Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 16

  its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men

  walking the size of specks of wool—

  Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,

  sun go down over New Jersey where I was born

  & Paterson where I played with ants—

  my later loves on 15th Street,

  my greater loves of Lower East Side,

  my once fabulous amours in the Bronx

  faraway—

  paths crossing in these hidden streets,

  my history summed up, my absences

  and ecstasies in Harlem—

  —sun shining down on all I own

  in one eyeblink to the horizon

  in my last eternity—

  matter is water.

  Sad,

  I take the elevator and go

  down, pondering,

  and walk on the pavements staring into all man’s

  plateglass, faces,

  questioning after who loves,

  and stop, bemused

  in front of an automobile shopwindow

  standing lost in calm thought,

  traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me

  waiting for a moment when …

  Time to go home & cook supper & listen to

  the romantic war news on the radio

  … all movement stops

  & I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,

  tenderness flowing thru the buildings,

  my fingertips touching reality’s face,

  my own face streaked with tears in the mirror

  of some window—at dusk—

  where I have no desire—

  for bonbons—or to own the dresses or Japanese

  lampshades of intellection—

  Confused by the spectacle around me,

  Man struggling up the street

  with packages, newspapers,

  ties, beautiful suits

  toward his desire

  Man, woman, streaming over the pavements

  red lights clocking hurried watches &

  movements at the curb—

  And all these streets leading

  so crosswise, honking, lengthily,

  by avenues

  stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums

  thru such halting traffic

  screaming cars and engines

  so painfully to this

  countryside, this graveyard

  this stillness

  on deathbed or mountain

  once seen

  never regained or desired

  in the mind to come

  where all Manhattan that I’ve seen must disappear.

  New York, October 1958

  Ignu

  On top of that if you know me I pronounce you an ignu

  Ignu knows nothing of the world

  a great ignoramus in factories though he may own or inspire them or even be production manager

  Ignu has knowledge of the angel indeed ignu is angel in comical form

  W. C. Fields Harpo Marx ignus Whitman an ignu

  Rimbaud a natural ignu in his boy pants

  The ignu may be queer though like not kind ignu blows archangels for the strange thrill

  a gnostic women love him Christ overflowed with trembling semen for many a dead aunt

  He’s a great cocksman most beautiful girls are worshipped by ignu

  Hollywood dolls or lone Marys of Idaho long-legged publicity women and secret housewives

  have known ignu in another lifetime and remember their lover

  Husbands also are secretly tender to ignu their buddy

  oldtime friendship can do anything cuckold bugger drunk trembling and happy

  Ignu lives only once and eternally and knows it

  he sleeps in everybody’s bed everyone’s lonesome for ignu ignu knew solitude early

  So ignu’s a primitive of cock and mind

  equally the ignu has written liverish tomes personal metaphysics abstract

  images that scratch the moon ‘lightningflash-flintspark’ naked lunch fried shoes adios king

  The shadow of the angel is waving in the opposite direction

  dawn of intelligence turns the telephones into strange animals

  he attacks the rose garden with his mystical shears snip snip snip

  Ignu has painted Park Avenue with his own long melancholy

  and ignu giggles in a hard chair over tea in Paris bald in his decaying room a black hotel

  Ignu with his wild mop walks by Colosseum weeping

  he plucks a clover from Keats’ grave & Shelley’s a blade of grass

  knew Coleridge they had slow hung-up talks at midnight over mahogany tables in London

  sidestreet rooms in wintertime rain outside fog the cabman blows his hand

  Charles Dickens is born ignu hears the wail of the babe

  Ignu goofs nights under bridges and laughs at battleships

  ignu is a battleship without guns in the North Sea lost O the flowerness of the moment

  he knows geography he was there before he’ll get out and die already

  reborn a bearded humming Jew of Arabian mournful jokes

  man with a star on his forehead and halo over his cranium

  listening to music musing happy at the fall of a leaf the moonlight of immortality in his hair

  table-hopping most elegant comrade of all most delicate mannered in the Sufi court

  he wasn’t even there at all

  wearing zodiacal blue sleeves and the long peaked conehat of a magician

  harkening to the silence of a well at midnight under a red star

  in the lobby of Rockefeller Center attentive courteous bare-eyed enthusiastic with or without pants

  he listens to jazz as if he were a negro afflicted with jewish melancholy and white divinity

  Ignu’s a natural you can see it when he pays the cabfare abstracted

  pulling off the money from an impossible saintly roll

  or counting his disappearing pennies to give to the strange busdriver whom he admires

  Ignu has sought you out he’s the seeker of God

  and God breaks down the world for him every ten years

  he sees lightning flash in empty daylight when the sky is blue

  he hears Blake’s disembodied Voice recite the Sunflower in a room in Harlem

  No woe on him surrounded by 700 thousand mad scholars moths fly out of his sleeve

  He wants to die give up go mad break through into Eternity

  live on and teach an aged saint or break down to an eyebrow clown

  All ignus know each other in a moment’s talk and measure each other up at once

  as lifetime friends romantic winks and giggles across continents

  sad moment paying the cab goodbye and speeding away uptown

  One or two grim ignus in the pack

  one laughing monk in dungarees

  one delighted by cracking his eggs in an egg cup

  one chews gum to music all night long rock and roll

  one anthropologist cuckoo in the Petén rainforest

  one sits in jail all year and bets karmaic racetrack

  one chases girls down East Broadway into the horror movie

  one pulls out withered grapes and rotten onions from his pants

  one has a nannygoat under his bed to amuse visitors plasters the wall with his crap

  collects scorpions whiskies skies etc. would steal the moon if he could find it

  That would set fire to America but none of these make ignu

  it’s the soul that makes the style the tender firecracker of his thought

  the amity of letters from strange cities to old friends

  and the new radiance of morning on a foreign bed

  A comedy of personal being his grubby divinity

  Eliot probably an ignu one of the few who’s funny when he eats

  Williams of Paterson a dying American ignu

  Burroughs a pur
est ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger

  pinkie chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts

  his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars

  Céline himself an old ignu over prose

  I saw him in Paris dirty old gentleman of ratty talk

  with longhaired cough three wormy sweaters round his neck

  brown mould under historic fingernails

  pure genius his giving morphine all night to 1400 passengers on a sinking ship

  ‘because they were all getting emotional’

  Who’s amazing you is ignu communicate with me

  by mail post telegraph phone street accusation or scratching at my window

  and send me a true sign I’ll reply special delivery

  DEATH IS A LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT

  Knowledge born of stamps words coins pricks jails seasons sweet ambition laughing gas

  history with a gold halo photographs of the sea painting a celestial din in the

  bright window

  one eye in a black cloud

  and the lone vulture on a sand plain seen from the window of a Turkish bus

  It must be a trick. Two diamonds in the hand one Poetry one Charity

  proves we have dreamed and the long sword of intelligence

  over which I constantly stumble like my pants at the age six—embarrassed.

  New York, November 1958

  Battleship Newsreel

  I was high on tea in my fo’c’sle near the forepeak hatch listening to the stars envisioning the kamikazes flapping and turning in the soiled clouds ackack burst into fire a vast hole ripped out of the bow like a burning lily we dumped our oilcans of nitroglycerine among the waving octopi dull thud and boom of thunder undersea the cough of the tubercular machinegunner

  flames in the hold among the cans of ether the roar of battleships far away

  rolling in the sea like whales surrounded by dying ants the screams the captain mad

  Suddenly a golden light came over the ocean and grew large the radiance entered the sky

  a deathly chill and heaviness entered my body I could scarce lift my eye

  and the ship grew sheathed in light like an overexposed photograph fading in the brain.

  New York, 1959

  V

  KADDISH AND

  RELATED POEMS

  (1959–1960)

  Kaddish

  For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894–1956

  I

  Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

  downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

  the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer—

  And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn—

  Dreaming back thru life, Your time—and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,

  the final moment—the flower burning in the Day—and what comes after,

  looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city

  a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed—

  like a poem in the dark—escaped back to Oblivion—

  No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream, trapped in its disappearance,

  sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other,

  worshipping the God included in it all—longing or inevitability?—while it lasts, a Vision—anything more?

  It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,

  Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shouldering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant—and the sky above—an old blue place.

  or down the Avenue to the south, to—as I walk toward the Lower East Side —where you walked 50 years ago, little girl—from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock—

  then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?—toward Newark—

  toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards—

  Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this life?

  Toward the Key in the window—and the great Key lays its head of light on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk—in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater—and the place of poverty

  you knew, and I know, but without caring now—Strange to have moved thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,

  with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstoops doors and dark boys on the street, fire escapes old as you

  —Tho you’re not old now, that’s left here with me—

  Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe—and I guess that dies with us—enough to cancel all that comes—What came is gone forever every time—

  That’s good! That leaves it open for no regret—no fear radiators, lacklove, torture even toothache in the end—

  Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul—and the lamb, the soul, in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change’s fierce hunger—hair and teeth—and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin, braintricked Implacability.

  Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you’re out, Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your century, done with God, done with the path thru it—Done with yourself at last—Pure —Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all—before the world—

  There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good.

  No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more fear of Louis,

  and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts, loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands—

  No more of sister Elanor,—she gone before you—we kept it secret—you

  killed her—or she killed herself to bear with you—an arthritic heart

  —But Death’s killed you both—No matter—

  Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and

  weeks—forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth,

  or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin’s at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar —by standing room with Elanor & Max—watching also the Capitalists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,

  with the YPSL’s hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920

  all girls grown old, or dead, now, and that long hair in the grave—lucky to have husbands later—

  You made it—I came too—Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer—or kill —later perhaps—soon he will think—)

  And it’s the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now —tho not you

  I didn’t foresee what you felt—what more hideous gape of bad mouth came first—to you—and were you prepared?

  To go where? In that Dark—that—in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with you?

  Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon—Deaths-head with Halo? can you believe it?

  Is
it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence, than none ever was?

  Nothing beyond what we have—what you had—that so pitiful—yet Triumph,

  to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower—fed to the ground—but mad, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe, shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth wrapped, sore—freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.

  No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the knife—lost

  Cut down by an idiot Snowman’s icy—even in the Spring—strange ghost thought—some Death—Sharp icicle in his hand—crowned with old

  roses—a dog for his eyes—cock of a sweatshop—heart of electric irons.

  All the accumulations of life, that wear us out—clocks, bodies, consciousness, shoes, breasts—begotten sons—your Communism—‘Paranoia’ into hospitals.

  You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is Elanor happy?

  Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over midnight Accountings, not sure. His life passes—as he sees—and what does he doubt now? Still dream of making money, or that might have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Immortality, Naomi?

  I’ll see him soon. Now I’ve got to cut through—to talk to you—as I didn’t when you had a mouth.

  Forever. And we’re bound for that, Forever—like Emily Dickinson’s horses —headed to the End.

  They know the way—These Steeds—run faster than we think—it’s our own life they cross—and take with them.

  Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed—Ass and face done with murder.

  In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.

  Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore

  Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity—

  Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death

  This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping —page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!