technology

Of a ghost,

Of a spinning top on its point,

Of a tornado perspiring forward a few miles an hour

Uprooting everything and smelling sweetly like a lawn.

It's that time of year.

It's that time of year a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day,

A thousand times a day,

You are reborn flying to out-ski

The first avalanche each spring,

And buried alive.

I went to sleep last night so I could see you.

I went to see the world destroyed. It was a movie.

I went to sleep that night so I could see you.

And then a drink and then to sleep.

That's Vermont.

The universe hung like a flare for a while and went out,

Leaving nothing, long ago.

Each galaxy at war exhaled

A firefly glow, a tiny quiet, far away …

On and off … worlds off and on—and then

The universe itself brightened, stared and went out.

I cannot see.

I will not wake though it's a dream.

I move my head from side to side.

I cannot move.

The nights are cold, the sun is hot,

The air is alcohol at that altitude

Three thousand miles from here—is here

Today a thousand times.

You haven't changed.

There is a room in the Acropolis Museum.

The kouroi smile silence.

The way a virus sheds. The way

A weave of wind shear

And the willingness to share is the perfect friend

Every child invents for his very own. I don't know.

The Parthenon suddenly made me cry.

I saw it and I sobbed,

And
it doesn't share.

I was so out of it

You came too close. I got too near

The temple, flying low. I got too near

The power, past the ropes. I touched the restoration work.

It could mean a loss of consciousness

In the right-hand seat to be with God.

The Early Warning Ground Proximity Indicator is flashing.

Never mind. I knew it was.

The alarm ah-ooga ah-ooga and the computer-generated

Voice says

And says and says Pull Up Pull Up Pull Up Pull Up.

You say come closer.

You say come closer.

I cannot move.

You say I have to whisper this. Come closer.

I want to hear.

There also is the way a virus sheds.

I want to see. And the ground whispers

Closer. In the Littré the other day and you were there

In the Petit Robert. Grévisse—Larousse—

Ten million years from now, will there be anything?

The rain came down convulsively on the dry land,

As if it would have liked to come down even harder,

Big, kind, body temperature

Shudderings, and on the far bank of the newborn river,

The joyous drumming of the native drums,

Making a tremendous sound twelve feet beneath the snow

Without an avalanche beeper in those days. It's true—

I don't believe in anything I
do

Believe in, but I do believe in you

Moving your face from side to side to make a space to breathe.

I think I am crying on all my legs

From a dark place to a dark place like a roach.

I am running on the ground with my wings folded—

But now I am extending them,

Running across my kitchen floor and

Running down the rue Barbet-de-Jouy,

Trying historically before it's too late to get into the air.

I have on my ten Huntsman suits,

And many shining shoes made to my last.

I believe in one Lobb.

Faites sur mesure. Everything

Fits my body perfectly now that I'm about to disappear.

I don't believe in anything.

Lightning touches intimately the sable starless. Thunder.

You start to breathe too much.

It starts to rain, in your intoxication.

Communism and capitalism go up in flames

And come back down as rain—I'm coming now—

But Greece stays parched.

I'm coming now.

I'm being thrown violently at the sky,

The deck of the carrier shrinking to a dot,

Thirty-some years ago

Suddenly catching sight of Chartres Cathedral miles away;

Horizon to horizon, a molten ocean

The beautiful urine color of vermeil,

Color and undercolor as with a fur;

Soaring stock-still above the windblown waves of wheat,

Dialing on the seemingly inexhaustible power.

Break it.

I swim over to the sealed

Aquarium window of the TV screen to try.

President of the United States descending the stairs

Of his helicopter pixels snap a salute at the American flag

Pixels. I turn the sound off

And the Marine band explodes.

I'm coming now.

I can't breathe.

I'm coming now to the conclusion that

Without a God. I'm coming now to the conclusion.

 

A football spirals through the oyster glow

Of dawn dope and fog in L.A.'s

Bel Air, punted perfectly. The foot

That punted it is absolutely stoned.

A rising starlet leans her head against the tire

Of a replica Cord,

A bonfire of red hair out of

Focus in the fog. Serenading her,

A boy plucks “God Bless America” from a guitar.

Vascular spasm has made the boy's hands blue

Even after hours of opium.

Fifty or so of the original

Four hundred

At the fundraiser,

Robert Kennedy for President, the remnants, lie

Exposed as snails around the swimming pool, stretched

Out on the paths, and in the gardens, and the drive.

Many dreams their famous bodies have filled.

The host, a rock superstar, has

A huge cake of opium,

Which he refers to as “King Kong,”

And which he serves on a silver salver

Under a glass bell to his close friends,

So called,

Which means all mankind apparently,

Except the fuzz,

Sticky as tar, the color of coffee,

A quarter of a million dollars going up in smoke.

This is Paradise painted

On the inside of an eggshell

With the light outside showing through,

Subtropical trees and flowers and lawns,

Clammy as albumen in the fog,

And smelling of fog. Backlit

And diffuse, the murdered

Voityck Frokowski, Abigail Folger and Sharon Tate

Sit together without faces.

This is the future.

Their future is the future. The future

Has been born,

The present is the afterbirth,

These bloodshot and blue acres of flowerbeds and stars.

Robert Kennedy will be killed.

It is '68, the campaign year—

And the beginning of a new day.

People are waiting.

When the chauffeur-bodyguard arrives

For work and walks

Into the ballroom, now recording studio, herds

Of breasts turn round, it seems in silence,

Like cattle turning to face a sound.

Like cattle lined up to face the dawn.

Shining eyes seeing all or nothing,

In the silence.

A stranger, and wearing a suit,

Has to be John the Baptist,

At least, come

To say someone else is coming.

He hikes up his shoulder holster

Self-consciously, meeting their gaze.

That is as sensitive as the future gets.

 

Antonioni walks in the desert shooting

Zabriskie Point
. He does not perspire

Because it is dry. His twill trousers stay pressed,

He wears desert boots and a viewfinder,

He has a profile he could shave with, sharp

And meek, like the eyesight of the deaf,

With which he is trying to find America,

A pick for prospecting passive as a dowser.

He has followed his nose into the desert.

Crew and cast mush over the burning lake

Shivering and floaty like a mirage.

The light makes it hard to see. Four million dollars

And cameras ripple over the alkali

Waiting for the director to breathe on them.

How even and epic his wingbeats are for a small fellow.

He sips cigarette after cigarette

And turns in Italian to consult his English

Girlfriend and screenwriter, who is beautiful.

In Arizona only the saguaros

And everybody else were taller than he was.

Selah. He draws in the gypsum dust selah

He squats on his heels for the love scene, finally

The technicians are spray-dyeing the dust darker.

It looks unreal, but it will dry lighter,

Puffs of quadroon smoke back out of the spray guns.

The Open Theater are naked and made up.

Between his name and néant are his eyes.

 

Nothing is human or alien at this altitude,

Almost a drug high, one mile in the blue,

I am flying over what I will have to live through:

So this is love, four curving jet trails of flock.

How different it was to look up and see

The train you rode on curving away from you

On a long bend—like your child body, part

Of you, apart from you. It felt so odd,

How hauntingly it straightened and disappeared.

This is love reflected in the window

Tippling a complimentary cup of broth,

Myself and Magritte, the desert takes a drink.

I gaze through my forehead at the rising desert,

Dots and dashes like meanings, pain-points of green,

Cactus crucifying the beautiful emptiness.

I hold my own hand while I slowly find

The horizon on the other side of my eyes.

It I feel close to, it cannot come near:

There and beyond one like heaven, as Che is. Once,

On the new Metroliner fleeing New York,

Fleeing the same girl I am flying to …

The experimental train dreamed of flight,

Eupeptic sleek plastic, Muzak, its steel skin twinkled.

We rose on music from under Park Avenue

To the fourth floors of Harlem where only the bricked-up

Windows didn't reflect us. I saw them, the slightly

Lighter bricks within the brick window frames.

 

The tan table of the desert is an empty

Sunlit plaza by de Chirico

That has no meaning, that is like the desert

Rising in the windows of an Astrojet

As it so coldly dips to right itself.

A rich man in Arizona drives a tan

Mercedes, bulbous and weightless as an astronaut.

It barely moves, it walks through space the way Mao does,

Tan freezing silence like a freeze frame.

Across a desk top, in his fuselage,

The rudimentary tail brain of his two

Propels the largest living dinosaur,

Schizophrenia. And when he tilts

His head Tucson turns, a slow veronica,

The horizon lifts to one side like a drawbridge.

Years float by, cold novocaine nirvana

Aloft in a holding pattern as if forever.

They bring the stairs up, First Class ducks out first.

Step one is to be rich. The two men are beaming:

My host with the Mercedes and his guest

Fly in on the freeway through a desert noon.

Their conversation seems to them an oasis,

Air-conditioning sanitizes the air.

The giant saguaros stand up, without hearts or hair,

Autoplastic adaption that can't fail.

I see a desert. I look down at the typed page:

We are the room and the cloud on its painted ceiling.

 

Your eyes gazed

Sparkling and dark as hooves,

They had seen you through languor and error.

They were so still. They were a child.

They were wet like hours

And hours of cold rain.

Sixty-seven flesh inches

Utterly removed, of spirit

For the sake of nobody,

That one could love but not know—

Like death if you are God.

So close to me, my soul mate, like a projection.

I'd loved you gliding through St. Paul's sniffing

The torch of yellow flowers,

The torch had not lit the way.

Winter flowers, yourself a flame

In winter. In the cold

Like a moth in a flame.

I seemed to speak,

I seemed never to stop.