and dry lyrics three times at least in the Cantos,
but tell me where that snow is now and tell me—
as in where is Tangerine and where is Flora—
how old Ruth is and where does she live and does she
still dance the Locomotive and does she bundle.
Hydrangea
I was pleased by blue hydrangea because at
last I had a flower from a gorgeous
family I could hate just as when certain
say Jewish poets, whom I’m supposed to revere
because they’re Jewish and not to love them would be
an act of betrayal to all eleven prophets;
dozens of kings and clothing manufacturers;
dentists, chess players, swimmers, stockbrokers, English teachers;
psychiatrists, painters, physicists, salesmen, violinists;
social workers, merchants, lawyers, cutters, trimmers;
critics; reveal themselves as snobs and bigots
and analytical and anti-passionate which could be
for all I know another side of Judaism
since Judaism has three sides as in the
Mercy, as in the Exceptions, as in the Melancholies,
which takes me back to the blue hydrangea I see
between an opening in the fence, it looks like
the blue was painted on, I hate it, I also
hate the red carnation, I love the cream
and when it’s cone-shaped, I even like the pink,
may God forgive me, Lord of the lost and destitute.
Spider
How you like these threads, said white spider
traveling back and forth between two rooms in
Lambertville, New Jersey, his web a work of
art, truly excessive, spit from his soul,
and the first case of any spit, it came from
my own soul since I am a mimic neurotic.
But how you like my steel? You like my window?
You like my big eye waiting? How you like my
chandelier? How you like fate? You like
my silk? Do cover your legs, do tighten
the arms a little, do tighten around the neck.
And how you like my kiss? How about
my rasping bloody tongue? Weren’t those herbs
and such like any household, giant unkempt
Russian sage, the better to smell you, my dear,
and spicy rosemary beside the orange and
purple echinacea, all that a little
to placate—though I know you don’t believe it,
for nature is nature—your perverted Isaiah
from running around like crazy in the meat markets.
Iris
The lock was on the right although I had to
open it from the left so I could use
my other hand to turn the knob and there were
four windows facing the street and for a
study I put my feet on the painted board
that covered the radiator and that’s where I
slept for an hour since it was too exhausting
to cross the room, and when I got up I walked
downstairs so I could sit in the square on one
of the cold benches behind the limp flags
for it was two in the morning and the prostitutes
were making faces at the slow-moving cop cars
and smoking cigarettes the secondhand smoke of
which I moved two benches away to escape
though I didn’t say a word nor did they ask me
for anything more than a cigarette, and one of them
gave me a flower, it was a faded blue iris,
and it was cold that night, I put it inside
my shirt so I could hurry home to adore it.
Grand Hotel
The time I took Anne Marie to what had been
a Nazi brothel in Prague some tourists were standing
under the chandelier and some leftover communist
stood there explaining the thickness of glass and what
the history was of glassmaking in the Czech
Republic, and we walked through them to get
seats so we could suck in the Art Nouveau
over our coffee and undercooked pancakes
before we got into the ancient elevator
and went back to our room, en suite, as it were,
and dirty, dark, and seedy at that, and looked
in the bottom of the wardrobe, behind the blankets,
to see what they did with love—the pricks—and could
we sleep on that mattress, and how thick was the window glass,
and this time walked down the great marble staircase
holding hands the whole way down, nor did I
bark even once or say fuck you to the Germans.
Sam and Morris
I had two uncles who were proletarians
and one of them was a housepainter and one of them
was a carpenter—they beat their wives
regularly and they had nineteen children
between them. Once a month or so my father
would go to one of their houses to intervene
and once I remember a police car with a dog.
When I was home on a short furlough I went
with my mother and father to a Jewish restaurant
and there, sitting in the back, were my two uncles,
in their seventies by then, and eating together,
chicken, chopped liver, God knows what, but pickles
and coleslaw, there always were pickles and coleslaw
and they were almost conspiring, it seemed to me
then, so young I was, and I was reading my
Ezra Pound already and I was ashamed of
what he said about Jews. Of usury those
two unshaven yidden, one of them red-eyed
already from whiskey, they knew nothing, they never
heard of Rothschild. Their hands were huge and stiff,
they hardly could eat their kreplach, Pound, you bastard!
Burning
Where is the mind that asked whether the drugstore
that stood at the crest of a hill and had a beacon
as its emblem, and I ate fruit salad sundaes there
and grilled cheese sandwiches, was or wasn’t a tower,
in the sense that there were porches, windows and staircases,
in the sense that there were mirrors and shining lamps
and one or two banners, and what was a tower doing there
with me walking to the library and post office,
and only a Chinese restaurant next door;
and where is the mind that abided the large plaza
outside the drugstore and made its own canopies
and beautiful flying objects, and where did the tower
come from and the dream of emptiness
that has abided for more than fifty years,
and the heart which burned, such was burning, and such
was the tower, it also burned, only in that case
it wasn’t attached to anything, it burned
of its own volition and mountains in Pennsylvania
still burn, alas, they have an abode, and empty
bottles explode and paper flutes burn and birdsong.
Studebaker
Try a small black radio from any year
and listen to the voices you get, they were
much faster then, they raced ahead of us
and rushed the music; love was in a rocking chair,
the floor was crooked, the moon was already in
the sky, though it was daylight still; or love
was in a Studebaker, we were driving east
and we had no idea how long the corporation
would last, or if there was a corporation, how could we?
And did it have its headquarters in Delaware
for
taxes and connections, though the doors
were heavy and solid, what was the year? ’55?
The Lark appeared in 1958 or
’59—it was their last attempt,
though I remember the Wagoneer, it was 19-
66 and something called the Cruiser, we had
Nat King Cole on the radio though static
was bad in Pennsylvania, given the mountains,
and there was a lever you pushed to make a bed—
I hope I’m getting it right—the leaves on the windshield
were large and wet, the song was “Unforgettable,”
the tree was either a swamp maple or a sycamore.
Cost
From the beginning it was the money, how I
could live on seven dollars a week anywhere
outside the U.S. or go to France
on the G.I. Bill, and learn to love cauliflower.
Although the Caribbean was even cheaper
and Mexico cheaper than that. You wouldn’t believe
what life was like after the war, that was
the time, if ever, to live on nothing. I was
enflamed by an article in Look magazine,
news went sideways then, but I had already
spent a year in New York City. I was
more or less getting ready, and it was odd
that money would so engross me; I got started
early and it went on for years; I kept
notebooks then as I do now; I love
looking at the stacks of figures, how much
it cost to read Catullus in Latin, what it
cost to understand Villon, including
the price of books and bicycles, not to mention
the price of a lost epic—by week or by month—
and what my ignorance cost and what my stubbornness.
Still Burning
Me trying to understand say whence
say whither, say what, say me with a pencil walking,
say reading the dictionary, say learning medieval
Latin, reading Spengler, reading Whitehead,
William James I loved him, swimming breaststroke
and thinking for an hour, how did I get here?
Or thinking in line, say the 69 streetcar
or 68 or 67 Swissvale,
that would take me elsewhere, me with a textbook
reading the pre-Socratics, so badly written,
whoever the author was, me on the floor of
the lighted stacks and sitting cross-legged,
walking afterwards through the park or sometimes
running across the bridges and up the hills,
sitting down in our tiny dining room,
burning in a certain way, still burning.
Roses
There was a rose called Guy de Maupassant,
a carmine pink that smelled like a Granny Smith
and there was another from the seventeenth century
that wept too much and wilted when you looked;
and one that caused tuberculosis, doctors
dug them up, they wore white masks and posted
warnings in the windows. One wet day
it started to hail and pellets the size of snowballs
fell on the roses. It’s hard for me to look at
a Duchess of Windsor, it was worn by Franco
and Mussolini, it stabbed Jews; yesterday I bought
six roses from a Haitian on Lower Broadway;
he wrapped them in blue tissue paper, it was
starting to snow and both of us had on the wrong shoes,
though it was wind, he said, not snow that ruined
roses and all you had to do was hold them
against your chest. He had a ring on his pinky
the size of a grape and half his teeth were gone.
So I loved him and spoke to him in false Creole
for which he hugged me and enveloped me
in his camel hair coat with most of the buttons missing,
and we were brothers for life, we swore it in French.
Hearts
The larger our hearts were, the more
blurred our love was, the softer
our arrows became, the vaguer
our initials, the deeper
the woods were and more abandoned
the more distant we were and more
absurdly hooked by those arrows
and linked by those bulging valves
whose soft contours were widened
with time and roughened at the edges
whatever you were, whatever
the life was that kept us connected,
buried in a birch too close
for comfort to a black locust
whose one side was destroyed
more than half a century
after we stopped downstream
to look at the stone farmhouse,
a fence holding up a dead
rosebush, another birch
starting to sprout, some clattering
and croaking in both directions.
Slash of Red
It was another one of his petite visions
and he had one every day now—at Optiques,
at Gold and Silver—and he ended up,
for it was hard work, sitting against a wall;
and when he looked at the yard he knew the dimensions
were ancient, holy he called them, and made comparisons
to African and Turkish rectangles,
only his yard was bare, there were two trees,
and a brick walk going from the gate to the steps.
He said it was Zen-like, only he meant he resisted
the fountaineers and their computer drawings;
it was a straight line, there wasn’t a curve
in the middle, there wasn’t a jog at the end,
considering that he never used a string,
and he was proud that he had only a trowel
and a little sand to place the bricks. He counted
320, some broken, some not,
and thought about it as a slash of red
against a background of green. This is how
he entered the twenty-first century. More charitable now.
Box of Cigars
I tried either one or two but they were stale
and broke like sticks or crumbled when I rolled them
and lighting a match was useless nor could I
put them back in the refrigerator—
it was too late for that—even licking them
filled my mouth with ground-up outer leaf,
product of Lancaster or eastern Virginia,
so schooled I am with cigars, it comes in the blood,
and I threw handfuls of them into the street
from three floors up and, to my horror, sitting
on my stoop were four or five street people
who ran to catch them as if they were suddenly rich,
and I apologize for that, no one should
be degraded that way, my hands were crazy,
and I ran down to explain but they were smoking
already nor did I have anything to give them
since we were living on beans ourselves, I sat
and smoked too, and once in a while we looked
up at the open window, and one of us spit
into his empty can. We were visionaries.
Justice
Only, to hear him scream, you had to know
that he was in the body of the worm
and even the robin could hear the scream, so close
she was to the shaking ground, and though the struggle
was over in less than a minute, the sun turned red,
as you could see between the birches, but that
was just a decoration, a brief statement
as on a gravestone, Here lies such and such,
and at the bottom, below a lily, the worm
will
lie down with the robin, or it was
two carved roses intertwined, or maybe
the sun was more pink, more from shame, it only
lasted a few seconds considering the
size of things, and more and more the hopping
and screaming, whatever he was, however he was
dismembered, and as for justice, it was redder
still, you would say carmine, you would say ruby,
my clothes were red, my neck and face were scarlet.
American Heaven
A saltwater pond in the Hamptons near David
Ignatow’s house, the water up to my chest,
an American Heaven, a dog on the shore, this time
his mouth closed, his body alert, his ears
up, a dog belongs in heaven, at least our
kind. An egret skidding to a stop, I’m sure
water snakes and turtles, grasses and weeds,
and close to the water sycamores and locusts,
and pitch pine on the hill and sand in the distance,
and girls could suckle their babies standing in water,
so that was our place of origin, that was
the theory in 1982—David
had his own larder, Rose had hers, he brought
tuna fish into her kitchen, it was a triptych,
the centerpiece was the pond, the left panel
was his, his study, and he was stepping naked
across the frame into the pond holding an
open can and hers was the right, her arms had
entered the pond, holding a bowl, it was her
studio, we ate on a dry stone
and talked about James Wright and Stanley Kunitz,
and there was a star of the fourth magnitude
surrounded by planets, shining on all of us.
from Everything Is Burning
La Pergola
Finally daisies and tomatoes, I have settled for
that and bushes more important than fruit and
flowers and one gray squirrel running back and forth on
the fence and leaping onto the humbled sunflower,
how deep it bows, the tomatoes are only green
and as we speak I am out there bending over,
making a bouquet of daisies, you can
count them, I have five fedoras, there in
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