Collected Poems 1947-1997 Read online

  and we beat apart after six decades …

  and on an asphalt crossroad,

  deal with each other in princely

  gentleness once more, recalling

  famous dead talks of other cities.

  The windshield’s full of tears,

  rain wets our naked breasts,

  we kneel together in the shade

  amid the traffic of night in paradise

  and now renew the solitary vow

  we made each other take

  in Texas, once:

  I can’t inscribe here… .

  • • • • • •

  • • • • • •

  How many Saturday nights will be

  made drunken by this legend?

  How will young Denver come to mourn

  her forgotten sexual angel?

  How many boys will strike the black piano

  in imitation of the excess of a native saint?

  Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high

  schools of melancholy night?

  While all the time in Eternity

  in the wan light of this poem’s radio

  we’ll sit behind forgotten shades

  hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.

  Neal, we’ll be real heroes now

  in a war between our cocks and time:

  let’s be the angels of the world’s desire

  and take the world to bed with us before we die.

  Sleeping alone, or with companion,

  girl or fairy sheep or dream,

  I’ll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:

  all men fall, our fathers fell before,

  but resurrecting that lost flesh

  is but a moment’s work of mind:

  an ageless monument to love

  in the imagination:

  memorial built out of our own bodies

  consumed by the invisible poem—

  We’ll shudder in Denver and endure

  though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.

  So this Green Automobile:

  I give you in flight

  a present, a present

  from my imagination.

  We will go riding

  over the Rockies,

  we’ll go on riding

  all night long until dawn,

  then back to your railroad, the SP

  your house and your children

  and broken leg destiny

  you’ll ride down the plains

  in the morning: and back

  to my visions, my office

  and eastern apartment

  I’ll return to New York.

  New York, May 22–25, 1953

  An Asphodel

  O dear sweet rosy

  unattainable desire

  … how sad, no way

  to change the mad

  cultivated asphodel, the

  visible reality …

  and skin’s appalling

  petals—how inspired

  to be so lying in the living

  room drunk naked

  and dreaming, in the absence

  of electricity …

  over and over eating the low root

  of the asphodel,

  gray fate …

  rolling in generation

  on the flowery couch

  as on a bank in Arden—

  my only rose tonite’s the treat

  of my own nudity.

  Fall 1953

  My Alba

  Now that I’ve wasted

  five years in Manhattan

  life decaying

  talent a blank

  talking disconnected

  patient and mental

  sliderule and number

  machine on a desk

  autographed triplicate

  synopsis and taxes

  obedient prompt

  poorly paid

  stayed on the market

  youth of my twenties

  fainted in offices

  wept on typewriters

  deceived multitudes

  in vast conspiracies

  deodorant battleships

  serious business industry

  every six weeks whoever

  drank my blood bank

  innocent evil now

  part of my system

  five years unhappy labor

  22 to 27 working

  not a dime in the bank

  to show for it anyway

  dawn breaks it’s only the sun

  the East smokes O my bedroom

  I am damned to Hell what

  alarmclock is ringing

  New York, 1953

  Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain

  Liang Kai, Southern Sung

  He drags his bare feet

  out of a cave

  under a tree,

  eyebrows

  grown long with weeping

  and hooknosed woe,

  in ragged soft robes

  wearing a fine beard,

  unhappy hands

  clasped to his naked breast—

  humility is beatness

  humility is beatness—

  faltering

  into the bushes by a stream,

  all things inanimate

  but his intelligence—

  stands upright there

  tho trembling:

  Arhat

  who sought Heaven

  under a mountain of stone,

  sat thinking

  till he realized

  the land of blessedness exists

  in the imagination—

  the flash come:

  empty mirror—

  how painful to be born again

  wearing a fine beard,

  reentering the world

  a bitter wreck of a sage:

  earth before him his only path.

  We can see his soul,

  he knows nothing

  like a god:

  shaken

  meek wretch—

  humility is beatness

  before the absolute World.

  New York Public Library, 1953

  Havana 1953

  I

  The night café—4 A.M.

  Cuba Libre 20c:

  white tiled squares,

  triangular neon lights,

  long wooden bar on one side,

  a great delicatessen booth

  on the other facing the street.

  In the center

  among the great city midnight drinkers,

  by Aldama Palace

  on Gómez corner,

  white men and women

  with standing drums,

  mariachis, voices, guitars—

  drumming on tables,

  knives on bottles,

  banging on the floor

  and on each other,

  with wooden clacks,

  whistling, howling,

  fat women in strapless silk.

  Cop talking to the fat-nosed girl

  in a flashy black dress.

  In walks a weird Cézanne

  vision of the nowhere hip Cuban:

  tall, thin, check gray suit,

  gray felt shoes,

  blaring gambler’s hat,

  Cab Calloway pimp’s mustachio

  —it comes down to a point in the center—

  rushing up generations late talking Cuban,

  pointing a gold-ringed finger

  up toward the yellowed ceiling,

  other cigarette hand pointing

  stiff-armed down at his side,

  effeminate:—he sees the cop—

  they rush together—they’re embracing

  like long lost brothers—

  fatnose forgotten.

  Delicate chords

  from the negro guitarino

  —singers at El Rancho Grande,

  drunken burlesque

  screams of agony,

  VIVA JALISCO!

  I eat
a catfish sandwich

  with onions and red sauce

  20¢.

  II

  A truly romantic spot,

  more guitars, Columbus Square

  across from Columbus Cathedral

  —I’m in the Paris Restaurant

  adjacent, best in town,

  Cuba Libres 30¢—

  weatherbeaten tropical antiquity,

  as if rock decayed,

  unlike the pure

  Chinese drummers of black stone

  whose polished harmony can still be heard

  (Procession of Musicians) at the Freer,

  this with its blunt cornucopias and horns

  of conquest made of stone—

  a great dumb rotting church.

  Night, lights from windows,

  high stone balconies

  on the antique square,

  green rooms

  paled by fluorescent houselighting,

  a modern convenience.

  I feel rotten.

  I would sit down with my servants and be dumb.

  I spent too much money.

  White electricity

  in the gaslamp fixtures of the alley.

  Bullet holes and nails in the stone wall.

  The worried headwaiter

  standing amid the potted palms in cans

  in the fifteen-foot wooden door looking at me.

  Mariachi harmonica artists inside

  getting around to Banjo on My Knee yet.

  They dress in wornout sharpie clothes.

  Ancient streetlights down the narrow Calle I face,

  the arch, the square,

  palms, drunkenness, solitude;

  voices across the street,

  baby wail, girl’s squeak,

  waiters nudging each other,

  grumble and cackle of young boys’ laughter

  in streetcorner waits,

  perro barking off-stage,

  baby strangling again,

  banjo and harmonica,

  auto rattle and a cool breeze—

  Sudden paranoid notion the waiters are watching me:

  Well they might,

  four gathered in the doorway

  and I alone at a table

  on the patio in the dark

  observing the square, drunk.

  25¢ for them

  and I asked for “Jalisco”—

  at the end of the song

  oxcart rolls by

  obtruding its wheels

  o’er the music o’ the night.

  Christmas 1953

  Green Valentine Blues

  Green Valentine Blues

  I went in the forest to look for a sign

  Fortune to tell and thought to refine;

  My green valentine, my green valentine,

  What do I know of my green valentine?

  I found a strange wild leaf on a vine

  Shaped like a heart and as green as was mine,

  My green valentine, my green valentine,

  How did I use my green valentine?

  Bodies I’ve known and visions I’ve seen,

  Leaves that I gathered as I gather this green

  Valentine, valentine, valentine, valentine;

  Thus did I use my green valentine.

  Madhouse and jailhouses where I shined

  Empty apartment beds where I pined,

  O desolate rooms! My green valentine,

  Where is the heart in which you were outlined?

  Souls and nights and dollars and wine,

  Old love and remembrance—I resign

  All cities, all jazz, all echoes of Time,

  But what shall I do with my green valentine?

  Much have I seen, and much am I blind,

  But none other than I has a leaf of this kind.

  Where shall I send you, to what knowing mind,

  My green valentine, my green valentine?

  Yesterday’s love, tomorrow’s more fine?

  All tonight’s sadness in your design.

  What does this mean, my green valentine?

  Regret, O regret, my green valentine.

  Chiapas, 1954

  Siesta in Xbalba

  AND

  Return to the States

  For Karena Shields

  I

  Late sun opening the book,

  blank page like light,

  invisible words unscrawled,

  impossible syntax

  of apocalypse—

  Uxmal: Noble Ruins

  No construction—

  let the mind fall down.

  —One could pass valuable months

  and years perhaps a lifetime

  doing nothing but lying in a hammock

  reading prose with the white doves

  copulating underneath

  and monkeys barking in the interior

  of the mountain

  and I have succumbed to this

  temptation—

  ‘They go mad in the Selva—’

  the madman read

  and laughed in his hammock

  eyes watching me:

  unease not of the jungle

  the poor dear,

  can tire one—

  all that mud

  and all those bugs …

  ugh… .

  Dreaming back I saw

  an eternal kodachrome

  souvenir of a gathering

  of souls at a party,

  crowded in an oval flash:

  cigarettes, suggestions,

  laughter in drunkenness,

  broken sweet conversation,

  acquaintance in the halls,

  faces posed together,

  stylized gestures,

  odd familiar visages

  and singular recognitions

  that registered indifferent

  greeting across time:

  Anson reading Horace

  with a rolling head,

  white-handed Hohnsbean

  camping gravely

  with an absent glance,

  bald Kingsland drinking

  out of a huge glass,

  Dusty in a party dress,

  Durgin in white shoes

  gesturing from a chair,

  Keck in a corner waiting

  for subterranean music,

  Helen Parker lifting

  her hands in surprise:

  all posturing in one frame,

  superficially gay

  or tragic as may be,

  illumined with the fatal

  character and intelligent

  actions of their lives.

  And I in a concrete room

  above the abandoned

  labyrinth of Palenque

  measuring my fate,

  wandering solitary in the wild

  —blinking singleminded

  at a bleak idea—

  until exhausted with

  its action and contemplation

  my soul might shatter

  at one primal moment’s

  sensation of the vast

  movement of divinity.

  As I leaned against a tree

  inside the forest

  expiring of self-begotten love,

  I looked up at the stars absently,

  as if looking for

  something else in the blue night

  through the boughs,

  and for a moment saw myself

  leaning against a tree …

  … back there the noise of a great party

  in the apartments of New York,

  half-created paintings on the walls, fame,

  cocksucking and tears,

  money and arguments of great affairs,

  the culture of my generation …

  my own crude night imaginings,

  my own crude soul notes taken down

  in moments of isolation, dreams,

  piercings, sequences of nocturnal thought

  and primitive illuminations
<
br />   —uncanny feeling the white cat

  sleeping on the table

  will open its eyes in a moment

  and be looking at me—

  One might sit in this Chiapas

  recording the apparitions in the field

  visible from a hammock

  looking out across the shadow of the pasture

  in all the semblance of Eternity

  … a dwarfed thatch roof

  down in the grass in a hollow slope

  under the tall crowd of vegetation

  waiting at the wild edge:

  the long shade of the mountain beyond

  in the near distance,

  its individual hairline of trees

  traced fine and dark along the ridge

  against the transparent sky light,

  rifts and holes in the blue air

  and amber brightenings of clouds

  disappearing down the other side

  into the South …

  palms with lethargic feelers

  rattling in presage of rain,

  shifting their fronds

  in the direction of the balmy wind,

  monstrous animals

  sprayed up out of the ground

  settling and unsettling

  as in water …

  and later in the night

  a moment of premonition

  when the plenilunar cloudfilled sky

  is still and small.

  So spent a night

  with drug and hammock

  at Chichén Itzá on the Castle:—

  I can see the moon

  moving over the edge of the night forest

  and follow its destination

  through the clear dimensions of the sky

  from end to end of the dark

  circular horizon.

  High dim stone portals,

  entablatures of illegible scripture,

  bas-reliefs of unknown perceptions:

  and now the flicker of my lamp

  and smell of kerosene on dust-

  strewn floor where ant wends

  its nightly ritual way toward great faces

  worn down by rain.

  In front of me a deathshead

  half a thousand years old

  —and have seen cocks a thousand

  old grown over with moss and batshit

  stuck out of the wall

  in a dripping vaulted house of rock—

  but deathshead’s here

  on portal still and thinks its way

  through centuries the thought

  of the same night in which I sit

  in skully meditation

  —sat in many times before by

  artisan other than me

  until his image of ghostly change