1. AFTER NIGHT FELL DOWN THE ABYSS
After Night fell down the Abyss,
ages after Eros mated with Chaos,
the gods were cut up and scattered.
After Forty-Two Names, the creation, the flood,
after nights and days were everyday,
the laws, the land promised,
centuries before an English word there was the Word,
Jesus alone chose to be born.
First day of spring,
flocks of birds break out of darkness,
hatch without choice
into the universe with the rest of us,
join the elements we know and don’t know,
protons and neutrons that live privately,
never chose to be born,
dark holes that did not and do not
choose to be gravitational.
Pushing with closed wings,
soon to fly to its first flower
a butterfly looks out of its chrysalis,
through a torn silk web.
Spring is coming in. A milk-fed race,
that has no choice but nipples,
four-footed and two-footed,
is coming into society.
There are gatherings in vineyards.
In that beautiful, noisy company
I would not choose to be a grape.
I hear a buzzing, a splashing, a God bless.
Most will live a day or two without choice
then become feed.
Some frogs, after a three-day orgasm,
may be devoured by a loveless bass or heron.
I pity flies.
I cannot conceive of insect pleasures.
After a while
philosophers and farmers are feed,
which we all become sooner or later
unless we choose to go up in smoke
that has no choice where to go
any more than mountains do.
A cup of tea, a shot of old whiskey,
comfort for the moment,
I do not choose to play chess,
I play there-is-Heaven-and-Hell.
I choose to sing, Depuis le jour, then silence . . .
silence gets me used to silence,
I will hear it for a long while.
No silence in my trees—
I say “my trees,” I planted hundreds,
some assassinated in their own beds.
On May afternoons, it is my opinion
the survivors recognize me,
but birds and squirrels living in the branches
don’t know me from Adam. Barefoot,
lonely as a cloud I’ve walked beaches,
I’ve gathered cubist driftwood, discovered a trunk,
the chapel of a Chinese temple bridge,
I’ve climbed mountains, found rocks
with fossils of seashells and fish spines carved in.
We are made to look ridiculous.
Our bodies are stuck with fingers,
usually ten, knuckles and hair.
We have ridiculous noses
with nostrils that pull air in and out
with the help of ridiculous lungs,
God-made feet with toenails,
a navel that connects us to holes of ill repute
that are made to do outlandish things
with mouths and tongues on pilgrimage or hajj
or going to Jerusalem “next year”
with our pagan ridiculous teeth.
After an outlandish past and present,
we die ridiculously, go to dirty hell.
I hunt for sensible things
in rock without feelings,
both of us loaded with ludicrous bacteria.
I know some people and gardens
that are beautiful, clearly sensible,
are reasons for, but they die
ridiculous deaths like the rest of us.
I’m soon to have my ridiculous salad,
everything is ridiculous
but a good cup of coffee in the morning.
The rising and setting sun is iffy,
clouds are not ridiculous,
winds certainly are ridiculous,
are political but don’t vote,
they are left-wing, right-wing, east or west.
I am registered to vote in a cosmological election.
The sun is president.
What is the state of the universe?
Time and space are certainly undemocratic.
Still, in the sensible by-and-by, dark holes
will hold an election, the candidates
real-lifers against supernaturalists.
What ridiculously new
relative pronoun will come of cosmic jousting?
In the distant future tense:
I will will cry over spilled milk.
It is ridiculous as gravity to wait
to pull a string theory on anyone.
Still I am prepared to stay here and wait.
I wait and wait, wait and wait.
Some of us choose to disappear,
which is not the same as burial.
After wonderful everyday routines,
breakfast and suppers,
Shakespeare and the singing laudy goddamn others
with their lending hands, still part of the forest
in darkness, “for the birds,” as they say in Queens.
I delight in my broken circle because
I can say “birds of prey”
and “I pray that you observe the Sabbath.”
Praying pays attention, reminds me
Jesus alone chose to be born.
Wishing, I make noise,
“noise for the Lord” as David suggested.
I could write a history of choice and necessity.
I do not choose my dreams.
Time and space, those grown-ups, are choiceless.
If I had a choice, I’d choose to be human,
a farmer or poet, a farmer-poet.
No farm ever chose to be a farm.
Not having chosen my beginnings,
my language, my century, I choose English now.
Some say the poem writes itself.
I do not think a child
is born simply because
you do it or did it.
Birth is a miracle,
like December 21st,
shortest day of the year.
Death is everyday
like waking up.
Death is hardhearted.
I know flying birds
carry a heart with them
as do sandpipers
and cormorants that dive
and seem to disappear.
Trees’ hearts are difficult to find
when they are cut down—
so many leaves, branches, and roots.
A tree has its own soul,
often houses a god,
should be offered a gift.
Mothering is rare,
not like fish eggs or pollen,
but thanks to four holy letters
a miracle happens.
Stars fall in love
at first sight,
have illegitimate stars,
commonplace and steadfast.
Miracles don’t have to be holy,
can be profane.
Okay with me if you tell me
you grew up unmiraculously.
“Every living thing is part-miracle,”
I don’t know why.
The miracle gets tired,
needs a good night’s sleep
we call death.
Death is not a defeat
it is a triumph, the permanent
over the temporary.
There are diminishing unshakeable effects,
love, fathering, friendship,
first love, chance encounters.
I may simply stay home.
Life’s not a menu, but I can choose a song,
my final resting place for a while.
In the end I’ll simply say:
the universe did not choose
Big Bang or Mom and Pop.
Speechless bastard orphan
abandoned on the doorstep of language,
to stay alive I will accept any tongue,
inarticulate as the wheels of a locomotive—
after a month listening I will learn, I think,
first useful words, names of things, foods and drink,
salt, how to nod thank you and good night,
personal pronouns, if any, some understood.
I think I will learn the possessive quickly.
My new tongue has an untranslatable word
for gratitude that also seems to mean
the sun is shining and number one.
The goddess Dawn seized me as a boy,
clouded me to a secret place on the horizon
where she taught me lessons about her body
I will not share. Now, in old age, I wake
when it is still dark, hoping she will see me
in half-darkness, that remembering when I was young,
she, in error, in media luz, will carry me off again,
and share me with the golden goddess Day.
I see time passing erotically:
the rivers of time, the seas of time passing,
on which men, women, everything living
sails, floats, paddles, rows by hand,
enters, kisses, gives birth.
Clockwise and counterclockwise,
passing time is declared profanely like war
against a City filled with Greek whores wearing sandals,
“follow me” written on backs of heels.
I hope, in half-darkness,
Peloponnesean Dawn
will see me, straight and tall,
a timeless waterfall, a crash of water
never frozen, never drying up in summer.
I hollow the rocks I fall upon,
I deepen the river.
I am Dawn’s waterfall.
In fresh snow that fell on old snow
I see wild roses in bloom, springtime,
an orchard of apple and peach trees in bloom,
lovers of different preferences
walking naked in new snow, not shivering,
no illusion, no delusion, no bluebells.
Why should I live by reality that murders?
I wear a coat of hope and desire.
I follow fallen maple leaves abducted by the wind.
I declare I am a Not Quite, almost a nonentity.
I fought for that “almost.”
I lift up and button my collar of hope.
I simply refuse to leave the universe.
I’m all the aunts in my father’s house and all my uncles too.
I had fifty great-great-grand-grandmothers
who got to Paradise,like Enoch, without dying.
Once my friends and I went out in deep paradise snow
with Saint Bernards and Great Pyrenees
to find those lost in the blizzard God made for Himself
because He prefers not seeing what happens on earth.
With touch He can hear, taste, smell, see,
and He has fourteen other senses there are no words for.
Memory, He said, is a sense, not a power.
Who am I to disagree with Him?
There are some vegetarians among you,
so I will tell you what He eats.
It’s green, and cows and sheep eat it too.
He picks His teeth. I think I heard Him say,
“Gentlemen don’t void in swimming pools or the ocean.
I like your dirty jokes, I prefer them in meter.”
He told me to carry on.
I thought “On” was a Norse god. He said, “No,
it’s just a burden that gets heavier,
the burden makes you stronger.”
“Isn’t on the Japanese debt to ancestors?” I countered.
He resents hearing the prayers and praise of sycophants.
“How come you are speaking to me?” I asked.
He speaks Silence, languages I call “Night” and “Day.”
His politics? “Nations” to Him are “a form of masturbation.”
Original blasphemy amuses Him, describes
His coitus with living creatures,
mothers, His self,
a whale, a male praying mantis dying to mate.
He likes to hear, “do unto others
what you would not want others to do unto you.”
Instead of a prayer rug,
I stitch Him a pillow of false proverbs:
“In the house of the hangman talk of rope.”
I asked Him if I ever did anything he liked.
“You planted eggplant too close to the cucumbers
and they married. I blessed that wedding,
sent roses by another name.”
“How come you speak to me?” I asked.
He said He was not speaking to me,
“Consult Coleridge on the Imagination.”
He waved, He did not say goodbye.
The thing written is a sexual thing,
may bite, tell a truth some have died for,
even the most casual initialing
is a touch of love and what love goes for.
A sometime thing, it smiles or has an ugly grin,
on the page or wall may be holy and a sin.
Writing wants, must have, must know,
is flesh, blood, and bone,
proof we are not made to be alone.
Beneath a dove and rainbow
some bank their fire,
wrap their erogenous zones in barbed wire.
Writing may dance in ink flamenco,
kneel before the cross, right
wrongs, fall in love at first sight,
honor the naked languages it holds tight,
kidnap, suck or be sucked for hire,
may look and look or sneak a look,
it has eyes, can read, is remarkable.
From the tower of sexual babble,
when dreams were the beginning of writing,
the angel of dreams descended, stair by stair,
the stone watchtower became the first stone book.
Writing never speaks word, may ache to talk,
and yet each letter of any alphabet
is a fragment of desire,
like half and quarter notes on a staff, or a hawk,
may swoop down, fly higher and higher
to catch a word, and then another word.
The sexual thing may be all love or malice,
eunuchs writing in the Forbidden Palace
where poets dressed in rags, or silk and lace.
The thing written touches, kisses, cuddles,
may be democratic, autocratic, medieval
in the 21st century, feudal, imperial, animal,
sexually digital, a Serf, a King, a Queen,
la chose écrite est une chose sexuelle.
I had a woman beautiful as the letter L.
There is the passion of letters, each may mean
another thing, be defaced, after a while.
Writing leans forward,
there is a certain optimism in the written word,
a sexual sunrise that is not daybreak.
Words, words, a carnival of wordplay
on St. Nobody’s Day.
Reader, look, there is an S, a snake
on the cross of the letter T.
The letter of love is still the open-legged V.
How can I dot the i with humanity?
I am prepared to believe Yahweh has a younger brother.
God’s brother wears his hand-me-down clothes.
It’s pretty tough on the kid. Everywhere he goes,
he basks in the light of family resemblance.
Many use him to get a little closer.
Mortal, he eats, sleeps, falls in love,
he looks in the mirror, sees something of God in his own face.
He knows God never gets tired, never sleeps.
No one ever prays to the brother, the runt of the litter.
God will kill him, see he is buried with a cloud or two,
put stones on his grave, nothing obscure,
nothing ordinary like a sparrow.
He heard God coughing in the next apartment,
his life a hospital, he moved from bed to bed
with us and Baudelaire, except he always had
Finnegans Wake tucked in his pajamas,
which must mean, sure as chance,
the human race is God’s Phlegm. Penitent,
I say a prayer in God’s throat:
“Mister, whose larynx we congest,
spit us into the Atlantic or Hudson. . .
let us be dropped into the mouth of the first fish
that survived by eating its young—
drink hot tea and honey Your mother brings You
till You are rid of Your catarrh, well again.
Let us swim back to our handiwork.”
Far from the world of Howth Castle, Delmore died
in a bedbugged hotel, unclaimed for three days.
A week before, by chance, I saw him
at a drugstore counter, doubled over a coffee,
he moaned, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,
deceitful enemy kisses.”
He held my hand too tight, too long.
Melancholy Eros flew to my shoulder,
spoke in Greek, Yiddish, and English:
“Wear his sandals, his dirty underwear,
his coat of many colors that did not keep him warm.”
I was startled, not like a lion or a fawn,
more like a teacup breaking on a marble floor—
a guide tells schoolchildren after they’ve passed
the Greco Fable, a man blowing on a flame,
a monkey on his shoulder chained to heaven,
that Goya’s dog is drowning, not
that the dog is humanity looking up
at a possible Christ in the sky.
No, señora, we are God’s dog.
I looked for a washroom sign
and for a marble Dionysus,
God of theater, religious ecstasy,
the grape, ritual madness.
I found him in an amphitheater
more Sicilian than Delphic.
The world is more like a paintbrush than a cloud.
I see a changing color, a cloud, a form,
the form two olive-trees high, the cloud
fixed in the corner vault of the ceiling.
I’ve come to life and death,
wandering in Spain for sixty-five years,
asking for offerings.
I sit on a bench near La maja desnuda,
exhausted American
now in the Gallery of Philosophy.
Let me consider how I ought to speak,
then speak, dreaming of reason.
I played soldier as a child.
I took a purple blanket
and made my terrain, mountains
on a fine evening, my universe,
an autumn battlefield.
Out of a tin candy-box burial ground,
not by nation or religion,
enemies made of lead, my soldiers and sailors,
all murderers, good and bad on each side.
I knew and remember their faces.
Troops fought in my bed, for islands,
for mothers and chocolate.
I pulled the chain on the toilet
that overflowed with the big ones of history.
Death was a birthday present
but in my game they all rose again.
At 17, Harmonium in my duffel bag,
I enlisted in the US Navy
my service number 7661612.
I was decorated face and chest
by the red and white ribbons
of my boyhood friend Gerry’s brains.
Arthur lost a leg. Danny the pianist
who played Chopin sonatas
had his spine made into an accordion.
I was shocked the other day to discover
that I was born near here, swaddled
in lace turning brown like the pinwheels
on the back of pinochle decks. How convenient
my place of birth gives my mind a footing
between the old and new on this island
with its dunes, factories, and state highways.
My birth brought the rage of my parents and a tongue
that choked me. I bit my tongue in half,
my first impossible effort to double my forces.
Trains, not triads, heard all night . . .
The first gift I could accept from my father
was a branch he broke off a sugar maple
that served as a fishing rod,
a bow, and a sign to the world I was
a bender of trees and breaker of branches.
But this was not my truck-farming Long Island
near Whitman’s boyhood home, now prosy,
miracle floors, windows face the same sun,
fictitious plumping, no lilac bush, brotherly trees.
A crow walks across the grass
with human steps, sparrows hop.
Mine was the world of David and Absalom,
and I was both. I worshipped the word,
it was graven, and worshipped the presence
of the word, the old prayers, the old revenge,
the old laws of obligation, although
I didn’t know them, and never prayed.
I wanted an idol of
gold lead.
Life was that mysterious, so I sang all day
comforting myself like a Spanish housemaid scrubbing floors
till they were just about ready to lock me up.
I was fascinated by cracked sidewalks,
four feet by four feet,
thought them ancient links to the past,
I watched the dust and soot
where grass grew mysteriously like me.
Age three, I cried “help.”
My head smashed on the cement
like a bundle of newspapers
thrown from a truck.
It was my first battle
near Liberty Avenue
against Jerry O’Brian.
I do not know
why we were fighting.
It was a fight to the death
and I lost.
EPITAPH FOR A COOK
Again the same old stew,
neither potato nor carrot,
I thicken the gravy,
may the good Lord
soak me up with bread.
I.
Lost summers and winters ago
I gave my dog Sancho the gift of my old car
with its 15 years of smells.
I took off the license plate.
When the battery died he could no longer
blow the horn summoning a holy spirit.
I kept open the passenger side window
so he could jump in and out,
closed it when it rained or snowed.
Field animals came to call.
He sat behind the wheel, did not pretend
to be me. He did not know he was behaving
like a temple dog, but to him and me
his car was a holy place, the goodness
of my dog sanctified his dead Chevy.
We fished together. He’d see the line moving upstream,
jump after a rainbow trout breaking water.
If I let him he’d pull the fish in,
to see the joy on his face made me a happy dog,
Sancho dunked his head in the stream, picked up
a round rock, a present for me and the suffering world.
II.
Before I willed him the car, I’d step on the gas,
the headlights showed the road.
You could see the car, with its battery
instead of a heart, coming a mile off
until, like a deer, the lights blinded you.
Once Sancho disappeared from the back seat,
leapt out an open window, chased a deer
across a field, up a mountainside.
A very long hour after, I spotted him
waiting under an oak for me to find him.
How did Sancho die?
What happened to the car? It’s a long story.
I guess I had the car, the dog synagogue,
hauled off for scrap. I’m sure I would not take
fifty bucks for what was not for sale.
When someone else was walking him,
Sancho ate some rat poison around a waste bin
in Central Park—he died very slowly
in a hospital cage, his insides crucified.
My dog who loved wilderness
as much as any good wolf looked at me
for weeks when I visited each day, asking
what have I done wrong?
I had a telephone call he was dead.
I swore to myself I’d never let a friend
die alone like that again.
It wasn’t all smell of Adirondack lilac
and flowering chestnut trees along Broadway
in the spring of 1824.
Human sewers, mostly Negroes, carried waste in tubs
at night to the Hudson and East Rivers. James Hewlett,
said to be ex-slave, ex-tubman, self-purchaser,
ex-houseboy to English actors, leapt up like a wildcat,
then like a witch he joined a Shakespeare theater of ex-slaves,
billed himself: “Vocalist and Shakespeare’s Proud Representative.”
I pick his pocket
. He played Richard the Third and Othello,
sang Il Barbiere, La Marseillaise, and “O!
say not that woman’s love is bought” in one evening.
Humped in silk, Mr. Hewlett called out:
“Now is the winter of our discontent
made glorious summer by this son of New York,”
to black applause. Whatever the beauty of the season,
his actors and actresses were beaten up, his theater
finally burned to the ground with the pleasures of lynching
and cutting out a tongue.
I pick his pocket.
He let the winds of eloquence take him where they would:
often, late at night, he recited
speeches from Shakespeare in the street,
sometimes in the snow.
In disgrace for marrying a pretty-as-a-picture white woman,
he served six months for stealing wine, then three years
for stealing a silver watch from the vest pocket
of a dead man, a show-off laid out in tails.
What good is a watch in the grave?
He answered the sentencing with
“I have done the state some service, and they know it.”
While he was away playing with himself,
better people attended the fashionable theater
and minstrel shows, danced the cotillion. The industrious poor—
slaves who bought their freedom, or whose fathers or mothers
had bought their freedom, a few simply freed—
dressed up as no one had dressed before, hired ballrooms,
cotillioned, and held a benefit dance and supper
to support Greek freedom. Late in the evening,
sweating and full of whiskey, their loins sweetened,
they fell to what whites called “crazy dancing
and senseless music” that “frightened the horses.”
Out, Hewlett gave one last performance, a newspaper reported:
“to great applause he made a fine speech before the curtain,
which ended up—he could not help himself—
in some kind of talk you had to be a nigger to understand.”
I pick his pocket.
Signed up on a crew of freemen and slaves
he made his way to Trinidad,
“Shakespeare’s Proud Representative” found a stage,
portrayed Mr. Keene playing nine tragic roles.
Sometimes he gave himself laughing gas to please the crowd
or pretended to. A one-man band,
Othello sang La Marseillaise.
He disappeared in New York in the Forties,
the streets slave-free after 1827,
full of Negroes and Irish; older, there is no reason to think
he was kidnapped and shipped south for sale.
What had it come to beyond the gaslights
and wood fires? History as entertainment,
a stained purse I grab. I sit in the dark, listening
to a call and response, a call and response.
For no reason, beauty reports, disappears
not like early-morning birdsong in the city
but like the report of a rifle. I pick his pocket
in the third balcony of my life; segregated from myself,
I am barely a ghost in my own poem.
I salute a word, I stand up and give it my chair,
because this one Zulu word, ubuntu,
holds what English takes seven to say:
“the essential dignity of every human being. ”
I give my hand to ubuntu—
the simple, everyday South African word
for the English mouthful.
I do not know the black Jerusalems of Africa,
or how to dance its sacred dances.
I cannot play Christ’s two commandments on the drums:
“Love God” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
I do not believe the spirits of the dead
are closer to God than the living,
nor do I take to my heart
the Christ-like word ubuntu
that teaches reconciliation
of murderers, torturers, accomplices,
with victims still living.
Jefferson was wrong:
it is not blood but ubuntu
that is the manure of freedom.
With spray can paint,
I illuminate my name
on the subway cars and handball courts,
in the public school yards of New York,
S M
written in sky-above-the-ocean-blue,
surrounded by a valentine splash
of red and white, not for Spiritus Mundi,
but for a life and death, part al fresco
part catacomb,
against the city fathers
who have made a crime of signaling
with paint to passengers and pedestrians.
For the ghetto population of my city
I spray my name
with those who stand for a public art.
In secret if I must
and wearing sneakers, I sign with those
who have signed for me.
Death, take a Mediterranean cruise,
drop Murder off at Cadiz
where you were mocked at your labor
in many noble corridas . . . . Let Death’s
heart fail in Venice, good news on the Rialto.
Let absentminded Death, always present,
float Cancer up the Nile past Luxor
where they’re reading the Book of the Dead,
sail the Meander to Troy.
Let Death drag Death like Hector around its walls
where Helen is sometimes seen walking in the evening.
So far Death has paid me scant attention
despite my war on that hijo de puta.
But God with His big heart feels sorry for Death,
lets Death live, play at His feet like a puppy.
God thinks the puppy just bites us a little.
The Lord is mistaken, so we must want
till every living thing is dead as a doornail,
the universe covered with doornails.
Death will not drown, does not starve
long as anything lives. Toward the end, starving,
Death devours the last trees like salad.
Finally when fire and darkness are celebrating
with nothing living, Death falls in God’s arms,
looks Him in the face, and says, “I’m your heir.”
For His reasons, God says,
“Nein, nein. Auf wiedersehen.”
In beautiful Russian, Mandelstam wrote
“the soul’s a woman.”
I remember dead men, their mouths wide open:
no doubt different women,
some naked flew out,
some in transparent nightgowns,
no souls dressed in street clothes
or country clothes, boots, no wedding gowns.
I feel a woman dancing in me,
I speak of her carefully.
When she is angry, anyone can see it in my eyes.
She speaks to me like an orchestra tuning up.
Her mortal opposite is not body, is time
with its dirty timely words.
Every day the soul does woman’s work.
It’s as if she’s trying to unscramble eggs.
There is the question of immortality.
Does the soul get lost?
Is the woman given or do we fashion her?
To hell with public opinion. She is mortal.
To change the subject I like to turn around
like a migrating bird, head south then north
then south again. I inhale my soul
and the souls of passersby, that, who,
sleep in me only for the night.
I am a country inn. I’d rather be a country inn
than Claridge’s or the Savoy.
What do I really believe?
The soul must be good for something.
Dr. Abrams, your last name ends in “S,”
that does not mean you’re plural
but when I addressed an envelope
with a check inside I left off the S
which means I had the hope against hope
to cut off your penis
with a rural pen, not cause your funeral.
I’m earnest, is your S
more housefly than eagle,
do you use it to jump rope?
I bet
it does not genuflect.
It is more sinful than pious,
more dybbuk than elf,
more Pope Francis than Pius
the Twelfth.
I have no doubt
your S straightens out—
never disguised,
it is more cabbage than Brussels sprout,
hugely prized.
Your S smiles—is not just erotic
but patriotic,
free,
ready to serve its country
Sleepless,
I smell the 1940 bombings
surrounded by English affection.
Arrived mostly in Manchester, UK,
I call the operator
to hello me later.
I’ve already run into an honored citizen,
bleeding Nameless Corporal War.
I want to take the measure of pleasure,
and I do, in feet, notes, and handbreadths,
in the sky, not in light years, foot by foot.
I know “men have died and worms
have eaten them, but not for love.”
Dressed in green corduroy,
I fall on the bed, I measure worms.
THE AUCTION
Finally it comes down to this,
the buying and selling of Christ’s
foreskin and robes,
the bidding on Moses’ tablet,
Samson’s hair, David’s sling and harp,
all come to the block.
The last lot is happiness.
“It is against you, Sir.
Sold to a telephone bidder!”
There is nothing without a price.
Kindness is passed, may be sold
“by private treaty.”
There is nothing without a price
except what’s loved,
the God’s honest truth.
There’s wondering, idle thoughts,
thinking over what was last said,
some poetry in my head
like traffic outside the window.
In my forgetful marrow, I consider
often lying words, like everything and all.
Nothing is another matter.
Nothing comes of everything and all.
Something comes of nothing.
I know the word no means no,
yes, yes, except when they mean each other.
There’s water, which means water,
dishwater, that may mean worthless.
It’s often better
to say worthless when you mean it.
I’ve come to meaning, that can mean
reason for or reason to live,
words I might say outright
without first saying meaning.
Then there is a mean man.
How did mean come to have two meanings?
Take a dictionary of homonyms
and tell me how words got to sound alike
with different meanings and spellings,
a Sea of Words
which is a Chinese dictionary.
Language has its ways,
its altitude and latitude. . .
Stanley, baby, quit jerking on and off.
I’m simply talking to myself.
I am more familiar with the dark night
and bright day of the body
than the dark night of the soul.
Light has an exaggerated reputation.
Goethe’s last words were, “ Mehr Licht!”
Faust was dragged off to hell
when he was content.
Goethe preferred discontent, which needed light.
The seed is contained discontent.
Early morning, what poems I read don’t make sense,
are blurred unless I read aloud. It’s as if
there were a wall or fence taken down
by speaking out, a cliff I had to climb to see.
I am awake, my mind’s eye, my mind’s nose and mouth,
stuffed closed,
my eyelids lead, silent poetry a lie—
uncomposed,
Eurydice not found, Orfeo’s flute
fingered but not blown, the other woodwinds
playing octets, the choirs gone mute.
The mind attends a thought as a mother attends
her child, and so I write to make sense
when reading silently is not recompense
for bad dreams or a night’s silent sleep
into which I fall, but never leap to sleep.
1
Dear Monarchs, fellow Americans,
friends have seen you and that’s proof,
I’ve heard the news:
since summer you traveled 5,000 miles
from our potato fields to the Yucatan.
Some butterflies can bear what the lizard would never endure.
Few of us can flutter away from the design:
I’ve seen butterflies weather a storm
in the shell of a snail, come out of nowhere
twenty stories up in Manhattan.
I’ve seen them struggling on the ground.
I and others may die anonymously,
when all exceptionalism is over,
but not like snowflakes falling.
This week in Long Island
before the first snowfall, there is nothing left
but flies, bees, aphids, the usual.
2
In Mexico
I saw the Monarchs of North America gather,
a valley of
butterflies surrounded
by living mountains of butterflies—
the last day for
many.
I saw a river of butterflies flooding
through the valley, on a
bright day black clouds
of butterflies thundering overhead,
yet every one
remained a fragile thing.
A winged colossus wearing billowing silk
over a
sensual woman’s body
waded across the valley,
wagons and armies rested
at her feet.
A village lit fires,
and the valley was a single black
butterfly.
3
Butterflies,
what are you to me
that I
should worry about your silks and powders,
your damnation or
apotheosis,
insecticides and long-tongued lizards.
Some women I
loved are no longer human.
I have a quarrel with myself for leaving my
purpose,
for the likes of you, beauties I could name.
Sooner or
later
I hope you alight on my headstone
above my name and dates,
questioning
my bewilderment.
Where is your Chinese God of walls and
ditches?
Wrapped in black silk I did not spin,
do I hold a butterfly
within?
What is this nothingness they have done to me?
to Theodore Roethke
A poet friend was caught in the john
during a Seattle earthquake, rushed out to find
the walls cracked and
the chandelier swaying,
convinced that his dumping had caused it all.
Often he
broke wind, called it “music”—
on one famous occasion, having eaten
too
much cabbage over brandy and clams,
caught on a local train, he had to go bad
but didn’t want to get off
to wait an hour for the next commuter
when there was
a sudden jolt, a dead stop—
he soiled himself, kept reading John Clare,
thought
he was undetected, sat unfrowning,
until a small boy said, “Mister, please—
the next car is empty, can you go there?”
He noticed the Douglas firs the
train was passing,
obeyed the boy, asked himself why
it is our fate, that with
all the possibilities,
what passes through us is live dead matter,
somewhere
always an afterlife
somewhere beyond the treatment plant or gutter?
Three
stops, deep in philosophy, at last
at the depot, the poet waltzed into the
washroom
to make the best of things.
Tales of poets catching or missing
trains
are seldom very funny,
always with a little “afterlife” in them.
Goethe waiting to catch a coach to Italy
heard Mendelssohn playing Beethoven,
“enough,” he said, “to knock the planets off their axes.”
I see summer where the winter was,
time, a fish breaking water.
You say time is never surprising.
I say it is like an idea come out of
nowhere.
You say, “in the beginning was. . .”
I don’t listen. Nowhere is a
lie.
Winter is where summer was,
they remember each other.
Look, a cardinal
just flew past my frosty window.
I am wrong talking like this, I say
summer
resembles winter,
a hellish, icy-cold memory.
If they could speak
and
we could hear them, they might just
be comedians (spring and autumn tragedians):
“You’re too hot.” “You’re too cold.”
“A little more respect,” winter says,
“because I am older than you.
Summer, you play me in Australia and
Argentina.”
Reader, I am content with all seasons,
truest words first
spoken
“Mama, Papa.”
Although summer and winter
may wear each other’s
clothes,
only the mostly blind
confuse the sun and the moon.
There are
summer prayers and winter prayers.
There will always be, as long as the
weather changes.
There are the lawless luxuries of love poems,
and there
are poems of disagreement
that get down in the gutter and fight.
You wrote I appeared in your dream last night in Granada.
Some
dreamers have the gift to dream
the fate of others before it happens.
Any good
or bad news?
The towns in Andalusia were filled
with such dreaming women
dressed in black.
Women mourned for five years,
so most were dressed in
black.
Some held part of the collar of their dress
in their mouths, veiling
their face.
In the arms of your lover you dreamed of me.
Two’s company,
three’s a crowd;
I know dreams bring unwelcome friends,
strangers, enemies
to bed,
and Mom and Pop are always there.
Outside your window, a gypsy
girl
was chased by the wind and naked St. Christopher
who wanted to lift her
dress and finger her blue rose.
She ran to the house of the English consul
who gave her warm milk and gin.
The Granada gardens are full of remembering
olive and flowering trees that weep sometimes
for the moonlight Taj Mahal
gardens
with their night-blooming flowers and sleepless bees
serving queens who
fill their hives with laughter
at human folly before they are betimes
murdered.
You sleep where blind musicians played
in the bedrooms of
lovers.
Nightingales police the fields of paradise
on Sabbath nights while
flamenco dancers sit and drink
Anís de Chinchón, listening to jazz.
Your
dream made me unforget
I spent seven days and nights
on my first honeymoon
in Granada
in March 1953, the month Stalin died,
but that is another story.
Without ambition, I’ve stolen the world.
Who among you is
poor enough to understand
if I had not I’d have no place to sleep tonight?
For
what I need belongs to mankind,
yet I stole because I could not bear the
human condition.
The world, as far as my eye can see, notices no change,
according to my nature I practice my craft,
hammer out the rose in the
spine of a fish.
The ocean is bread, an old gypsy without a guitar
sings in
cante jondo, ¿Dónde vas media judía?
The ocean is bread.
I consider, common to all uses, love.
The only thing more popular than war,
orgasm.
I’ll make use of death, that it might serve me.
I’ll capture war,
make it a frightened, hungry boy.
I had the gall for that—spell it G-A-U-L,
if you like.
Now my donkey, my lad, my good world,
the meek, the humble,
and innocent
I spur with murdered Caesar’s boot,
my praetors,
generals, kings and subjects
I command to do all things beyond my
imagination!
POEM
Teacher of reading, of “you will not” and “you
shall,”
almighty Grammarian author of Genesis,
whether language holds three
forms of the future
as Hebrew does or no future tense at all
like Chinese, may
it perform a public service,
offer the protection of the Great Wall,
the
hope and sorrow of the Western Wall.
My dear
friends
you did not marry as doves cooing
under a bird feeder,
after your
combined 152 years
of mischance and luck. It was fate.
Eros at a Bacchanal
whispered:
“What is yours is hers, what is hers is yours,
you may keep each
other’s ‘sweet company,’
kiss away yesterday’s kisses,
wear each
other’s nightgowns and pajamas!”
Then Eros flew off, a hopeful God.
Old
vows broken were repaired,
all vows to ex-husbands
and ex-wives broken,
repaired,
as were the vows of your children
broken and repaired.
God
blesses a just cause.
I send love. Beware the wrath of the dead.
My best customer was Mark Rothko,
who bought six copies of
The Wrong Angel.
I note I write this with blue ink,
but I pay little
attention to the color.
He would make Biblical without a word
different shades
of blue,
Deuteronomy black, Genesis serpent-green.
He could obey or
break the commandments
with a brush or palette knife, paint the colors of time.
He lives in the sigh of the past,
his heart and soul hang themselves on
walls.
At night, when no one’s around,
his paintings sing Hebrew, Greek,
and Yiddish songs.
If the play’s the thing, Oedipus tore out his eyes,
Mark
killed himself thinking
he painted psalms and proverbs,
“tragedy, ecstasy,
doom”—
then he saw what he’d really painted on a wall,
his sweetheart
sucking off her naked lover
in a mirrored chapel, so he bathed them
with blood
poured from his well-cut wrist.
1
Because I’ve lived beyond my years, I’m in the soup.
I don’t spit in the soup from which I’ve
eaten.
Because I am in the soup
amuses a satyr sunning himself on Greek
rocks
where Eros masturbates
with a fantasy he is Mars making war, not love.
I
read poetry and write garlic lines.
I swim in a zuppa di pesce, my
company,
my wife the catch of the day.
Young, there was the question
of civilizations,
borscht, wonton, chowders, gazpacho,
an antediluvian
primordial soup—
sorry, but I went from soup to soup to nuts.
I loved
obscene Andalusian lullabies
sung by abused nannies and wet nurses.
Older than a
crabapple tree,
I sing unaccompanied songs,
ghost songs with my mother
and father’s voices
on Liberty Avenue.
A riffon a ram’s horn,
I am a short repeated phrase, frequently played over,
changing chords and
harmony
used as background to a solo improvisation.
Eros daydreams beneath my
window.
I don’t spit in the soup from which I’ve eaten.
2
The
satyr believes, because of one song I wrote,
my “Satyr Song,” he is my heir.
He says, “I’m broke, extravagant.
Since you will be dead before five
years pass
you should turn over your interests to me now.”
He’s not an
honest murderer.
No songbird, my satyr has appetite for my liver,
but I’ve
stolen more kindness than fire.
Reader, keep out of mind my
transparency.
The dead never block the view from my window,
or from a
mountaintop, or from poetry
that may take the place of a mountain.
You can
see I’m in the soup.
I offer you a spoon. Taste how it happens:
the
satyr repeats, “I want my golden future now.”
Eros, I leave you a checkbook
of unsigned checks, my love.
This is not the first time I’ve talked only in
metaphors.
It’s Thanksgiving, I give thanks.
I can still carry a tune.
Just out of diapers, I am a giant
standing in a harbor, pissing
ships
to shipwreck against the cliffs.
I have some memory how proud I was,
my first standing-up-like-a-man piss,
later pissing into the Grand Canyon,
proof
I could piss half-a-mile.
I was beaten by Old Faithful,
the steaming,
pissing earth
at Yellowstone, where buffalo and moose,
when the sun is right,
piss rainbows.
The mind is a family, dreams
are father and mother.
They head the family:
the children are wishes,
thoughts, inclinations,
and there are orphans.
If a dream, forgetting
nothing, mothers or fathers
a notion, he, she, or it may grow up to be an
idea.
We all can remember dinners
when our family of the mind sat at table,
hope and despair opposite,
loneliness dressed like an ocean
in blue, green
and white.
Or is the dream simply an uninvited guest
who rules the mind
night and day?
The mind’s family is never far apart.
The triplets of love
tell lonely jokes—
there’s the one about Miss, Mrs., Missing You.
They go
to celebrations, secular and devout.
Today is Buddha’s birthday.
I say
happy birthday to the World
that has nothing to do with first or last,
because
they are twins, as are good and evil.
I grant you they are fraternal, not
identical twins.
They fight for their cause, honor is at stake.
“How stand I
then?”
On the Bible you translated I
solemnly swear
I read a poem to you on your dentist’s chair:
I could hear
the drill, the dust of your jaw bone,
impacted wisdom tooth on the telephone.
I know you have more teeth than languages—
truth is, you have Latin, Greek,
Chinese teeth,
French, Spanish and German molars, English front teeth
in
one mouth—gives you advantages.
A Sanskrit incisor would not be missed.
I
don’t think Alcibiades is your dentist.
A little laughing gas makes you
silly,
you say, “Crown my tooth with the shield of Achilles,”
while a
phalanx charges your root canal.
You tell me my Delphic oracle
wears
sunglasses—“You had better sing for Argos,
leave Willis Telemachus.”
I say
Eros, the builder, is always near us,
consider how many cathedrals were
built by Jesus,
but Notre Dame
is not worth all those murdered in His Name.
He
saved His wrath for the moneychangers
but left us with greater dangers,
racism and war. What are little miracles good for?
We walk in brothers’ blood,
He walked on water.
We seldom see a bird with a broken wing,
He gave us the
first garden, flocks of birds flying.
The donkey and cow did not kiss in the
stable,
love between the species must become comfortable.
We are God’s
dogs, may He feed us under the table.
I don’t know the year, I don’t know
the century.
John the Baptist was dried with a towel—for a fee,
I’ll sell you
his sacred towel prix d’ami,
but not for paper money.
I hope to
love every stranger that I meet
but I do not offer God a prayer, milk and meat.
I’m a broken CD, so I repeat:
I really prefer the curs whose breath reeks
o’ the rotten fens
to immaculate heaven.
There are American questions,
and
the question of death that has a worldwide reputation.
I’ve told you this
before:
we have lots of darkness and light, later just death,
or, if you
prefer, we do not enter life by the front door,
but the door that leads to the
basement beneath.
When I’m having my colonoscopy I won’t think it silly
if
you call me and say, “I want to read you a poem, it’s Willy.”
You
are a viola
and I am a bow in your hand,
or am I your bass and you my bow?
We play,
pluck strings, pluck
and pluck the night away.
You wake me in the
morning,
call me your “bow” again.
What if you don’t
have money in your hand,
a novel, her breast, or your day.
On the brow of
the hill,
do you finish draining the radiator, do butchers
continue sawing
through bone? What if your knife
is slicing a round bread in Spain
where bread
is called the face of Christ—
if the bread falls on the floor
do you pick it up
and kiss it?
His body was never a shaft of wheat or rye
although His body
is bread.
I do not believe He will receive me,
barefoot, with shoes or
sandals,
I do not really believe He will be there,
He does not care if we
are deodorized,
strawberry, not garlic breath.
What if you face an idol you
do not believe in,
do you turn supplicant with the smooth talkers?
Does He want
us to join the stammerers?
What of political hacks? Surely He knows
their
speeches, in fact He has heard it all before,
seen it all before.
I will
not run to greet Him at all.
He is amused by my ventriloquy.
I shall not put it
over on Him—
I will not walk to Jerusalem. I will not con Him.
Better my
live dog words than my dead lion voices.
to the worthless poor
I see America sitting at Trump’s table,
to speak of anything but money
is taboo.
His pals think the wrong side won the Civil War,
slavery was
worth fighting for.
They say he’s suing Louis Armstrong
for playing the
trumpet, he damns King Kong
for climbing the Empire State because the sinless
real estate monkey business is his business.
His barber has made a
fortune selling his cut golden hair
with the gold dust dandruff of a
billionaire.
Trump’s Spray, his broken wind, rare fragrance,
the
perfume of love, once the rage in France,
given his plans for Muslim and
Mexican immigration
now off the shelves by counter reformation.
One plus
nine zeros make a billion
but no number of zeros make number one.
How many lies
make a mistake?
Every twinkling star, the moon, the sun,
has Trump’s face,
every snowflake.
You may want less, but I’ll give away the store:
wrapped
in the stars and stripes, patriots galore
shout “Trump for president!” want his
face
on paper money, pennies, nickels, and dimes.
“End the dirty news in The
New York Times!”
Monuments to his victories like Samothrace:
Donald’s tennis
racquet, golf shoe, and sneaker,
anything his, a stain from a love affair,
is worth as much as a Van Gogh ear.
I heard there was sold at auction
somewhere
out of the tax zones of the human race
for the price of a Rodin bronze
“Thinker”
a Trump toilet seat, a burnisht throne
he called his “little gold
mine,”
proof top of the world and bottom meet.
Without sin, he casts
the first stone.
History’s a sissy, let’s bring back the guillotine.
A
judge with a Latin name is Pontius Pilate.
Build a wall, Mexicans won’t let
gringos come in.
Trump’s rule: 100-proof love of country
is buy a farm or
building in every state.
Money, money, money, money,
is what keeps America
great.
USA! USA! USA!
He denies he built the Great Wall in Cathay,
in
Mobile, Alabama he forgot three Ks.
Donald is an oak, his foes pussy willows,
his enemies crooked marshmallows.
Trump is proud in a public shower—
between
his legs, a twelve-inch root
flowers into a redwood.
Judas was a liberal,
made a hell of a deal.
Trump Ocean will cover Trump Tower
when all the holy
texts are drowned,
when sharks have devoured the last minnow,
the one good
book afloat: The Art of the Deal.
Because no is yes, and yes is no,
pray, our Father who art in Trump Tower,
hallowed be thy portfolio,
thy
casino come, thy will be done in real estate
as it is in Heaven. . .
Getting
old, the earth is black hole jailbait.
Evangelical citizen, with angel in
your name,
I find a terrible ugliness in TRUMP heaven
along the parkways, his
name in saintly skies
twenty-four seven,
longer than the moon or sun,
the
Statue of Liberty’s evil eyes
and Trump’s searchlight on everyone.
ISIS
and Fidel Castro
give me gastro-
enteritis.
Remember
the missile crisis?
Fidel wanted to drop the atom bomb
on us. Asked what
would happen
to Cuba then, he said, “Annihilation.”
That’s the forgotten rap
on
Fidel, but there was something finer—
MacArthur’s plan to drop thirty
atom bombs on
the People’s Republic of China.
While bombs are bursting in
air,
Nixon urged Ike to bomb Red Square.
Ah, it’s better to take the
trouble
to remember Chardin’s boy blowing a Soap Bubble,
David’s virtuous
slingshot killed a giant,
Teddy Roosevelt told us “be self-reliant.”
Auden wrote, “We must love one another or die,”
changed the line to be true,
“love one another and die.”
As time goes by, I think it shall be seen,
to
survive we must do something in between,
respect the golden mean.
More than
ever, respect one another.
Even a Nazi has a mother.
We are able not to
murder our brother.
Rather than bomb, we can just wish the other dead.
It’s not nice, but burn books instead
of dropping bombs. They burned and
sacked Rome,
still some manage to read or write a poem.
Long as I can hold
a pen, so to speak, I will write fables,
celebrate a good book, wines and
vegetables,
greens, epics, and tomatoes.
I celebrate potatoes.
Memorial Day, Washington D.C.
The first thing I did against
my will is see light.
Older, in my mother’s belly with a good mind,
I
sometimes dreamed different kinds of darkness.
I kicked, had sweet dreams and
nightmares
something like death, unborn happiness,
blind hallucinations,
memories I can’t name
that still push me to act with unborn hands,
all before
breathing.
What last thing will cross my mind
after last rights and
wrongs?
They say the grand finale is like sleep,
I may feel love’s
nuts and bolts unscrewing—
it’s best to be held tight. A pillow does not kiss.
May I never waver in peaceful unmindfulness.
I’ve seen passionate
suffocation,
I’ve felt exquisite pain. Far better doggerel:
“Nurse, nurse,
I’m getting worse!”
Undone, I’d like my last thoughts to rhyme:
I did
not lend
you my love. The end.
This red oak table has no
memory.
Its mother was a tree
who needed earth, water, and sunlight,
a
forest’s love of sunlight we can envy.
Trees are deaf to birdsong,
dead
trees cut into boards join
celebrations beyond their understanding:
Thanksgiving, Christmas, Passover suppers.
A hundred years from now
I’d
rather be an antique table
than Yorick’s distant cousin.
No living tree is
indifferent, casual, or half-hearted.
Never indifferent, Voltaire could not
forgive
the Jews for giving France Christianity.
Surely he would rather be
a Revolutionary table
in the year of our Lord 2016
than a Louis Quatorze
table under a chandelier.
I believe there is a battle between
the kitchen
table, bimah, and altar.
The kitchen table
that serves food to hungry
strangers wins.
1
Today, my Italian-American
electrician
who’s never been to Italy
and doesn’t want to go
because it’s out of
his way,
smells the cinnamon in my oatmeal
from across the room,
that
I can’t smell
holding the hot bowl in my lap.
It’s true, I can’t see
what’s
playing on a marquee
half-a-mile away anymore,
that I say, “What’s that you
said?” quite often,
English mustard and horseradish are less hot,
but I can
touch more than I could touch
a little while ago, and more touches me.
I am not
lying when I tell you
I touched Courbet’s Origin of the World
when the paint was wet, the summer of 1866.
I smell a rat, I am too old.
My nose is Roman partisan.
I remember the smell of different ladies,
Lady Cinnamon, Lady Turmeric, Countess of Cloves,
a Saffron ungrammatical
companion
who sang, “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?”
Smelling, whispering
and wolf-growling,
young me had a den, paper hills, drafts
of poems and books
rugged the dirty floor.
They tripped me, I almost broke a leg.
2
Deaf rivers try to lip-read poetry,
blind rivers read Milton in windy braille.
They do not have diction because they are voiceless.
The riverbanks, I know, are thighs, male and female.
The river tongues, tastes the
shallows.
Greetings, my senses, my salutations
are old, not fashionable. I
don’t kiss hands
as some Italian signorini do
wearing a bathing suit at
the Lido.
The senses change from season to season.
I love fashionable
forests
that change from day to day, season to season.
This is a preamble to my
anti-Platonic dialogue
between fashion and Mrs. Death.
This morning, the merry-go-round
in my head stopped to let the kids climb
down horses, lions, and swans with backseats.
I’m off to the Boston Post Road,
the traffic moving north bumper-to-bumper,
pushing, not blowing horns.
Best to back up, some drivers and passengers
walk on the shoulders, in ditches—
it is something like turning back the clock
an hour from Daylight Saving to Eastern Standard.
At the same time, I’m crazy as a grandfather clock.
Don’t I have hands, toes, two eyes,
don’t I need winding? I’ve learned
something about the wind and winding.
Wasn’t there a banging wind that blew time
into the universe? I can’t help but go back:
I shift into reverse,
a
necklace of June days under my shirt,
on six fingers the rings of May,
last
April’s earrings, a pearl tie-pin,
in my pocket a crucifix that opens to a
knife
that came in a box of candy in Cordova forty years ago.
I’ve a drawer full
of lunar calendar animals.
*
God and the gods wished the rich to live
longer.
On the sacred mountain above Granada,
there is ice and snow year
round,
unmelted, centuries deep ice and snow,
Iberian, Greek, Carthaginian,
Roman,
Jewish, Muslim, Catholic snow and ice.
Most lived short lives
when
the chief product of trade was the color purple.
Oh, yes, across the
straits
that part the Atlantic and Mediterranean,
waters and winds famously
confused,
armies made their way from west to east
and east to west after they
were driven
from the Christian north, whatever the weather.
Mr. Speaker,
point of disorder:
in the Sinai, where there are hard winters,
on the
mountaintop above the rocks and sand,
every spring the ice melts, apple,
pear,
and fig trees have bloomed since Moses.
*
The unblue bird flew
past
the unred robin redbreast,
flew past the unred-winged blackbird,
past
the unbald eagle,
the ungrounded groundhog in the underbrush,
past
understanding,
something unreadable became un-
the unknown god I’ve come to
tell you about.
In an untidy way, I re-write uncle.
I’ve forgotten unhappy,
unfaithful, unending,
I’ve got to be down to earth and up to earth,
to be
unnatural, to be true, natural and unnatural
before my timely untimely end.
I am getting out of grammar.
There is a prefix, be.
I beget,
begat, become, befriended,
because of those bedamned, beguiled,
I did not
bequeath or belittle. I recall
I was bejeweled, bewildered years ago.
I am
running out of prefixes,
I step out of my coffin, not resurrected,
to begin
again, unfallen.
SPRING MORNING
God, how do you dew?
The grass I
planted is growing
with the help of you.
You said, “Let
time’s bones be broken.”
Please tell me what time’s skeleton looks like.
Any
vertebrate, Mrs. Bones?
I wonder what human bones time may have,
something like a nose to smell space
in a sky bed? Time and space are married,
exchanged saturnal rings, and rings of other planets
out of our solar system.
Our
planets and stars are something like flies
around time’s head. I say “time’s head,”
but time has no head, has temperature,
and that’s not the end of that.
Time has a language, of course,
speaks sonata, sign, speaks up Volcano.
Time has sung love songs for some thousands of years,
outside of what I’ll call space’s window.
I would lie if I said, “time has a heart.”
But perhaps falling, gravity everywhere is time’s heart.
Time is falling, not just falling,
something like the beginnings of falling in love.
Question, Mr. Speaker—if time has bones,
is falling, where is time’s marrow and blood?
Darkness is blood. (I’ve out-metaphored myself.)
I can’t
break time’s bone. Did infant time wet the bed?
Perhaps time sat on the potty,
making constellations.
Alas, poor time, I did not figure him,
never having
seen him, but I know
when he or she is passing. I am happy to salute time,
because he or she is Admiral, General, and President,
Prime Minister, Dictator, still husband and wife of space.
I am a Seaman Third Class,
which will always be my rank.
But I carry the flag in an honor guard,
the flag of poetry gets the salute.
I must look ahead, and stand up straight.
Day is carved in marble, a man reclining,
a naked giant
suffering.
Preoccupied Day faces Night, who is a woman,
huge, naked,
Herculean, both pillowed
on their uncarved rough marble bed.
They need
light to be seen, neither
has anything to do with the sun or moon.
Art is not astronomy,
but the heavens are useful as gardening to poets,
not useful as love or loneliness.
If I write out of arrogance and ignorance
a poem called Day, my chisel and mallet, words
and pen, paper my marble, I must not confuse
sunlight and Day, petals with hours. I could rhyme,
perhaps by reason and chance describe the nature of Day.
I might discover Nature is surprisingly
sometimes moral, unexpected, a principle
over which the lovers Night and Day quarrel.
In my poem, faithful Night and faithful Day quarreled;
rhyme told me they quarreled because Day is gold
Night hates the thought of celestial
money,
rages at the starless differences between cost and price.
Michelangelo did not choose to make a sculpture
Prezzo, or put the finger of God on a coin.
Day and Night saw Danaë’s legs spread apart
for Zeus to enter as a shower of gold.
They are not household gods or saints.
Better I write about things nearby,
a chair, a stool, the principle I’m sitting on.
Day is my dictionary. If my Day were animal, he might be
a baby elephant who eats leaves.
My good Day stays close to his mother,
who is murdered for her ivory tusks.
My Day is an endangered specie. I whisper
into elephant ears, peace, my darling little Day.
An owl hoots, your Day has no given name!
True, I refuse names useful to many others:
Sabbath, Sunday, Friday,Saturday.
My Day is not baptized, circumcised, or blessed.
I pick him up and hold Day in my arms.
I put my head in Day’s open mouth.
I tongue Day,and Day tongues me.
Yes, although my Day loves Night,
he tongues me in and out of bed.
My Day knows Night carnally,
lets Night know me.
So I love Day
today.
And I love Night tonight.