My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  Improvisations on a Sentence by Poe

  “Indefiniteness is an element of the true music.”

  The grand concord of what

  Does not stoop to definition. The seagull

  Alone on the pier cawing its head off

  Over no fish, no other seagull,

  No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning

  As a French horn.

  It is not even an orchestra. Concord

  Alone on a pier. The grand concord of what

  Does not stoop to definition. No fish

  No other seagull, no ocean—the true

  Music.

  A Valentine

  Useless Valentines

  Are better

  Than all others.

  Like something implicit

  In a poem.

  Take all your Valentines

  And I’ll take mine.

  What is left is better

  Than any image.

  Cantata

  Ridiculous

  How the space between three violins

  Can threaten all of our poetry.

  We bunch together like Cub

  Scouts at a picnic. There is a high scream.

  Rain threatens. That moment of terror.

  Strange how all our beliefs

  Disappear.

  Orfeo

  Sharp as an arrow Orpheus

  Points his music downward.

  Hell is there

  At the bottom of the seacliff.

  Heal

  Nothing by this music.

  Eurydice

  Is a frigate bird or a rock or some seaweed.

  Hail nothing

  The infernal

  Is a slippering wetness out at the horizon.

  Hell is this:

  The lack of anything but the eternal to look at

  The expansiveness of salt

  The lack of any bed but one’s

  Music to sleep in.

  Song of a Prisoner

  Nothing in my body escapes me.

  The sound of an eagle diving

  Upon some black bird

  Or the sorrow of an owl.

  Nothing in my body escapes me.

  Each branch is closed

  I

  Echo each song from its throat

  Bellow each sound.

  Jungle Warfare

  The town wasn’t much

  A few mud-huts and a church steeple.

  They were the same leaves

  And the same grass

  And the same birds deep in the edge of the thicket.

  We waited around for someone to come out and surrender

  But they rang their church bells

  And we

  We were not afraid of death or any manner of dying

  But the same muddy bullets, the same horrible

  Love.

  Good Friday: For Lack of an Orchestra

  I saw a headless she-mule

  Running through the rain

  She had the hide of a chessboard

  And withers that were lank and dark

  “Tell me,” I asked

  “Where

  Is Babylon?”

  “No,” she bellowed

  “Babylon is a few baked bricks

  With some symbols on them.

  You could not hear them. I am running

  To the end of the world.”

  She ran

  Like a green and purple parrot, screaming

  Through the sand.

  Mummer

  The word is imitative

  From the sound mum or mom

  Used by nurses to frighten or amuse children

  At the same time pretending

  To cover their faces.

  Understanding is not enough

  The old seagull died. There is a whole army of seagulls

  Waiting in the wings

  A whole army of seagulls.

  The Cardplayers

  The moon is tied to a few strings

  They hold in their hands. The cardplayers

  Sit there stiff, hieratic

  Moving their hands only for the sake of

  Playing the cards.

  No trick of metaphor

  Each finger is a real finger

  Each card real pasteboard, each liberty

  Unaware of attachment.

  The moon is tied to a few string.

  Those cardplayers

  Stiff, utterly

  Unmoving.

  Ghost Song

  The in

  ability to love

  The inability

  to love

  In love

  (like all the small animals went up the hill into the

  underbrush to escape from the goat and the bad tiger)

  The inability

  Inability

  (tell me why no white flame comes up from the earth

  when lightning strikes the twigs and the dry branches)

  In love. In love. In love. The

  In-

  ability

  (as if there were nothing left on the mountains but

  what nobody wanted to escape from)

  Army Beach With Trumpets

  Rather than our bodies the sand

  Proclaims that we are on the last edge

  Of something. Two boys

  Who cannot catch footballs horseplay

  On the wet edge.

  Or if the sight of the thing ended

  Did not break upon us like a wave

  From every warm ocean.

  We call it sport

  To play on the edge, to drop

  Like a heartless football

  At the edge.

  Duet for a Chair and a Table

  The sound of words as they fall away from our mouths

  Nothing

  Is less important

  And yet that chair

  this table

  named

  Assume identities

  take their places

  Almost as a kind of music.

  Words make things name

  themselves

  Makes the table grumble

  I

  In the symphony of God am a table

  Makes the chair sing

  A little song about the people that will never be sitting on it

  And we

  Who in the same music

  Are almost as easily shifted as furniture

  We

  Can learn our names from our mouths

  Name our names

  In the middle of the same music.

  Conspiracy

  A violin which is following me

  In how many distant cities are they listening

  To its slack-jawed music? This

  Slack-jawed music?

  Each of ten thousand people playing it.

  It follows me like someone that hates me.

  Oh, my heart would sooner die

  Than leave its slack-jawed music. They

  In those other cities

  Whose hearts would sooner die.

  It follows me like someone that hates me.

  Or is it really a tree growing just behind my throat

  That if I turned quickly enough I could see

  Rooted, immutable, neighboring

  Music.

  A Book of Music

  Coming at an end, the lovers

  Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where

  Did it end? There is no telling. No love is

  Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries

  From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye

  Like death.

  Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length

  Of coiled rope

  Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths

  Its endings.

  But, you will say, we loved

  And some parts of us loved

  And the rest of us will remain

  Two person
s. Yes,

  Poetry ends like a rope.

  SOCRATES

  Because they accused me of poems

  That did not disturb the young

  They gave me a pair of glasses

  Filled with tincture of hemlock.

  Because the young accused me

  Of piles, horseradish, and bad dreams

  They gave me three days

  To burn down the city. What dialogues

  (If they had let me)

  Could I have held with both of my enemies.

  A POEM FOR DADA DAY AT THE PLACE, APRIL 1, 1958

  i.

  The bartender

  Has eyes the color of ripe apricots

  Easy to please as a cash register he

  Enjoys art and good jokes.

  Squish

  Goes the painting

  Squirt

  Goes the poem

  He

  We

  Laugh.

  ii.

  It is not easy to remember that other people died besides Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker

  Died looking for beauty in the world of the bartender

  This person, that person, this person, that person died looking for beauty

  Even the bartender died

  iii.

  Dante blew his nose

  And his nose came off in his hand

  Rimbaud broke his throat

  Trying to cough

  Dada is not funny

  It is a serious assault

  On art

  Because art

  Can be enjoyed by the bartender.

  iv.

  The bartender is not the United States

  Or the intellectual

  Or the bartender

  He is every bastard that does not cry

  When he reads this poem.

  BILLY THE KID (1958)

  I.

  The radio that told me about the death of Billy The Kid

  (And the day, a hot summer day, with birds in the sky)

  Let us fake out a frontier—a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff’s posse after him—a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles—a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people.

  Torture gardens and scenic railways. The radio

  That told me about the death of Billy The Kid

  The day a hot summer day. The roads dusty in the summer. The roads going somewhere. You can almost see where they are going beyond the dark purple of the horizon. Not even the birds know where they are going.

  The poem. In all that distance who could recognize his face.

  II.

  A sprinkling of gold leaf looking like hell flowers

  A flat piece of wrapping paper, already wrinkled, but wrinkled again by hand, smoothed into shape by an electric iron

  A painting

  Which told me about the death of Billy The Kid.

  Collage a binding together

  Of the real

  Which flat colors

  Tell us what heroes

  really come by.

  No, it is not a collage. Hell flowers

  Fall from the hands of heroes

  fall from all of our hands

  flat

  As if we were not ever able quite to include them.

  His gun

  does not shoot real bullets

  his death

  Being done is unimportant.

  Being done

  In those flat colors

  Not a collage

  A binding together, a

  Memory.

  III.

  There was nothing at the edge of the river

  But dry grass and cotton candy.

  “Alias,” I said to him. “Alias,

  Somebody there makes us want to drink the river

  Somebody wants to thirst us.”

  “Kid,” he said. “No river

  Wants to trap men. There ain’t no malice in it. Try

  To understand.”

  We stood there by that little river and Alias took off his shirt and I took off my shirt

  I was never real. Alias was never real.

  Or that big cotton tree or the ground.

  Or the little river.

  IV.

  What I mean is

  I

  Will tell you about the pain

  It was a long pain

  About as wide as a curtain

  But long

  As the great outdoors.

  Stig-

  mata

  Three bullet holes in the groin

  One in the head

  dancing

  Right below the left eyebrow

  What I mean is I

  Will tell you about his

  Pain.

  V.

  Billy The Kid in a field of poplars with just one touch of moonlight

  His shadow is carefully

  distinguished from all of their shadows

  Delicate

  as perception is

  No one will get his gun or obliterate

  Their shadows

  VI.

  The gun

  A false clue

  Nothing can kill

  Anybody.

  Not a poem or a fat penis. Bang,

  Bang, bang. A false

  Clue.

  Nor immortality either (though why immortality should occur to me with somebody who was as mortal as Billy The Kid or his gun which is now rusted in some rubbish heap or shined up properly in some New York museum) A

  False clue

  Nothing

  Can kill anybody. Your gun, Billy,

  And your fresh

  Face.

  VII.

  Grasshoppers swarm through the desert.

  Within the desert

  There are only grasshoppers.

  Lady

  Of Guadalupe

  Make my sight clear

  Make my breath pure

  Make my strong arm stronger and my fingers tight.

  Lady of Guadalupe, lover

  Of many make

  Me avenge

  Them.

  VIII.

  Back where poetry is Our Lady

  Watches each motion when the players take the cards

  From the deck.

  The Ten of Diamonds. The Jack of Spades. The Queen

  Of Clubs. The King of Hearts. The Ace

  God gave us when he put us alive writing poetry for unsuspecting people or shooting them with guns.

  Our Lady

  Stands as a kind of dancing partner for the memory.

  Will you dance, Our Lady,

  Dead and unexpected?

  Billy wants you to dance

  Billy

  Will shoot the heels off your shoes if you don’t dance

  Billy

  Being dead also wants

  Fun.

  IX.

  So the heart breaks

  Into small shadows

  Almost so random

  They are meaningless

  Like a diamond

  Has at the center of it a diamond

  Or a rock Rock.

  Being afraid

  Love asks its bare question—

  I can no more remember

  What brought me here

  Than bone answers bone in the arm

  Or shadow sees shadow—

  Deathward we ride in the boat

  Like someone canoeing

  In a small lake

  Where at either end

  There are nothing but pine-branches—

  Deathward we ride in the boat

  Broken-hearted or broken-bodied

  The choice is real. The diamond. I

  Ask it.

  X.

  Billy The Kid

  I love you

  Billy The Kid

  I back anything you say


  And there was the desert

  And the mouth of the river

  Billy The Kid

  (In spite of your death notices)

  There is honey in the groin

  Billy

  FOR STEVE JONAS WHO IS IN JAIL

  FOR DEFRAUDING A BOOK CLUB

  And you alone in Federal prison saying

  That the whole State is based on larceny

  Christ who didn’t know that, Steve?

  The word steals from the word, the sound from the sound. Even

  The very year of your life steals from the last one. So

  Do you have to get put in jail for it? Finding

  Yourself a martyr for a cause that you and your jury and your heartbeat all support. All

  This crap about being a human. To tell the truth about our State.

  So—

  You would say—

  It is better than going to Europe.

  FIFTEEN FALSE PROPOSITIONS AGAINST GOD (1958)

  I.

  The self is no longer real

  It is not like loneliness

  This big huge loneness. Sacrificing

  All of the person with it.

  Bigger people

  I’m sure have mastered it.

  “Beauty is so rare a thing,” Pound sings

  “So few drink at my fountain.”

  II.

  Look I am King Of The Forest

  Says The King Of The Forest

  As he growls magnificently

  Look, I am in pain. My right leg

  Does not fit my left leg.

  I am King Of The Forest

  Says The King Of The Forest.

  And the other beasts hear him and would rather

  They were King Of The Forest

  But that their right leg

  Would fit their left leg.

  “Beauty is so rare a thing,” Pound sang.

  “So few drink at my fountain.”

  III.

  Beauty is so rare a th—

  Sing a new song

  Real

  Music

  A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A

  Visiting card.

  There are rocks on the mountains that will lie there for fifty years and I only lived with you three months