My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  I think that on the day I leave

  This town of quiet houses they

  Will sound their horns.

  I think that then that burning herd

  Will turn and follow me towards you

  Like unicorns.

  A SECOND TRAIN SONG FOR GARY

  When the trains come into strange cities

  The citizens come out to meet the strangers.

  I love you, Jack, he said

  I love you, Jack, he said

  At another station.

  When passengers come in from strange cities

  The citizens come out to help the strangers.

  I love you too, I said

  I love you too, I said

  From another station.

  The citizens are kind to passing strangers

  And nourish them and kiss their lips in kindness.

  I walk the unbelieving streets

  I walk the unbelieving streets

  In a strange city.

  At night in cold new beds the welcomed strangers

  Achieve in memory the city’s promise.

  I wake in love with you

  I wake in love with you

  At last year’s station.

  Then say goodbye to citizens and city

  Admit this much—that they were kind to strangers.

  I leave my love with you

  I leave my love with you

  In this strange city.

  BERKELEY / SAN FRANCISCO (1952–1955)

  A POSTSCRIPT TO THE BERKELEY RENAISSANCE

  What have I lost? When shall I start to sing

  A loud and idiotic song that makes

  The heart rise frightened into poetry

  Like birds disturbed?

  I was a singer once. I sang that song.

  I saw the thousands of bewildered birds

  Breaking their cover into poetry

  Up from the heart.

  What have I lost? We lived in forests then,

  Naked as jaybirds in the ever-real,

  Eating our toasted buns and catching flies,

  And sometimes angels, with our hooting tongues.

  I was a singer once. In distant trees

  We made the forests ring with sacred noise

  Of gods and bears and swans and sodomy,

  And no one but a bird could hear our voice.

  What have I lost? The trees were full of birds.

  We sat there drinking at the sour wine

  In gallon bottles. Shouting song

  Until the hunters came.

  I was a singer once, bird-ignorant.

  Time with a gun said, “Stop,

  Find other forests. Teach the innocent.”

  God got another and a third

  Birdlimed in Eloquence.

  What have I lost? At night my hooting tongue,

  Naked of feathers and of softening years,

  Sings through the mirror at me like a whippoorwill

  And then I cannot sleep.

  “I was a singer once,” it sings.

  “I sing the song that every captured tongue

  Sang once when free and wants again to sing.

  But I can sing no song I have not sung.”

  What have I lost? Spook singer, hold your tongue.

  I sing a newer song no ghost-bird sings.

  My tongue is sharpened on the iron’s edge.

  Canaries need no trees. They have their cage.

  A POEM FOR DADA DAY AT THE PLACE, APRIL 1, 1955

  Darling,

  The difference between Dada and barbarism

  Is the difference between an abortion and a wet dream.

  An abortion

  Is a conscious sacrifice of the past, the painting of a mustache

  On Mona Lisa, the surrender

  Of real children.

  The other, darling, is a sacrifice

  Of nobody’s children, is barbarism, is an Eskimo

  Running amok in a museum, is Bohemia

  Renouncing cities it had never conquered.

  An ugly Vandal pissing on a statue is not Phidias

  Pissing on a statue. Barbarism

  Is something less than a gesture.

  Destroy your own gods if you want Dada:

  Give up your vices, burn your jukebox,

  Draw mustaches on music, paint a real mother

  On every non-objective canvas. Befoul only

  Those things that belong to you.

  “Beauty is so rare a thing,” Pound said,

  “So few drink at my fountain.”

  You only have the right to piss in the fountain

  If you are beautiful.

  “The window is a sword . . .”

  The window is a sword. In the wet air the glass rain falls. I sense the early morning rain. I hear it drop against the window, die there, as if the glass were violent. I feel your body move. You are so far away. In all your sleep, the murdered rain will not cry out. I turn and place my hand upon your groin. This window is a sword.

  The window is an angel. It kills the memories of the outside air as they surge in to reach us. Look, you move. You are not safe in sleep. Your hands are clenching sea wind from the air. You groan. Softly, Leech! No childhood rain will rise to drown this room. No long-forgotten wind will chafe your flesh. This window is an angel.

  The window is a mirror. We see ourselves upon it. Passionless, it separates our flesh against our flesh until we sleep alone. You, firm in sleep, become the room and I become the rain behind the glass. It keeps a watch so we see ourselves across its opaque edge. It passes light. It keeps us separate. This window is a mirror.

  The window is a door. All beauty is behind it. Look, Leech, the light, the light that vanishes! Behind the cracks, the chinks—vague tigers walking under vanilla suns, tired oceans, monsters of the air. All beauty is behind it. See, Leech, the light! This window is a door.

  The window is an ocean.

  IMAGINARY ELEGIES

  IV.

  Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought

  When I wrote that. The dreamers sag a bit

  As if five years had thickened on their flesh

  Or on my eyes. Wake them with what?

  Should I throw rocks at them

  To make their naked private bodies bleed?

  No. Let them sleep. This much I’ve learned

  In these five years in what I spent and earned:

  Time does not finish a poem.

  The dummies in the empty funhouse watch

  The tides wash in and out. The thick old moon

  Shines through the rotten timbers every night.

  This much is clear, they think, the men who made

  Us twitch and creak and put the laughter in our throats

  Are just as cold as we. The lights are out.

  The lights are out.

  You’ll smell the oldest smells—

  The smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep

  Before you wake. This much I’ve learned

  In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:

  Time does not finish a poem.

  What have I gone to bed with all these years?

  What have I taken crying to my bed

  For love of me?

  Only the shadows of the sun and moon

  The dreaming groins, their creaking images.

  Only myself.

  Is there some rhetoric

  To make me think that I have kept a house

  While playing dolls? This much I’ve learned

  In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:

  That two-eyed monster God is still above.

  I saw him once when I was young and once

  When I was seized with madness, or was I seized

  And mad because I saw him once.

  He is the sun And moon made real with eyes.

  He is the photograph of everything at once. The love

  That makes the blood run cold.

  But he is g
one. No realer than old

  Poetry. This much I’ve learned

  In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:

  Time does not finish a poem.

  Upon the old amusement pier I watch

  The creeping darkness gather in the west.

  Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts

  I hear the seagulls call. They’re going west

  Toward some great Catalina of a dream

  Out where the poem ends.

  But does it end?

  The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds.

  NEW YORK / BOSTON (1955–1956)

  IInd PHASE OF THE MOON

  Son of Pan with thighs smooth as raw silk, send some of our dreams back to us from your moonless north. Unnatural sorcerer, you spend your days watching the birds conceal themselves in a cloudless sky or hunting the same birds like a patch of fog in the darkness of birch thickets.

  No living man has seen you. The sun that shines so brightly on your lips has made you forget how to cast a shadow. We have been looking for you on the insides of mirrors. You might have given us great joy.

  No, you are too tall for love. Along your thighs your love is erected by the birds’ screaming, is empty as a lake. No living man has seen such innocence.

  Unaware of us as an autumn, you are born and you die in the middle of our parks and our oceans. You hide nothing. You cannot imagine the eyes with which we could watch you.

  Let me say now that we suspect you. Let me say now that you have already made yourself known to us as a murderer. Let me say now that our love for you is only an insane abstraction of the love that we have been waiting to give.

  IIIrd PHASE OF THE MOON

  You stand on a small hill overlooking a valley we were not able to visit. You raise your arms and out of the air comes a mad procession of herons and sparrows flying past you and a small wren, frightened, which flies just above your naked shoulder. We would snatch at the cold wing as it passes, but you blow kisses at its moving shadow. You have broken up all auguries and patterns. Yours is the magnificent nonsense of experience.

  In China the nights are cold. Vague tigers gather around your fire and watch you breathlessly. I have not seen you flying into the heart of the sun on wings that did not melt. You play chess with the Emperor of Egypt in an ivory castle. People are dying all around you. I have seen your body stretched out naked before God and reason.

  Nothing is too incredible to believe about you. Idiot, simpleton, heartbreaker! . . . Teach us the magic of the departing shadow, teach us how to smash our hearts into butterflies!

  IVth PHASE OF THE MOON

  You are almost as old as the youngest of us were. So old, old king, and we were in love with your grandfather. See there, on your throne, sitting in judgment like a mountain, see a solitary bird pass through the window, over the banquet table, and down the dark ale-hall towards another window. Your senile heart has ripened into a bird flying. We were in love with your grandfather.

  Or a flat Tarot pack. A bearded king on a throne in wisdom, a lightning-blasted tower on a throne in wisdom, a crucified fool ass-backwards on a throne in wisdom. Fire can only burn, terror can only crumble, the heart can only die. There is room for triumph.

  Die, then, loved by the gods. Who are we but those that have dared to create you? Lawgiver for your nation, wise as the stone of an old cathedral, moonlight flutters into your ale-hall like a bird without message. Who wrote your laws but those that will be born to destroy them? Who laid that stone but those who will be born to destroy it? The cathedral of stone is beginning to crumble. Die then, loved by the gods who will be born to destroy you, they who were in love with your grandfather.

  SOME NOTES ON WHITMAN FOR ALLEN JOYCE

  “Let shadows be furnished with genitals.”

  He was reaching for a world I can still remember. Sweet and painful. It is a world without magic and without god. His ocean is different from my ocean, his moon is different from my moon, his love (oh, God the loss) is different from my love.

  In his world roads go somewhere and you walk with someone whose hand you can hold. I remember. In my world roads only go up and down and you are lucky if you can hold on to the road or even know that it is there.

  He never heard spirits whispering or saw Aphrodite crawl out of the water or was frightened by the ghost of something crucified. His world had clouds in it and he loved Indian names and carried some of his poems in a pouch around his neck. He had no need of death.

  Rimbaud without wings.

  Forgive me Walt Whitman, you whose fine mouth has sucked the cock of the heart of the country for fifty years. You did not ever understand cruelty. It was that that severed your world from me, fouled your moon and your ocean, threw me out of your bearded paradise. The comrade you are walking with suddenly twists your hand off. The ghost-bird that is singing to you suddenly leaves a large seagull dropping in your eye. You are sucking the cock of a heart that has clap.

  Calamus cannot exist in the presence of cruelty. Not merely human cruelty, but the cruelty of shadows, the cruelty of spirits. Calamus is like Oz. One needs, after one has left it, to find some magic belt to cross its Deadly Desert, some cat to entice one into its mirror. There Walt is, like some great seabird from the Emerald Palace, crying, “Calamus, Calamus.” And there one is, at the other side of the desert, hearing Walt but seeing that impossible shadow, those shimmering heat waves across the sky. And one needs no Virgil, but an Alice, a Dorothy, a Washington horsecar conductor, to lead one across that cuntlike mirror, that cruelty.

  So when I dreamed of Calamus, as I often did when I touched you or put my hand upon your hand, it was not as of a possible world, but as a lost paradise. A land my father Adam drove me out of with the whip of shadow. In the last sense of the word—a fairy story. That is what I think about Calamus. That is what I think about your damned Calamus.

  THE DAY FIVE THOUSAND FISH DIED

  ALONG THE CHARLES RIVER

  And when the fish come in to die

  They slap their heads against the rocks until they float

  Downstream on one dead eye. From rocks

  The Irish boys yell and throw rocks at them and beat them with their sticks.

  Gulls wheel in the fine sky. Tall as an ogre

  God walks among the rocks. His angels cry,

  “Yell and throw rocks at them and beat them with sticks!”

  But watch those upturned eyes

  That gleam like God’s own candles in the sun. Nothing

  Deserves to live.

  HIBERNATION—AFTER MORRIS GRAVES

  Deeper than sleep, but in a room as narrow

  The mind turns off its longings one by one,

  Lets beautiful black fingers snap the last one,

  Remove the self and lie its body down.

  The Future chills the sky above the chamber.

  The Past gnaws through the earth below the bed.

  But here the naked Present lies as warmly

  As if it rested in the lap of God.

  ÉTERNUEMENT

  There is a beautiful world in a little girl’s body.

  When I poke my fingers into her I can see it.

  Or when the absurdity of the postman

  Or the snow that won’t stay still on the ground

  Or the queers with painted noses that walk together in the Bois

  Or the birds

  When I poke my fingers into them I can see it

  When I poke my fingers into them I can see it.

  SONG FOR THE GREAT MOTHER

  One minute after midnight, Mrs. Doom

  From the middle distance of another room

  Begins to take the furniture apart

  And close the drawers, and slam the windows shut.

  She puts away each angry, loving sight

  We left behind us or had heard or touched.

  She rolls the carpet up on which we danced

  Sweeps up the dust, then sighs and snaps the light
.

  And if we sleep, she whispers round our beds

  And buzzes at the corners of our eyes

  Snipping each dream with hungry murmuring.

  Oh, who would take this darkness for his bride?

  Nothing is changed by her. All things remain

  As beautiful and angry as they were.

  She merely wipes their shadows from our hearts,

  Shakes out her broom, and shuts the final door.

  “The city of Boston . . .”

  The city of Boston is filled with frogheaded flies and British policemen. The other day I saw the corpse of Emily Dickinson floating up the Charles River.

  Sweet God, it is lonely to be dead. Sweet God, is there any god to worship? God stands in Boston like a public statue. Sweet God, is there any God to swear love by? Or love—it is lonely, is lonely, is lonely to be lonely in Boston.

  Now Emily Dickinson is floating down the Charles River like an Indian princess. Now naked savages are climbing out of all the graveyards. Now the Holy Ghost drips birdshit on the nose of God. Now the whole thing stops. Sweet God, poetry hates Boston.

  FIVE WORDS FOR JOE DUNN ON HIS

  TWENTY-SECOND BIRTHDAY

  I shall give you five words for your birthday.

  The first word is anthropos

  Who celebrates birthdays.

  He is withered and tough and blind, babbler

  Of old wars and dead beauty.

  He is there for the calmness of your heart as the days race

  And the wars are lost and the roses wither.

  No enemy can strike you that he has not defeated.

  No beauty can die in your heart that he will not remember.

  The second word is andros

  Who is proud of his gender

  Wears it like a gamecock, erects it

  Through the midnight of time

  Like a birthday candle.

  He will give you wisdom like a Fool

  Hidden in the loins

  Crying out against the inelegance

  Of all that is not sacred.