My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  We are all alone and we do not need poetry to tell us how alone we are. Time’s winged chariot is as near as the next landmark or busstation. We need a lamp (a lump, spoken or unspoken) that is even above love.

  St. Elmo’s Fire was what was above the ships as they sailed the unspoken seas. It was a fire that was neither a glow or a direction. But the business of it was fire.

  25.

  Like love being made between fire-engines the poets talk to each other. To put out the fire—not in each other but the fire that the poems made.

  To feel sorry for the bastards. Us. Who walk through hell’s fire without moving (quickly) listening to seashells while in our ears there is its real roar.

  Quickly. And then the sea moves toward us conveniently. As if death were an excuse for all of our sorrows.

  The birds fly away. The surf breaks on the shore, on the rocks, on whatever the ocean, being ocean, is conscious of. Deliberately.

  And the tides pull back against the very bones we have let them.

  26.

  And yet they two bake hearts. Immortal mockers of man’s enterprise.

  Unbelieving, the photograph shows nothing of their faces. The two of them. Not even as if they were a strange language.

  From the top to bottom there is a universe. Extended past what the words mean and below, God damn it, what the words are. A vessel, a vesicle of truth.

  And yet they too break hearts. These humans—uncoded, uncyphered, their sheer presences. Beyond the word “Beauty.”

  They are the makers of man’s enterprise. Beyond the word “blowtorch,” the two of them, holding a blowtorch at all beauty.

  27.

  What I am, I want, asks everything of everyone, is by degrees a ghost. Steps down to the first metaphor they invented in the underworld (pure and clear like a river) the in-sight. As a place to step further.

  It was the first metaphor they invented when they were too tired to invent a universe. The steps. The way down. The source of a river.

  The dead are not like the past. Do not like the passed. Hold to their fingers by their thumbs. A gesture at once forgiving and forgotten.

  The eye in the weeds (I am, I was, I will be, I am not). The eyes the ghosts have seeing. Our eyes. A trial of strength between what they believe and we.

  28.

  We do not hate the human beings that listen to it, read it, make comments on it. They are like you. It is as if they or you observed one continual moment of surf breaking against the rocks. A textbook of poetry is created to explain. We do not hate the human beings that listen to it, the moment of surf breaking.

  It is fake. The real poetry is beyond us, beyond them, breaking like glue. And the rocks were not there and the real birds, they seemed like seagulls, were nesting on the real rocks. Close to the edge. The ocean (the habit of seeing) Christ, the Logos unbelieved in, where the real edge of it is.

  A private language. Carried about us, them. Ununderstanding.

  29.

  That they have lost the significance of a name is unimportant. In hoc signo vincit (or the passive troubling probability troubling the restless sea which the restless poets support with their metaphors about it being as how it isn’t there).

  Now the things that are for Jim are coming to an end, I see nothing beyond it. Like a false nose where a real nose is lacking. Faceless people.

  The real sound of the dead. A blowing of trumpets proclaiming that they had been there and been alive. The silver voices of them.

  To be alive. Like the noises alive people wear. Like the word Jim, esspecially—more than the words.

  LAMENT FOR THE MAKERS (1961)

  Dover Beach

  Tabula rasa

  A clean table

  On which is set food

  Fairies have never eaten.

  Fairies, I mean, in the ancient sense

  Who invite you to dinner.

  The mind clean like that

  Prepared

  With proper provisions

  For its journey into.

  Almost like a web

  (Dinner table)

  Spider, fly, and the web are one

  For one moment.

  Time traveller,

  Personal pronoun

  Trapped in the mind. Why

  Not put it all to sleep?

  O anima cortese Mantovana

  A whore’s answer to a whore

  They go to sleep them souls

  But they move in their sleep

  O anima cortese

  As Pope would have written if he had cared or had known Italian

  The final table they show you

  Is pop.

  Ghost the weasel

  Unman him. Make him drink

  Lavender water mixed with ink.

  Soda water they drink in the ghost canyons of their memories.

  The sharp

  Im

  age

  A new aesthetic

  Each place firmly tied to its place

  Eaches to each. Doesn’t

  Reach much

  And the owl’s bones

  Are built in a nest with them. That’s

  A poem Pope would have been proud of

  One keeps unmentionable

  What one ascends to the real with

  The lie

  The cock in the other person’s mouth

  The real defined out of nothing. Asking

  Shadows. Is pop. Pope

  To the worms that bury them. Limit-

  Less does it.

  Damn it all, Robert Duncan, there is only one bordello.

  A pillow. But one only whores toward what causes poetry

  Their voices high

  Their pricks stiff

  As they meet us.

  And this is rhetoric. The warning mine

  Not theirs.

  Words-

  worth

  Nods

  He heap good

  Gray poet

  English department in his skull.

  And the sea changes

  Despite the poet it is next to

  The waves beat.

  In his skull. Love pops

  Crab shells and sand dollars

  This you lose if you don’t sea it. The

  Crash.

  Pope, Pope, Pope of the evening

  Beautiful Pope. Help

  Me as sheer ghost. I

  Would like to write a poem as long as the hat of my nephew, as wide as is spoiled by writing

  Crash

  Those waves

  Only in one skull

  Skill at this is pop. Goes the weasel

  (All of them weasels alone, seeking the same things)

  On the beach

  With the tide sweeping up

  The whole sand like a carpet

  And throwing it back. Ear full of sea foam. Whore Pound

  Wondered Homer. Help

  Us sleep as men not as barbarians.

  Only in one skull

  Those waves

  They change

  Patterns. The scattered ghosts of what happens

  Is kelp. Whelp

  Of bending and unbending

  Ebbs and flows

  Breaks and does not break. Dogs

  The wetness in the sand

  Bitch

  Howling all night. The bitch dog howls

  At the absolute boundaries of sentences. The night they made the sea in

  The second night. Stars bright as raspberries up there (they made the stars the first night) and the wind changes

  Table of sand

  As the moon begins to be created. No

  Gnostrum will cure the ills that are on the face of it. No Babylonian poets employ charms

  Each other’s arms are not enough either when the sea shifts and changes

  The flight of seagulls here. The pebbles there. Chickens of some hen.

  Men curse it. For the torments it brings their boats, their rafts, their canoes, their reasons for existence.
Their sight of the sea on their boats. Their child.

  Chill-dren of the skull. Chilled beyond recognition. Pray for us who are living on the sand.

  Aphrodite

  born of waters and of sea weeds

  Under an island. Grave

  Mother

  Pray for us.

  The Birds

  A penny for a drink for the old guy

  Asmodeus, flycatcher

  Or whatever is that moves us.

  Us we define as invisible worms

  Poems you never see. A vision

  Of sex in the distance.

  Overseer of the real. Lears shout obscenely

  One Shakespeare’s, the other friend of those damned Jumblies.

  A distant race

  With the seawater

  Between them. Beating

  Great clouds of smoke. A worm

  In the whole visible world held still. To whom? As we define them they dis

  appear.

  The Birth of Venus

  Everything destroyed must be thrown away

  If it were even an emotion

  The seashell would be fake. Camp

  Moving in nothing.

  Camp partly as the homosexuals mean it as private sorrow

  And partly as others mean it—lighting fire for food.

  Neither, I said, seawater

  Gives nothing.

  The birth of Venus happened when she was ready to be born, the seawater did not mind her, and more important, there was a beach, not a breach in the universe but an actual fucking beach that was ready to receive her

  Shell and all.

  Love and food of

  Lament for the Makers

  No call upon anyone but the timber drifting in the waves

  Those blocks, those blobs of wood.

  The sounds there, offshore, faint and short

  They click or sound together—drift timber spending the night there floating just above this beach. Thump or sound together. The sound of driftwood the sound that is not really a sound at all.

  At all

  All of them

  Cast

  In the ghost of moonlight on them

  On shore.

  Postscript

  “Then Frieda told us an incredible story. Someone who wanted Lawrence—and Frieda named the possessive admirer—wanted him in death as well as in life. Frieda’s house was invaded and Lawrence’s ashes were stolen.

  ‘You can believe,’ said Frieda, ‘I had a hard time getting them back. But I recovered them. And I made up my mind that nothing of this sort should happen again. So I fixed it.’

  ‘How?’ we asked. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I had the ashes mixed with a lot of sand and concrete. Now they are in a huge concrete slab. It weighs over a ton.’ She laughed heartily. ‘A dozen men could not lift it.’”

  A RED WHEELBARROW (1962)

  A Red Wheelbarrow

  Rest and look at this goddamned wheelbarrow. Whatever

  It is. Dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not

  For their significance.

  For their significance. For being human

  The signs escape you. You, who aren’t very bright

  Are a signal for them. Not,

  I mean, the dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not

  Their significance.

  Love

  Tender as an eagle it swoops down

  Washing all our faces with its rough tongue.

  Chained to a rock and in that rock, naked,

  All of the faces.

  Love II

  You have clipped his wings. The marble

  Exposes his wings clipped.

  “Dead on arrival”:

  You say before he arrives anywhere.

  The marble, where his wings and our wings in similar fashion blossom. End-

  Less.

  Love III

  Who pays attention to the music the stone makes

  Each of them hearing its voice.

  Each of them yells and it is an echo bouncing the stone hard.

  Imprisoned in the stone the last of the stone, the last of the stone singing, its hard voice.

  Love IV

  There are no holds on the stone. It looks

  Like a used-up piece of chewing gum removed from all use because they left it. Naturally

  It cannot afford to exist.

  Without it I cannot afford to exist. Within

  The black rock.

  Love V

  Never looking him in the eye once. All mythology

  Is contained in this passage. Never to look him in the eye once. His exclusive right to be

  Seen. That is the God in the stone

  Who barely comes up to expectation.

  Love VI

  Hoot! The piercing screams of ghosts vanish on the horizon

  I had come to the wrong place

  Tall as a monster the shadow of the rock overwhelmed us

  Nothing that the stone hears.

  Love VII

  Nothing in the rock hears nothing

  The stone, empty as a teacup, tries for comfort,

  The sky is filled with stars:

  The wax figures of Ganymede, Prometheus, Eros

  Hanging.

  Love 8

  Love ate the red wheelbarrow.

  THREE MARXIST ESSAYS

  Homosexuality and Marxism

  There should be no rules for this but it should be simultaneous if at all.

  Homosexuality is essentially being alone. Which is a fight against the capitalist bosses who do not want us to be alone. Alone we are dangerous.

  Our dissatisfaction could ruin America. Our love could ruin the universe if we let it.

  If we let our love flower into the true revolution we will be swamped with offers for beds.

  The Jets and Marxism

  The Jets hate politics. They grew up in a fat cat society that didn’t even have a depression or a war in it. They are against capital punishment.

  They really couldn’t care less. They wear switchblade knives tied with ribbons. They know that which runs this country is an IBM machine connected to an IBM machine. They never think of using their knives against its aluminum casing.

  A League Against Youth and Fascism should be formed immediately by our Party. They are our guests. They are ignorant.

  The Jets and Homosexuality

  Once in the golden dawn of homosexuality there was a philosopher who gave the formula for a new society—“from each, according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

  This formula appears in the New Testament—the parable of the fig tree—and elsewhere.

  To continue the argument is fruitless.

  THE HOLY GRAIL (1962)

  THE BOOK OF GAWAIN

  1.

  Tony

  To be casual and have the wish to heal

  Gawain, I think,

  Had that when he saw the sick king squirming around like a half-cooked eel on a platter asking a riddle maybe only ghostmen could answer

  His riddled body. Heal it how?

  Gawain no ghostman, guest who could not gather

  Anything

  There was an easy grail.

  Later shot a green knight

  In a dead forest

  That was an easy answer

  No king

  No riddle.

  2.

  In some kind of castle some kind of knight played chess with an invisible chessplayer

  A maiden, naturally.

  You can hear the sound of wood on the board and some kind of knight breathing

  It was another spoiled quest. George

  Said to me that the only thing he thought was important in chess was killing the other king. I had accused him of lack of imagination.

  I talked of fun and imagination but I wondered about the nature of poetry since there was some kind of knight and an invisible chessplayer and they had been playing chess in the Grail Castle.

  3.

/>   The grail is the opposite of poetry

  Fills us up instead of using us as a cup the dead drink from.

  The grail the cup Christ bled into and the cup of plenty in Irish mythology

  The poem. Opposite. Us. Unfullfilled.

  These worlds make the friendliness of human to human seem close as cup to lip.

  Savage in their pride the beasts pound around the forest perilous.

  4.

  Everyone is impressed with courage and when he fought him he won

  Who won?

  I’m not sure but one was wearing red armor and one black armor

  I’m not sure about the colors but they were looking for a cup or a poem

  Everyone in each of the worlds is impressed with courage and I’m not sure if either of them were human or that what they were looking for could be described as a cup or a poem or why either of them fought

  They made a loud noise in the forest and the ravens gathered in trees and you were almost sure they were ravens.

  5.

  On the sea

  (There is never an ocean in all Grail legend)

  There is a boat.

  There is always one lone person on it sailing

  Widdershins.

  His name is Kate or Bob or Mike or Dora and his sex is almost as obscure as his history.

  Yet he will be met by a ship of singing women who will embalm him with nard and spice and all of the hallows

  As the ocean

  In the far distance.

  6.

  They are still looking for it

  Poetry and magic see the world from opposite ends

  One cock-forward and the other ass-forward

  All over Britain (but what a relief it would be to give all this up and find surcease in somebodyelse’s soul and body)

  Thus said Merlin

  Unwillingly

  Who saw through time.

  7.

  Perverse

  Turned against the light

  The grail they said

  Is achieved by steady compromise.

  An unending