My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  The shifts of one sense of a word to another

  The birds flying there inside the eaves with their wings dangling

  Not bats, birds.

  And offering up your life to summon anything is a pretty silly thing. I can’t see

  Where their messages get me. Another five years

  Their wings

  Glittering in its black ab/sense.

  For the birds. Whose live-r is torn out. Whose live-r is torn out. Pro-me-thee-us. The old turning.

  Where their messages get me. The shifts

  Of their beaks. Their hungry beaks. But the birds are real not only in feeding. I think

  Their wings. Glittering in the black ab/sense.

  Pro-me-thee-us. Our mouths water

  Like an ocean.

  And so I say to you, Jim, do not become too curious about your poetry

  Let it speed into the tunnel by itself

  Do not follow it, do not try to ride it

  Let it go into the tunnel and out the other side and back to you while you do important things like loving and learning patience

  Five years. The train with its utterly alien cargo moving on the black track.

  Prometheus was a guy who had his liver eaten out by birds. A bum who rode a black train. Who was curious.

  Play it cool with Williams or paranoid with Pound but never ride it past the tunnel or look for a conductor to ask questions

  Hide, and do not ask the questions,

  At the black throat of the tunnel.

  Pro-me-thee-us

  Pro-me-thee-us

  Five years

  The song singing from its black throat.

  VI.

  Dignity

  Dig–nity

  The extra syllables are unimportant. Have no dignity, no meaning on this world.

  Nity. Hear those syllables and dig is an obvious pun for digging graves or whatever that gravedigger is doing at the moment.

  The extra syllables are unimportant. I should have loved him yesterday

  The boy whistles

  Dig-

  nity

  Or like that little window in Alice which she can’t go through because she’s 27 feet tall because she ate a bottle called Drink Me

  Po – etery. Po – eatery. The eaxtra slyllables is unimportant. because the poem said Drink Me. I’ll find a substitute

  For all your long-

  Ing.

  And that little door with all those wheels in it

  Be-

  leave in it

  Like God.

  “Dignity is a part of a man . . .”

  Dignity is a part of a man being naked before everybody. The part where the heart separates itself from the loins.

  The poet is stepping out of the airplane.

  Dignity is a part of a rose in a broken vase. The part where the thorns separate themselves from the flower

  The poet is stepping out of the airplane

  Dignity is a part of not being asked.

  *

  I miss you, I said. The dead flowers,

  The poets who wanted to kiss me, the naked hatred

  That wanted to kiss me. I miss their flowers

  I miss the hatred of not being asked.

  But Jack . . .

  Shut up, I said. Nothing but love could have eaten the roses.

  *

  Then, as we went toward the big ocean

  Our poems became more threatening. Words sounded like

  D-E-A-T-H, L-O-V-E, and the seals howled up from the rocks like the last line of a French poem.

  *

  God is merely domestic. Death is merely domestic. They are a lie told to disguise the nature of art.

  The poet is stepping out of the airplane.

  Magic is merely domestic. Dignity is merely domestic.

  The poet is stepping out of the airplane.

  My house is merely domestic. I live in my house; my skin lives in my house. We are domestic. My house is merely domestic. We are a lie to disguise the nature of art.

  *

  I loved him. I loved him. I loved you.

  I loved him. I loved him. I loved you.

  It is true. It is true. It returns.

  HELEN: A REVISION (1960)

  Nothing is known about Helen but her voice

  Strange glittering sparks

  Lighting no fires but what is reechoed

  Rechorded, set on the icy sea.

  All history is one, as all the North Pole is one

  Magnetic, music to play with, ice

  That has had to do with vision

  And each one of us, naked.

  Partners. Naked.

  _______________

  Helen: A Revision

  ZEUS: It is to be assumed that I do not exist while most people in the vision assume that I do exist. This is to be one of the extents of meaning between the players and this audience.

  I have to talk like this because I am the lord of both kinds of sky—and I don’t mean your sky and their sky because they are signs, I mean the bright sky and the burning sky. I have no intention of showing you my limits.

  The players in this poem are players. They have taken their parts not to deceive you (or me if it matters) but because they have been paid in love or coin to be players. I have known for a long time that there is not a fourth wall in a play. I am called Zeus and I know this.

  THERSITES (running out on the construction of the stage): The fourth wall is not as important as you think it is.

  ZEUS (disturbed but carrying it off like a good Master of Ceremonial): Thersites is involuntary. (He puts his arm around him.) I could not play a part if I were not a player.

  THERSITES: Reveal yourself to me and don’t pretend that there are people watching you. I am alone on the stage with you. Tell me the plot of the play.

  ZEUS (standing away): Don’t try to talk if you don’t have to. You must admit there is no audience. Everything is done for you.

  THERSITES: Stop repeating yourself. You old motherfucker. Your skies are bad enough. (He looks to the ground.) A parody is better than a pun.

  ZEUS: I do not understand your language. (They are silent together for a moment and then the curtain drops.)

  _______________

  And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost

  And if he doesn’t, and he won’t, hope the cost

  Hope the cost.

  And the terror of the what meets the why at the edge

  Like a backwards image of each terror’s lodge

  Each terror’s lodge.

  And if he cries put his heart out with a lantern’s goat

  Where they pay all passages to pay the debt

  The lighted yet.

  _______________

  The focus sing

  Is not their business. Their tracks lay

  By not altogether being there.

  Here and there in swamps and villages.

  How doth the silly crocodile

  Amuse the Muse

  _______________

  And in the skyey march of flesh

  That boundary line where no body is

  Preserve us, lord, from aches and harms

  And bring my death.

  Both air and water rattle there

  And mud and fire

  Preserve us, lord, from what would share a shroud

  and bring my death.

  A vagrant bird flies to the glossy limbs

  The battlefield has harms. The trees have half

  Their branches shot away. Preserve us, lord

  From hair and mud and flesh.

  _______________

  A twisted smile, a flower I

  Could name a rose.

  A trick of rhetoric, the shadow standing firm

  Against the glass.

  A twisted smile, a flower I

  Could name a rose.

  ______________

  Which without feeling to the enormous source

  Of deep emot
ion

  We laugh until we are hoarse.

  Each poisons every well

  In which each shadow dwells.

  Unmixed emotion. You can shoe a horse

  With darkness on the plates

  For mates.

  _______________

  Half-real, the iceberg

  Was kept from us. By not altogether being there

  They couldn’t care less what hit them

  (A big, red, joyous caterpillar twisting and spewing the wet leaves

  (From top to bottom the iceberg

  Totally indistinguishable.

  _______________

  Nothing complete at the opera but singing

  Nothing moves in the grass but noise

  There in the edge there, there is some singing

  And in the grass there is noise.

  Grass is to be prayed for by the singer

  A quiet noise that has its grass forever

  There in the edge there, there is some singing

  Nothing moves in the grass but noise.

  _______________

  An image of withdrawal. All

  Of her beauty.

  A pair of sox knitted for her in Sparta

  Left there to rot.

  The rouge she left in Troy.

  Fausts.

  Now, in Egypt, she who was never there perceives

  Two names.

  _______________

  “You have done big things,” said the dwarf to the answer.

  “We answers live in the ground.” We are called

  When we’re cold.

  We grasshoppers live a thousand years

  When the ants answer.

  _______________

  Then

  Even the extraordinary is unimportant.

  Helen’s eyes

  Are these.

  These are bright as stars

  We disclothe.

  ______________

  Troy is a bathtub

  (An image)

  And like a bathtub (an image)

  It lets out all its sparks.

  In the dark aftermath of it

  The pipeline between the poem and the reader

  (Them-and-us)! An

  Image of pure beauty

  _______________

  The last edge of the voice

  Where she sings to men and women

  Unchanged like the edge of the moon.

  A floating parapet an up-there

  She worships herself with it

  She lives there,

  In brandy and in all senses

  Alien.

  _______________

  To make her into an artifact is to try to kill her

  Helen was not born of men of history

  (They said she had an egg in her cunt)

  The what gave life to her

  Was extra to her beauty

  Housing her.

  ______________

  Dear Russ,

  I am writing to you in the middle of a poem about Helen. What there was to her about your body I should have never ceased to wish to know. It is as if there was a dark fleshy space between us labeled, “I am not myself.”

  There is utterly no reason for imagining Helen. Whether she was in Troy or Egypt, she would be the same figure of imagination put into being by a vacuum, the same vacuum by which I write poetry or you paint, or, I suppose men fought for her.

  Or becomes more unreal every minute. I do not love her. As the thought of you or anyone I loved.

  Hold us to the real, lady of the seven webbed fingers, hold us to their hard hearts bouncing to and fro against each other.

  _______________

  Where the old distrust breaks through the floor of the grainery

  No trust is but fallen oats.

  On when the seeds do not sprout in the darkness of the underground

  Nothing shouts out loud.

  The crowd

  Of loves possible to a man thins

  When the crop is harvested.

  ______________

  Black ghosts and black ghosts

  Whose little schemes

  Possessed by the right dreams.

  There is the horror of what isn’t and what was

  And the little people. They

  Haven’t anything to say.

  _______________

  Informed against itself

  Like your body twisting on its bed dreaming of poems it is writing or more probably has never written

  Hokku, haikku

  2400 syllables.

  _______________

  Invited a daimon

  A guardian angel closer

  Where we could both

  Observe ourselves.

  “That Helen cat is nothing

  She’s a dream

  From Rockefeller.” In Sparta and in histroy (a lump)

  They are choosing sides.

  “Like Helen isn’t

  The Y of her cunt,

  A birthplace

  Isn’t.”

  ______________

  He was beautiful. I am trying to leave him and it at that.

  I am trying to write a poem apart from all beauty

  The world is ugly. A sunshade. Figure that in your business. A poetry that don’t matter.

  The sun is beautiful. Molecules at 532 miles a second and 832 billion degrees fahrenheit jangle apart

  There, his body, when I noticed it. Going at a second a time.

  _______________

  Years ago a kindly English professor told me that Robert Frost had once said in a moment of absolute vision, “Any damned fool can get into a poem but it takes a poet to get out of one.”

  I confused this with sexuality and believed it.

  Actually getting out of a poem is no more difficult than answering a lying obvious answer to a lying obvious question in an intelligence test or a lover.

  What is difficult is the form.

  Past one’s only cleverness (paradoxes, which are songs set aside)

  Is the other answer that it is as difficult to get into a poem as into Helen.

  THE HEADS OF THE TOWN UP TO THE AETHER (1960)

  HOMAGE TO CREELEY

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  I.

  For Cegeste

  Several Years’ Love

  Two loves I had. One rang a bell

  Connected on both sides with hell

  The other’d written me a letter

  In which he said I’ve written better

  They pushed their cocks in many places

  And I’m not certain of their faces

  Or which I kissed or which I didn’t

  Or which of both of them I hadn’t.

  Car Song

  Away we go with no moon at all

  Actually we are going to hell.

  We pin our puns to our backs and cross in a car

  The intersections where lovers are.

  The wheel and the road turn into a stair

  The pun at our backs is a yellow star.

  We pin our puns on the windshield like

  We crossed each crossing in hell’s despite.

  Concord Hymn

  Your joke

  Is like a lake

  That lies there without any thought

  And sees

  Dead seas

  The birds fly

  Around there

  Bewildered by its blue without any thought of water

  Without any thought

  Of water.

  Wrong Turn

  What I knew

  Wasn’t true

  Or oh no

  Your face

  Was made of fleece

  Stepping up to poetry

  Demands

  Hands.

  The Territory Is Not the Map

  What is a half-truth the lobster declared

  You have sugared my groin and have sugared my hair

  What correspondence except my despair?

  What is my crime but my
youth?

  Truth is a map of it, oily eyes said

  Half-truth is half of a map instead

  Which you will squint at until you are dead

  Putting to sea with the truth.

  They Came to the Briers and the Briers Couldn’t Find ’Em

  The goop

  Is like mulberry soup

  Or like anything

  You sang.

  The goop is an international criminal organization that talks to each other, makes passes at each other, sings to each other, clings to each other, is as absolutely alien to each other as a stone in Australia

  For example

  the poem does not know

  Who you refers to.

  When You Go Away You Don’t Come Home

  On the mere physical level

  There is a conflict between what is and what isn’t

  What is, I guess, is big

  And what isn’t, bigger

  Metaphysically speaking

  What aren’t casts no shadow

  And what are is bigger than the moon, I guess,

  Bigger than that boy’s pants.

  Sheep Trails Are Fateful to Strangers

  Dante would have blamed Beatrice

  If she turned up alive in a local bordello

  Or Newton gravity

  If apples fell upward

  What I mean is words

  Turn mysteriously against those who use them

  Hello says the apple

  Both of us were object.

  To Be Inscribed on a Painting

  The fate of the car

  And the fate of the ride

  Is only a bridegroom

  Without a bride

  Though she hasn’t a face

  And I haven’t seen her

  She isn’t a mirror

  Whatever she was.

  And the light in the air

  Was as real as it was

  And it hasn’t her beauty

  Whose blankness I stare.

  Elegy

  Whispers—

  Eurydice’s head is missing

  Whispers—