Poems 1959-2009 (24 page)

And carnivorous and fast and keeps going.

Sri Lanka, southern India, Myanmar

(Where Ne Win, the senile military dictator who has tried to ruin

Rangoon and everywhere else and everyone, still keeps the daughter

Of the great patriot democrat of the country

Under house arrest, but one day that will end).

For nine months she travels, pregnant.

On the day she turns into a tree,

She gives birth to a boy.

 

A man is masturbating his heart out,

Swinging in the hammock of the Internet.

He rocks back and forth, his cursor points

And selects. He swings between repetitive extremes

Among the come-ons in the chat rooms.

But finally he clicks on one

World Wide Web woman who cares.

Each of her virtual hairs

Brings him to his knees.

Each of her breasts

Projects like a sneeze.

He hears her dawning toward him as he reads her dimensions,

Waves sailing the seas of cyberspace—

Information, zeros-and-ones, whitecaps of.

Caught in a tangle of Internet,

Swinging in the mesh to sleep,

Rocking himself awake, sailing the virtual seas,

A man travels through space to someone inside

An active-matrix screen. Snow falls.

A field of wildflowers blooms. Night falls.

Day resumes.

This is the story about humans taking over

The country. New York is outside

His study while he works. Paris is outside.

Outside the window is Bologna.

He logs on. He gets up.

He sits down. A car alarm goes off

Yoi yoi yoi yoi and yips as it suddenly stops.

Man has the takeover impact

Of an asteroid—throwing up debris, blotting out the sun—

Causing the sudden mass extinction

Of the small bookstore

At the millennium. The blood from the blast cakes

And forms the planet's new crust:

A hacker in Kinshasa getting it on with one in Nome.

Their poems start

With the part about masturbating the heart—

Saber cuts whacking a heart into tartare—

Heart art worldwide,

Meaning that even in the Far East the subject is love.

Here in the eastern United States,

A man is masturbating his art out.

An Ice Age that acts hot

Only because of the greenhouse effect

Is the sort of personality.

Beneath the dome of depleted ozone, they stay cold.

Mastodons are mating on the Internet

Over the bones of dinosaur nuclear arms,

Mating with their hands.

 

A dog named Spinach died today.

In her arms he died away.

Injected with what killed him.

Love is a cup that spilled him.

Spilled all the Spin that filled him.

Sunlight sealed and sent.

Received and spent.

Smiled and went.

 

I see a first baseman's mitt identical to mine

On the right hand of the best who ever lived.

The dark deep claw of leather

Called a trapper hungrily flaps shut and open

While Stan Musial stands there glowing and magnified

In Sportsman's Park on the red dirt behind the bag,

A crab whose right claw is huge,

Costumed legs apart and knees slightly bent,

Springy on spikes, a grown man on springs,

Source of light with wings

(And when he is at bat, one of the beautiful swings).

The pitcher goes into the windup and rears back with desire.

Stan the Man pounds our glove

Broken in with neat's-foot oil.

We get a runner caught in a rundown between first and second.

I can't get the ball back out of the pocket

To throw to the pitcher covering second in time.

Then fifty years pass.

Nothing is next.

 

The beauty of the boy had twisted

Into a shape brain damage has.

Into the room walked a twenty-year-old

Helix with a head

Lopsidedly.

The radiant

Grimness of the Shostakovich

Fifteenth Quartet, the last,

Most austere, most beautiful solemn terror,

The most music one repeated note can make, put out green leaves.

The twentieth century was drawing

To a close with a foal caught in amber smiling

At his mother.

Whose infinite eyes as he limped

In the room smiled.

 

A gerbil running on an exercise wheel whirs away the hours

To eternity by reciting the
Iliad
.

Just a gentle gerbil under Joseph Stalin, the eagle Osip Mandelstam.

Biting the arctic stars, black sky,

Spruce trees line his lower jaw.

Stalin flutters like a moth against his hot light.

Lightning flutters against the hot night.

St. Petersburg and Moscow are having sexual intercourse

In a slaughterhouse,

And will produce many sons.

But in the meantime there are the mixed moans.

The cockroach telephones Boris Pasternak from the Kremlin to croon

His fellow poet will be all right—but adds, “You don't really say

Much to save your friend,” and hangs up.

 

The United Nations is listening

Via simultaneous translation to the poet Mandelstam.

Tier after tier of the Tower of Babel tribunal being

Breast-fed by their headsets hear his starry eyes,

Marbles of melody and terror.

PowerBooks, powder of the rhinoceros horn, delegates

In every kind of suit and sari and sarong and dream

Men and women around the round world wear, rip

The ribbon from a box of chocolates

And find inside his wife and him,

And hear him begging Nadezhda not to leave the box.

A United Nations of all the languages is going

Through the air, a motorcycle going fast

Into the Nevada desert,

The joy of the original

Into a beautiful emptiness.

Through the double-parked side streets of New York

Into a tunnel, under a river,

The joy of the original goes

Into a tile hole

Which amplifies the sound.

The leading edge of the wing is your face

That comes to earth to me.

I watch you wait.

A twentieth-century

Power outage brings the darkness back

In the vicinity of Jesus Christ, a Caucasian male.

I want the General Assembly to know

How China greets the day.

They don't like blonds and they don't like blacks.

The smell won't go away.

The smell of sperm on the edge of the axe.

Among them Mandelstam, among the millions.

Into the aurora borealis cathedral he walks, filling the choir.

He and the other children weave

A rose window with the face of Shakespeare as the rose.

The tale he tells is made of Northern Lights.

Hairs of titanium are the bridge cables, of spun glass.

Horror has been hammered

Into white gold and gold gold,

Benumbed. Stalin has become sweet butter and salt

On an ear of summer butter-and-sugar corn.

The phonograph record pinned

Under the needle reaches the scratch.

Don't stop
thump
don't stop
thump
don't stop.

Snow is falling.

A candle burns.

I watch you waiting for me to wake.

 

The perfect body of the yoga teacher

Stains a timeless pose.

Her perfect tan

Is an untouchable.

The beauty of her body

Is a storm

About to hit.

The monsoon air is rank and sweet.

Lightning storms a room

Which thunder overpowers

With stun grenades

That blind and deafen.

Her skin contains the storm

Inside the pose.

Rain squalls wash

The sidewalks raw.

The bombing run unleashes

Mushrooms on a path.

The Stealth flies unseen

Inside out.

High above the homeless,

Back and forth,

Job walks inside out

Weeping storms.

The widow throws her body

On her husband's pyre.

The pose is pain

About to fall in floods.

The goal is grain

Enough to feed the world.

Bodies floating down the Ganges

Do the pose but while they do

The king is entering the field.

The queen is entering a grove.

The king is singing to the troops.

The storm is starting.

 

My tiny Pitts

Fifteen and a half feet long

Brightly painted so it can be seen easily

By the aerobatics judges on the ground

Is a star.

The invisible biplane

Parked on display in my living room

With an inferior roll rate cheerily

Outperforms the more powerful Sukhoi's

Loops and spins.

G's of the imagination fasten

My five-point harness

To the star upside down

The sky is my living room

A chuck behind each wheel.

 

Suddenly I had to eat

A slowly writhing worm

A woman warmed on a flat stone in a jungle clearing

Or starve. I had to charm a Nazi waving a Lüger

Who could help me escape from a jungle river port town or die.

I had to survive not being allowed to sit down,

For ten hours, in a Mexico City

Jail, accused of manslaughter because

My cab driver in the early morning rush hour

Had killed a pedestrian and jumped out and run.

The prostitute even younger than I was that

I had spent the night with had been

So shy I had gone home with her to meet her parents

When she asked. In the Waikiki Club

Where she worked, I'd faced her machete-faced pimp wielding a knife.

At the Mayan Temple of the Moon, “that” instead of “whom,”

Which the explorer Richard Halliburton

Has written everyone must climb on a night of the full moon

At midnight who wants to say he or she has lived,

The guard dog woke the guard up.

I heard the lyrical barking from the top.

I saw the wink of the rifle barrel far below in the moonlight and hit

The deck like a commando on the ramp along the outside of the pyramid to hide.

When at last I looked up Orson Welles stood there, doe-eyed sombrero silence

Expecting a bribe. I walked with him all innocence down the ramp.

I walked past him out the gate and he fired.

I felt invulnerable, without feelings, without pores.

A week after I got back home to St. Louis I fainted

At the wheel of a car just after I had dropped off a friend,

And for four months in the hospital with a tropical disease I nearly died.

Suddenly in the jungle there was an American professor named Bud Bivins

Who had fled from Texas to avoid the coming nuclear war.

The Nazi found passage for us both on a tramp steamer which ran

Into a violent storm in the Gulf not long after Bivins had gone mad

And taken to pacing the deck all night after the cook had demanded

On the captain's behalf that we pay him more, on top of what

We'd already paid, or swim, with his butcher knife pointing to a thin line

Of green at the horizon, the distant jungle shore.

The captain would be delighted to let us off immediately if we wished.

No one saw Bivins when we reached port.

In the middle of the night a huge wave hit

The rotten boatload of tarantulas and bananas, slam-dunking us under.

The cook and all the others, including our captain,

Kneeled at the rail holding on, loudly praying, so who was at the wheel?

Bivins was last spied on the deck. I was sixteen.

 

Nothing is pure at 36,000 feet either.

Even in First, there is only more.

The wing is streaked

By the jet engine's exhaust. Sometimes

I stand outside a toilet

Which is occupied, staring out

A window somewhere over Malaysia at dawn.

I am the wing,

The thing that should be lift,

Soiled by power.

Make no mistake about the heat.

It also has to eat.

It eats the fuel it's fed.

It eats the air.

It eats the hair.

It eats what's there.

The jungle devours me with its eyes which are

Screamed skyscrapers of plasm.

I said dismal. I meant passion.

The sky unfreezes me alive.

There is heaven the mainland. And there is heaven the island.

There is the warm water of heaven between.

The minister of defense bull's-eyes on the helicopter pad

With security all around wearing a curly wire into one ear.

Code-named Big Fish, he likes Eau Sauvage

To be there ahead of him wherever he goes.

There is heaven the novel, and heaven the movie.

Below you is the sky at 35,000 feet.

Above you is the muezzin until it ends.

I have the lift, but think I ought to land.

The blank eye of the sky muezzins the faithless to rise

And face the heat

And urinate and defecate and eat and act

Another day.

I wish I knew your name.

Powerful forces have built a road

Through the jungle. Muslim apparently

Women fully clothed are apparently allowed to expose in the lucky

Warm water with their brown kids sporting like putti flying fish.

Quiet on the set, please, thank you. The actors are rehearsing.