The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
Page 11
I don’t ask you to put eyes in the bats in the
cave.
I don’t ask you to dissolve the bombs like
snow.
I don’t ask pet lions on the front lawn or a
free train ride to
St. Louis.
just a few things.
either that or I’ve got to sell the
piano.
It’s Nothing to Laugh About
there’s no color like the color of an orange,
and the mountains were a sad smokey purple like
old curtains in some cheap burlesque house;
and the small toad sat there
holding the dusty road like a tiny tank,
and staring,
staring like something really definite,
a greener living green than any green leaf;
and it puffed its sides and let them fall
and sometimes through the skin you could see
the dark water of another world;
and then it shot the blood through one eye—
you could see the guts contract
gripped by the glove of the skin—and
the red-thin stream of frogblood
a bright neat trick of centuries
hurled through bright valley air
upon golden nylon;
she screamed and he laughed, delighted with
the frog’s great victory; she rubbed a quick
pink hanky against the desecrated nylon—
some womanly female in her had been splashed
and unveiled and defeated, and her dress hung
like some loose and second skin as the
indelicate horror writhed in her and claimed away
her fullness;
“you fool!” she spit over the stocking, “it’s
nothing to laugh about!”
he looked at the toad in the fine rustbrown road
and imagined it smiled at him—
and then it turned half-sideways and hopped left
without haste
and popped again into the air
like some slow-motion nature film,
the legends seeming to grip for notches in the air
and the head humped stiff
and brutalized away from life
like an old man reading a newspaper;
and then, with a backward over-the-shoulder look
it hopped into the grass of home;
“he’s gone,” he spoke sadly.
he looked to the rocks of the purple mountains
and sensed the frog moving toward them,
done with cities and roads;
he imagined the frog in a stream
his green skin happy against the blue-chill water;
he took her hand and they moved forward
together
over the unguarded road.
35 Seconds
failures. one after the
other. a whole duckpondfull
of failures. my
right arm hurts way
up into my shoulder.
it’s like at the track.
you walk up to the bar
your eyes scared out of
your head and
you drink it down:
bar legs asses
walls ceiling
program
horseturds
and you know you
only have 35 seconds left to live
and all the red mouths
want to kiss you,
all the dresses
want to lift and
show you leg,
it’s like bugles
and symphonies
everywhere
like war
like war
like war
and the bartender leans
across and says
I hear they’re going to
send in the 6
in the next
race.
and you say
fuck you,
and he is
a white dishtowel
in your grandmother’s house
which is no longer
there.
and then he says
something.
and that’s how
I hurt my
arm.
Regard Me
regard me in high level of terror
as the one who pulled down the shades
when the president stopped to shave,
enthralled by the way the Indian turned
through darkness and water and sand;
regard me as the one who laughed
when the cat caught fire in the radio
and the owl blew his stinking stack
grabbing mice and bulls and ornaments;
regard me as the one who picked the meat
from the bones and shot craps with God
as the poison coronets floated in the air;
regard me, even as dead, more alive than
many of the living,
and regard me, as I fumble with flat breasts,
regard me as nothing
so we may have peace
and forget.
With Vengeance Like a Tiger Crawls
to hell with metric—I have read the lore of the ages
and placed them back on their lifeless shelves:
we have written ourselves insensible
while outside…
to hell with poesy—I would rather sit
in cheap burlesque houses
and watch the sick Irish and Jewish clowns
spill their rank wit
into thimble minds.
ah, I know the clouds are quicker than we think
and that we fail at center,
spread outward
like so much ink
and quickly die;
so being a poltroon, I have read the classics,
I have argued in the marketplace,
I have been drunk with the immortals:
I have listened to these children cry
that language is too huge a bone for all of us:
even the finer wits have dulled their massive teeth.
all the waters are wasted
on Cadillacs and dahlias,
and I am wasted on Milton and matchsticks…
and, tonight, closer to madness than I have ever known,
I watch a small yellow bird
eat gravel at the bottom of his cage.
oh, let me lose my father’s face!
…and find a forest all the axmen execrate,
let me be fuddled in the glade
numb with the growth of fancy;
let me find men and dogs and children,
let me find towers and lattice swaying
in the sun
and a God of Life instead of Death.
when they deal their sticks against my brain
let me see dogs and goats and islands
and clasp my hands beneath their might
(to hell with your bright wit,
with vengeance like a tiger crawls)
and flying, flying
reach Israel
the waters
a stone of blue
all round in midnight
ah, I want too much!
bring on your voices, gallant but gall,
chill me with garlic and horns
and yawn me glibly through the
last candle of my hours: I will die
witless and poor.
Itch, Come and Gone
words words like steel
like a copper bodice,
like flamingoes
their bloody straw legs
caught under rock;
words as ridiculous
as the equator
as pitiful and clumsy
as some mongrel dog
scratching
working away at an itch
in the skin;
then
other ways
some shine and some sing
and there are some that spin
and some that kill,
but always,
back to the word:
it will describe your painting
your statue—
words
to end a fable
that no longer itches
anywhere
now ridiculous but not clumsy
pitiful
but not wrong.
This
I have refused the discipline
of Art and Government and
God and all that which
destroys my seeming
and lifting my beer now
frothy
in the golden afternoon
light
I have it:
plateaus of softness, wire
leaves, spirit of the sidewalks
walls that weep like old paintings
everything real, not bent,
and as a brown sparrow
drops across my window’s sight
and the planes graze Africa again
in fire-lit nightmare
I have all I need on this tablecloth:
sunflower seeds, can opener
razor, 2 pencils, bent paper clip
memory of sparrow, angular sidewalk—
this under my fingers
myself myself myself.
2 Outside, As Bones Break in My Kitchen
they get up on their garage roof
both of them 80 or 90 years old
standing on the slant
she wanting to fall really
all the way
but hacking at the old roofing
with a hoe
and he
more coward
on his knees praying for more days
gluing chunks of tar
his ear listening
for more green rain
more green rain
and he says
mama be careful
and she says nothing
and hacks a hole
where a tulip
never grew.
Saying Goodbye to Love
no more stalling,
the war torch is lit
and all over the neighborhood
men rattle in their irons,
flares kite the sky
somebody rushes past,
a confused cock crows
and I strike up
a cigarette.
it is difficult to decide
where the enemy is:
I go inside
to wife and hound
both fat and soft
as peaches
under the
sun.
I shave by candlefat and lightning,
I shave by their holy silence
in a shattered mirror.
I put on my hat
and hug them both
like two jellychildren
lost in smoke;
then outside I go,
searching the West
(dim and hilly
I’m told)
with bright
mean eyes.
You Smoke a Cigarette
You smoke a cigarette in fury and fall into
neutral slumber, to awaken to a dawn of
windows and grieving, without trumpets; and
somewhere, say, is a fish—all eye and movement—
wiggling in water; you could be that
fish, you could be there, held in water,
you could be the eye, cool and hung,
non-human; put on your shoes, put on
your pants, boy; not a chance, boy—
the fury of the absent air, the scorn of those alike
as dead violets; scream, scream, scream
like a trumpet, put on your shirt, your
tie, boy: grieve is a pretty word like
mandolin, and strange like artichoke; grieve is
a word and grieve is a way; open the door,
boy; go away.
Friendly Advice to a Lot of Young Men
Go to Tibet.
Ride a camel.
Read the bible.
Dye your shoes blue.
Grow a beard.
Circle the world in a paper canoe.
Subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post.
Chew on the left side of your mouth only.
Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a
straight razor.
And carve your name in her arm.
Brush your teeth with gasoline.
Sleep all day and climb trees at night.
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.
Hold your head under water and play the violin.
Do a belly dance before pink candles.
Kill your dog.
Run for Mayor.
Live in a barrel.
Break your head with a hatchet.
Plant tulips in the rain.
But don’t write poetry.
Everything
the dead do not need
aspirin or
sorrow,
I suppose.
but they might need
rain.
not shoes
but a place to
walk.
not cigarettes,
they tell us,
but a place to
burn.
or we’re told:
space and a place to
fly
might be the
same.
the dead don’t need
me.
nor do the
living.
but the dead might need
each
other.
in fact, the dead might need
everything we
need
and
we need so much,
if we only knew.
what it
was.
it is
probably
everything
and we will all
probably die
trying to get
it
or die
because we
don’t get
it.
I hope
you will understand
when I am dead
I got
as much
as
possible.
…American Express, Athens, Greece
fucker, you might at least send me a couple of your
books
I don’t read anymore unless
I get them free
you write a good letter but then
a lot of them write good
letters
but when it comes to writing the poem
they dry up and die like a
wax museum.
and, baby, I see you’ve been around:
Evergreen Review, Poetry etc.
I cannot
make these golden outhouses of
culture and have long since
given up.
I will never have a house in the valley with
little stone men to water my
lawn.
as I get older
(and I am getting older)
I can look at a green gardenhouse
(not mine)
for hours or I can look at
these swinging elephant ears outside the
window
they are caught between the wind and me and
the sinking sun
and the sea is 20 miles west and
I have not seen the sea for maybe 3
years and
maybe it’s not there anymore and maybe I’m
not here, anymore.
and the only time I begin to feel
is when I drink the yellow beer down so fast and so
long that the electric light bulb glows like the
sun and my woman looks like a highschool girl with
schoolbooks and
there is not a dent in the world and
Pound has shaved and
the bulldog smiles.
now,
for a cigarette. cancer and I
have an understanding like a
whore paid for. I haven’t been to a
charity ward and been slugged to my knees for some
time
all the stale blood everywhere like
puke
and I keep thinking that there have been men who
died for something or
thought they did
and so
there’s this sense of waste
just dying for yourself with
nobody around
not even a nurse
just
this
old man of 80
yelling at you down on the floor while you are
hemorrhaging,
yelling from his bed:
“shut up! I want to SLEEP!”
well, he’ll get his
sleep.
One Hundred and Ninety-Nine Pounds of Clay Leaning Forward
the chain is on the door
the naked women shut out
the naked power on as I
bend over turbine-powered
sun-powered jets
knowing that I am not very good at