Mercy (11 page)

to not get hurt, to have regular boyfriends, to pretend they

were different or bad; but I was really lost so I had to be lost,

not pretend, in a dark as hard and unyielding as the cement

under it. In N ew Y ork I got o ff the bus dank from old Charles,

old Vincent, he walked away, wet, rumpled, not •looking

back, and I had some dollars in my hand, and I took the A train

to Greenwich Village, and I went to the Eighth Street

Bookstore, the center o f the universe, the place where real

poets went, the most incredible place on earth, they made

beauty from the dark, the gray, the cement, your head down

in someone’s lap, the torn skin on your bruised knees, your

bloody hands; it wasn’t the raspy, choked, rough whisper, it

was real beautiful words with the perfect shape and sound and

filled with pain and rage and pure, perfect; and I looked

everywhere, at every book, at every poem, at every play, and I

touched every book o f poems, I just touched them, just passed

my hand over them, and I bought any poems I had money for,

sometimes it was just a few pages stapled together with print

on it, and I kept them with me and I could barely breathe, and I

knew names no one else knew, Charles Olsen, Robert

Duncan, Gregory Corso, Anselm Hollo, Leroi Jones,

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Creeley,

Kenneth Rexroth; and when Allen Ginsberg had new poems I

almost died, Allen Ginsberg who was the most perfect and the

bravest and the best and the words were perfect beauty and

perfect power and perfect pain and I carried them with me and

read them, stunned and truly trembling inside because they

went past all lies to something hidden inside; and I got back on

the bus and I got back to Camden and I had the poems and

someday it would be me. I wrote words out on paper and hid

them because my mother would say they were dirty words; all

the true words were dirty words. I wrote private, secret words

in funny-shaped lines. Y ou could take the dark— the thick,

mean, hard, sad dark— the gray cement, lonely as death, cold

as death, stone cold, the torn skin, you on your knees your

hands bleeding on the cold cement, and you could use words

to say
I am
— I am, I want, I know , I feel, I see. N in o ’s knife,

cold, on the edge o f m y skin down m y back, the cement

underneath: I want, I know, I feel; then he tears you apart from

behind, inside. Y ou could use words to say what it was and

how it felt, the dark banging into you, pressing up against you,

pinning you down, a suffocating mask over your face or a

granite mountain pressing you under it, you’re a fossil, delicate,

ancient, buried alive and perfectly preserved, some bones

between the mountain and the level ground, pressed flat on the

cement under the dark, the great, still, thick, heavy dark. Y ou

could sing pain soft or you could holler; you could use the

voices o f the dead i f you had to, the other skeletons pressed in

the cement. Y ou could write the words on the cement blind in

the dark, pushed on your knees, a finger dipped in blood; or

pushed flat, the dark on you, the cement under you, N in o ’s

knife touching the edge o f your skin. The poems said: Andrea,

me too, I’m on m y knees, afraid and alone, and I
sing
; I’m

pushed flat, rammed, torn up, and I
sing;
I weep, I rage, I
sing
; I

hurt, I’m sad, I
sing
; I want, I’m lost, I
sing.
Y ou learned the

names o f things, the true names, short, abrupt, unkind, and

you learned to
sing
them, your heart soared from them, the

song o f them, the great, simple music o f them. The dark

stayed dark and hard but now it had a sound in it, a bittersweet

lyric, music carried on the edge o f a broken line. Then m y

m omma found the words I wrote and called me awful names,

foul names, in a screaming voice, in filthy hate, she screamed I

was dirty, she screamed she wanted me o ff the face o f the

earth, she screamed she’d lock me up. I left on the bus to N ew

Y ork . N o one’s locking me up. When the men said the names

they whispered and touched you; and flat on the cement, still

there were no locks, no walls. When the men said the names

they were all tangled in you and their skin was melting into

you the w ay night covers everything, they curved and curled.

There was the edge o f N in o’s knife on your skin, down your

back, with him in you and the cement under you, your skin

scraped away, burned o ff almost, the sweat on you turning as

cold as the edge o f his knife; try to breathe. She screamed

foul hate and spit obscene words and tore up all your things, all

your poems you had bought and the words you had written;

and she said she’d lock you up; no one locks me up. Men

whispered the same names she said and touched you all over,

they were on you, they covered you, they hid you, they were

the weight o f midnight on you, a hundred years o f midnight,

they held you down and kept you still and it was the only

stillness you had and you could hear a heartbeat; men

whispered names and touched you all over. Men wanted you

all the time and never had enough o f you and the cement was a

great, gray plain stretching out forever and you could wander

on it forever, free, with signs that they had been there and

promises they would come back, abrasions, burns, thin,

exquisite cuts; not locked up. Under them, covered, buried,

pinned still— the dark ramming into you— you could hear a

heartbeat. And somewhere there were ones who could
sing.

Whisper; touch everywhere;
sing.

T H R E E

In January 1965

(Age 18)

M y name is Andrea. It means manhood or courage, from the

ancient Greek. I found this in Paul Tillich, although I like

Martin Buber better because I believe in pure love, I-Thou,

love without boundaries or categories or conditions or

making someone less than you are; not treating people like

they are foreign or lower or things, I-It. Prejudice is I-It and

hate is I-It and treating people like dirt is I-It. In Europe only

boys are named Andrea, Andre, Andreus, but m y mother

didn’t know that and so I got named Andrea because she

thought it was pretty. Philosophy comes from Europe but

poetry comes from America too. I was born down the street

from Walt Whitman’s house, on M ickle Street in Cam den,

N ew Jersey, in 1946, after the bomb. I’m not sad but I wish

everyone didn’t have to die. Everyone will burn in a split

second, even less, they w o n ’t even know it but I bet it will hurt