My Vocabulary Did This to Me Page 14
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