Poems 1959-2009 (26 page)

 

My violent Honda 125cc Grand Prix racer

Is the size of a bee.

It is too small to ride

Except for the joy.

My on-fire 1996
RS125R

Flies on its little wings,

A psalmist, all stinger,

On racing slicks.

It absolutely can't stop

Lifting its voice to scream.

It mounts the victory podium.

Lauda, Jerusalem, Dominum.

I am a Jew.

I am Japan.

I shift gears over and over.

I scream to victory again and again.

Fall leaves inflame the woods.

It is brilliant to live.

The sorrow that is not sorrow,

The mist of everything is over everything.

 

The god in the nitroglycerin

Is speedily absorbed under the tongue

Till it turns a green man red,

Which is what a poem does.

It explosively reanimates

By oxygenating the tribe.

No civilized state will execute

Someone who is ill

Till it makes the someone well

Enough to kill

In a civilized state,

As a poem does.

I run-and-bump the tiny

Honda 125cc Grand Prix racer. Only

Two steps and it screams. I

Slip the clutch to get the revs up, blipping and getting

Ready not to get deady,

Which also is what a poem does.

They dress them up in the retirement centers.

They dress them up in racing leathers.

They dress them up in war paint and feathers.

The autumn trees are in their gory glory.

The logs in the roaring fire keep passing

The peace pipe in pain, just what a poem does.

Stanza no. 5. We want to be alive.

Line 26. We pray for peace.

Line 27. The warrior and peacemaker Rabin is in heaven.

28. We don't accept his fate.

But we do. Life is going ahead as fast as it can,

Which is what a poem does.

 

An animal in the wild

Comes up to you in a clearing because it

Has rabies. It loves you. It does not know why.

It pulls out a gun.

You really will die.

The motorcycle you are riding

Is not in control of itself.

It is not up to you to.

The sky is not well.

It wants to make friends.

It stalks you to

Hold out its hand

At a hundred and sixty-four miles an hour.

It asks you to

Take down your pants.

Daphne fleeing Apollo

Into the Sinai shrinks to a bonsai.

The Jewish stars that top the crown

Prime Minister Rabin is wearing

As he ascends to heaven assassinated, twinkle.

The main tank holds the dolphins.

Land for peace is not for them.

Daphne fleeing Apollo

Across the desert of your desk becomes

In India a cow.

The icing on the cake

Is stone. The Ten Commandments

Are incised in it.

You take a bite

Of Israel and spit out teeth, señor.

You throw your head back and wheelie

On the
RS125R

And the Ducati,

Surrounded by security rushing you forward,

Suddenly aware you have been shot.

 

A Ducati Supermono walks down the aisle

At a hundred and forty-one miles an hour

To kiss the Torah, trumpeting,

An elephant downsized to a gazelle that devours lions.

Red Italian bodywork

Designed by the South African

Pierre Terblanche is sensuous lavish smoothness

With mustard-yellow highlights.

Even the instrument binnacle

Is beautiful and the green

Of the top triple clamp

Means magnesium, no expense spared, very trick.

The rabbi weighs only

301 lbs. with the tank full.

It wails straight

To the Wailing Wall.

It is big but being small

The Supermono has a mania.

The double con-rod balance system is elegance.

The total motorcycle bugles petite magnificence.

How to keep killing Hitler

Is the point.

How to be a work of art and win.

How to be Supermono and marry Lois Lane in the synagogue, and love.

 

I'd had a haircut at Molé.

I called you from the first pay phone that worked.

You were high above Park Avenue,

Having damask troubles in their library.

I saw the man approaching not see me.

I held the phone and heard the servants getting you.

I watched him squat in the street near the curb while the traffic passed,

Spreading under himself sheets of newspaper;

Which when he rose he folded neatly

And carried to the trash basket at the corner.

Across the street were Mortimer's' outside tables set for lunch.

Now the maître d' was seating an early customer,

While a woman pushing a shopping cart

Picked through the trash in the trash basket the man had used,

And the butler finally came back

To the phone to say you had gone.

 

City of neutered dogs,

How homeless can you be

In a nine-room apartment

With windows on three sides?

Waiting to be shot

At sunrise by sixteen windows!

Everything you need is

A wall to stand in front of.

With a southern exposure.

Paneling in front of

The wall you stand in front of.

The doorman calls upstairs.

Shall I send it up?

It is coming up.

Your back is to the wall

This pleasant afternoon,

This autumn afternoon,

This final afternoon.

You on all sides of you

In the mirrored bathroom.

You on all sides of you

In the walk-in closet.

In your booklined blindfold.

In the deep fatigue

The sunset warms with rouge.

The
homeless
homeless have

The center strip of Broadway.

To live where you should jump.

 

They can't get close enough—there's no such thing.

Look. When they smile. Each rising like a tree

Inside the other, breathing quietly.

Two women start their hour by moistening.

The engine pulling them around the bend

Exposes irresistibly the train

They're on extending from them through the rain.

And then it's night. And it will never end.

They're in a limousine. The plane they're on

Is over water. Dawn reveals the two

Berlins becoming one. And now they knew

The time had come. And now the rain is gone.

Two passengers aboard their lives undress

Down to their hands. The lifelines touch. They stay

Behind their smiles. The guard comes in to say

The hour is over, and they tell her yes.

 

If you're a woman turning fifty,

You're a woman who feels cheated.

This message now will be repeated.

The bittersweetness known as Jesus

Was not some nice man saying he is

Not quite a feminist and not quite not one.

Every man's a rapist until he's done.

The bitch relieves the dog. The wound, the gun.

The Sermon on the Mount, the Son.

Was it better back in Peapack

Riding over hills to hounds,

Your consciousness not yet raised?

At Foxcroft, under Miss Charlotte,

Polishing your boots till they were bittersweet,

The fields were a girl's cantata.

Doing the rumba at the regatta,

Plato in Greek, amphetamines your stallion, were your alma mater,

And the Metropolitan, and the Modern … and then S/M.

Oh, the tiny furs and the red stench of the fox

Of all those white girls taking cold showers

And then lining up to jump

Hair in a net in a hat over perfectly maintained fences.

Everything male is a rapist, certainly God,

Except for Henry James.

At the Institute for Advanced Study,

Which your father helped organize,

Your father made lives,

Scientists he saved from the Nazis,

Putting his face on the cover of
Time
,

Or was that for his part in building the Atom Bomb?

And otherwise—the man made gushers in Texas rise.

He macadamized the roads of Greece.

His sword was terrible and swift.

He strode up the hill in the heat.

He dove into the ice-cold pool and burst

Instantly into death like a flame.

 

Reginald Fincke was his name,

The son of Reginald Fincke.

All his friends called him Rex.

Rex lost his eye playing rackets.

The match at the New York City Racquet Club,

In the battleship-gray rackets court,

With the lines done in red like a Mondrian,

Was stopped short,

With the light from the skylight streaming down,

And the overhead electric lights also on

(So the light in the court would be even).

A dashingly handsome young man,

Flawless brutal power.

Hot elegance of a thoroughbred being hot-walked

By George Santayana and Learned Hand through Harvard.

The slender long shaft of the rackets racket,

With its rather small head, so graceful.

The rifle shot crack of the rackets ball

When a hard forehand drive meets the faraway front wall

(And the clang if the ball hits the telltale).

And the lovely backhand backswing

Flowing back to a cocked position.

A rackets ball is a rock. A rackets ball is a
rocketing
rock.

Once the ball is served,

In between each shot,

The marker calls out
Play!

If the path for the next shot is free,

If the other man is not in the way.

When the ball is crackling back and forth,

Picking up speed off four stone walls,

Accelerating right at you, exploding away,

In the lightning exchanges of a rally,

Over and over the marker cries
Play!

Meaning the other man is not in your way,

Play!—Play!—Play!—Play!

Meaning the other man is not in your way,

Except when the marker yells
Time!

The ball can do such damage!

George Santayana, what kind of insane is it

If someone has to okay each shot!

And the gasp from the gallery when the marker called
Play!

And immediately Fincke was struck.

Fincke was his name,

Fincke went his game.

He'll never fight in a war,

Not that there'll be a war,

Now that he's lost an eye.

He'd become number one in the world earlier that year,

Crushing the previous number one in a private court near Oxford.

He answered a challenge at Tuxedo Park.

Ten thousand dollars had been put up.

Eight million men will die.

The instinct for self-preservation is real though in young men

It pulls its head in but sticks its neck out.

The enormous gun starts firing at the world,

Fires and recoils, fires and recoils.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife the duchess, the duchess,

Are dead at Sarajevo. It echoes.

Welcome to the Racquet Club, Mr. Princip.

Welcome, everyone, to the Porcellian.

Wise—he would have said simply hardworking, sane. Plain

Human magnificence, ugly as Socrates.

Fat hairy caterpillar eyebrows.

Learned Hand was America's.

My former wife's mother was Hand's daughter, one of three.

(He had always wanted a son.)

She curled her pinky in smiling imitation

Of the ancient crone she had known as a child

Who seized every opportunity to say,

Her fabulous diamonds winking away,

“I am Mrs. Reginald Fincke! Fincke with an ‘e'!”

 

That wasn't it.

The other wasn't either.

I woke up looking through a hole.

Love was blowing through.

It was fresh.

The clouds were clean as only

Squeezed out of a tube

In blobs can be.

The universe begins,

And look what happens. It's spring

At the event horizon.

My future former wife expands

In the ungovernable first seconds to a speck

Which will be high school age fifteen

Billion years from now.

Donna mi priegha—

A lady asks me, I speak in season,

What is the origin of the universe?

What is an event horizon?

If you put a gun to your temple and close your eyes,

And the enormous pressure builds and builds,

And slowly you squeeze the trigger …

Do you hear the big bang?

When you kill yourself,

Do you hear the sound?

Followed by the universe.

On the far side of the invisible,

On the inside of a black hole, is

The other universe, which is closed,

Which you can't enter or see,

Which you don't know is right there,

Without dimensions and unknowable.

Eyelet

As vast as a pore.

An entire universe in less than a dot.

The opposite of infinite.

Less than a dot that weighs more than the world.

The opposite of infinite

Is infinite.

The gravity is so great.