My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  Then, when success is achieved and the sweating author has managed to get shut his casket of paragraphs, hammering on it in a perfect fury to keep the body from bursting out, what then? He has a casket, a small regular box with a corpse inside it, and he can sell it on the market where such boxes are sold—and it has been safer, it has been less eccentric and altogether more profitable than walking down the streets with a dead man ever could have been.

  There are some complaints from the customers, however. These caskets all look alike. They are brown or gray or purple (almost never black), the customers complain that they don’t look very much like people.

  The customers are right. The outside of the casket is made up mostly of the writer, his descriptions, his feelings, his fancies, his regrets—little or nothing about the corpse on the inside. Nothing but a few spoken words. But it is those words, only them, which give the third dimension to the story, show that there is space inside the casket. For this reason whenever I read a short story I skip through the narrative paragraphs and concentrate on the dialogue. (That is the scrollwork on the casket.)

  “Whenever I read a short story,” Ken said, looking up from his coffee, “I skip through the narrative paragraphs and concentrate on the dialogue.” He paused for a moment. “And that’s the scrollwork on the casket,” he added parenthetically.

  It is Ken, of course, who is dead. It is his casket I hammer now. Obviously there is something hallucinatory in the hammering of caskets. Whenever I hammer a nail into the outside of the casket, I can hear someone, on the inside, also hammering a nail. That’s the trouble with this burial business; it’s hard to know who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside, whether the living bury the dead or the dead bury the living.

  “The dead bury the living,” Ken said. He pulled his coat tightly around his shoulders and walked a few yards ahead of me. “The dead never return to the living; it is the living that return to the dead. People search out the ghosts they find.” He walked silently ahead of me for a while and then stopped. He leaned against a heavy box and looked at me with something like pity. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said.

  I think I’m going to be sick.

  THE DANCING APE

  The dancing ape is whirling round the beds

  Of all the coupled animals; they, sleeping there

  In warmth of sex, ignore his fur and fuss

  And feel no terror in his gait of loneliness.

  Quaint though the dancer is, his furry fists

  Are locked like lightning over all their heads.

  His legs are thrashing out in discontent

  As if they were the lightning’s strict embodiment.

  But let the dancing stop, the apish face go shut in sleep,

  The hands unclench, the trembling legs go loose—

  And let some curious animal bend and touch that face

  With nuzzling mouth, would not the storm break—

  And that ape kiss?

  IMAGINARY ELEGIES

  For Robin Blaser

  All the philosophy a man needs is in Berkeley.

  —W.B. Yeats

  I.

  Poetry, almost blind like a camera

  Is alive in sight only for a second. Click,

  Snap goes the eyelid of the eye before movement

  Almost as the word happens.

  One would not choose to blink and go blind

  After the instant. One would not choose

  To see the continuous Platonic pattern of birds flying

  Long after the stream of birds had dropped or had nested.

  Lucky for us that there are visible things like oceans

  Which are always around,

  Continuous, disciplined adjuncts

  To the moment of sight.

  Sight

  But not so sweet

  As we have seen.

  When I praise the sun or any bronze god derived from it

  Don’t think I wouldn’t rather praise the very tall blond boy

  Who ate all of my potato-chips at the Red Lizard.

  It’s just that I won’t see him when I open my eyes

  And I will see the sun.

  Things like the sun are always there when the eyes are open

  Insistent as breath.

  One can only worship

  These cold eternals for their support of

  What is absolutely temporary.

  But not so sweet.

  The temporary tempts poetry

  Tempts photographs, tempts eyes.

  I conjure up

  From photographs

  The birds

  The boy

  The room in which I began to write this poem

  All

  My eye has seen or ever could have seen

  I love

  I love—The eyelid clicks

  I see

  Cold poetry

  At the edge of their image.

  It is as if we conjure the dead and they speak only

  Through our own damned trumpets, through our damned medium:

  “I am little Eva, a Negro princess from sunny heaven.”

  The voice sounds blond and tall.

  “I am Aunt Minnie. Love is sweet as moonlight here in heaven.”

  The voice sounds blond and tall.

  “I’m Barnacle Bill. I sank with the Titanic. I rose in salty heaven.”

  The voice sounds blond, sounds tall, sounds blond and tall.

  “Goodbye from us in spiritland, from sweet Platonic spiritland.

  You can’t see us in spiritland, and we can’t see at all.”

  II.

  God must have a big eye to see everything

  That we have lost or forgotten. Men used to say

  That all lost objects stay upon the moon

  Untouched by any other eye but God’s.

  The moon is God’s big yellow eye remembering

  What we have lost or never thought. That’s why

  The moon looks raw and ghostly in the dark.

  It is the camera shots of every instant in the world

  Laid bare in terrible yellow cold.

  It is the objects we never saw.

  It is the dodos flying through the snow

  That flew from Baffinland to Greenland’s tip

  And did not even see themselves.

  The moon is meant for lovers. Lovers lose

  Themselves in others. Do not see themselves.

  The moon does. The moon does.

  The moon is not a yellow camera. It perceives

  What wasn’t, what undoes, what will not happen.

  It’s not a sharp and clicking eye of glass and hood. Just old,

  Slow infinite exposure of

  The negative that cannot happen.

  Fear God’s old eye for being shot with ice

  Instead of blood. Fear its inhuman mirror blankness

  Luring lovers.

  Fear God’s moon for hexing, sticking pins

  In forgotten dolls. Fear it for wolves.

  For witches, magic, lunacy, for parlor tricks.

  The poet builds a castle on the moon

  Made of dead skin and glass. Here marvelous machines

  Stamp Chinese fortune cookies full of love.

  Tarot cards

  Make love to other Tarot cards. Here agony

  Is just imagination’s sister bitch.

  This is the sun-tormented castle which

  Reflects the sun. Da dada da.

  The castle sings.

  Da. I don’t remember what I lost. Dada.

  The song. Da. The hippogriffs were singing.

  Da dada. The boy. His horns

  Were wet with song. Dada.

  I don’t remember. Da. Forgotten.

  Da. Dada. Hell. Old butterface

  Who always eats her lovers.

  Hell somehow exists in the distance

  Between the remembered and the forgotten.

  Hell somehow exists in the distance

>   Between what happened and what never happened

  Between the moon and the earth of the instant

  Between the poem and God’s yellow eye.

  Look through the window at the real moon.

  See the sky surrounded. Bruised with rays.

  But look now, in this room, see the moon-children

  Wolf, bear, and otter, dragon, dove.

  Look now, in this room, see the moon-children

  Flying, crawling, swimming, burning

  Vacant with beauty.

  Hear them whisper.

  III.

  God’s other eye is good and gold. So bright

  The shine blinds. His eye is accurate. His eye

  Observes the goodness of the light it shines

  Then, pouncing like a cat, devours

  Each golden trace of light

  It saw and shined.

  Cat feeds on mouse. God feeds on God. God’s goodness is

  A black and blinding cannibal with sunny teeth

  That only eats itself.

  Deny the light

  God’s golden eye is brazen. It is clanging brass

  Of good intention.

  It is noisy burning clanging brass.

  Light is a carrion crow

  Cawing and swooping. Cawing and swooping.

  Then, then there is a sudden stop.

  The day changes.

  There is an innocent old sun quite cold in cloud.

  The ache of sunshine stops.

  God is gone. God is gone.

  Nothing was quite as good.

  It’s getting late. Put on your coat.

  It’s getting dark. It’s getting cold.

  Most things happen in twilight

  When the sun goes down and the moon hasn’t come

  And the earth dances.

  Most things happen in twilight

  When neither eye is open

  And the earth dances.

  Most things happen in twilight

  When the earth dances

  And God is blind as a gigantic bat.

  The boys above the swimming pool receive the sun.

  Their groins are pressed against the warm cement.

  They look as if they dream. As if their bodies dream.

  Rescue their bodies from the poisoned sun,

  Shelter the dreamers. They’re like lobsters now

  Hot red and private as they dream.

  They dream about themselves.

  They dream of dreams about themselves.

  They dream they dream of dreams about themselves.

  Splash them with twilight like a wet bat.

  Unbind the dreamers.

  Poet,

  Be like God.

  PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

  What are you thinking about?

  I am thinking of an early summer.

  I am thinking of wet hills in the rain

  Pouring water. Shedding it

  Down empty acres of oak and manzanita

  Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,

  Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.

  Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana

  Driving the hills crazy,

  A fast wind with a bit of dust in it

  Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.

  Or down in the city where the peach trees

  Are awkward as young horses,

  And there are kites caught on the wires

  Up above the street lamps,

  And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

  What are you thinking?

  I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer

  As slow getting started

  As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza

  After a lot of unusual rain

  California seems long in the summer.

  I would like to write a poem as long as California

  And as slow as a summer.

  Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow

  As the very tip of summer.

  As slow as the summer seems

  On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside

  Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road

  Between Bakersfield and Hell

  Waiting for Santa Claus.

  What are you thinking now?

  I’m thinking that she is very much like California.

  When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways

  Traveling up and down her skin

  Long empty highways

  With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them

  On hot summer nights.

  I am thinking that her body could be California

  And I a rich Eastern tourist

  Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas

  Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California

  That I have never seen.

  Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,

  Send them.

  One of each breast photographed looking

  Like curious national monuments,

  One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway

  Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging

  In the world’s oldest hotel.

  What are you thinking?

  I am thinking of how many times this poem

  Will be repeated. How many summers

  Will torture California

  Until the damned maps burn

  Until the mad cartographer

  Falls to the ground and possesses

  The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

  What are you thinking now?

  I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

  MINNESOTA POEMS (1950–1952)

  MINNEAPOLIS: INDIAN SUMMER

  What did the Indians do

  In a hot Indian October?

  Did the same things, I suppose,

  Saw the birds flying,

  Gathered the last corn.

  The same things . . .

  Saw the birds flying,

  Followed their muddy river

  Looking the last time

  For a warm face

  To kiss in the winter.

  The same things . . .

  Their muddy river still muddy.

  The woods choked with red leaves . . .

  Under a sun bright like a broken promise

  Watched the birds flying.

  And dirty October

  Moved like their river

  With a heat that frightened the birds away.

  WATCHING A TV BOXING MATCH IN OCTOBER

  The boxers show an equilibrium

  Unmatched this autumn. In the air outside

  Winds swirl around the big October moon

  While men and boxers seek a place to hide.

  Within the focus of a crowded screen

  The boxers face each other. They pretend

  That man can counterpunch real enemies.

  They hit each other til the very end.

  One wins and they embrace there while the wind

  Grows louder and the screen begins to fade.

  Then all the men and boxers bind their wounds

  Behind an empty screen, and are afraid.

  PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

  Ovid among the Thracians soon received

  A willing smile from those who baked his bread;

  Walked country highways thinking of the dead;

  Was nodded at by strangers as he grieved.

  Not at Colonus, speaking sacred words

  But cunning, exile, silence—country things.

  As winter came he watched familiar birds

  Fly southwards toward the sea on little wings.

  SONNET FOR THE BEGINNING OF WINTER

  A kind of numbness fills your heart and mine,

  A gap where things and people once had been.

  We fell unloved, like frozen fields of snow

  Upon which not
a track has broken through.

  The robin and the thrush have taken wing.

  The sparrow stays. He sings a dismal song

  And eats the seed uncovered in the snow.

  An ugly bird, call him the heart’s agony.

  His songs of disbelief will fill our hearts

  As long as winter lasts, as long as we

  Are distant partners of this agony

  Too far apart to keep each other warm.

  So let our hearts lie dead like fields of snow

  Unloved, untouched until the distant spring

  Grows closer and the gentle birds return

  And fill the empty air, and sing.

  ON READING LAST YEAR’S LOVE POEMS

  The heart’s a sprinting thing and hammers fast.

  The word is slow and rigid in its pace.

  But, if they part once, they must meet at last

  As when the rabbit and the tortoise race.

  Words follow heartbeats, arrogant and slow

  As if they had forever in their load,

  As if the race were won, as if they go

  To meet a dying rabbit on the road.

  Then, step by step, the words become their own.

  The turtle creeps ahead to win the prize.

  But, ah, the sweeter touch, the quicker boon

  Is lost forever when the rabbit dies.

  ORPHEUS IN ATHENS

  The boy had never seen an honest man.

  He looked among us every night he said.

  He eyed each stranger like Diogenes

  And took him with his lantern into bed.

  He’d probe the stranger’s body with that light

  Search every corner of his flesh and bone

  But truth was never there. He’d spend the night

  Then leave him and resume his search alone.

  I tried to tell him there was some mistake

  That truth’s a virtue only strangers lack.

  But when he turned to face me with a kiss

  I closed my lying heart against his lips.

  TRAIN SONG FOR GARY

  The trains move quietly upon

  The tracks outside like animals

  I hear them every night.

  And sometimes I can almost see

  Their glittering unhurried eyes

  Move out of sight.