Poems 1959-2009 (33 page)

You tossed your head back and a cloud

Of hair from your eyes,

You listened with the beautiful

Waiting look of someone

Waiting to be introduced,

Without wings but without weight, oh light!

As the fist which has learned how

Waving goodbye, opening and closing up to the air

To breathe. The child

Stares past his hand. The blank stares at the child.

Goodbye.

 

FOR BLAIR FOX

The gold watch that retired free will was constant dawn.

Constant sunrise. But then it was dawn. Christ rose,

White-faced gold bulging the horizon

Like too much honey in a spoon, an instant

Stretching forever that would not spill; constant

Sunrise blocked by the buildings opposite;

Constant sunrise before it was light. Then it

Was dawn. A shoe shined dully like liquorice.

A hand flowed toward the silent clock radio.

Bicentennial April, the two hundredth

Lash of the revolving lighthouse wink,

Spread out on the ceiling like a groundcloth.

Whole dream:
a child stood up
. Dream 2:
yearning,

Supine, head downhill on a hill
. Dream:
turning

And turning, a swan patrols his empty nest,

Loops of an eighteenth-century signature, swan crest,

Mother and cygnet have been devoured by the dogs.

The dogs the dogs.
A shadow shivered with leaves.

Perth, Denpasar, Djakarta, Bangkok, Bom

Bombom bay. Dogs are man's greatest invention. Dogs.

They were nice dogs. Find a bottle of Dom

Pérignon in Western Australia.

Find life on Mars. Find Jesus. “You are a failya,”

The president of the United States said.

He was killed, and she became Bob's. His head,

Robert Kennedy's, lay as if removed

In the lap of a Puerto Rican boy praying.

Ladies and gentlemen, the president

Of the United States, fall in the air,

A dim streetlight past dawn not living to repent,

Ghostwalks by the canal, the blood still dry

Inside soaked street shoes, hands washed clean that try

To cup the rain that ends the drought. No one

Spoke. Blindfolds, plus the huge curtains had been drawn.

Because of his back he had to be on his back.

Neither woman dreamed a friend was the other.

Innocence. Water particles and rainbow

Above the sweet smell of gasoline—hiss of a hose

Drumming the suds off the town car's whitewalls, which glow!

Pink-soled gum boots, pink gums of the ebony chauffeur,

Pink summer evenings of strontium 90, remember?

Vestal black panther tar stills the street.

The coolness of the enormous lawns. Repeat.

O innocent water particles and rainbow

Above the sweet smell of gas, hiss of the hose!

When you are little, a knee of your knickers torn,

The freshness of rain about to fall is what

It would be like not to have been born.

Believe. Believed they were lined up to take showers

Dies illa, that April, which brought May flowers.

Safer than the time before the baby

Crawls is the time before he smiles, maybe.

Stalin's merry moustache, magnetic, malignant,

Crawls slowly over a leaf which cannot move.

If the words sound queer and funny to your ear,

A little bit jumbled and jivey, it must be

Someone in 1943 you hear:

Who like a dog looking at a doorknob

Does not know why. Slats of daylight bob

On the wall softly, a gentle knocking, a breeze.

A caterpillar fills the bed which is

Covered with blood. 1943.

The stools in the toilet bowl, are they alive?

Harlem on fire rouged the uptown sky.

But the shot squeezed off in tears splashes short.

But bullets whizzing through hell need no alibi

Before they melt away. Intake. Compression,

Ignition, explosion. Expansion. Exhaust. Depression

Reddens the toilet paper. That black it feels.

Endomorphic round-fendered automobiles

Slow, startle each other, and bolt in herds across

Spuyten Duyvil for the fifties and Westchester.

The cob stayed on the pond, perfect for Westchester,

Circling a nonexistent pen. Polly

Urethane sat on his face, Polly Esther

Sat on his penis. Protecting the non-cygnet.

Walking one day through the Piney Woods, he met

Three dogs in that peculiar light, strays. Two

Were shitting, looking off in that way dogs do,

Hunchbacked, sensitive, aloof, and neither

Male nor female. The third sat licking its teeth.

At the Institute they are singing
On Human

Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes

of Individuation
. Light of the One—

A summer sidewalk, a shadow shivered with leaves.

The mother smiles,
fa, so
, the mother grieves,

Beams down on the special bed for spinal

Injuries love that is primary and final,

Clear crystal a finger flicked that will ring a lifetime.

Plastic wrap refuse in the bare trees means spring.

And clouds blowing across empty sky.

A gay couple drags a shivering fist-sized

Dog down Broadway, their parachute brake. “Why

Robert Frost?” the wife one pleads, nearly

In tears; the other sniffs, “Because he

Believed in Nature and I believe in Nature.”

Pacing his study past a book-lined blur,

A city dweller saw breasts, breast; their sour

And bitter smell is his own smoker's saliva.

The call had finally arrived from Perth:

He would live. C-4, a very high cervical

Lesion, but breathing on his own—rebirth

Into a new, another world, just seeing,

Without losing consciousness, and being,

Like being on the moon and seeing Earth,

If you could breathe unaided. God, in Perth,

Twelve hours' time difference, thus day for night,

It was almost winter and almost Easter.

So accepting life is of the incredible.

2 a.m., the reeking silky monsoon

Air at Bombay Airport is edible,

Fertile, fecal, fetal—thunder—divine

Warm food for Krishna on which Krishna will dine.

The service personnel vacuum barefooted,

Surely Untouchables. Thunder. The booted

Back down the aisles spraying disinfectant,

By law, before disembarkation in Perth.

Down Under thunder thunder in formation

Delta wing Mach 2 dots time-warp to dust

Motes, climb and dissolve high above the one

Couple on the beach not looking up,

In the direction of Arabia, Europe,

Thunder, thunder, military jets,

Mars. The man smokes many cigarettes.

The man was saying to the woman, “Your son

Has simply been reborn,” but can't be heard.

All is new behind their backs, or vast.

House lots link up like cells and become house,

Shade tree and lawn, the frontier hypoblast

Of capitalism develops streets in minutes

Like a Polaroid. The infinite's

Sublime indifference to the mile—Mao

On nuclear war. Inches; dust motes; they go bow wow

At the heels of history. The dust

Imitates the thunder that will bring rain.

By the Indian Ocean, he sat down

And wept. Snarl suck-suck-suck waaah. It was the Grand

Hôtel et de Milan. It was a gown

Of moonlight, moving, stirring a faint breeze,

Gauze curtains hissing softly like nylons please

Please crossing and uncrossing. Who—how had

The shutters opened? and the heavy brocade

Curtain? How far away the ceiling was.

The bedlamp. One floor below, Verdi died.

How far away Australia was, years.

A man asleep listened while his throat

Tried to cry for help. He almost hears

The brayed, longing, haunting whale song the deaf speak,

Almost words. Out of silence, sounds leak

Into silence, years. He lay there without

Love, in comfort, straining to do without,

And dreamed. A spaceship could reach the ceiling, the special

Theory of relativity says.

Leave love, comfort, not even masturbate,

Not even love justice, not even want to kill,

O to be sterile, and to rise and wait

On the ceiling at sunrise, for dawn! stainless blond

Ceiling, the beginning of the beyond!

But the TV showed outstretched hands—a revolver

Blocked the open door of the last chopper,

Struggling to get airborne. The ditto sheet served

With espresso began:
Good morning! Here are the news.

Phosphorescent napkins don't make a bomb;

Under the parasols of Bicè's, Via

Manzoni, chitchat chased the firefly of Vietnam.

The courtyard flickered; the tablecloth glowed like lime.

Corrado Agusta's chow chow took its time

Turning its head to look at one, very

Refined and inhuman and dark as a mulberry,

Not a dog. Its blue tongue was not on view.

It had a mane and wore a harness, unsmiling.

Being walked and warmed up, they roared like lions on leashes.

The smell of castor oil. Snarl suck-suck-suck waaah

A racing motorcycle running through

The gears, on song; the ithyphallic faired

Shape of speed waaah an Italian's glans-bared

Rosso di competizione
. The Counts

Agusta raced these Stradivarius grunts

As genteelly as horse farms race horses—helicopter

Gunships, Agusta Aeronautiche.

The communists organized. Domenico

Agusta reigned. Of course the one who knew

Kennedys was the cold white rose Corrado.

The boss nailed each picket by name with a nod,

While Ciudad Trujillo and Riyadh

Kept unrolling more terror dollars for Corrado.

The iron and pious brother saw God go;

The salesman brother settled for everything:

Small arms fire, new nations; splits of brut, dry tears.

Domenico Agusta saw God go

Backwards like a helicopter in

A film he saw in Rome—i.e., in tow

With a helicopter. Sunbathers on Rome's

Roofs looked sideways from their cradled arms.

Just outside the window Jesus appears.

He faces us and steadily disappears.

The audience applauded. So odd to be

Agusta lifting off in your Agusta.

Goodbye. Goodbye. The stuck door was freed

And thrown open, and then closed and sealed.

The moviegoers of the world recede,

The White House and the tiny Marine band

Were wheeled away. A bulbously gloved hand

Frees the faulty door. Thrown open. Into

The countdown, and counting. –
9
. When you

Are no longer what you were. Thrown open.

–
8
. O let me out nor in.

Forty stories stock still like a boy

Whose height is being measured stands on smoke

As they withdraw the gantry, wheeled awoy,

Away. Perth Denpasar Djakarta Bangkok

Bombay in the capsule at the extreme tock,

La la, in the minute head above

The rest, eye movement peck peck like a dove,

A man sits on his back strapped down reading

Off numbers and getting younger, counting, cooing.

Millions of pounds of propellants make one dream,

Even more than psychoanalysis,

Of getting somewhere. Eyes glow in the gleam

Of the fuel gauges. Liquid oxygen

And kerosene. Check. Liquid oxygen

And liquid hydrogen—liquid in a freeze

Of –420°

F. Smoke boils off the ice that sheathes

The stainless steel building beneath him, forty floors.

Blue as the winder sapphire of the Cartier

Watch he has no use for now, goodbye,

The diodes of the digital display—

Information the color of his eyes,

As if his life were passing before his eyes,

–
7. Fin de race
face Louis

Cartier designed, inside a chewy

Candy of gold; face in a diver's helmet

Glassed in, prickles of the gold rivets and screws.

For everyday use, but by a Tutankhamen.

It would look feminine on a girl. The first

Wristwatch amused the sports of 1907.

The sport who commissioned the original,

The Brazilian Santos-Dumont, for a while

In 1906 believed he was the first man

To fly. Who says he did? None other than

The National Air and Space Museum says

Fernando Hippolyto da Costa does—

Believes Santos
was
. How could—but then

Who cares? Santos did not. Santos was not.

The watch was 1908, some say seven.

–
6
. What is there to believe in?

–
6
. What kind of god is not even

Immortal! –
6
. Nothing lasts.

A block of hieroglyphics trumpets, blasts

A golden long upended riff of silence,

It says for whom, whose name has been effaced.

To speak the name of the dead is to make them live

Again. O pilgrim, restore the breath of life

To him who has vanished.
But the names they give.

No one can pronounce the hieroglyphs.

Then they had vowels to breathe with their bare midriffs,

Yes which? No one's known how to vocalize

The consonants. The kings don't recognize

Their names, don't recognize our names for them;

The soft parts that could not be embalmed are life.