but not so very much
poetry.
the state of world affairs
from a 3rd floor window
I am watching a girl dressed in a
light green sweater, blue shorts, long black stockings;
there is a necklace of some sort
but her breasts are small, poor thing,
and she watches her nails
as her dirty white dog sniffs the grass
in erratic circles;
a pigeon is there too, circling,
half dead with a tick of a brain
and I am upstairs in my underwear,
3 day beard, pouring a beer and waiting
for something literary or symphonic to happen;
but they keep circling, circling, and a thin old man
in his last winter rolls by pushed by a girl
in a catholic school dress;
somewhere there are the Alps, and ships
are now crossing the sea;
there are piles and piles of H- and A-bombs,
enough to blow up fifty worlds and Mars thrown in,
but they keep circling,
the girl shifts buttocks,
and the Hollywood Hills stand there, stand there
full of drunks and insane people and
much kissing in automobiles,
but it’s no good: che sera, sera:
her dirty white dog simply will not shit,
and with a last look at her nails
she, with much whirling of buttocks
walks to her downstairs court
trailed by her constipated dog (simply not worried),
leaving me looking at a most unsymphonic pigeon.
well, from the looks of things, relax:
the bombs will never go off.
for marilyn m.
slipping keenly into bright ashes,
target of vanilla tears
your sure body lit candles for men
on dark nights,
and now your night is darker
than the candle’s reach
and we will forget you, somewhat,
and it is not kind
but real bodies are nearer
and as the worms pant for your bones,
I would so like to tell you
that this happens to bears and elephants
to tyrants and heroes and ants
and frogs,
still, you brought us something,
some type of small victory,
and for this I say: good
and let us grieve no more;
like a flower dried and thrown away,
we forget, we remember,
we wait. child, child, child,
I raise my drink a full minute
and smile.
the life of borodin
the next time you listen to Borodin
remember he was just a chemist
who wrote music to relax;
his house was jammed with peor e:
students, artists, drunkards, bur s,
and he never knew how to say: no.
the next time you listen to Borodin
remember his wife used his compositions
to line the cat boxes with
or to cover jars of sour milk;
she had asthma and insomnia
and fed him soft-boiled eggs
and when he wanted to cover his head
to shut out the sounds of the house
she only allowed him to use the sheet;
besides there was usually somebody
in his bed
(they slept separately when they slept
at all)
and since all the chairs
were usually taken
he often slept on the stairway
wrapped in an old shawl;
she told him when to cut his nails,
not to sing or whistle
or put too much lemon in his tea
or press it with a spoon;
Symphony #2, in B Minor
Prince Igor
On the Steppes of Central Asia
he could sleep only by putting a piece
of dark cloth over his eyes;
in 1887 he attended a dance
at the Medical Academy
dressed in a merrymaking national costume;
at last he seemed exceptionally gay
and when he fell to the floor,
they thought he was clowning.
the next time you listen to Borodin,
remember…
no charge
this babe in the grandstand
with dyed red hair
kept leaning her breasts against me
and talking about Gardena
poker parlors
but I blew smoke into
her face
and told her about a Van Gogh
exhibition
I’d seen up on the hill
and that night
when I took her home
she said
Big Red was the best horse
she’d ever seen—
until I stripped down. Though I
think on the Van Gogh thing
they charged
50 cents.
a literary romance
I met her somehow through correspondence or poetry or magazines
and she began sending me very sexy poems about rape and lust,
and this being mixed in with a minor intellectualism
confused me somewhat and I got in my car and drove North
through the mountains and valleys and freeways
without sleep, coming off a drunk, just divorced,
jobless, aging, tired, wanting mostly to sleep
for five or ten years, I finally found the motel
in a small sunny town by a dirt road,
and I sat there smoking a cigarette
thinking, you must really be insane,
and then I got out an hour late
to meet my date; she was pretty damned old,
almost as old as I, not very sexy
and she gave me a very hard raw apple
which I chewed on with my remaining teeth;
she was dying of some unnamed disease
something like asthma, and she said,
I want to tell you a secret, and I said,
I know: you are a virgin, 35 years old.
and she got out a notebook, ten or twelve poems:
a life’s work and I had to read them
and I tried to be kind
but they were very bad.
and I took her somewhere, the boxing matches,
and she coughed in the smoke
and kept looking around and around
at all the people
and then at the fighters
clenching her hands.
you never get excited, do you? she asked.
but I got pretty excited in the hills that night,
and met her three or four more times
helped her with some of her poems
and she rammed her tongue halfway down my throat
but when I left her
she was still a virgin
and a very bad poetess.
I think that when a woman has kept her legs closed
for 35 years
it’s too late
either for love
or for
poetry.
the twins
he hinted at times that I was a bastard and I told him to listen
to Brahms, and I told him to learn to paint and drink and not be
dominated by women and dollars
but he screamed at me, For Christ’s Sake remember your mother,
remember your country,
you’ll kill us all!…
I move through my father’s house (on which he owed $8,000 after 20
years on the same job) and look at his dead shoes
the way his feet curled the leather, as if he was angrily plan
ting roses,
and he was, and I look at his dead cigarette, his last cigarette
and the last bed he slept in that night, and I feel I should remake it
but I can’t, for a father is always your master even when he’s gone;
I guess these things have happened time and again but I can’t help
thinking
to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o’clock in the morning
while other people are frying eggs
is not so rough
unless it happens to you.
I go outside and pick an orange and peel back the bright skin;
things are still living: the grass is growing quite well,
the sun sends down its rays circled by a Russian satellite,
a dog barks senselessly somewhere, the neighbors peek behind blinds.
I am a stranger here, and have been (I suppose) somewhat the rogue,
and I have no doubt he painted me quite well (the old boy and I
fought like mountain lions) and they say he left it all to some woman
in Duarte but I don’t give a damn—she can have it: he was my old
man
and he died.
inside, I try on a light blue suit
much better than anything I have ever worn
and I flap the arms like a scarecrow in the wind
but it’s no good:
I can’t keep him alive
no matter how much we hated each other.
we looked exactly alike, we could have been twins
the old man and I: that’s what they
said. he had his bulbs on the screen
ready for planting
while I was lying with a whore from 3rd street.
very well. grant us this moment: standing before a mirror
in my dead father’s suit
waiting also
to die.
the day it rained
at the los angeles
county museum
the jew bent over and
died. 99 machine guns
were shipped to France. somebody won the 3rd race
while I inspected
the propeller of an old monoplane
a man came by with a patch over his eye. it began to
rain, it rained and it rained and the ambulances ran
together
in the streets, and although
everything was properly dull
I enjoyed the moment
like the time in New Orleans
living on candy bars
and watching the pigeons
in a back alley with a French name
as behind me the river became
a gulf
and the clouds moved sickly through
a sky that had died
about the time Caesar was knifed,
and I promised myself then
that someday I’d remember it
as it was.
a man came by and coughed.
think it’ll stop raining? he said.
I didn’t answer. I touched the
old propeller and listened to the
ants on the roof rushing over
the edge of the world, go away, I said,
go away or I’ll call
the guard.
2 p.m. beer
nothing matters
but flopping on a mattress
with cheap dreams and a beer
as the leaves die and the horses die
and the landladies stare in the halls;
brisk the music of pulled shades,
a last man’s cave
in an eternity of swarm
and explosion;
nothing but the dripping sink,
the empty bottle,
euphoria,
youth fenced in,
stabbed and shaven,
taught words
propped up
to die.
hooray say the roses
hooray say the roses, today is blamesday
and we are red as blood.
hooray say the roses, today is Wednesday
and we bloom where soldiers fell,
and lovers too,
and the snake ate the word.
hooray say the roses, darkness comes
all at once, like lights gone out,
the sun leaves dark continents
and rows of stone.
hooray say the roses, cannons and spires,
birds, bees, bombers, today is Friday
the hand holding a medal out the window,
a moth going by, half a mile an hour,
hooray hooray
hooray say the roses
we wave empires on our stems,
the sun moves the mouth:
hooray hooray hooray
and that is why you like us.
the sunday artist
I have been painting these last two Sundays;
it’s not much, you’re correct,
but in this tournament great dreams break:
history removes her dress and becomes a harlot,
and I have awakened in the morning
to see eagles flapping their wings like shades;
I have met Montaigne and Phidias
in the flames of my wastebasket,
I have met barbarians on the streets
their heads rocking with rodents;
I have seen wicked infants in blue tubs
wanting stems as beautiful as flowers,
and I have seen the barfly sick
over his last dead penny;
I have heard Domenico Theotocopoulos
on nights of frost, cough in his grave;
and God, no taller than a landlady,
hair dyed red, has asked me the time;
I have seen grey grass of lovers in my mirror
while lighting a cigarette to a maniac’s applause;
Cadillacs have crawled my walls like roaches,
goldfish whirl my bowl, hand-tamed tigers;
yes, I have been painting these Sundays—
the grey mill, the new rebel; it’s terrible really:
I must ram my fist through cleanser and chlorine,
through Andernach and apples and acid,
but, then, I really should tell you that I have a
woman around mixing waffle flour and singing,
and the paint sticks to my plan like candy.
old poet
I would, of course, prefer to be with the fox in the ferns
instead of with a photograph of an old Spad in my pocket
to the sound of the anvil chorus and legs legs legs
girls kicking high, showing everything but the pisser,
but I might as well be dead right now
everywhere the ill wind blows
and Keats is dead
and I am dying too.
for there is nothing as crappy dissolute
as an old poet gone sour
in body and mind
and luck, the horses running nothing but out,
the Vegas dice cancer to the thin green wallet,
Shostakovich heard too often
and cans of beer sucked through a straw,
with mouth and mind broken in
young men’s alleys.
in the hot noon window
I swing and miss a razzing fly,
and ho, I fall heavy as thunder
but downstairs they’ll understand:
he’s either drunk or dying,
an old poet nodding vaguely in halls,
cracking his stick across the backs
of innocent dogs
and spitting out
what’s left of his sun.
the mailman has some little thing for him
which he takes to his room
and opens like a rose,
only to scream loudly and vainly,
and his coffin is filled
with notes from hell.
but
in the morning you’ll see him
packing off little envelopes,
still worried about
rent
cigarettes
wine
women
horses,
still worried about
Eric Coates, Beethoven’s 3rd and
something Chicago has held for three months
and his paper bag of wine
and Pall Malls.
42 in August, 42,
the rats walking his brain
eating up the thoughts before they
can make the keys.
old poets are as bad as old queers:
there’s something quite unacceptable:
the editors wish to thank you for
submitting but
regret…
down
down
down
the dark hall
into a womanless hall
to peel a last egg
and sit down to the keys:
click click a click,
over the television sounds
over the sounds of springs,
click clack a clack:
another old poet
going off.
the race
it is like this
when you slip down,
done like a wound-up victrola
(you remember those?)
and you go downtown
and watch the boys punch
but the big blondes sit with
someone else
and you’ve aged like a punk in a movie:
cigar in skull, fat gut,
but only no money,
no wiseness of way, no worldliness,
but as usual
most of the fights are bad,
and afterwards
back in the parking lot
you sit and watch them go,
light the last cigar,
and then start the old car,
old car, not so young man
going down the street
stopped by a red light
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame Page 2
