Too many go express to the house of rest,
buffooning, to-froing on the fringe of being,
one foot in life, and little right to that:
“I had to stop this business going on,
I couldn’t attack my doctor anymore,
he lost his nerve for running out on life.…”
“Where I am not,” we chime, “is where I am.”
Dejection washes our pollution bare.
My shoes? Did they walk out on me last night,
and streak into the glitter of the blear?
I see two dirty white, punctured tennis-shoes,
empty and planted on the one-man path.
I have no doubt where they will go. They walk
the one life offered from the many chosen.
Person, place and thing, once violated,
join the rubbish that predated nature;
boys race the hooded highway lights untimed,
and tiptoe through the treasuries of smashed glass,
scavenging for a lifelike hand or head.
I hoped to find girls in the wide, white squares;
I had no names or numbers—I could not meet them,
the women had suffered a fate worse than death—
weird in London of the bullhorn God.
No rocket goes as far astray as man.…
I’m on bounds, I mark my proofs, a sheaf of tapeworms,
sleek, untearable, interminable
paper that slices my finger like a knife—
one time in fifty, God will make a date.
Is there an ur-dream better than words, an almost
work of art I commonplace in retelling
through the fearfullness of memory,
my perfunctory, all-service rhythms?…
For long, our taxi is changing into a van—
you-I … beefing we’ve not seen our driver.
He moves through the tan canvas-lapped bales of the van,
his step is careless, the bales begin to converge.
I am happy because I recognize
the man who assaulted you yesterday.…
Much later, the man’s face, tan, a Chinese portrait,
floats symmetrical in a pool the same color.
It takes seconds to see the rival is dead,
the same water washes in and out of the mouth.
Climbing from chair to chair to chair to chair,
I dare not look the stairwell in the eye;
its underpinning soils like carbon paper,
each step up would stop an athlete’s heart—
the stairwell is hollow, bored, unbearable,
the same six words repeating on a disk:
marching for peace with paranoia marching,
marching for peace with paranoia marching …
ever at my heels and stormily.
Darling, we have halved the ailing summer.
Did the beheaded wish himself in half?
He was so airily cool and free and high—
or did he wish the opposite like us,
when we stitched two summer months in one?
Horseguard and Lifeguard, one loud red, one yellow,
colorful and wasteful and old hat.…
Americans can buy them on a postcard—
we do not see them with hallucinated eyes,
these horsemen, smartly antiqued and resurrected
from the blood of Crimea and Waterloo,
free to ramble London or trample France.…
Here sitting at your feet I feel no pressure
of analogies binding us to them.
Our omen is Raleigh kneeling for the axe—
he isn’t going to die, it’s not been painted.
Our Raleigh is a small boy in his velvet
and courting dress hearing an old buffer
lie about the toothless Spanish Main.
I tie a second necktie over the first;
no one is always waiting at the door,
and fills the window … sometimes a Burmese cat,
or maybe my Daughter on the shell of my glasses.
I turn and see persons, my pajama top
loose-knotted on the long thin neck of a chair—
make yourself at home. The cat walks out—
or does it? The room has filled with double-shadows,
sedation doubles everything I see.…
You can’t be here, and yet we try to talk;
somebody else is farcing in your face,
we haggle at cross-purposes an hour.
While we are talking, I am asking you,
“Where is Caroline?” And you are Caroline.