by Patti Smith
I was left to wonder of this raucous swarm why I, in my plaid coat and little watch cap, was chosen by the King of Fools for a bristly greasepaint kiss. It set me apart, in heart, year to New Year. Assailed by winter fever, no longer dead, I vainly attempted to peel the mug of mummer love.
My coat reeked, my face sooty with indignant tears. It didn’t really matter then. It doesn’t really matter now. I can make it matter or not. I can be beatific or dead. I can be bountiful or a shriveled branch. I long to see, to hear that which I create. The moods storm the impossible sink flushing water the wrong way corkscrew style. I long to hear that which I made and not outlive it. Not outlive it.
oh stolen book my salvation no crime sweet no scent mesmeric no snow so light than the simple knowledge of you rimbaud sailor face words hidden in my blouse so close to my breast
—piss factory draft
The years saw me grow long-limbed awkward inexplicably maverick. I sought my kind and found none. How you rescued me. Your peasant hands reaching through time wrapping my young heart. Your poems, found in a stall by the greyhound station I dogged dreaming of escape, were my ticket out of my cloistered existence. Words I could not comprehend and yet, deciphered by blood, illuminated adolescence. Armed with you I fled the rural suffocation of southern New Jersey past the streets of our forefathers to New York City of poet rats and public transit. I wrote with the image of you above my worktable, vowing to one day trace your steps dressed in the watch cap and coat of my present self.
This morning, pulling into your town, I walked the streets that you despised, the streets I love for your having despised them. I sleep steps away from your child sleep and awake to hear you call. I sense you loitering by the river, willing me to rise.
I will go to the train station in Roche, touch the remains of the wall of the farmhouse where you wept A Season in Hell while your sisters harvested the fields.
I will walk the road you raced as a sturdy-limbed boy. The road you were carried on with one leg, facedown on a litter, flanked by misery who loved no company—the road to Marseilles, to a ship returning to Abyssinia, to descend into the abyss, the black hole of universal love.
I will be there at the station in Roche. I will piss in the urinal you pissed in. A young man cursing existence. And then a dying man. I will squat and rise. I will stand. I will give you my limbs, no longer young, but sturdy all the same.
Mummers ask for nothing in return. They give a sign to sign. Then they’re gone. I project from the urinal to Marseilles that you gave glory and they just tossed it away into the river—a discarded wreath where rats sit, using it for a nest. A. Rimbaud, the rats’ poet laureate.
A rat is all I have been, scurrying through the streets of the city of brotherly love. I am here my brother. I am here where you were and I feel as if I could find you waiting, if I only drew myself from this torpor and moved into the empty streets. I know your loneliness, which I desired to fill with my own. But I am no longer lonely. I am this close to a shade. Yet I still feel. I long to peel the last of my face struck in mummer love and left the impression of a festival. To the new. To the new year. And it’s not clear at all why it embedded itself in me. That phantom clown chose me, unformed. He left me branded forever it seems, until perhaps, this moment while I peel the last face. The last phase of my existence. As you read. As I have written. As I have gone.
Seedless winter. Yet it springs with life. There should be fireworks. It’s Independence Day. The sky, which I cannot see, is alive with colored wheels and I know saints have been stretched on such glowing racks. Girls as sweet as stems and gloomy priests. Everything compressed into a leaf pressed in a book. The book of summer, when I wrote about winter. The book of life that told of the dead. Everyone wears a corpse about their wrist. Just a bit of twine, but a corpse all the same. A dead thing proclaiming I have you and you. I will snip all these things and hurl all rings in the urinal you knelt in. Your tears made it overflow. All the sewage covered the station and made you shudder. This was as close to a laugh as you could get. The image of a shit-covered wagon. You stood clad in white, trembling.
Once I awoke and heard your voice. I caught bits of nature, in truth, our whole natural world. I heard the dead. They were calling to me. I felt my powers. Yet I did not go out into the night. I did not go out into the world. I did not use my powers but I wrote what I wrote. My heart cries but my eyes are dry as a salt bed.
The cursed mist shall lift and all the infants’ breath. I will butter my hair. I will unfasten the last. I will tremble like you when I glimpse the visible ink peeling at the edge of my cheek. I have danced on the edge of ignorance. I have wept impossible dreams. I have melted nothing. I have stood in the warped curve of a light that should have taken me away yet left me with the human kind I have never been.
Everything here is a small offense and not of value as art or confession. It is not a whim. It is an attempt to peel another putrid skin. The greasepaint of mummer love. The honor and the stain. So when it happens, I can say I did it. I’ll be okay. Just a kid. A severely gimped little goat, yet sturdy limbed, who can hold you up. The goats once ran wild over the cobblestone streets of the city of brotherly love. And I am as they on your road my brother.
Who can color a corpse around the wrist and call it blessed? All because of mummer love. One deep and scratchy greasepaint kiss on the day of the new and spotless. This is what I know. I am here for a purpose. The purpose changes. Gifts that are not mine. Children who are not mine. An angel who is not mine. And this—to meet you at the urinal and draw you upright in my arms. I am still sturdy. This memory may enter me and I will realign the clay of my being. Will be you. Muscle shall be ours. All limbs intact. All brutal mirrors cracked. I am here and that is something. I am here my friend, and have always been. As much as for any living thing.
THE WRITER’S SONG
I did not wish to work
I did not wish to earn
but to curl with my jar
in the sweet sorghum
I laid my mat among the reeds
I could hear the freemen call
oh my life
what does it matter
will the reed cease bending
will the leper turn
I had a horn I did not blow
I had a sake and another
I could hear the freemen
drunk with sky
what matter my cry
will the moon swell
will the flame shy
banzai banzai
it is better to write
then die
in the blue crater
set with straw
I could hear
the freemen call
the way is hard
the gate is narrow
what matter I say
with the new mown hay
my pillow
I had a sake and another
I did not care to own nor rove
I wrote my name upon the water
nothing but nothing above
banzai banzai
it is better to write
then die
a thousand prayers
and souvenirs
set away in earthenware
we draw the jars
from the shelves
drink our parting
from ourselves
so be we king
or be we bum
the reed still whistles
the heart still hums
About the Author
PATTI SMITH is a writer, artist, and performer. Her seminal album Horses was followed by nine releases, including Radio Ethiopia; Easter; Dream of Life; Gone Again; and Trampin’. Her artwork was first exhibited at Gotham Book Mart in 1973, and she has been associated with the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Strange Messenger, a retrospective of three hundred works, made its debut at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and has been exhibited worldwide. On March 28, 2008, a retrospective of her visual work opened at
the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. Her books include Witt; Babel; Woolgathering; The Coral Sea; and Complete Lyrics. On July 10, 2005, she received the Commandeur dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the highest grade awarded by the French republic to eminent artists and writers. On March 12, 2007, Patti Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Smith resides in New York City and is the mother of two, Jackson and Jesse.
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Credits
Frontispiece photograph © 2005;
endpiece photograph © 2008, Patti Smith.
Copyright
AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE. Copyright © 2005, 2008 by Patti Smith. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition JULY 2008 ISBN: 9780061982675
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