At closing time once, she kept talking to a man
when I was trying to catch her attention to leave.
It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines
and black masses and black hydrants filled
with black water. When the lights came on
you could see all kinds of intentions in the air.
I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass,
but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife
and I took out his guts and I said, “Here they are,
motherfucker, nigger, here they are.”
There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on.
At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me
from the end of the world where I saw her standing,
and the way the sacred light played across her face
all I can tell you is I had to be a diamond
of ice to manage. Right down the middle from beginning to end
my life pours into one ocean: into this prison
with its empty ballfield and its empty
preparations for Never Happen.
If she ever comes to visit me, to hell with her,
I won’t talk to her, and my son can entertain
himself. God kill them both. I’m sorry for nothing.
I’m just an alien from another planet.
I am not happy. Disappointment
lights its stupid fire in my heart,
but two days a week I staff
the Max Security laundry above the world
on the seventh level, looking at two long roads
out there that go to a couple of towns.
Young girls accelerating through the intersection
make me want to live forever,
they make me think of the grand things,
of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies.
Sometimes I stand against the window for hours
tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal
meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body.
Jesus Christ, your doors close and open,
you touch the maniac drifters, the fireaters,
I could say a million things about you
and never get that silence out of time
that happens when the blank muscle hangs
between its beats—that is what I mean
by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth,
where nothing bad has happened.
I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told
when you will come to save us. I have written
several poems and several hymns, and one
has been performed on the religious
ultrahigh frequency station. And it goes like this.
The Skewbald Horse
I wish to tell about a time
That’s gone,
When I looked at the wheat and thought it was the sea.
I rode to town. The light was gold. I heard them
Speak of the future—around them the dogs dreamed.
It was Sunday, and in our town
The church bells then were so arranged
As to play “Amazing Grace” upon the drugged
Air and clenched hearts of August. And all the time
The wheat in its inlets of honey
Perished and replaced itself imperceptibly
And the horses swam slowly through the fields.
I breathed something thick and terrible
Riding home toward the falling sun, a wild
Musical heat of sorrow and youth that made
A great strength up and down me. I
Was desire—what lived in the sad, slow
Thighs of young girls the dull breeze
Pressed their aprons to embrace? The same
Pitchblende dying between mine? Whatever
It was, I believed it whirled the Earth,
In faith and troth, whatever it was—
Mingling of phosphor and lodestone
Drawn through our hearts—caught fire,
And didn’t it ride the horse and me, but we
Rode through it also? All
Were in town: I stood in the house of my birth,
In the silence of its sun-struck rooms,
The only house to have known my cries,
The only house to have witnessed these beginnings,
And thought, How far from home!
Whatever it was, I took to sea
To drown it—but it was only
The downslope of eighteen hundred forty-seven,
The dead-flowery twilight of my nineteenth summer—
And it set me adrift. The sea
Was not the sea. It was a gray, austere dumb land
Of messages without a word,
Tumbling its seed, holding out its hands
Around our senseless faiths, the faiths that placed us
In this chasm between the torn hopes
Behind us and the hopes, fragile as cobwebs, on the other shore.
Watch on and watch off, in the green illumination
Froth cast unreasonably out of dark water, I sighted
Our lesser selves ever attending our passage,
The demons, the criminals, the fools
We demonically, criminally, foolishly believed
Lay back of us: it wasn’t to ferry cargo but to create
Jetsam that we’d put ourselves in danger.
And when we’d arrived, whatever it was—
The time, it was the time—
Drove me to cheat my brothers, to search
The purses of my mates while the merchant
S.S. John Adams slept in St. George’s Channel,
To forge my name to the bill of lading,
To steal my captain’s skewbald quarter stallion
And strike across the Irish countryside.
Our fourth day in that country
Brought us to the thick of Kildare County,
A Yankee sailor on a stolen quarter horse,
The sailor in rags and waving a bill of lading
For a hold of goods, the horse consumed
And starved and marked such as no Irishman
Could remember—skewbald, he’d be named
In Boston, where our captain
Had traded for him before I stole him—
And the several tribes
Gathered for a festive day of races laughed
Inside their whiskers at this creature and scraped bare
Their birthrights to wager against him.
Their eyes like sapphires strewn in the sun,
Their purses sighing and crying along their bellies,
The spittle doing a jig along the strands
Of their old beards: the men
Of the large-boned clans had black hair
That came up out of the throats
Of their shirts and ate their faces,
While the little fellows like me were of a blonder
More shall we say humanified strain of farmer,
But all were truly horsemen—never having to touch
Their animals but always smelling just like them,
Telling a horse’s life and death in a hoof,
Everyone wagering with a loud word
On some half-extinguished, half-Highlands nag
Raised by the spoon-to-mouth from an ugly
Head parting her mother’s hindquarters.
And drunk! These people sweated
Into their saddles a stench of barley liquor
That felled the bugs of summer coming near,
And fed, as well, two quarts of thick brown beer
To their favored stallions in the morning trough.
Now they whacked their kegs, and yodeled around
Amongst themselves incomprehensibly,
Looking at me with mingled pity and greed,
Cracking also the tubs of white
Butter and
slapping fistfuls onto bread for me,
For I was their bread and butter now, and entitled.
I’d judge their fervid offerings had made me heavy
By three pounds more by the time the charge
Of musket shot exploded into the still
Moment above our horses’ heads, and the last
Kildare County Cup broke from the gate.
Was there ever a race where any rider but had
One chance, no time, and everything to lose?
I see how our tears wash none of it away,
How our cries call back no one into our arms,
But I’ve learned that whenever at last the sobbing breaks
From my chest into the sound of weeping, my cross breaks;
The river of grief carries itself away,
Laying down its rude memento of ash—such stories
As I tell about that afternoon
In a strange country in a young time,
And such, no doubt, as others tell
Considerably otherwise, of an iron
Afternoon when a villain flogged a county
Of its heart’s savings, and the songs
That claim I raced him all over England and Spain,
The songs that give him a silver bridle,
A mane of gold, a saddle beyond worth,
And the songs sung of a gigantic wager
Regretted to the core of grief—
I bet on Griselda
I bet on the bay
If I’d bet on old Stewball
I’d be a free man today—
I know
Even the bravest of that village had to sleep
In the darkness that night, I know
How the fiddles went rotten in the sacks,
I know the revelry blackened and trickled away
Before any of the candles could be lit,
But I gained. I gained a great amount. I gained
The sums and worthy items they had placed
Against my ridiculous skewbald horse—an amount
Exactly measured to my daring and their greed,
And I say it though it takes from my modesty
And lends them sympathy, because it’s true.
Oh, I was a bold crossroader and they were all monkeys
The day I drove the fastest horse in Ireland,
And as I came not the width
Of a finger from the smear of their faces along the rail,
The flayed mounts bellowing toward the line,
The light in the atmospheric dust like light
Going down to the springs of the sea,
I saw, as if the world had ceased in front of them,
The blind eyes made of tears
In the face of a lad who’d wagered everything:
Things not belonging to him, things that could never be replaced,
That his mother cherished and his father
Had worked away his hands to keep—all
Just memories turning to stone as I clipped past
Like a razor through the dreams of an Irish village.
And I thought then
That if God made pain it so repented Him
He climbed the Cross and drank it to the last
Nail in the cup and ate the bloody dregs
In vain, for we go on hurting.
But why should he have wept to lose his wealth
Or I to have laughed, holding it in my hands?—when
It was nothing
Next to what held us, and lay before us,
What couldn’t be won or lost, but only spent;
More than a feeling, less than a thing: a fact,
A murky element, a medium, a sea
Of fadeless dew upon the leaf
Of the mind—
Time! Time that gives everything but itself,
Time that steals everything but the heart—
It caught in the throat
To see it light down all around us like a young girl’s dress,
And we were the mystery underneath it:
Oh, it was summer! But it was dusk.
The Basement
Last night I dreamed
I was chased by wolves
through the snow,
and though they were gaining,
I was running,
but when I woke up
I did not have the use
of my legs. More
than my parents
I love to raise my hands
to my face and feel them
against my eyes.
When I woke
from the nightmare
of running, I was afraid
that sitting up in bed
might be a dream
and the light from the street
a dream in blindness
and the dark room a dream
in an iron lung.
After I was hurt
the nurse took me down
to the basement
to see it. It looked
like a gigantic oven,
and they were baking
all but the head,
and so that he would know
who I was, she shouted
in his ear, Ernest, Ernest,
here’s a little boy
who will never walk again.
The Monk’s Insomnia
The monastery is quiet. Seconal
drifts down upon it from the moon.
I can see the lights
of the city I came from,
can remember how a boy sets out
like something thrown from the furnace
of a star. In the conflagration of memory
my people sit on green benches in the park,
terrified, evil, broken by love—
to sit with them inside that invisible fire
of hours day after day while the shadow of the milk
billboard crawled across the street
seemed impossible, but how
was it different from here,
where they have one day they play over
and over as if they think
it is our favorite, and we stay
for our natural lives,
a phrase that conjures up the sun’s
dark ash adrift after ten billion years
of unconsolable burning? Brother Thomas’s
schoolgirl obsession with the cheap
doings of TV starlets breaks
everybody’s heart, and the yellow sap
of one particular race of cactus grows
tragic for the fascination in which
it imprisons Brother Toby—I can’t witness
his slavering and relating how it can be changed
into some unprecedented kind of plastic—
and the monastery refuses
to say where it is taking us. At night
we hear the trainers from the base
down there, and see them blotting out the stars,
and I stand on the hill and listen, bone-white with desire.
It was love that sent me on the journey,
love that called me home. But it’s the terror
of being just one person—one chance, one set of days—
that keeps me absolutely still tonight and makes me listen
intently to those young men above us
flying in their airplanes in the dark.
Man Walking to Work
The dawn is a quality laid across
the freeway like the visible
memory of the ocean that kept all this
a secret for a hundred million years.
I am not moving and I am not standing still.
I am only something the wind strikes and clears,
and I feel myself fade like the sky,
the whole of Ohio a mirror gone blank.
My jacket keeps me. My zipper
bangs on my guitar. Lord God help me
out by the lake after the shift at Frigidaire
when I stop laughing and taste how wet the beer
is in my mouth, suddenly recognizing the true
wedding of passage and arrival I am invited to.
TWO
The Veil
When the tide lay under the clouds
of an afternoon and gave them back to themselves
oilier a little and filled with anonymous boats,
I used to sit and drink at the very edge of it,
where light passed through the liquids in the glasses
and threw itself on the white drapes
of the tables, resting there like clarity
itself, you might think,
right where you could put a hand to it.
As drink gave way to drink, the slow
unfathomable voices of luncheon made
a window of ultraviolet light in the mind,
through which one at last saw the skeleton
of everything, stripped of any sense or consequence,
freed of geography and absolutely devoid
of charm; and in this originating
brightness you might see
somebody putting a napkin against his lips
or placing a blazing credit card on a plastic tray
and you’d know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say.
Gray Day in Miami
Our love has been.
I see the rain.
Nothing
is abstract any more:
I nearly expect one of these
droplets loose tonight on the avenues of wind
to identify itself as my life.
Now love is not a feeling
like wrath or sadness, but an act
like murdering the stars.
And now the limp suits
drying out on the railings of hotels,
and the sorrows
drifting like perfume,
and telephones ringing in the darkness
and milk
tears shining on rouged cheeks.
While nearby
sighs the sea like God, the sea of breath, the resolute
gull ocean trembling its boats.
The Other Age
A petal dripping off a dead flower, dew on the benches, a dead shoe.
They’ve got to hate whoever did it and leave town.
They’ve got to find the red issue of the magazine.
They’ve got to place their hands on it so the bones shine through.
They’ve got to admit it’s the window of Hell.
They’ve got to put their lips down and inhale its nicotine.
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Page 9
