Poems 1959-2009 (19 page)

The rain is over and gone:

Rise up, my love, my fair one,

And come away.

Tomorrow I set sail for the bottom, never to return.

The master cabin has its own head—which I'm from.

I'm from my head.

 

That was the song he found himself singing.

He heard a splash before he hit the concrete.

There was no water in the pool.

He couldn't stop himself in time.

One day, while he was waiting for the light to change,

And suddenly it began to rain,

And all at once the sun came out,

He saw a rainbow of blood.

He was so excited.

Splash.

That he dove off

The diving board without a thought.

There was no water in the pool.

He heard a splash

Just before he hit the concrete.

Gosh—

From good in bed

To as good as dead!

You smell the rain before it comes.

You smell the clean cool pierce the heat.

He has the air-conditioning on

But keeps the car windows open driving back to town.

It is the story of his life.

He smells the rain before it falls.

It was the middle of the night

In 212, the area code of love.

The poem he was writing put

Its arms around his neck.

Why write a poem?

There isn't any rain in hell

So why keep opening an umbrella?

That was the song he found himself singing.

 

The cord delivers electricity

From the wall socket to my mouth

Which I drink.

I want you all to know how much

My hair stands on end.

You will leave me alive.

You will leave me and live.

I hold midnight in my hand.

The town siren sounds because it's

Noon. The sunlight throws spears

Into the waves

And the gulls scream.

You get there.

Something instantly is wrong.

It only seems it's instantly.

It always is

The case that different time zones

Produce

Different midnights.

I hold a new year in my hand.

She stood on her toes to kiss me

Like in the nineteen fifties.

I glued my mucho macho lips to destiny.

I hurl a fireball at the logjam.

I turn on the TV.

I turn the oven off.

I make a call on my cell phone

To the mirror.

I see in the mirror Aeneas

Has changed.

He is drinking vodka odorlessly.

Into Dido wearing a dildo.

 

I have a dream

And must be fed.

The manta rays when you wade out

Ripple toward your outstretched hand.

The answer is

The friendliness of the body.

There is no answer, but the answer is

The friendliness of the body

Is the stars above

The dock at night.

And in the afternoon lagoon flags lazily flap

Their bodies toward yours

To be fed. I landed on

An atoll in the soft

Perfume.

The airport air was sweet. The blond January breeze was young.

The windchill factor

Which is Western thought

Received an IV drip of syrup of clove.

I have a dream. I have a dream the

Background radiation is a

Warm ocean, and a pasture for

Desire, and a

Beach of royal psalms.

The IV bag is a warm ocean,

Is a body not your own feeding your body.

My body loves your body

Is the motto of Tahiti.

Two flying saucers mating,

One on top the other, flap and flow, in love.

Each is a black

Gun soft as a glove.

 

The best way not to kill yourself

Is to ride a motorcycle very fast.

How to avoid suicide?

Get on and really ride.

Then comes Valentine's Day.

It is February, but very mild.

But the MV Agusta is in storage for the winter.

The Ducati racer is deeply asleep and not dreaming.

Put the pills back in the vial.

Put the gun back in the drawer.

Ventilate the carbon monoxide.

Back away from the railing.

You can't budge from the edge?

You can meet her in front of the museum.

It is closed today—every Monday.

If you are alive, happy Valentine's Day!

All you brave failed suicides, it is a leap year.

Every day is an extra day

To jump. It is February 29th

Deep in the red heart of February 14th.

On the steps in front of the museum,

The wind was blowing hard.

Something was coming.

Winter had been warm and weird.

Hide not thy face from me.

For I have eaten ashes like bread,

And mingled my drink with weeping,

While my motorcycles slept.

She arrives out of breath,

Without a coat, blazing health,

But actually it is a high flu fever that gives her glory.

Life is death.

 

God made human beings so dogs would have companions.

Along the promenade dogs are walking women.

One is wearing fur

Although the day is warm.

The fur

Trots behind a cur.

The mongrel sparkles and smiles

Leading her by the leash.

The month of March, that leads to hell,

Is plentiful in Cap Ferrat.

There is gambling around the bend

In the bay at the Casino in creamy Monte Carlo.

White as the Taj Mahal,

White as that stove of grief,

Is the cloud

Just passing by.

The air is herbs.

The sea is blue chrome curls.

The mutt sparkles and leers

And lifts a leg.

White as the weightless Taj Mahal,

White as the grief and love it was,

The day is warm, the sea is blue.

The dog, part spitz, part spots, is zest

And piss and Groucho Marx

Dragging a lady along.

The comedy

Is raw orison.

Dogs need an owner to belong to.

Dogs almost always die before their owners do.

But one dog built a Taj Mahal for two.

I loved you.

 

He discovered he would have to kill.

He went to Paris to study how.

He returned home to throw out the colonial French.

He never left the United States.

He was a boy who was afraid.

He talked arrogance, secretly sick at heart.

He oozed haughty nonchalance, like a duke sitting on a shooting stick.

He grinned toughness on the playing field running behind his teeth.

He strutted in the school library, smirking

Like Charlie Chaplin twirling his cane jauntily.

He was a genius but he was afraid

He would burst into flames of fame and cry.

This Ho Chi Minh was arrogant. This Ho Chi Minh was shy.

Then he discovered poetry. It was in Florida

One March, at spring break, with his sister and parents,

Having parted for the week from his first girlfriend ever.

He wrote:
The sea pours in while my heart pours out
—

Words to that effect.

Even for age thirteen,

This was pretty dim.

This was the year of his bar mitzvah.

It was his genocidal coming of age in Cambodia.

Everyone who wore glasses was executed.

He took his off.

They killed everything in sight in a red blur.

It rained

A rainbow of the color red.

They wore black pajamas in a red bed.

They killed anyone named Fred.

This to start Utopia. Everyone was dead.

The Algerians blew up the French.

The French horribly tortured them to find out.

 

The wind lifts off his face,

Which flutters

In the wind and snaps back and forth,

Just barely attached.

It smiles horribly—

A flag flapping on a flagpole.

Why is this idiot patriot

Smiling?

He is horribly

In love.

It is embarrassing to see

The red, white, and blue.

The field of stars

Is the universe, his mind,

Which thinks about her constantly

And dials her number.
Hello. It's me.

It really hurts

To see it in his face.

The awful smile of a dog

Is a grimace.

You can believe

In God again—God looks like him.

The Easter koan says the gas tank must be full

But empty. The taut wind sock

Sounds the trumpet,

Summoning all

To the new.

The trumpet sounds!

Sweet is spreading salt,

But only on the ice where people walk,

Only it is rice in slow motion showering fragrant

Spring rain on the couples.

 

A baby elephant is running along the ledge across

The front of an apartment building ten stories up.

What must be the young woman handler desperately gives chase,

Which has a comic aspect as she hangs on by the rope.

But the baby elephant falls, yanking the young woman floatingly

To her death on a ledge lower down.

The baby elephant lies dead on Broadway.

Every year it does.

Birds bathe in the birdbath in the warm blood.

The bed upstairs is red.

The sheets are red.

The pillows are blood.

The baby elephant looks like a mouse running away

Or a cockroach scuttling away on a shelf,

Followed by the comically running sandpiper

Holding the rope.

It is everywhere when you restart your computer.

You don't see it and then you do.

A half has already fallen to the street,

And the other is falling and hits the ledge.

Now
is a vase of flowers

Maniacally blooming red.

The medallion cabs seem very yellow

Today—as yellow as lymph.

Every April 1st Frank O'Hara's ghost

Stops in front of the Olivetti showroom

On Fifth Avenue—which hasn't been there for thirty years.

He's there for the Lettera 22 typewriter outside on a marble pedestal

With a supply of paper—to dash off a city poem, an April poem,

That he leaves in the typewriter for the next passerby,

On his way to work at the Museum of Modern Art, because

The baby elephant is running along the ledge, chased by its handler.

 

A man picks up a telephone to hear his messages,

Returns the handset to the cradle, looking stunned.

The pigeon on the ledge outside the window

Bobs back and forth in front of New York City, moaning.

A man takes roses to a doctor, to her office,

And gets himself buzzed in, and at the smiling front desk

Won't give his name to the receptionist, just leaves red roses.

The doctor calls the man the next day, leaves a message.

There isn't anything more emptiness than this,

But it's an emptiness that's almost estival.

The show-off-ness of living full of May

Puts everything that's empty on display.

The pigeon on the ledge outside the window

Moans, bobbing up and down, releasing whiteness.

The day releases whiteness on the city.

And May increases.

Seersucker flames of baby blue and white

Beneath a blue-eyed Caucasian sky with clouds

Fill up the emptiness of East Side life

Above a center strip that lets red flowers grow.

They call them cut flowers when they cut them.

They sell the living bodies at the shop.

A man is bringing flowers to a doctor,

But not for her to sew them up.

And May is getting happy, and the temperature is eighty.

And the heart is full of palm trees, even when it's empty.

The center strip migraine down Park Avenue sees red.

Girl with a Red Hat
in the Vermeer show is what it sees.

Vermeer went in a day and a half from being healthy to being dead.

A city made of pigeons is moaning in a morgue that's a garden.

The red hat reddens the Metropolitan.

It's its harem.

 

Venus wants Jesus.

Jesus wants justice.

That one wants this.

This one wants that.

I want.

It means I lack.

Working men and women on

May 1st march.

They want to increase

The minimum wage and they will form a line.

My fellow glandes march

Entirely

Around the girl while

Around the world bands

Are playing.

On the White House lawn, “Hail to the Chief”

Greets the arriving helicopter slowly curtsying

On the landing pad.

They ought

To wait till the rotor stops. The president

Descends

The stairs waving. Behind him is

The uniformed aide with the attaché case carrying

The codes.

The president

Can place a lei around

A billion necks

In an hour.

They wanted to live till June.

They wanted the time.

They wanted to say goodbye.

They wanted to go to the bathroom before.

 

Each June there is a memorial Mass

For Count Corrado Agusta in the family church,

Whose factory team of overwhelming motorcycles

Won every Grand Prix championship for years.

The courtyard in front of the sinister stark house