Earlier Poems (9 page)

So far I have eluded them.
I don't have the faintest idea what I've done.
I do know it must have been terrible:
at this point every other person on the street
looks as if he could be a plainclothesman;
and whatever they did with the half of the town
they replaced, they were splendidly trained
in mimicking those former citizens' sullen
opinion of my presence,
their indifference to my comings and goings,
to the fact that I exist at all. I'm trying to get home.
A group of men approaches as I cross the park.
One of them is a good friend I remember from school,
one I lost contact with years ago. How wonderful!
I feel happy and safe for the first time
in so many months. We grin and embrace.
He asks about my life. I tell him
I will be teaching again very soon.
I'm afraid it won't be soon, he remarks,
with a sinister failure to alter the warmth in his voice
or the broad smile.
All at once the cuffs are on—
someone's soundlessly come from behind—
freezing through to the bones
of my wrist, like they do,
although he hasn't moved or ceased to gaze into my eyes
with the same protective look of sadness and delight
you develop at encountering some beloved person
long considered dead, or forever lost to you.
There are, incidentally, a couple of gun barrels
touching my head, coldly branding
their zeros in my temples.
The others all stand in a ring
surrounding me.
I start to cry.
I have to feed my cat first!
I have to feed my cat.
What's going to happen to my cat.
I think you had to be there.

This is why somebody loves
the poem, or attempts to
make up his own verses, in other words
devote his life to something
that's generally held to be
an occupation solely of the dead,
and so impossible. (In terms of livelihood
this is, in fact, correct.)
Those who inhabit the rest of this block,
the greater part of the city, the planet, to them
it is impossible, irrelevant, and again
on account of its clearly nonlucrative
nature, contemptible: but I will tell you
why one sits writing his poem, which is nothing
in the end but the longing to locate
the door to his own happy world
forever locked in his face otherwise;
to therefore see the world in terms of words, and pay
the price for this, in a strange
key. There is no point to it, one passing through this
fire, yet involved's an indomitable thirst
to attempt, without knowing how,
knowing only you're going to fail,
saying back to the earth
a few words which equal
or even rival its beauty,
its loneliness,
its disappointment and wrath.
And for what? My landlord never heard of me
and expects his rent just the same
as he expects it from the junkies,
giggling sophomores and cowering eccentrics
with whom I share this building.
I have gone on with it. I don't know why
except that I've never loved anything else,
its possibility anyway;
and it is the only thing that has never
permanently turned its back on me. And so
I've gone on, in this absurdly ugly place—
I have yet to hear a single note
of that famous still sad music.
I've done it for the sake
of maybe 10 minutes when I was fifteen:
when I—when it suddenly—but why describe it?
No one will understand, no one will care
that today, while waiting for the bus
I looked up from the tedium
of untreatable things
and found them again,
here.
The few newborn
leaves more light
than leaf on a branch.
They were back—or I was.
For an instant no time had elapsed:
these leaves were not new,
they were the same ones, and I was not old.
Nothing had changed, they were the same
leaves that blazed before
my eyes all those years ago, mind blazing.
That moment so long ago,
I did not have to say, was this moment.
How could I go to the hospital
for my appointment now,
when I had gotten well?
So I just turned and walked
home. (I call it home.)
Having nowhere else to turn
this is where I generally go.
What difference does it make anymore?
And it was fine. I had not lived
my whole life in vain—
nothing had damaged that instant
those minutes I had lived
for all my life.
And anyone, in the words
of Andre Breton, who smirks at this
is a pig.

I have been attempting to pray
the Lord's Prayer for the first time
since I was a child. Only now
the problem is not one
of mystified indifference, on
the contrary. Now
my concentration is eclipsed
by many distractions, though I'm trying to mean it.
One question now is the existence
of the mad. One of the most bothersome
things about the mad:
they are so often right.
Look at Christ. And yet
as they are, after all, insane
most don't possess the social graces,
the finances or tact
that would be required, so
there is virtually no question
of their influencing or getting anywhere near
the circles where the true and the delusional are
legislated.

I think of Pilate, eyebrows slightly raised in weary but astonished sarcasm, responding to the assertion, “I come to bear witness to the truth.” It's horrifying but I can never read this, that is PP's reply, “What is truth?”
without having to suppress a strong impulse to agree. This is the abomination of the secret
envy the sane feel for the mad with their constantly

menaced yet suicidal willingness to say what's true with a clear conscience; envy of the torturer
who will be going home soon, disgusted and tired from his day's legal work to supper and family.

We've grown a good deal more cunning— compassionate, we call it. Still, we don't take any chances. We keep them under control—just think, when we could so easily kill them just like in the old days of family and morality. But it's an easy task, since they are incapable of taking any action whatsoever save that of occasionally perceiving reality. The real one.
We do this for their own good, of course; they might hurt themselves, you see, especially
us. And we have any number of methods which involve both their concrete surroundings and the medicinal alteration of their capacity to think. I mean, look where it got them. For no one, absolutely no one harbors the slightest desire to be reminded of reality. Things are bad enough as it is. I myself have served with a believer's heart on both sides, and I must say I greatly prefer the company of the nuts, though I will side with the sane any day.

I will freely admit to being a little confused
by this. It's not so much a matter
of Lowell's off-the-cuff remark, “I am inclined to
believe that it is better to be happy and good than to be a poet.” It isn't that simple. In fact, it is excruciatingly mysterious. But perhaps the human race is not all dressed up in mystery at all, but in reality is the Void
in pathetically transparent drag, “or something.” “So to speak.”

Dawn finds you leafing through old address books.

You thought you had written to everyone.

Yes, you have. To everyone—some of them

also wrote to you. They wrote back to you. Years ago, now. You aren't there anymore.

Then what do you want them to say. Nothing has changed, nothing has happened

to them—the ones who lived, the ones still at the same address. How would you ever describe it. And why.

And what could they say. They are safe.

They have a life, why would they want to write.

I like to see the individual verses
spread on the otherwise blank sheet of paper
like lines of black cocaine. Unfinished,
unincorporated into something anyone is ever going
to see: they are mine, to deny their existence and share with no one, as I please. They fill me with joy while they're still unemployed, still about to be rising up through the trunk-spine and leaf-veins of the brain: before I shudder, close my eyes and see nothing but light where there's supposed to be nothing. Then open them on a new room, one with a window outside of which a different world has appeared, one embodying euphoric intimations of a life-beckoning beauty, death-beckoning beauty, what do I care— I've entered my vacant room as I must, only this time to find a nude woman who's kneeling with her slender forearms resting on the sill, who tosses her hair to one side as the breeze from the window blows through it, its dark blond torrent floating, color of a horseman's torch at dawn, and stares in my direction over her shoulder, sees no one and almost
smiles before her eyes
return to the window I, too,
continue to gaze out of,
unless I do dare to approach her, letting this page
go totally blank once again and the mere
words all blow away.

The great black star-spoked hours
pass slowly
slowly
all morning long …

When I look back from here it seems all children must sense some vast inheritance

being withheld

life itself kept
deliberately from them
by their family the strangers

yet they all know the secret
of midnight
and wage a futile war for years
to stay awake
and see it
dawn

a black box of stars you could conceal in your fist if you knew where they kept it

The combination un divulged unknown perhaps except to those who do know where it is

The ones who command it is late go to bed

And you do for the time being In fact they are right it is late now

for them very late

All the while you are aware it is early

and getting earlier

One day I was suddenly wakened I'd finally escaped I don't know where or how I had managed it

Me

But somehow I was free I also had the box it was

still under my pillow where else like a gun

I was abruptly awakened
by eight numbers spoken in turn
by a circle
of eight diamond voices
identical
still vivid in my mind's ear

I reached for it and it was there beneath my ear and now

I also possessed the invisible key

I alone
could produce
with my voice with my soundless
mind's voice

From that day until this I've desisted

it was granted and that is enough

I ceased to obey

One will even after there is no one there to issue the command

And rose at last at my own
bidding
my own dawn

That's been a long time now
I can finally think
without fear
I will get something done now just watch

Because I live inside the dream the one I dreamed inside the life they forced on me

so long ago

Like a supper that's sadistically prepared from each and every food a child is known to gag on

day after month after year

One day the bird with diamond eyes discovers the door to its cage was always open

They can have their sunrise

The morning
with its billion suns is mine

We were wandering
the vast church—
Our Lady of the Strangers.
No audience, and
no magician in sight.
Watching the one trick he knows every day
must get boring.
I have an idea.
What if you were faced every morning
with taking
from the golden chalice
a sip of the real
thing, flowing into, joining
and haunting your own blood.
Because no symbol's going to help us.
I mean it,
really gagging it down
if you dared to
pity the ones being tortured right about now
and experience, not your own pain for a change, but
your helpless desire to assist them. Who knows,
you might get around to it
someday, that is
at least admit you believe
in their existence: that
shouldn't be so hard. We have to live
in the dark ages now, and I use that term
literally—the last one
was a carnival. There are no symbols
with the efficacy we require.
Blood, the real
blood: this
might be worth showing up for.
But I'll bet pretty damned few
would be able to
make it, even Sundays. Hell,
no one comes as it is, only
you and me, trespassing
during the off-hours.
Just wandering through the vast
void, with its dim
gold light from noplace, breathing in
illuminated motes
of dust and incense—
you and me, characteristically
lost somewhere off in our own
spooky corners
daydreaming, too far away
to whisper the name
of the other, alone, maybe
meeting each other by accident
as everyone must.

Without a measurable tremor or wince, with a coldly trained eye and hand the surgeon makes the first incision in the sleeper's brain.

He knows the risks. He knows this disorientingly fragile
embodiment of his own feelings and thoughts; though he, like the patient—he's also the patient—

feels nothing, must feel nothing
if he is to open and explore
that which would make a normal person
vomit, black out and fall down.

He is in possession of the identical feelings and thoughts of anyone else, so awful and dark sometimes, in illness. He is ill himself, that's the point. And yet

his mask is secure, he bends to the matter
at hand, spelling life or death
for the one in his sheet
the color of a blank page. If he faltered,
if he could not suspend
feelings and thoughts which accompany
his nausea at what he's seeing
while he probes and explores, making himself

cold as the scalpel he holds like a pen now, or now grips in his hand like the pen the child's using for the first time, like someone eating meat,

then how would he ever be able to gruesomely proceed and save his life; how would he, lacking this horrorlessness, locate the source of the horror, and start to heal.

In the windless one hundred degrees of eleven,
in the faintly sweet shade
of the grove just past town,
every day I would go to my tree
and sit down
with my back to it, open the notebook
and drunk with inspiration commence
describing.
It was demonstrated to me there
that nothing in the world can be described.
All attempts at pronouncing a place you loved
will have to be abandoned, oh
the ways the bright molested child has found to pass
his eerie day. And I began to learn. (There are hidden things waiting to utter anyone who needs
them.) After days of frustration verging on blackout some things I saw and felt there became, in what was once their botched depiction of a place, a place, and the saying of it into being the power of loving precisely what is.