If I had a Green Automobile
I’d go find my old companion
in his house on the Western ocean.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I’d honk my horn at his manly gate,
inside his wife and three
children sprawl naked
on the living room floor.
He’d come running out
to my car full of heroic beer
and jump screaming at the wheel
for he is the greater driver.
We’d pilgrimage to the highest mount
of our earlier Rocky Mountain visions
laughing in each other’s arms,
delight surpassing the highest Rockies,
and after old agony, drunk with new years,
bounding toward the snowy horizon
blasting the dashboard with original bop
hot rod on the mountain
we’d batter up the cloudy highway
where angels of anxiety
careen through the trees
and scream out of the engine.
We’d burn all night on the jackpine peak
seen from Denver in the summer dark,
forestlike unnatural radiance
illuminating the mountaintop:
childhood youthtime age & eternity
would open like sweet trees
in the nights of another spring
and dumbfound us with love,
for we can see together
the beauty of souls
hidden like diamonds
in the clock of the world,
like Chinese magicians can
confound the immortals
with our intellectuality
hidden in the mist,
in the Green Automobile
which I have invented
imagined and visioned
on the roads of the world
more real than the engine
on a track in the desert
purer than Greyhound and
swifter than physical jetplane.
Denver! Denver! we’ll return
roaring across the City & County Building lawn
which catches the pure emerald flame
streaming in the wake of our auto.
This time we’ll buy up the city!
I cashed a great check in my skull bank
to found a miraculous college of the body
up on the bus terminal roof.
But first we’ll drive the stations of downtown,
poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail
whorehouse down Folsom
to the darkest alleys of Larimer
paying respects to Denver’s father
lost on the railroad tracks,
stupor of wine and silence
hallowing the slum of his decades,
salute him and his saintly suitcase
of dark muscatel, drink
and smash the sweet bottles
on Diesels in allegiance.
Then we go driving drunk on boulevards
where armies march and still parade
staggering under the invisible
banner of Reality—
hurtling through the street
in the auto of our fate
we share an archangelic cigarette
and tell each other’s fortunes:
fames of supernatural illumination,
bleak rainy gaps of time,
great art learned in desolation
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