Collected Poems 1947-1997 Read online

  Him there to recover I guess, but made his way back to New York shuddering to fuck stiff Time girls,

  Death charm in person, sexual childlike radiant pain

  See his face in old photographs & bandaged naked wrist leaning melancholy contemplating the camera

  awkward face now calm, kind to me in cafeteria one sober morn looking for jobs at breakfast,

  but mostly smiled at roof edge midnight, all 1920s elegance reincarnate in black vomit bestriven suit

  & screechy records Mahagonny airplane crash, lushed young man of 1940s hated his fairy woe, came on Lizzie’s belly or Ansen’s sock in desperate orgies of music canopener

  God but I loved his murdered face when he talked with a mouthful of rain in 14th St subway—

  where he fell skull broken underground last, head crushed by the radiant wheel on iron track at Astor Place

  Farewell dear Bill that’s done, you’re gone, we all go into the ancient void drunkard mouth

  you made it too soon, here was more to say, & more to drink, but now too late to sit and talk

  all night toward the eternity you sought so well so fearlessly in so much alcoholic pain with so much fire behind eyes with such

  sweet manner in your heart that never won a happy fate thru what bleak years you saw your red skull burning deathshead in the U.S. sun

  Mix living dead, Neal Cassady, old hero of travel love alyosha idiot seek-train poems, what crown you wear at last

  what fameless reward for patience & pain, what golden whore come secret from the clouds, what has god bidden for your coffin and heart someday,

  what will give back your famous arm, your happy catholic boy eye, orphan torso shining in poolhall & library, intimate spermworks with old girls downtown rockabelly energy,

  what Paradise built high enough to hold your desire, deep enough to encompass your cock kindnesses, soft for your children to pray, 10 foot iron wheels you fell under?

  what American heaven receive you? Christ allow sufferings then will he allow you His opening tinbarrel Iowa light as Jerusalem?

  O Neal that life end we together on knees know harvest of prayers together,

  Paradise autos ascend to the moon no illusion, short time earth life Bibles bear our eyes, make it dear baby

  Stay with me Angel now in Shroud of railroad lost bet racetrack broke leg

  oblivion

  till I get the shining Word or you the cockless cock to lay in my ass hope mental radiance—

  It’s all lost we fall without glory to empty tomb comedown to nothing but evil thinkless worm, but we know better

  merely by old heart hope, or merely Desire, or merely the love whisper breathed in your ear on lawns of long gone by Denver,

  merely by the night you leaned on my body & held me for All & called me to Adore what I wondered at as child age ten I

  wandered by hopeless green hedges, when you sat under alley balcony garbagestair, ache in our breasts Futurity

  meeting Love for Love, so wept as child now man I weep for true end,

  Save from the grave! O Neal I love you I bring this Lamb into the middle of the world happily—O tenderness—to see you again—O tenderness—to recognize you in the middle of Time.

  Paris, Spring 1958

  At Apollinaire’s Grave

  “… voici le temps

  Où l’on connaîtra l’avenir

  Sans mourir de connaissance”

  I

  I visited Père Lachaise to look for the remains of Apollinaire

  the day the U.S. President appeared in France for the grand conference of heads of state

  so let it be the airport at blue Orly a springtime clarity in the air over Paris

  Eisenhower winging in from his American graveyard

  and over the froggy graves at Père Lachaise an illusory mist as thick as marijuana smoke

  Peter Orlovsky and I walked softly thru Père Lachaise we both knew we would die

  and so held temporary hands tenderly in a citylike miniature eternity

  roads and streetsigns rocks and hills and names on everybody’s house

  looking for the lost address of a notable Frenchman of the Void

  to pay our tender crime of homage to his helpless menhir

  and lay my temporary American Howl on top of his silent Calligramme

  for him to read between the lines with Xray eyes of Poet

  as he by miracle had read his own death lyric in the Seine

  I hope some wild kidmonk lays his pamphlet on my grave for God to read me on cold winter nights in heaven

  already our hands have vanished from that place my hand writes now in a room in Paris Git-le-Coeur

  Ah William what grit in the brain you had what’s death

  I walked all over the cemetery and still couldn’t find your grave

  what did you mean by that fantastic cranial bandage in your poems

  O solemn stinking deathshead what’ve you got to say nothing and that’s barely an answer

  You can’t drive autos into a sixfoot grave tho the universe is mausoleum big enough for anything

  the universe is a graveyard and I walk around alone in here

  knowing that Apollinaire was on the same street 50 years ago

  his madness is only around the corner and Genet is with us stealing books

  the West is at war again and whose lucid suicide will set it all right

  Guillaume Guillaume how I envy your fame your accomplishment for American letters

  your Zone with its long crazy line of bullshit about death

  come out of the grave and talk thru the door of my mind

  issue new series of images oceanic haikus blue taxicabs in Moscow negro statues of Buddha

  pray for me on the phonograph record of your former existence

  with a long sad voice and strophes of deep sweet music sad and scratchy as World War I

  I’ve eaten the blue carrots you sent out of the grave and Van Gogh’s ear and maniac peyote of Artaud

  and will walk down the streets of New York in the black cloak of French poetry

  improvising our conversation in Paris at Père Lachaise

  and the future poem that takes its inspiration from the light bleeding into your grave

  II

  Here in Paris I am your guest O friendly shade

  the absent hand of Max Jacob

  Picasso in youth bearing me a tube of Mediterranean

  myself attending Rousseau’s old red banquet I ate his violin

  great party at the Bateau Lavoir not mentioned in the textbooks of Algeria

  Tzara in the Bois de Boulogne explaining the alchemy of the machineguns of the cuckoos

  he weeps translating me into Swedish

  well dressed in a violet tie and black pants

  a sweet purple beard which emerged from his face like the moss hanging from the walls of Anarchism

  he spoke endlessly of his quarrels with André Breton

  whom he had helped one day trim his golden mustache

  old Blaise Cendrars received me into his study and spoke wearily of the enormous length of Siberia

  Jacques Vaché invited me to inspect his terrible collection of pistols

  poor Cocteau saddened by the once marvelous Radiguet at his last thought I fainted

  Rigaut with a letter of introduction to Death

  and Gide praised the telephone and other remarkable inventions

  we agreed in principle though he gossiped of lavender underwear

  but for all that he drank deeply of the grass of Whitman and was intrigued by all lovers named Colorado

  princes of America arriving with their armfuls of shrapnel and baseball

  Oh Guillaume the world so easy to fight seemed so easy

  did you know the great political classicists would invade Montparnasse

  with not one sprig of prophetic laurel to green their foreheads

  not one pulse of green in their pillows no leaf left from their wars—Ma
ya-kovsky arrived and revolted

  III

  Came back sat on a tomb and stared at your rough menhir

  a piece of thin granite like an unfinished phallus

  a cross fading into the rock 2 poems on the stone one Coeur Renversée

  other Habituez-vous comme moi A ces prodiges que j’annonce Guillaume Apollinaire de Kostrowitsky

  someone placed a jam bottle filled with daisies and a 5&10¢ surrealist typist ceramic rose

  happy little tomb with flowers and overturned heart

  under a fine mossy tree beneath which I sat snaky trunk

  summer boughs and leaves umbrella over the menhir and nobody there

  Et quelle voix sinistre ulule Guillaume qu’es-tu devenu

  his nextdoor neighbor is a tree

  there underneath the crossed bones heaped and yellow cranium perhaps

  and the printed poems Alcools in my pocket his voice in the museum

  Now middleage footsteps walk the gravel

  a man stares at the name and moves toward the crematory building

  same sky rolls over thru clouds as Mediterranean days on the Riviera during war

  drinking Apollo in love eating occasional opium he’d taken the light

  One must have felt the shock in St. Germain when he went out Jacob & Picasso coughing in the dark

  a bandage unrolled and the skull left still on a bed outstretched pudgy fingers the mystery and ego gone

  a bell tolls in the steeple down the street birds warble in the chestnut trees

  Famille Bremont sleeps nearby Christ hangs big chested and sexy in their tomb

  my cigarette smokes in my lap and fills the page with smoke and flames

  an ant runs over my corduroy sleeve the tree I lean on grows slowly

  bushes and branches upstarting through the tombs one silky spiderweb gleaming on granite

  I am buried here and sit by my grave beneath a tree

  Paris, Winter-Spring 1958

  Message

  Since we had changed

  rogered spun worked

  wept and pissed together

  I wake up in the morning

  with a dream in my eyes

  but you are gone in NY

  remembering me Good

  I love you I love you

  & your brothers are crazy

  I accept their drunk cases

  It’s too long that I have been alone

  it’s too long that I’ve sat up in bed

  without anyone to touch on the knee, man

  or woman I don’t care what anymore, I

  want love I was born for I want you with me now

  Ocean liners boiling over the Atlantic

  Delicate steelwork of unfinished skyscrapers

  Back end of the dirigible roaring over Lakehurst

  Six women dancing together on a red stage naked

  The leaves are green on all the trees in Paris now

  I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes

  Paris, May 1958

  To Lindsay

  Vachel, the stars are out

  dusk has fallen on the Colorado road

  a car crawls slowly across the plain

  in the dim light the radio blares its jazz

  the heartbroken salesman lights another cigarette

  In another city 27 years ago

  I see your shadow on the wall

  you’re sitting in your suspenders on the bed

  the shadow hand lifts up a Lysol bottle to your head

  your shade falls over on the floor

  Paris, May 1958

  To Aunt Rose

  Aunt Rose—now—might I see you

  with your thin face and buck tooth smile and pain

  of rheumatism—and a long black heavy shoe

  for your bony left leg

  limping down the long hall in Newark on the running carpet

  past the black grand piano

  in the day room

  where the parties were

  and I sang Spanish loyalist songs

  in a high squeaky voice

  (hysterical) the committee listening

  while you limped around the room

  collected the money—

  Aunt Honey, Uncle Sam, a stranger with a cloth arm

  in his pocket

  and huge young bald head

  of Abraham Lincoln Brigade

  —your long sad face

  your tears of sexual frustration

  (what smothered sobs and bony hips

  under the pillows of Osborne Terrace)

  —the time I stood on the toilet seat naked

  and you powdered my thighs with calamine

  against the poison ivy—my tender

  and shamed first black curled hairs

  what were you thinking in secret heart then

  knowing me a man already—

  and I an ignorant girl of family silence on the thin pedestal

  of my legs in the bathroom—Museum of Newark.

  Aunt Rose

  Hitler is dead, Hitler is in Eternity; Hitler is with

  Tamburlane and Emily Brontë

  Though I see you walking still, a ghost on Osborne Terrace

  down the long dark hall to the front door

  limping a little with a pinched smile

  in what must have been a silken

  flower dress

  welcoming my father, the Poet, on his visit to Newark

  —see you arriving in the living room

  dancing on your crippled leg

  and clapping hands his book

  had been accepted by Liveright

  Hitler is dead and Liveright’s gone out of business

  The Attic of the Past and Everlasting Minute are out of print

  Uncle Harry sold his last silk stocking

  Claire quit interpretive dancing school

  Buba sits a wrinkled monument in Old

  Ladies Home blinking at new babies

  last time I saw you was the hospital

  pale skull protruding under ashen skin

  blue veined unconscious girl

  in an oxygen tent

  the war in Spain has ended long ago

  Aunt Rose

  Paris, June 1958

  American Change

  The first I looked on, after a long time far from home in mid Atlantic on a summer day

  Dolphins breaking the glassy water under the blue sky,

  a gleam of silver in my cabin, fished up out of my jangling new pocket of coins and green dollars

  —held in my palm, the head of the feathered indian, old Buck-Rogers eagle eyed face, a gash of hunger in the cheek

  gritted jaw of the vanished man begone like a Hebrew with hairlock combed down the side—O Rabbi Indian

  what visionary gleam 100 years ago on Buffalo prairie under the molten cloud-shot sky, ’the same clear light 10000 miles in all directions

  but now with all the violin music of Vienna, gone into the great slot machine of Kansas City, Reno—

  The coin seemed so small after vast European coppers thick francs leaden pesetas, lire endless and heavy,

  a miniature primeval memorialized in 5¢ nickel candy-store nostalgia of the redskin, dead on silver coin,

  with shaggy buffalo on reverse, hump-backed little tail incurved, head butting against the rondure of Eternity,

  cock forelock below, bearded shoulder muscle folded below muscle, head of prophet, bowed,

  vanishing beast of Time, hoar body rubbed clean of wrinkles and shining like polished stone, bright metal in my forefinger, ridiculous buffalo —Go to New York.

  Dime next I found, Minerva, sexless cold & chill, ascending goddess of money—and was it the wife of Wallace Stevens, truly?

  and now from the locks flowing the miniature wings of speedy thought,

  executive dyke, Minerva, goddess of Madison Avenue, forgotten useless dime that can’t buy hot dog, dead dime—

  Then we’ve Geor
ge Washington, less primitive, the snub-nosed quarter, smug eyes and mouth, some idiot’s design of the sexless Father,

  naked down to his neck, a ribbon in his wig, high forehead, Roman line down the nose, fat cheeked, still showing his falsetooth ideas—O Eisenhower & Washington—O Fathers—No movie star dark beauty—O thou Bignoses—

  Quarter, remembered quarter, 40¢ in all—What’ll you buy me when I land—one icecream soda?—

  poor pile of coins, original reminders of the sadness, forgotten money of America—

  nostalgia of the first touch of those coins, American change,

  the memory in my aging hand, the same old silver reflective there,

  the thin dime hidden between my thumb and forefinger

  All the struggles for those coins, the sadness of their reappearance

  my reappearance on those fabled shores

  and the failure of that Dream, that Vision of Money reduced to this haunting recollection

  of the gas lot in Paterson where I found half a dollar gleaming in the grass—

  I have a $5 bill in my pocket—it’s Lincoln’s sour black head moled wrinkled, forelocked too, big eared, flags of announcement flying over the bill, stamps in green and spiderweb black,

  long numbers in racetrack green, immense promise, a girl, a hotel, a busride to Albany, a night of brilliant drunk in some faraway corner of Manhattan

  a stick of several teas, or paper or cap of Heroin, or a $5 strange present to the blind.

  Money money, reminder, I might as well write poems to you—dear American money—O statue of Liberty I ride enfolded in money in my mind to you—and last

  Ahhh! Washington again, on the Dollar, same poetic black print, dark words, The United States of America, innumerable numbers

  R956422481 One Dollar This Certificate is Legal Tender (tender!) for all debts public and private

  My God My God why have you forsaken me

  Ivy Baker Priest Series 1953 F

  and over, the Eagle, wild wings outspread, halo of the Stars encircled by puffs of smoke & flame—

  a circle the Masonic Pyramid, the sacred Swedenborgian Dollar

  America, bricked up to the top, & floating surreal above

  the triangle of holy outstaring Eye sectioned out of the aire, shining

  light emitted from the eyebrowless triangle—and a desert of cactus, scattered all around, clouds afar,