for the moment. But the guy with his back
turned to you isn’t laughing. He’s got some
losing proposition, got it as palpably as the tall
redhead has her matchbook, or the soda jerk
his generous monopoly on the warm
coffee and the light,
so that you have to come back to yourself in the dark
street where that proposition lives, where nothing shows
but a vague cash register in one of the windows,
and all the way home
flowers look out of their vases at you
while aspirins dissolve amid the flowers.
And beyond them, beyond the faces of their houses all
got up for a masque,
they’re sleeping two by two,
igniting the rooms
with their breaths and sighs,
holding one another closer,
tears on their pillows that this life
can be shared but not this survival.
Behind Our House
The cedar mapped with water and hung with rain
has whatever a cedar might want,
a sky higher and a soil
deeper than a cedar’s reaching,
but wants nothing.
My neighbor walks crippled, with half a head left,
toward the flag and boxes and machines
of the Post Office, having tried
once to shoot himself, and, having lived,
mails a letter.
Stove
at my back, warm me.
Rain on the harbor, tell me.
Dark on the day, know me.
Dark on the day, see me.
Dark on the day, help me.
Traveling
When I was waiting for a haircut at Joe’s
the man in the chair said, “Hey, do you know
Tony? Lives right up the hill from me?” and Joe
said, “Sure. Sure I know Tony. How long Tony
live up the hill from you?” The man said, “He been living
there about fifteen years I guess it must be.” “Been living
there about fifteen years, huh?” Joe said. “Yeah,
right up the hill from me. And you know what? Funniest thing,
the guy’s dif! Dif!” “Dif?” said Joe. “Yah! Dif! And I been
saying hello to the guy every day just about fifteen years.”
“That so,” Joe said. The man in the chair said, “Yeah!
Funniest thing! He must have good eyesight though,
because when I says hello, he says, ‘Hi!’”
“What do you know,” Joe said. Outside above the harbor,
clouds were moving freely over the sun’s face,
and the shifting illumination in the place
made it seem we were traveling. “Dif,
huh?” Joe said, and the man
said, “Yah! Dif!” “Well well,” Joe said.
The man remarked, “He must have pretty good eyesight:
because he talks to you when he can’t even hear you.”
“How about that,” Joe said.
“He can’t hear a word you’re saying,” the man said.
“How about that,” Joe said. The man
in the chair said, “He can’t hear a word of nothing.”
THREE
Red Darkness
Text for Sam Messer’s Paintings,
Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 2/20/82
Endeavor is that of seeking to be understood.
I’m not a child moving through light and shadow
We hope never to experience—escalators of darkness, escalators of heroin
From the screen door as my wife speaks.
Earth begin to tremble. Jungle drums do pound.
A man brushed you, saying Excuse me,
Or Mother why do you open your legs to these strangers,
Or detained you, asking if you knew the hour
Of the love and the sea that stinks like a sewer,
The geography and pornography of your face
To have my own address, my own reasons, my own shame.
And here, in the sweet red hotel room, where I witness
As dials on a crashed instrument,
You were coming out of the nightmare, any nightmare.
What am I sad about when I go to make love to you,
That you’re not my mother?
You’re so pretty, and the slender twigs nearly
Make numbers on your skin with their shadows.
I’m mystified and frightened.
It’s religious.
If we were two strangers, two sojourners in a movie theater near a train station,
Wouldn’t we have every right to cling to one another
While legibility tried to break
Out of all the things around us?
For once it’s impossible to mistake anything
For itself: word that looks like another world,
World that looks like another word,
Earth like a heart, night like a thing.
All night the silhouettes of houses absolutely
Hopeless in the red darkness are singing fuck you:
And I have come into your life again wearing a fake beard
to sing this beautiful anthem of how sorry I am.
The moon delivering its dry ice and spiritless hygiene
Over the world…I wish I had a way
Of telling you my heart is broken without calling on
Exactly those words, but when I marshal the terms
of my situation I see only two neon skulls
And one broken heart. When will I be returning to this place
In triumph? Why doesn’t L——ditch her man
And go for me forever and dance forever in the contests
With me all across this land? God, do you love me?
God do you love me God do you love me baby?
And tonight my ultimatums are dark
Where it occurs to me our absolutely hopeless
Of the latter, and the brightness that rakes the barbed wire.
The fire that precedes me is the fire of the wish,
The geography and pornography of your face.
Help me carry what can’t be understood through the streets,
Wheel turning round and round,
Where it occurs to me our absolutely hopeless
Suggests the interstellar distances.
I’m not a child moving through light and shadow,
Long journeys into an engulfing wheat—
But I didn’t bring you here to clock you
And is its own address.
There are things we don’t ever expect to have to do, gradations in the consciousness of the self
Feelings in which all the plant life has been killed,
Darkness in which the suffering is turning red,
Money on which the faces are so lonely…
I suppose another way would be
To talk about it as if it were a fact
With which we’re all familiar,
I suppose it is a fact with which we’re all familiar,
A network of feelings, darkness, and money, a web
Of plant life and suffering and faces
Where everything is killed and red and lonely.
This is the chief integrating thing about it:
We appear to be at the mercy,
But then again it may be we have not yet come
To the mercy, that we will never arrive at the mercy.
So after I broke the cat’s neck with a shovel because it was incurable
the parking lot looked like it was memorizing me.
I thought I heard the afternoon saying just another son of a bitch,
Just another thrillseeker another
Hard-on another nightmare. The infinite
Accent falling on the self seemed
To hold out forgiv
eness in its placement of some cars
To my left and to my right a shopping cart or something I forget
what it was.
The point is, the point is I might have singled out
Anything in that landscape and said those trees are after me; but
It is the nature of the Atlantic white cedar to invade swamps:
It is not the nature of this cedar to judge me. On
The other side of the damages I saw a man
Standing where the scenes of my childhood had been torn down.
And he was carrying the next day in his hands, and he was awake.
The orthodoxy in complete innocence drifts
Into being by a perfectly legitimate insistence,
And the lonely passion and triumph of spinsters,
The quiet radios in the red teenage heart
That serenade the fields around the car,
The Hojos’ desperate percolation of java
Are part of that legitimate insistence on quality.
But when the wounded man is able to stand up
There’s a second when we don’t know whether the spear
Comes from him or violates him. Somebody
Get me a witness now cause I got the power
To crumble the orthodoxy with my happiness,
And I speak of things that only the brink of sleep
Has dared to imagine and only belief has seen.
Stake me to the cutthroat breakwater, turnkey woman honey is that
The doorbell? Or is it just a doorbell on TV?
I look in your eyes I get that
Jailing feeling in the misery of your making tofu
Instead of—but yet, the tofu has that feeling
Of failing to curdle due to overboiling
While we kissed and kissed amid the fumes and utensils.
I swear to God there are words in the air
But I can’t read them, despite
Their shadows’ being visible on our love.
I talk of stuff 20 streets away because the lights
And liver suffer in a shell. I love you and
I can’t break through, I can’t, I can’t break through
Down there where they’re trying to destroy the building.
Endeavor is that of seeking to be understood.
At sunset whiten the justice.
I am a stranger and a sojourner
And imprisoned, the former in their white…
I have visited the sick
Hospitals announcing we cannot live, while the wild glances.
More than anything, I feel I’m neither guilty nor innocent,
The one about Father why are you talking wrong.
I’m sorry about the story of your life,
I am employed or unemployed, I am a turner
Where every word of the voice of the radio
Give me a possession of a burying place.
This is the one where I change my fate
That I shall not have to suffer any change.
FOUR
In Palo Alto
Every day I have to learn more about shame
from the people in old photographs
in secondhand stores, and from the people
in the photographic studies of damage and grief,
where the light assails a window and the figure’s back
is all we see—or from the very faces
we never witness in these pictures, several of whom
I passed today in their windows, some hesitant,
some completely committed to worthlessness—
or even from my own face, handed up suddenly by the car’s
mirror or a glass door. When I was waiting
for a bus, the man beside me
showed me a picture of a naked youth
with an erection, and the loneliness
in his face as he held this photograph
was like a light waking me from the dead.
I was more ashamed of it than I was of my own
a few days later—just tonight, in fact—
when solitude visited me on a residential street
where I stopped and waited for a woman to pass
again across her unshaded window, so that
I could see her naked.
As I stood there teaching
the night what I knew about this sort of thing,
a figure with the light coming from in front
while the axioms of the world one by one disowned me,
a private and hopeless figure, probably,
somebody simply not worth the trouble of hating,
it occurred to me it was better to be like this
than to be forced to look at a picture of it
happening to someone else. I walked on.
When I got back to the streets of noises and routines,
the places full of cries of one kind or another,
the motels of experience, a fool in every room,
all the people I’ve been talking about were there.
And we told one another we ought to be ashamed.
Survivors
Yes, it slips down to this time, dissolves,
and begins as nothing else,
a tone, a depth, a movement, a falling,
a snow of looseness, a chime of arcs
that begins again as nothing else
and holds in itself some clarity of what it was
like a sound in a word and like water on a mirror.
It is itself. It has itself. Men go down before it
holding in themselves some clarity of what they are
like the yellow fires in soft yellow globes
of matches in a fog, that go out in a time;
and while their hearts break, while the flowers lacquered on dark
bars before the tide of the heart bloom,
it lays out on the endless flats
of calcium a solitaire
of graves with no one in them.
After Mayakovsky
It’s after one. You’re probably alone.
All night the moon rings like a telephone
in an empty booth above our separateness.
Now is the hour one answers. I am home.
Hello, my heart, my God, my President,
my darling: I’m alarmed by the alarm
clock’s iridescent face, hung like a charm
from darkness’s fat ear. This accident
that was my life will have its witnesses:
now, while the world lies wholly motionless
and sorry in a crapulence of stars,
now is the hour one rises to address
the ages and history and the universe:
I swear you’ll never see my face again.
The Risen
How sad, how beautiful
the sea
of tumbling astronauts,
their faces barred
and planed and green amid
the deep.
I see them dancing in the kindness
of a broken answer,
by the light
of the jukebox,
by the light
of our fiery homes.
We are that sunset.
The angels envy us.
Hurts
like a mother burns
like an evil flame—
Black
knives,
the angels stand up inside themselves.
The Past
I will always love you
and think of you with bitterness,
standing on the corner with your life
passing before your eyes.
A car pulls up to the curb in front of you.
Inside it, the driver turns to strike
his woman companion repeatedly,
knocking askew her glasses.
And while your memory
speaks like a knife in the heart,
young girls with gloves made from the parts
of dead animals move
through intersections of ice—ice
collecting and collecting your face.
Betimes I held her pissed-off in mine arms
and ached, the while she paid me for her sins,
with a sweet joy like the Netherlands and its farms
flooded with haloes and angels in the gloaming.
Then how did I finally reach these executives
exiting the plushness carrying cool
musical drinks into the crystal noon
of the Goodyear Tire Company’s jumped-up oasis?
The sharks and generals within my heart,
the Naugahyde. When I close my eyes
I see her smoking cigarets in the night
by the window, naked and lit up by some kind of sign
out in the street; and then she turns
her vision on the black room where I lie abed.
How did snow roofs and ice-cold aerials become
this rain following the movies down a lonely fever,
daylight-saving virulent with romance,
phone booths with their lights on in the rain,
neighbors talking ragtime while the stink
of mowing carries over the lawns
on stretchers through the rain the little griefs
to make us cry? How do you stop
creating the worthless past—day, hour, minute—
the place forgetting us, the backward-looming
mist we couldn’t see when we were in it?
Waitress, afterimage of a flame,
God, she thinks, why do they make you live
in the restaurant that cannot last forever?
There are equals-signs all over the street,
and I feel like a scaly alien among you
waiting to be rescued to my home. The regret
turns all golden and I either fade
or watch it fade but in any case fail
to be touched by or to touch it. The rights
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Page 11
