The Ancient Rain, Poems 1956-1978
Page 1
Also by Bob Kaufman
Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness
THE ANCIENT RAIN
Editor’s Note
Poems 1956–1963
New Poems 1973–1978
Index of Titles and First Lines
EDITOR’S NOTE
“I want to be anonymous,” Bob Kaufman said one rainy night in a San Francisco saloon. I had sought out the reclusive and uncommunicative poet for nearly a year before he appeared suddenly in a café and took me by the arm to a deserted Chinatown bar. Alone together, his pronouncements were extreme and final. “I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvement, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”
For the past two decades Kaufman has been engaged in the active practice of being obscure, living the Orphic myth, adroitly avoiding all public contact. He had been a legendary figure among the jazzmen and bohemians of the nineteen-forties and ’fifties. Flamboyant and quick-witted, he was the original “beatnik”—a word he invented. His three broadsides (Abomunist Manifesto, Second April, Does the Secret Mind Whisper?), published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, became overnight classics of the Beat Generation. Adapting the harmonic complexities and spontaneous invention of be-bop to poetic euphony and meter, he became the quintessential jazz poet.
So absolute was Kaufman’s dedication to the oral and automatic sources of poetry, it was only at the insistence of his wife, Eileen, that he began to write down his work. With one exception, the earliest surviving poem in this volume dates from the night of their first meeting in 1957. Their life in San Francisco’s North Beach centered on the Co-existence Bagel Shop, where he held court. Carrying his son Parker in a clarinet case, Kaufman horrified the locals with his unruly antics and soon became the target of beatings and harassment by the city police.
Kaufman left San Francisco for New York in the spring of 1960. He had been invited to read at Harvard University and was to begin work on his first book, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions, 1965). But the New York years were filled with poverty, addiction, and imprisonment. “Blood Fell on the Mountains,” composed upon his return to San Francisco in 1963, portrays his sorrow and disillusionment. “Small Memoriam for Myself,” written the following week, became a final supplication. Three days later, Kaufman took a ten-year Buddhist vow of silence, prompted by the assassination of President Kennedy. For the next decade he neither spoke nor wrote.
Kaufman broke his silence in February 1973 on the day the Vietnam War ended. He stunned a local gathering one evening by reciting Thomas à Becket’s speech from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (“They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer. . . .”), followed by his own untitled poem which begins section two (“All those ships that never sailed . . .”), which, like many of the poems in this volume, has been transcribed from a tape recording.
During the next five years, Kaufman composed some of the finest poems of his career—simple, lofty, and resplendent. In the poem “The Ancient Rain,” he renews his preoccupation with Federico García Lorca, as he seeks to reconstruct the battered psyche of the Black man through poetry. In 1978, Kaufman abruptly renounced writing and withdrew once again into silence.
This book comprises the uncollected poems of Bob Kaufman. In the end, it received the poet’s blessings. I am indebted to the publishers of Bob Kaufman’s poetry through the years, to Neeli Cherkovski, who assisted in tracking down many of these poems, to Fred Martin and Peter Glassgold at New Directions, and most importantly to Eileen Kaufman, without whom this book would not exist. My love and gratitude.
Raymond Foye
27 October 1980
New York City
Poems
1956–1963
PRIVATE SADNESS
Sitting here alone, in peace
With my private sadness
Bared of the acquirements
Of the mind’s eye
Vision reversed, upended,
Seeing only the holdings
Inside the walls of me,
Feeling the roots that bind me,
To this mere human tree
Thrashing to free myself,
Knowing the success
Of these burstings
Shall be measured
By the fury
Of the fall
To eternal peace
The end of All.
LORCA
Split ears of morning earth green now,
Love and death twisted in tree arms,
Come love, throw out your nipple
to the teeth of a passing clown.
Spit olive pits at my Lorca,
Give Harlem’s king one spoon,
At four in the never noon.
Scoop out the croaker eyes
of rose flavored Gypsies
Singing García,
In lost Spain’s
Darkened noon.
DEAR PEOPLE
We cut our teeth on oyster shells,
We were suckled on father’s milk,
So what?
Broken homes,
Don’t cop out,
Buying diamonds
Off the backs of
South African Negroes
The wax bitches
Are well dressed tonight,
Dear people,
Let us
Eat jazz.
[THESE DAYS AND WEEKS]
These days and weeks
That cannot be found on any calendar,
These hours and minutes unknown to the clock,
When all those rusting ships of the past, long gone
To the bottom of life, guarding the sunken dreams
Cast up their sorrows to swell this grief with memory.
Terror is around us both my soul. Nothing else will come.
I cannot describe the horrors, and worse, I cannot flee.
A wall is all.
I am hacked by knives I do not see, stung by stinging bee,
I can only bleed in silence, my pains are numb with admiration.
Where do you keep them all, my soul? How long can you stand?
What question is this being asked, can humans ever know?
Mad teeth are in the forms of man and chew my love to bits,
And I can do nothing, my soul, but wait their clawing cut,
Asking only that my flesh holds
& my anguished mind’s reassurance in surprise,
& my love survive these brutal enigmas,
That I please you, my Soul . . . if only you alone.
AWE
At confident moments, thinking on Death
I tell my soul I am ready and wait
While my mind knows I quake and tremble
At the beautiful Mystery of it.
PICASSO’S BALCONY
Pale morning light, dying in shadows, loving the earth in midday rays, casting blue to skies in rings, sowing powder trails across balconies. Hung in evening to swing gently, on shoulders of time, growing old, yet swallowing events of a thousand nights of dying and loving, all blue. Gone to that tomb, hidden in cubic air, breathing sounds of sorrow.
Crying love rising from the lips of wounded flowers, wailing, sobbing, breathing uneven sounds of sorrow, lying in wells of earth, throbbing, covered with desperate laughter, out of cool angels, spread over night. Dancing blue images, shades of blue pasts, all yesterdays, tomorrows, breaking on pebbled bodies, on sands of blue and coral, spent.
Life lying heaped in mounds, with volcano mouth tops, puckered, open, sucking in atoms of air, sprinkling in atoms of air, coloring space, with flecks of brilliance, opaline glistening, in eyes, in flames.
Blu
e flames burning, on rusty cliffs, overlooking blue seas, bluish. In sad times, hurt seabirds come to wail in ice white wind, alone, and wail in starlight wells, cold pits of evening, and endings, flinging rounds of flame sheeted balls of jagged bone, eaten, with remains of torn flowers, overwhelming afterthoughts, binding loves, classic pains, casting elongated shadows, of early blue.
Stringing hours together in thin melodic lines, wrapped around the pearl neck of morning, beneath the laughter, of sad sea birds.
RUE MIRO
MIRO . . . THE FLOWERS ARE UP THERE ON THE WALL WHERE I LAST SAW THEM & THE TIME BEFORE THAT, VARIOUS, WITH HOT DOTS STICKING OUT ALL OVER, PRANCING DARKLY IN THEIR WOODEN FRAME, THEIR WALL, DANCING LIKE GYPSIES ON THE ROOF OF A DRUM . . .
MIRO . . . THERE IS A STREET WITH YOUR NAME, NAMED BEFORE YOU, AFTER YOU, THEN AND NOW IT FLOATS IN DROPS AND SHADINGS, STRANDED IN A FAKE SPAIN, FARTHER THAN MONTROICH, WAY OFF, A WET PLACE,
OF HOT RAINS, & YELLOWED LONG LEAF PLANTS, NAMED FOR A BROKEN SUN KING, LOUISIANA, RHYMES WITH YESTERDAY, GONE, PAST, MOVED ON, GHOSTLY, BROWN WISHES . . .
MIRO . . . YOUR NAME IS A BLACK RIBBON IN A STABBED LANDSCAPE, RAVED COLD FORMS SLANTED AGAINST A STEW OF BURNING SYMBOLS & EYES.
BLATANTLY HONKING DUCKS GO UNNOTICED IN EXPENSIVE FEATHERS, A FACELESS PLACE OF CURVING BLOOD & FINGERING MOTIONS . . .
MIRO . . . EMPTY TURTLES, GLIDE BETWEEN A DIVIDE OF BAROQUE HOTELS, FLEEING TO SHELLY NEST DEEP INSIDE A SCOOPED OUT TRUTH, A SCOPE OF THINNING CRIES, A CHORUS OF GRINNING OYSTERS, HEAVY DRAPERIES FROM TOULON, & ROOMS OF DROWNING FURNITURE, DANGLING IN THE MIND’S EYE, A WALK THROUGH THE BERSERK AIR,
MIRO . . . I WAS BORN ON YOUR STREET, FORTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO IN A YEAR OF APRILS & SCREAMED A FLOCK OF DAZED GEESE STAGGERED.
MIRO . . . ON THAT STREET, I HEARD A FEVER & SAW A WHITE MOON, BY THE GALVEZ GREENS, BROKEN INTO MILLIONS OF TRANSPARENCIES.
INQUIRY INTO A DECEMBER BECAUSE
The descendants of dinosaurs are quicksand men, holy crime minds, dripping fake myths.
Those germinal wise men circumcised trees, demolished time, invented mushrooms, those rubber toes of God.
I am being followed by hot butterflies and pickpockets have lifted my navel. Stony crows have wakened me cawing at the moon.
My eye leaks, dripping sight all over my collar.
Fake mystics, who photograph
God, while ecstatic pygmies
Burped the Christ child,
Murmuring, smile, baby,
It’s your birthday.
COUNTESS ERICA BLAISE: CHORUS
Erica Blaise began life with several established truths in her mouth, one was that her father owned three governments and held options on two more. The other was that she was ugly; the aesthetics of her physical make-up had been poorly handled by her maker, and as though in remorse, he had endowed her with all the appetites he had not lavished on the Marquis de Sade. It would not do to bore one with the education and girlhood of an aristocratic European girl, as their lives do not begin until all that is done with, stored with bloomers. Erica, being Countess Blaise, was not allowed to destroy ordinary people, that is, people whose annihilation is handled on a corporate scale. This placed her in the uncomfortable position of having to find two people who were not already spoken for, which is no small task today. Of course, after poking around the flabby corners of humanity, she discovered that the only group still available and in plentiful supply were artists; what’s more, they seemed to enjoy it, even demanding wounds that no one was prepared to inflict, as though their diet was pain—flavored with self-taught self-pity. Erica would not let such hungry people starve, for that would not be civilized. Neither would she turn her back on any who seemed worthy of such historical attentions. She began by collecting major works by artists whose triumphs had placed them outside her game preserve, unearned trophies, but useful lures for less wily game stalking the well-framed jungle. Indiscriminate in her choice of charms to dangle from her social bracelet, she concocted a hodgepodge of self-immolators, unique only for its variety, angelic American girl refugees from Nebraska Victorianism, grateful for the chance to buy Sorbonne dreams in her richly lavendered armpits, English prose writers fleeing Berlitz concentration camps, New York painters pining for one-man shows, which she allowed them to put on so long as they didn’t hang pictures, stone cutters, pastel chewers, wire benders, Arab boys with mosaic buttocks, inventors of new artistic movements that lasted one week, unless they became exhausted before the week was out—and fled to Marseilles. Blond German Faustian youth swearing to paint Nietzsche while tripping over borrowed evening gowns amid superman Teutonic giggles, hot-blooded Spaniards who had to be reheated every hour, who painted only their lips, sexy South Americans who slept in boots, and only with each other, explosive Mexicans who would paint only mountains and made love to kill time, Andalusian Gypsies with Flamenco dripping from their fingertips, who would not sin in the same room with a crucifix. African giants hired by the foot, with secret orders to kill Picasso, Italian futurists, who possessed nothing, but a past. Endlessly through the Louis Quinze bush, Erica led that vermilion safari in artistic circles until dizzy with the realization that she was bored, bored open to a new sound, one complete as yet unexplored world, jazz, Africa’s other face, stranded—in America, yet to be saved. No Erica anywhere could ignore such a situation; who else can bring the silence so completely? Many. But one must lead.
[AS USUAL]
As usual
the usual axe
falls on the usual neck
in the usual place
at the usual time
as usual.
TELEGRAM TO ALEX/BAGEL SHOP, NORTH BEACH SF
DEAR ALEX, TOMORROW I AM GOING TO EAT ALL OF THE SUEZ AND PANAMA CANALS, SO PLEASE DO NOT USE YOUR LIGHT & GAS AND REFRAIN FROM EYEBALLING FOR TWO SECONDS, WE HAVE A NEW DEAL FOR CHUCK BAUDELAIRE, THE NEW FRENCH JUNKIE KID TO PAINT SOME TENDER BATHING SUITS ON MA & PA KETTLE AND BEARNOG BAROOCK AND CARNAL SPELLMAN CAN’T COME, SO THERE.
CLAP HANDS, HERE COMES THE LINDBERGH BABY
I reject those frozen
injections
of last night’s junk
tragedy,
memory,
blotted survivor
no longer remembers
chromed elbows,
rosy highways,
pinned submission,
eyeless skull faces,
socketless eyes
screwed in,
eyes that have no history,
eyes that darken brows,
eyes that have no lids,
eyes that never blink
broken into &
entered eyes.
Sometimes a sacred dream
is wrapped in a scarf,
circling an anonymous
neck,
hung on a hook.
Sometimes are smoked times,
ambitiously obscured times,
frail times of the long pipe,
Mandarin by implication.
Maybe the young poets
wanted to be popes
or kings
of Mexico.
UNANIMITY HAS BEEN ACHIEVED, NOT A DOT LESS FOR ITS ACCIDENTALNESS
Raga of the drum, the drum the drum the drum the drum, the heartbeat
Raga of hold, raga of fold, raga of root, raga of crest, raga before coming,
Raga of lip, raga of brass, raga of ultimate come with yesterday, raga of a parched tongue-walked lip, raga of yellow, raga of mellow, raga of new, raga of old, raga of blue, raga of gold, raga of air spinning into itself,
I ring against slate and shell and wood and stone and leaf and bone
And towered holes and floors and eyes—against lone is lorn & rock & dust & flattened ball & solitudes of air & breath & hair & skin fed halves & wholes & bulls & calves & mad & soul & new & old & silence & saves & fall wall & water falling & fling my eye to sky & tingle & tangle.
I sing a mad raga, I sing a mad raga, a glad raga for the ringing be
ll I sing.
A man fishing with old clothes line, shouting bass drum
Sometimes in extravagant moments of shock of unrehearsed curiosity, I crawl outside myself, sneaking out through the eyes, one blasé, one surprised, until I begin to feel my own strangeness; shyly I give up the ghost and go back in until next time.
I can remember four times when I was not crying & once when I was not laughing.
I am kneaded by a million black fingers & nothing about me improves.
Gothic brain surgeons, weeping over the remains of destroyed love machines.
Diggers, corkscrewing cleanly in, exhilerausted, into the mind mine, impaled on edgeless shafts of subtle reminiscence, green-walking across the belts and ties.
Slanted dark-walked time, wet with ages of dryness,
Raga of insignificance & blessed hopelessness.
Raga of sadness, of madness, of green screamed dreams, mile-deep eyes.
The greatest men have gone unknown: Buddha was the twenty-fourth.
A beggar is the body of a God-ness, come to shoot movies with his eye,
Movies of people who do not beg, ragged, broke eagles, hummed into the wheels turning, some in, others out, rarely ever in or out, or vice versa, half open.
A string begins where a man ends a string, a man begins where a string ends. A man bereft of string falls all walls, becomes a screamed baby, raved.
FRAGMENT FROM PUBLIC SECRET
REBELS, WHAT ARE REBELS, HERE IN THIS LAND OF REBELLION, THIS LAND THAT BEGAN WITH REBELLION—ARE THEY THOSE WHOSE ACTIVITIES CAN OBJECTIVELY BE ABSORBED OR ASSIMILATED INTO THE PATTERING TIME, REMEMBER, IT IS NOT IMPORTANT, FOR IN THE END, THE REBEL IS TIMELESS, AND IT IS ONLY IN THE PASSAGE OF TIME THAT WE CAN DISCERN THE REBEL FROM THE DISSENTER.
AMERICA, WHO ARE YOUR REBELS, WHAT SHORES HAVE THEY BEEN CAST UPON? IS IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE DISCOVERED A USE FOR EVERYTHING THAT THEY HAVE FOUND THEIR ONLY RECOURSE IS TO SEEK AMONG NOTHING, HOPING TO FIND COMPONENTS WHICH, IN THE FINALITIES OF CONSTRUCTION, MIGHT ASSUME THE POSTURES OF PRINCIPLES, AND DISCOVERING THE HORROR OF FRUSTRATION, TURN TO DEATH AS THE FOUNT OF THE CREATIVE ACT? FROM THERE TO WHERE? WHERE DO SEEKERS GO—SEEKERS WHO HAVE NO GERMAN PHILOSOPHER TO LEAD THEM THROUGH THE HALLS OF DOOM, WHOSE WHITELIKE WALLS ARE INVISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE? SEEKERS OF THE TRUTH HAVE ALWAYS WAKED EYES, AND ALWAYS WILL, AND IN TIME SHALL BE NAKED IN THEIR OWN LIGHT.