whatever his fancy was and wherever his harmony took him,
and, as he said to his green Honda, it was only the body of Bliss he was
after, never mind “body,” never mind that “bliss,” a word
too close to happiness, ecstasy, something either
vague or unearned, though he at last had grown fearless
when it comes to languor and even provoked himself
as he did here with philosophical debate and a kind of
wordage he would have called too discursive when
he was twenty-five or thirty but he did what he did
and he praised the year he wrote his new book of poems
even if it was a year of murder and ignorance
talk about outer things, talk about the world
as opposed to the self and the name he gave
it was the year of everything.
Two Things
Always it’s putting two things together
that don’t necessarily belong there,
Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals
calling in his outfield and striking out
the last three Pittsburgh Pirates to win
a crucial game at Forbes Field—and the
bombing of Addis Ababa by Count Ciano
the son-in-law of Benito Mussolini
who described the destruction in terms of lovely blossoms
spreading out in the smoke of the lower atmosphere.
The year was 1936 and my father,
driving a 1935 silver-gray Pontiac,
described the Ethiopians sitting on the heads
of African elephants, carrying poisonous spears
which would destroy the Fascists using outmoded weapons
from World War I too terrified to do battle
with Ethiopia—Abyssinia it was called,
a great empire which had resisted Mohammed
and his son-in-law 1,500 years earlier
and everything before and after since Sheba.
I also have a vague memory of the hood ornament
I think it was an Indian “chieftain”
with a dour puss as it was on old nickels
as I remember, and for all I know there’s a stamp
with a feather or two, most likely turkey
but it could be goose or even crow but never
canary and never for that matter parrot,
so accurate the artists at GM were
whether they were designing the hood ornaments
of Chevys or Cadillacs, which I also remember,
for without knowing it I was an expert on many things
especially baseball cards and stamps and I had one of
Honus Wagner and a few gorgeous French Empires
which surpassed I thought those of the English since
if the sun never set on the British Empire
it did set on their artisans at least when it came to
stamps, it was a Martinique
I especially loved, the upright tits
and—in spite of the gender—the bolo knife that cut
its way through the forests as if the trees were butter
which brings up the great subject and what
an eleven-year-old was doing admiring tits,
especially the pointed kind that began
higher on the upper body than nature
allowed maybe with a tiny baby sucking
or one on her mother’s back too small anatomically
all of which got him started at an early age
hunting through magazines for undressed women
and trading in flutter-books, his favorite the goings-on
between Bluto and Olive, Wimpy and Geezil watching
I could compare to flying the friendly skies
of newnited with a hit on cattle cars and a
boughten sandwich, this way bringing together
what doesn’t at first (and second) blush belong there
which you might call a metaphoric rage
for we are used to that where like is more and
I have a pen with an eraser my darling
and you are a 1940 radio and
you are seventeen inches of snow in Michigan
shall I compare thee to a winter’s day?
Larry
He kept a hog in Utah
as big as an old bathroom
and parked it in his parlor
so he could polish one bristle at a time
and he kept a horse in his heart
a capacious meadow surrounding him,
the one with a holy ankle,
nor did he forget the bruised jockey.
And he missed my war
though he had a good one of his own
for which he wrote the best poem known
of the alphabetized corpses
and suffered Ike only as a boy
and never took the ride
to Sète on a French bicycle
and staggered back home in the French moonlight.
I had the great honor of introducing him to New Orleans
and watching him jump with joy oh literally
as we visited Hebrew Rest for sorrow
and the caves on Bourbon for cold beer
and we both loved the same woman years apart,
and it was I who called her up
to give her the bad news to which she said
“Now I’m going upstairs to read every word he ever wrote.”
Sunset
At the horizon line there was a touch of pink
but everything above was a heavy gray with
streaks of white behind it though yesterday it
was two black lines stretching across the sky with
the red then the pink behind it but it wasn’t the
end of days, it was just two variations
showing through the slightly moving palm trees
but I wasn’t sure that a madman wouldn’t ride down the
street on a large white horse with a sword hanging
from his mouth murdering left and right with ten
million angels shouting after him or twenty
million monkeys as the sages of India have it,
all with harmonicas and pocketknives loving
Apocalypse, as they called it, given the darkness.
Orson
Orson Welles has been my philosopher
for the last few weeks now and if he’s just a
phenomenon and doesn’t really have a system
as Spinoza did or Anaxagorus, he
at least is consistent even if some of the things
he talks about are immensely unimportant
except to actors maybe or gossipmongers.
It was 1950—I think—in a Protestant church
near the Pont d’Austerlitz we met him directing
a small troupe in Macbeth even before he
made the movie; he was taking a vacation
from America during the naming of names and I had
the honor not only of watching them rehearse
but having some vin ordinaire afterwards.
Of the poets, it was Dylan Thomas he seemed to
love the most and just because I could speak
one poem after another he assumed
I was a tub-thumper myself though it was Stevens—
an English edition—and Hopkins I carried around
and hateful Pound I dragged from place to place
and Crane, his ecstasy.
As far as God
Orson, like every secularist, was evasive
and spoke of unknown gases and random objects
floating through the universe and called what was called
sin just selfishness—this from a heavyweight
eating his steaks and potatoes at 2 or 3 a.m.
the No. 1 saint of the sinners of old Hollywood.
Gelato
The two nuns I saw I urged them to
convert to Luther or better yet to join
the Unitarians, and the Jews I
encountered to think seriously about
Jesus, especially the Lubavitchers,
and I interrupted the sewer workers
digging up dirt to ask them
how many spoonfuls of sugar they
put in their coffee and the runners in
their red silk to warn them about
the fake fruit in their yogurt since
to begin with I was in such a good
mood this morning waiting patiently
for the two young poets driving over from
Jersey City to talk about the late forties
and what they were to me when I was their age and
we turned to Chinese poetry and Kenneth Rexroth’s
Hundred Poems and ended up
talking about the Bollingen and Pound’s
stupid admiration of Mussolini
and how our main poets were on the right
politically—most of them—unlike the European
and South American and we climbed some steps
into a restaurant I knew to buy gelato
and since we were poets we went by the names,
instead of the tastes and colors—and I stopped talking
and froze beside a small tree since I was
older than Pound was when he went silent
and kissed Ginsberg, a cousin to the Rothschilds,
who had the key to the ghetto in his pocket,
one box over and two rows up, he told me.
Ancient Chinese Egg
I counted wrong in the other poem,
it was five hundred years, not a thousand
so that meant the egg was cooked
during the time of Ben Jonson, it also
was neither simmered nor steamed, but baked
in the sun on the heated rocks, I’d say three minutes
in the way we keep time in this era and since I
“obtained” it in 1970 it had to be
the grandson, and the poets were late Ming
and one of them wrote about the swarm of flies
on his sick horse and what the smell of blood was
and one of them wrote about his pauvre hut in the mountains
as if it were still early T’ang but what the hell,
a hut is a hut be it this be it that
and self-pity in terms of the geese coming north
is the same both here and there, the egg on the outside
was perfect though I’m a little nervosa
of what I’d find inside so I tossed it
from hand to hand stopping once or twice
to read and reread the certificate
of priceless possession and how I could reduce
the value to zero by just two gulps,
or a few nibbles at the parameters;
ah, one of them wrote of his life
wasted on Weights and Measures and how his shoes
were ruined by the time he got home for he couldn’t carry
them swinging from side to side
while he walked barefoot the thousand miles
for he was too old and soft and had a wattle
under his chin—he’d have to stop
dozens of times,
and consider that though the Manchu regime was coming,
in Europe it was no better
though since it was almost June he still could be saved
by the tragic solitary dark red iris
forcing its way again through the dense green hedges.
Loneliness
Nothing by or for itself, the sound of
eggs hard-boiling in the hot water
echoed by the heavy rain that pours
down the broken spout, the cowardly lion’s
roar answered by the moos of the buffalo
the bloody mouth of the one
by the sharp and polished horns of the other,
even Nelson Eddy
could hear someone else singing in his bathtub
the songs from his dumb movies
though when I once drove up the vertical highway
in Colorado to visit Elaine the Gnostic
and take her to the stone mountain
where her husband fell
we drove back without talking
though she touched my knee in gratitude and when
we reached the very top there were no trees
only flowers grew there
accompanied by nothing
the name of which was loneliness
which Shelley the poet himself suffered from
among his beleaguered women
you’ll die remembering.
Hamlet Naked
It was a theater west on 47th
that smelled inside of urine
both upstairs and down,
you wouldn’t believe it
but it was Hamlet naked, not Lear, not love
next door to where ten or so men
were facing the walls and swaying
in what was called a bookstore
across the street from Nedick’s, orange soda and hot dogs
for which I’ll say just this
that some could bend their knees while swaying
and move their lips
and shut their books with a loud amen.
When I walked east past Broadway
I hesitated too long and by this act
I had to press the button twice to change
the red to green, for I was in a fog,
and someone should light a bonfire
since I could walk wherever I wanted then
and didn’t know north from south or east from west
nor was it Papp his Hamlet circa
1968 nor Dante naked nor Faust,
it was instead your normal lewdness
posing in a halfhearted way as art.
I was ironic then as I am now
but my head was too far down as if I were looking
for nickels, though anything less than a quarter
I wouldn’t disgrace myself.
Maybe I was looking at the metal doors
open to let the light down into the cellar,
Gregory Corso playing the harmonica,
Diana Trilling with a toy cello,
both I saw one day on Avenue A
among the bags of rice and the boxes of lettuce,
the old Ukrainian restaurant which this late date
could be an expensive Armenian or Ethiopian,
diners sucking it up with chunks of bread
for there is nothing but improvement now
among the lettered streets, and there was a learned
couple with a five-year-old, all three had
matching neckties—I want to wear one
when I go into the cellar, I want to be
arrested for causing havoc, especially when a
crowd gathers around the opening—
in New York a crowd can form in a second, think
of Gregory, a blue jay on his head,
think of Diana seeing a live rat,
think of me lying on the gunnysacks
my left arm up
conducting.
Fall 1960
Castro himself—you won’t believe it—ate Wheaties
for breakfast at his hotel in Harlem
I remember it was the Theresa and they
cooked chickens in the kitchen they brought over
from Cuba for they were afraid John Foster Dulles
or his brother Allen Dulles might poison them
and Khrushchev took off his heavy black shoe and turned on
the radio at 4:45 to hear the
latest adventure of Jack Armstrong, the All-
American Boy and I even stopped
kissing my close friend’s wife while he was in the bathtub
soaking, drunk and singing songs from the islands
>
off Messina, he who worked for the Quakers
and was fired for drinking and singing, though soaking
was acceptable, here is the song:
We the Piper Hudson High boys
show them how we stand,
never tired of Wheaties,
the best food in the land
so won’t you try Wheaties
the best breakfast food in the land.
Skylark
That’s my suit Johnny Mercer is wearing,
the buttonhole at top visible through the lapel,
the jacket loose the hands falling
naturally in the trouser pockets,
the look required one of disdain what you’d call
arrogance for want of a better word,
a joke Hoagy Carmichael told him
still in his smile, the words to “Skylark”
in his inside breast coat pocket,
honeysuckle everywhere, everywhere,
the main lie of the thirties and forties, the last
century, the one I was born in.
The Other
I woke up determined to turn everything
upside down, to convert music to protest
and protest to song,
always struggling against the Other
and there was a baby robin on the ground
screaming just to unnerve me and—
more—there was its mother in the Japanese
maple half-scolding, half-beseeching,
all this to bring me to my knees
to unhold myself from the screwed-in two-by-four
where I was doing one leg at a time to strengthen
my back and stomach muscles and I discovered
again the Other could be the mother or the
baby, or even the tree itself.
New Poems
The Camargue
The rain came down for hours
unlike the fitful showers of eastern America
under the awnings and the doorways waiting;
the hail was the size of hardballs
denting the roof of our rented Renault,
the size of softballs, the size of mushballs,
the size of small white horses running through
the lavender, their bodies soaked, screaming
eagles the size of lead quarters,
the New York Times the only rain hat I ever had:
you fold and crease it, it’s worth three dollars, four dollars,
nobody wears a newspaper hat now
everyone wore a newspaper hat then.
Blessed as We Were Page 13
