It used to be life fell apart every
so often, every year or two, now every morning.
Can you imagine? Once they were professors.
They told who danced and who needed pity.
They had skin. They didn’t have ropes
of muscle for a face. But the dot became a tunnel,
the tunnel a journey, the journey a reason and a life.
We must start to forgive and not stop
for a single minute, maybe not even to love.
We must look down
out of this age spent telling stories
about each tree, each rock, each
person who is a bird, or a fish, or walks in their fur,
and see our brothers and sisters.
There is no such thing as danger,
no such thing as a false move,
but they are afraid;
the stores have everything
and everything salutes
its own reflection—shiny, shiny
life that we call
shelf life,
but they are afraid;
the eight-ball is a meatball in whiskey heaven; the motorcycles
stand out front in the sun like spears,
and they are afraid.
Killed in the War I Didn’t Go To
I have seen you walking out
of blue smoke…
like dreamed streetlights,
like parlor fans
in a dream, the palm trees burn…
and seen you favored by a wet wind
oh where was it, in Ben Suc, a village that is no more,
and I have seen you
halfway there, bandaged,
reaching a fingertip toward a cigaret,
ambushed by the NVA
at the battle of LZ X-ray,
bent and weeping over your failures
or floating like an advertisement
in a hole of praise
or holding your ears and turning away from the lion
flying out of a mortar,
and on the outskirts of town I’ve seen a man
standing at the door of the very last house…
He won’t get
there in time. Time will get there in him.
Whatever discovery he is about to make,
something about sorrow and loneliness it would stand
to reason, about how our necks
burn fiercely because we keep stepping on our chains,
he goes on
to make it.
He goes on
to see it arriving on the steel point of the moment
and see it passing with the ponderous
drift of roulette,
he goes on to see what
a translucence, only a foretelling,
is something as stationary as a house…
I have slept, and dreamed all the things you might have done,
I have gone out walking,
abysmally sad and utterly alone
because these lives aren’t like the lives in movies
and nothing is expressed—nothing’s pressed out,
I tell you!—of our wordless darkness in our art,
have walked with the crickets singing
and the faucets going on and off and the telephones ringing
in the mysterious houses,
and I’ve gone on
past the tracks and the sheds and the wharf
to the place with the waitress and the empty heads
and a few late truckers at the counter like piled stones,
and I’ve shouted for you and thought
how like your name this house is
with me outside of it and nobody talking
and pollen all over my hands
and fishes in my eyes and my feet moving through the world.
The Heavens
From mind to mind
I am acquainted with the struggles
of these stars. The very same
chemistry wages itself minutely
in my person.
It is all one intolerable war.
I don’t care if we’re fugitives,
we are ceaselessly exalted, rising
like the drowned out of our shirts…
Street Scene
Everything is water:
the pigeon trying to work his mutilated
wing; the crowd that draws a brand of peace
from his circular dance before the theater;
the woman in an aluminum hat who rises
out of the sidewalk on an elevator softly
through metal doors that part above her like water—
telling myself that no one can walk on the water,
nobody can take these little ones softly
enough against his chest. The flood rises
and the pigeon shows us how to die before the theater,
where terror is only the aftermath of peace
full of sharks, the mutilated
surface over the falling deep, only water.
The Spectacle
In every house
a cigaret burns,
an ash descends.
In the ludicrous breeze
of an electric fan
the papers talk,
and little vague
things float over
the floor. When
you turn the TV
on it says, “Killed
by FBI sharpshooters,”
it says, “Years he was with
the organization.”
I have a friend
on the fourth tier
of a parking ramp.
To one ear he holds
a revolver, to the
other a telephone. TV
cameras move
this way and that way
on the neighboring roofs.
We all know this guy,
he’s one of us,
you can see him
changing his position
slowly on the news.
When you turn the TV on
it says, “Everything I owned,
all I loved, in 1947,”
then there’s a preacher
saying that on the bluffs
of Hell the shadows
are terrible—there
when a spirit turns
from the firelight
he sees the shadow
of a man murdering
another man, and knows
the shadow is his.
We’re all waiting
for our friend’s
head to explode.
We must go down
to see him plainly,
stand still on the street
knowing his name
as the heat peels a film
from our eyes and
we see, finally,
the colors of neon,
the fluorescence
of gas stations ticking
like lightning,
the pools of light,
the sirens moving
through water,
everything
locked in a kind
of amber. But we
who appear to have
escaped from a fire
are still burning.
When the cameras turn
to look at us
we feel so invisible,
we do not feel seen,
calling him home
with a star
in every voice,
calling his name,
stranger,
oh! stranger.
Someone They Aren’t
Of all the movies that have made me sweat
The ones that make me most uncomfortable
Are those in which a terrible fool pretends to be
Someone they aren’t—
A man, a woman, a gentile, a cop, dog, mannequin, tree.
Of all the movies that have made me uncomfortable—
All th
ose with cliffs; with triggers; with creeping gauges and
Sand that slowly covers up the fingers; fog
That binds and makes even of standing
Still a rending and departure; and slow, blown tracers—
Those that have really made me sweat are the ones
The professors are moving past, and looking in, and seeing
The dark shells of heads,
And above them,
Where our dreams and the smoke
Of our thinking,
Where our sighs and untended and escaping
Souls must be drifting,
The beam of projection like something
We are in the jaws of.
And the professors
Go by, pointing at this one or that one.
They pick out the dancer and tell her she can’t dance,
They explain the rules to the poet and dismiss him,
They drag the clerk out under the fluorescent light,
They put numerals on the storekeeper’s fingertips,
They read the TV Guide to the mothers and fathers
And lay wounds upon the sons and chasms beside the daughters.
This is the kind of movie that drives me crazy,
The movies through which the professors move,
Face-owners, eyes of lichen, impossible to impress, dead inside,
Looking for somebody they can trust again,
Someone to make them feel betrayed one more time.
The Words of a Toast
The man wants to make love to the crippled man’s sister
because he loves the crippled man.
The man cries
beside the bed of the man who cannot breathe.
He stands in the parking lot, turning in the sun.
He says to the restaurant, I’m closed,
and to the sunlight, Why don’t you arrest me?
But the spring changes so thickly among the buildings, the sun
brightens so sharply on the walls,
and the air tastes so sweetly of the rightness of things—
suddenly thinking of his crippled friend: Oh, God,
you wanted water,
didn’t you? And you with only tears for a voice.
What can I do now?
What can I do for you but drink this glass of water?
Sonnets Called “On the Sacredness”
Close by the jerkwater rancheros tonight, the round
gloom longs, a window in the gloom, an attitude in the window, a pleading
in the attitude, an unwitnessed
ravishment in the pleading. A man stands there in the window
thinking about how naked the water looks,
thinking the water looks like emptiness, it looks
like nothing. His heart
aches to think how many gamblers have broke down
on this highway? How many princesses of ice?
I know I’m suburban, I’ve got a shitty whiskey in my hand,
I work a job like eating a knife…
Everyone’s sperm all over my life,
the sad waiting. Here’s to the simple and endless
desperate person lifting this glass.
If you imagine you’re at the base of a cross coming out of your chest,
that its vertical beam is a café
and its crossbeam a bar of inebriates running along the rear of the café,
that you’re in a soft booth in the vertical beam of the cross
facing a blonde over whose shoulder you happen to glance
at the instant the TV above the bar
broadcasts the unmistakable image of fate,
the Vietnamese man getting a bullet shot into his ear,
then you understand that I had to stop
eating my squid stew. I started to cry.
Susan tried to make
some gesture, baby
playing in front of the cobra’s den,
and it was enough: I was lodged in the moment, we were the treasure.
Sweet heat each breath of air,
sugar of fire, and yet
Dark said she was my date.
She told me Don’t be late.
I guess it is our fate
here in the mental hospital
of passion and forgetting
to scream inside the dream,
put back the suicide,
stand upon the corner
starkly lit by the beam
of memory from the face
of a friend amid the glass
of a toast, and wait that wait.
But I always come back to the corner of feelings and the sponge of vinegar.
What is made with the hands rises up to seize us
and press every word to its service
so that I can never look at anything that hasn’t
been talked about a thousand times already,
but I saw him screw his face up like a child in suspense
of some mischief, and they blew his brains out.
Your homework is more important than Cub Scouts.
His head jerks.
There’s a blue-and-white menu by Susan’s left hand.
He collapses as if full of sand.
You’d better settle down and eat.
At the next table before his mother
the boy in the Cub Scout uniform settles down and eats.
The Prayers of the Insane
The crocuses are all closed up; the spring is cold;
I read about prayer and think about prayer; however,
yesterday when I put my head down I found myself
inhabiting so completely a past
that never happened, that when I looked up out of it
I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it, it
might have been a symbol for my life, this moment
I’d entirely let slip—a steep hill, a road among pines,
no mist, but blurred hints of it in each breath,
no sun, but light everywhere, no shadows, because this is the shadow.
I want to go home from this place
to the beach that is only itself, not sand—
“My mother held me up so my father could beat me,
I was three years old, naked—by the ankles—I prayed,
I fashioned some idea of a Great Power in that instant,
and in that instant my personality was fashioned.
I was under a lot of pressure when I set the fire.
In the State Hospital I prayed that one of the patients
would attack a doctor so that I could illustrate
my intentions by a good deed. My prayer
was brought true on the forty-seventh day of my suffering.
Since then I’ve been moved here. My case
is beginning to look better and better
as I enter the twenty-seventh month of my ordeal.”
The Discalced Carmelites of Sedona, Arizona, warn
that we must not hope to return alive from prayer.
On the streets our heads come along like black and white dice
and our faces are fives.
I bow my head to pray, and they are what I see.
All-Night Diners
At another table, some South Americans are singing,
Detectives are moving across my sight.
I am without humility tonight.
What is my fate, what is my fate, what is my fate?
We’re not in this disreputable hotel:
The disreputable hotels are in us,
And we inhabit a hole in the light.
What is my fate, what is my fate, what is my fate?
Their countries are being torn apart,
and yet some of them may be here for the chess tournament.
Oh yes, the world is sick of itself, sitting in its car,
but after the awful rejection I suffered by you
it was night.
A chilly wind was taking
&
nbsp; small sticks and the like down the block
and worrying the signs. The street I walked was lifeless
but for three or four silent
figures moving in their white judo suits
toward The Center for Martial Arts…
Think of the flayed visage of our era,
the assassinated fathers, the naked hooks of
glances and the slithering
insinuations of our music,
and all our friends who have traveled so far to meet
their anagammaglobulinaemic, jail,
monsoon, AK-47 fates
in ways and places that sound
French—laceration,
heroin, Khe Sanh…
Later I was nearly killed
by a firetruck coming around a corner
filled with men completely decked out for fighting blazes.
There wasn’t any siren. There was a radio playing
In the jungle
The mighty jungle
The lion sleeps tonight
and they were all singing along, a dozen
ghosts
on a ghostly ship, steering
God knows where, what kind of fire—
I’m trying to explain how these islands of meaningless joy
or the loss of someone close to me, like you,
can make the tragedy of a whole age insignificant.
The local priest has swept the cross from his wall
and hung a large print of Edward Hopper’s
Nighthawks, wherein the figures stall
as if somebody has told a joke
the three of them have just finished laughing at
or made one of those comments that says it all
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Page 10
