Blessed as We Were

by Blessed as We Were (retail) (epub)

  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.