Within the world of little shapes and sounds
Of random pleasures and of vagrant pains
The mind possesses all that it contains
And measures briefly all that there abounds.
If this were all--but something deeper mars
The woof of matter with the warp of dreams
And for a frightened instant time will seem
A dappled horse gone mad among the stars.
“You’re all a pack of cards.”
--Alice in Wonderland
2 Hearts |
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The Crane of Harts, the King of Hearts |
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Spades, Spades, Spades |
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The Bird |
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2 Spades |
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The Sam of Spades, the Queen of Spades |
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Pass, Pass, Pass |
|
Tarot, Tarot, Tarot, Tarot |
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Pharaoh, Pharaoh, Pharaoh, Pharaoh |
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Read |
Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes Trismegistus |
Very |
Marco Polo, Khubla’s Palace |
Fast |
“Fortunes told by Mme. Alice.” |
Pass, Pass, Pass |
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Rod and Reel |
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Ace of Cups |
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Holy Grail |
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Bicycle, Bicycle, Bicycle, Bi-- |
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THE HANGED MAN |
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Read with |
Alice ! Alice ! |
an |
Miserere ! |
imploring |
Miserere ! |
voice |
Alice ! Alice ! |
King of Hearts |
|
Queen of Spades |
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Read |
Courtesy Bicycle |
Slowing |
Courtesy Bicycle |
Down |
Courtesy Bicycle Playing Cards. |
After the ocean, shattering with equinox
Has cast the last of creatures on its shore,
After the final tidal-wave has turned
And churned remaining rock to sandy vestiges-
Ebbing, it leaves its tide-pools in our skulls.
Amorphous and amphibious, we gasp
And grasp the call and rasp of all recall,
The fishly odor when a mermaid dies.
Wash up from the sea, stale with the smell of brine,
Puddle-waves and stinking pools of salt;
Tide penetrates the doorways, dwells and seeps.
Torn timber turns to form an ocean floor.
Blunt-bubbled from the sea, blind heads emerge
Bobbing, fine-flecked with phosphorescence, veined
Vaguely, blandly, with the blood of Adam
Deemed, redeemed, but turned to salt.
Among the coffee cups and soup tureens walked beauty,
Casual, but not unconscious of his power,
Carrying dishes mucked with clinging macaroni,
Unbearable in his spasmatic beauty,
Sovereign in Simon’s Restaurant and wreathed in power,
The monarch of a kingdom yet unruled.
Now regal at a table in the Starlight Club sits beauty,
Casual but not unconscious of his power,
Kept by a Mr. Blatz who manufactures girdles,
Unbearable in his spasmatic beauty,
Counting with kingly eyes the subjects of his power
Who sleep with Beauty and are unappeased.
If cylinders ran wild and begat parallelograms,
If odd spheres ran their cold noses against the universe,
Who then could say where the men could move ?
Bishops advancing out of space and time.
Knights cavalierly non-Euclidean.
Rooks flying in black formation faster than the speed of light.
These would look down on the brave little pawns
That march in solemn column toward the curve
That leads below the chessboard.
The king is dead and the queen is mad.
Where’s Alice ?
Alice should indeed be there
Imprisoned in her four-dimensioned looking-glass.
Dimensional, dementia,
Yes, we are curved now and all the arcs
Are round with envy.
We move counterclockwise toward another Wonderland.
The table upon which we play is cold
Shape-solid but with rapid, rapid
Approach to absolute zero.
Where are the players ?
Do they not laugh at the antics of their men ?
Perhaps they pray:
“Our father, which art in curved and thick space,
Blasphemous is thy name.”
“Thy chaos come, thy whim be done
In time as it is in space.”
Black moves.
“Give us this day our daily doubt
And forgive us our love as we forgive thy hatred.”
White moves.
“And lead us not, but deliver, deliver, deliver.”
No one moves.
The many-clanging bell peals loud.
The pulsing, driving sound
Falls groundwards, spent of tone.
Unbound.
I see,
Mind bent around the inner ear,
The long unfeelingness of things
Beyond all sound.
I find no quiet here, the rioting
Has curved confusion inward like a ball.
Though all my fractured senses act
As if their insulation were intact
And touch each miracle with much
The selfsame prickles as they would a fact,
I know that now the calendar has greened
And thrown a screen of leaves and branches over all the world.
Ashes for us; for Adam, unabashed,
From every fire falls in clinging curls
Of soot and cinder; Falling writhes and whirls
And settles with a whimper on His lashed
And bleeding, blessed flesh; then showers forth
Hot seed which burns its livid Adam-brand
In transit as it sweeps across the land
Flame-frightened from Golgotha towards the North.
Ashes for us; but on His lonely face
Above the Adam-fire there remains
More sorrow than our sorry token trace
Of ashes; on this God-head turn the pains
That twisted from His flesh the bread of grace
And squeezed the wine of glory from His veins.
He rode into the vineyard on an ass
Reclaiming all the vintage of the land.
The clamoring of those that watched him pass
Grew louder, shriller as he raised his hand
Demanding what he sought to repossess,
His father’s fields, the barren, sterile sheaves,
The bitter grapes and fig trees powerless
To harvest anything but wood and leaves.
His face was mild, but those that kept this field
On squatter’s rights could not be pacified,
And there was added to that season’s yield
One saviour, bound and bled and crucified.
Speak softly; definition is deep
But words are deeper,
Unmoving hungry surfaces
Lying like ice-bergs, half submerged
Waiting to feed, to chew the ships and spew
The half-digested sailors from their maw
Back into history.
Run up and down your orbit through my skin.
My lives, my random lives, are yours.
I’m meshed in stars.
They roar in constellation through my flesh
And every deed becomes a star.
Reborn
Each wish, each wanting wish becomes a star.
Sea-lions bark, betray the rocks,
Define the jagged edges of this night;
Everything echoes.
Contorted conch-shells strew this shore--
My share of that desiring
And that aching, slapping sound of a hundred waves.
My love for you rides higher than the tide,
Goes writhing through the current of my dreams
Deeper than sleep.
It bobs and gleams below my brain and seems
To cast its shadows sharper and more steep
Than could be magnified in surfaces.
I saw a thunder-blossomed tree
Extending ripe electric fruit
And there was all eternity
Between its branches and its root
But under it a darkness-thing
Lay struggling on the ground
A moment seeking permanence
A shadow seeking sound.
And from the thunder-blossomed tree
Branch-bending near too far
The random moment’s melody
Hung like a star.
The long, cold days of August stretch ahead
A heatless moonlight falls upon my bed.
The sun’s in hock, O pawn shop man remember
The unclaimed promise of a warm September.
Plague took us and the land from under us,
Rose like a boil, enclosing us within.
We waited and the blue sky writhed awhile
Becoming black with death.
Plague took us and the chairs from under us,
Stepped cautiously while entering the room,
(We were discussing Yeats) it paused awhile
Then smiled and made us die.
Plague took us, laughed, and reproportioned us,
Swelled us to dizzy unaccustomed size.
We died prodigiously; it hurt awhile
But left a certain quiet in our eyes.
Song changes and his unburnt hair
Upon my altar changes;
We have, good strangers, many vaults
To keep the time in, but the songs are mine,
The seals are wax, and both will leak
From heat.
A bird in time is worth of two in any bush.
You can melt brush like wax; and birds in time
Can sing.
They call me bird-girl, parrot girl and worth
The time of any bird; my vault a cage,
My cage a song, my song a seal,
And I can steal an unburnt lock of hair
To weave a window there.
A green wind rose in cones and shook our town.
Bone and timber split and we were drowned in wind.
Down with the sweet, hard greeness we were drawn
And there was left no bone or soul unturned.
The green cone rose and siphoned from the street
The brighter moving objects; carried off
Three brilliant busses; soon the bruising sweet
Green wind will set them down
Where there is neither soul nor bone to drown.
The unrejected bronze lies slowly in my hall.
I call a halt to beauty; let it grow
In polished surface, let its growth be all
The surfaces I know
The groan of growing metal smears the polish short.
My ears will be accustomed; let it pass.
The bulge of growth, too heavy to abort
The monotheism of mass.
I do not see the morning traveller, the phoenix-bird.
The half-drowned mutterings of flame are stilled.
The dawn of monsters, sunless and electric, filled
With all the former sound, the morning sound, is heard.
The song of dawn in birds is gone.
Oh, sing again you phoenix bird,
Sing Christ again, you savior bird.
Old Jesus made a will before he died
And got as witnesses an honest mob
Of good and hungry men; “I’m satisfied
To die,” he said, “for dying is my job.
I don’t mind doing it to save you guys
From having to endure a second hell.
This one is bad enough, but it’s your size.
It fits you, though it blisters pretty well.
So I won’t take you with me when I start
Though I can promise you you’ll not be damned;
But when I take my flesh off and depart
For Godhead I’d be sorry if I’d lammed
And left you fellows stranded, so to speak,
With nothing but a promise of rebirth.
So, this is legal: “To the poor and meek
I, Jesus, of sound mind, bequeath the earth.”
“We had lunch at a marvelous hotel, drank
some more wine, shook ourselves like dogs and
started again in the direction of Sparta.”
--Henry Miller
The long wind drives the rain around me now.
What length the wind, and where its roots,
And why it grows, and why it falls,
And how it knots a noose around the air,
Hangs space upon its neck and strangles everywhere:
These are the weather-beaten thoughts with which we start.
We start with nature, draw the sun within the skull,
And have a world to start, a word to write, a world to end,
And then with proper frictions properly applied
We make the groaning start.
But now the wind has stopped, the air has turned.
It will return in time, in time return
When time becomes the distance between cigarettes,
When all the winds are dead and all the clocks are stopped
And there’s in reach a climate made of clocks
Where all the climates cross and all the skies have stopped.
Oh God, magestic Weather-Man, what part
You play within the wind-wastes of my heart.
But now an ill wind blows the stars across the sky,
Ill wind and dying weather filled with rotting clouds,
No fire in the sky but lightning screams--electric screams,
No water in the sky but steaming rain--but raining streams.
The elements of tragedy, the water-flame, the planet-fire,
The air and grasp of burning gas, are here.
But God, Fair-Weather Friend, who shakes this dying wind?
Who twists these elements to tragedy? Who takes
Death to the fire through my cigarette,
Death of the fever to the air,
Death of the planet to the earth,
Death to the water through my tears.
And God, you great Fair-Weather Friend, these things are mixed,
These tears are mixed, this candle-flesh is short.
Death flickers like a candle in the wind--
“Et ego in the last Arcadia” is mixed, is dying, dead.
Fair-Weather Father when an ill-wind blows,
Your light will sharpen also, vanish into wind
And mix like earth and water into mud
And keyed to pitch of fever, vanish into sound,
And light will leap across from every star
To darkness there.
Tell Sparta we have suddenly arrived.
Tell Athens we have left the land we dreamed.
A final landscape is to be contrived.
A final language is to be redeemed.
Under the raspberry-purple sky,
Beneath the liver-spotted sun,
We touch and all the other climates die;
We kiss and all the trains begin to run.
We have heard the wind wobble into Gordon’s,
Singing through the bottles like an oyster,
Singing through the tables like an alcove.
We have heard the sorrows of those who are still walking
Melting through our glasses like an ice-cube,
Melting through our cigarettes like fire.
We have listened to the earliest piano
And have played the final number by request.
We have been ended at midnite
By the Board of Equalization.
And have fastened through the fallen night in puddles.
We have forgotten to ask for a savior.
Oh Christ, you pretty Weather-Boy, what part
You play within the waste winds of my heart.
I have walked through the wind and felt a shock in every key;
I have squatted beside a casual companion--stranger--looked often to his face
And found his every face a shock--and beauty;
And found his every touch a satisfaction--again beauty.
Yes, again beauty, again the shock,
The wind which blows against the night,
The star I wish to fasten on my cigarette.
Yes, always beauty--and if the air is writhing
And the water soundless, and the fire barren,
And time an unbearable quintessence,
If all these elements are weather-borne,
This stranger is my earth, my final sky,
My loss of time.