The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

  into – the order

  breaks up here – immortality:

  I know that’s where you think the brave

  little victims should go:

  I do not care what

  you think: I do not care what you think:

  I do not care what you

  think: one two three four five

  six seven eight nine ten: here we go

  round the here-we-go-round, the

  here-we-go-round, the here-we-

  go-round: coon will end in disorder at the

  teeth of hounds: the situation

  will get him:

  spheres roll, cubes stay put: now there

  one two three four five

  are two philosophies:

  here we go round the mouth-wet of hounds:

  what I choose

  is youse:

  baby

  Corsons Inlet

  I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning

  to the sea,

  then turned right along

  the surf

  rounded a naked headland

  and returned

  along the inlet shore:

  it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,

  crisp in the running sand,

  some breakthroughs of sun

  but after a bit

  continuous overcast:

  the walk liberating, I was released from forms,

  from the perpendiculars,

  straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

  of thought

  into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight:

  I allow myself eddies of meaning:

  yield to a direction of significance

  running

  like a stream through the geography of my work:

  you can find

  in my sayings

  swerves of action

  like the inlet’s cutting edge:

  there are dunes of motion,

  organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance

  in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:

  but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events

  I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting

  beyond the account:

  in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of primrose

  more or less dispersed;

  disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows of dunes,

  irregular swamps of reeds,

  though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all …

  predominantly reeds:

  I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,

  shutting out and shutting in, separating inside

  from outside: I have

  drawn no lines:

  as

  manifold events of sand

  change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape

  tomorrow,

  so I am willing to go along, to accept

  the becoming

  thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish

  no walls:

  by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek

  to undercreek: but there are no lines, though

  change in that transition is clear

  as any sharpness: but ‘sharpness’ spread out,

  allowed to occur over a wider range

  than mental lines can keep:

  the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:

  black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk

  of air

  and, earlier, of sun,

  waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,

  caught always in the event of change:

  a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals

  and ate

  to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,

  picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy

  turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:

  risk is full: every living thing in

  siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small

  white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears

  the shallows, darts to shore

  to stab – what? I couldn’t

  see against the black mudflats – a frightened

  fiddler crab?

  the news to my left over the dunes and

  reeds and bayberry clumps was

  fall: thousands of tree swallows

  gathering for flight:

  an order held

  in constant change: a congregation

  rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable

  as one event,

  not chaos: preparations for

  flight from winter,

  cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,

  beaks

  at the bayberries:

  a perception full of wind, flight, curve,

  sound:

  the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:

  the ‘field’ of action

  with moving, incalculable center;

  in the smaller view, order tight with shape:

  blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:

  snail shell:

  pulsations of order

  in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,

  broken down, transferred through membranes

  to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no

  lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together

  and against, of millions of events: this,

  so that I make

  no form of

  formlessness:

  orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override

  or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain

  the top of a dune,

  the swallows

  could take flight – some other fields of bayberry

  could enter fall

  berryless) and there is serenity:

  no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,

  or thought:

  no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

  terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities

  of escape open: no route shut, except in

  the sudden loss of all routes:

  I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will

  not run to that easy victory:

  still around the looser, wider forces work:

  I will try

  to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening

  scope, but enjoying the freedom that

  Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,

  that I have perceived nothing completely,

  that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

  Robert Ely 1926–

  The Executive’s Death

  Merchants have multiplied more than the stars of heaven.

  Half the population are like the long grasshoppers

  That sleep in the bushes in the cool of the day:

  The sound of their wings is heard at noon, muffled, near the earth.

  The crane handler dies, the taxi driver dies, slumped over

  In his taxi. Meanwhile, high in the air, executives

  Walk on cool floors, and suddenly fall:

  Dying, they dream they are lost in a snowstorm in mountains,

  On which they crashed, carried at night by great machines.

  As he lies on the wintry slope, cut off and dying,

  A pine stump talks to him of Goethe and Jesus.

  Commuters arrive in Hartford at dusk like moles

  Or hares flying from a fire behind them,

  And the dusk in Hartford is full of their sighs;

  Their trains come through the air like a dark music,

  Like the sound of horns, the sound of thousands of small wings.

  Waki
ng front Sleep

  Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,

  Tiny explosions at the water lines,

  And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

  It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.

  Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full

  Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

  Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast! –

  Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,

  Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

  Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.

  Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;

  We know that our master has left us for the day.

  Robert Creeley 1926–2005

  I Know a Man

  As I sd to my

  friend, because I am

  always talking, – John, I

  sd, which was not his

  name, the darkness sur

  rounds us, what

  can we do against

  it, or else, shall we &

  why not, buy a goddamn big car,

  drive, he sd, for

  Christ’s sake, look

  out where yr going.

  The Operation

  By Saturday I said you would be better on Sunday.

  The insistence was a part of a reconciliation.

  Your eyes bulged, the grey

  light hung on you, you were hideous.

  My involvement is just an old

  habitual relationship.

  Cruel, cruel to describe

  what there is no reason to describe.

  The Whip

  I spent a night turning in bed,

  my love was a feather, a flat

  sleeping thing. She was

  very white

  and quiet, and above us on

  the roof, there was another woman I

  also loved, had

  addressed myself to in

  a fit she

  returned. That

  encompasses it. But now I was

  lonely, I yelled,

  but what is that? Ugh,

  she said, beside me, she put

  her hand on

  my back, for which act

  I think to say this

  wrongly.

  The Rain

  All night the sound had

  come back again,

  and again falls

  this quiet, persistent rain.

  What am I to myself

  that must be remembered,

  insisted upon

  so often? Is it

  that never the ease,

  even the hardness,

  of rain falling

  will have for me

  something other than this,

  something not so insistent –

  am I to be locked in this

  final uneasiness.

  Love, if you love me,

  lie next to me.

  Be for me, like rain,

  the getting out

  of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

  lust of intentional indifference.

  Be wet

  with a decent happiness.

  Something

  I approach with such

  a careful tremor, always

  I feel the finally foolish

  question of how it is,

  then, supposed to be felt,

  and by whom. I remember

  once in a rented room on

  27th street, the woman I loved

  then, literally, after we

  had made love on the large

  bed sitting across from

  a basin with two faucets, she

  had to pee but was nervous,

  embarrassed I suppose I

  would watch her who had but

  a moment ago been completely

  open to me, naked, on

  the same bed. Squatting, her

  head reflected in the mirror,

  the hair dark there, the

  full of her face, the shoulders,

  sat spread-legged, turned on

  one faucet and shyly pissed. What

  love might learn from such a sight.

  ‘I Keep to Myself Such Measures …’

  I keep to myself such

  measures as I care for,

  daily the rocks

  accumulate position.

  There is nothing

  but what thinking makes

  is less tangible. The mind,

  fast as it goes, loses

  pace, puts in place of it

  like rocks simple markers,

  for a way only to

  hopefully come back to

  where it cannot. All

  forgets. My mind sinks.

  I hold in both hands such weight

  it is my only description.

  The Rhythm

  It is all a rhythm,

  from the shutting

  door, to the window

  opening,

  the seasons, the sun’s

  light, the moon,

  the oceans, the

  growing of things,

  the mind in men

  personal, recurring

  in them again,

  thinking the end

  is not the end, the

  time returning,

  themselves dead, but

  someone else coming.

  If in death I am dead,

  then in life also

  dying, dying …

  And the women cry and die.

  The little children

  grow only to old men.

  The grass dries,

  the force goes.

  But is met by another

  returning, oh not mine,

  not mine, and

  in turn dies.

  The rhythm which projects

  from itself continuity

  bending all to its force

  from window to door,

  from ceiling to floor,

  light at the opening,

  dark at the closing.

  Morning (8:10 a.m.)

  In sun’s

  slow rising

  this morning

  antenna tower

  catches

  the first light,

  shines

  for an instant

  silver

  white,

  separate

  from the houses,

  the trees,

  old woman walking

  on street out front.

  Blue Skies Motel

  Look at

  that mother-fucking smoke stack

  pointing

  straight up.

  See those clouds,

  old time fleecy pillows,

  like they say, whites and greys,

  float by.

  There’s cars

  on the street,

  there’s a swimming pool

  out front –

  and the trees

  go yellow

  now

  it’s the fall.

  Allen Ginsberg 1926–

  From Howl

  FOR CARL SOLOMON

  I

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

  dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

  angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

  who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

  who bared their brains to Heaven under the E1 and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

  who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

  who were expelled
from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

  who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

  who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

  who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

  with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

  incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

  Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joy-ride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

  who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

  who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

  who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

  a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,

  yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

  whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

  who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

  suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,

  who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

  who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

  who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

  who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,