Poems 1959-2009 (29 page)

In the crosshairs of the scope of love,

And smells what the gun calls Scotland and falls.

The meat of geology raw is Scotland: Stone

Age hours of stalking, passionate aim for the heart,

Bleak dazzling weather of the bare and green.

Old men in kilts, their beards are lobster red.

Red pubic hair of virgins white as cows.

Omega under Alpha, rock hymen, fog penis—

The unshaved glow of her underarms is the sky

Of prehistory or after the sun expands.

The sun will expand a billion years from now

And burn away the mist of Caithness—till then,

There in the Thurso phone book is Robin Thurso.

But he is leaving for his other castle.

“Yes, I'm just leaving—what a pity! I can't

Remember, do you shoot?” Dukes hunt stags,

While Scotsmen hunt for jobs and emigrate,

Or else start seeing red spots on a moor

That flows to the horizon like a migraine.

Sheep dot the moor, bubblebaths of unshorn

Curls somehow red, unshepherded, unshorn.

Gone are the student mobs chanting the
Little Red

Book
of Mao at their Marxist dons.

The universities in the south woke,

Now they are going back to the land of dreams—

Tour buses clog the roads that take them there.

Gone, the rebel psychoanalysts.

Scotland trained more than its share of brilliant ones.

Pocked faces, lean as wolves, they really ran

To untrain and be famous in London, doing wild

Analysis, vegetarians brewing

Herbal tea for anorexic girls.

Let them eat haggis. The heart, lungs, and liver

Of a sheep minced with cereal and suet,

Seasoned with onions, and boiled in the sheep's stomach.

That's what the gillie eats, not venison,

Or salmon, or grouse served rare, not for the gillie

That privilege, or the other one which is

Mushed vegetables molded to resemble a steak.

Let them come to Scotland and eat blood

Pud from a food stall out in the open air,

In the square in Portree. Though there is nothing

Better in the world than a grouse cooked right.

They make a malt in Wick that tastes as smooth

As Mouton when you drink enough of it.

McEwen adored both, suffered a partial stroke,

Switched to champagne and died. A single piper

Drones a file of mourners through a moor,

The sweet prodigal being piped to his early grave.

A friend of his arriving by helicopter

Spies the procession from a mile away,

The black speck of the coffin trailing a thread,

Lost in the savage green, an ocean of thawed

Endlessness and a spermatozoon.

A vehement bullet comes from the gun of love.

On the island of Raasay across from Skye,

The dead walk with the living hand in hand

Over to Hallaig in the evening light.

Girls and boys of every generation,

MacLeans and MacLeods, as they were before they were

Mothers and clansmen, still in their innocence,

Walk beside the islanders, their descendants.

They hold their small hands up to be held by the living.

Their love is too much, the freezing shock-alive

Of rubbing alcohol that leads to sleep.

 

The honey, the humming of a million bees,

In the middle of Florence pining for Paris;

The whining trembling the cars and trucks hum

Crossing the metal matting of Brooklyn Bridge

When you stand below it on the Brooklyn side—

High above you, the harp, the cathedral, the hive—

In the middle of Florence. Florence in flames.

Like waking from a fever … it is evening.

Fireflies breathe in the gardens on Bellosguardo.

And then the moon steps from the cypresses and

A wave of feeling breaks, phosphorescent—

Moonlight, a wave hushing on a beach.

In the dark, a flame goes out. And then

The afterimage of a flame goes out.

 

Older than us, but not by that much, men

Just old enough to be uncircumcised,

Episcopalians from the Golden Age

Of schools who loved to lose gracefully and lead—

Always there before us like a mirage,

Until we tried to get closer, when they vanished,

Always there until they disappeared.

They were the last of a race, that was their cover—

The baggy tweeds. Exposed in the Racquet Club

Dressing room, they were invisible,

Present purely in outline like the head

And torso targets at the police firing

Range, hairless bodies and full heads of hair,

Painted neatly combed, of the last WASPs.

They walked like boys, talked like their grandfathers—

Public servants in secret, and the last

Generation of men to prefer baths.

These were the CIA boys with
EYES

ONLY
clearance and profiles like arrowheads.

A fireside frost bloomed on the silver martini

Shaker the magic evenings they could be home.

They were never home, even when they were there.

Public servants in secret are not servants,

Either. They were our gods working all night

To make Achilles' beard fall out and prop up

The House of Priam, who by just pointing sent

A shark fin gliding down a corridor,

Almost transparent, like a watermark.

 

The endangered bald eagle is soaring

Away from extinction, according to the evening news—

Good news after the news, after

The stocking masks and the blindfolds,

Contorted and disfigured nature in the dying days of oil.

What a surprise happy ending for the half hour.

Eagles airlift above the timberline—
cut to

Their chicks nesting in the rocks.

The TV anchorman who predigests it all,

Himself has a great American carnivore prow,

But he is more an oak than an eagle.

According to polls, our father image comforts like the breast,

Is more trusted than the president by far.

Oh so honestly Carter's eyes widen and glitter

For emphasis—the expression of a very sober child

Who is showing you he can wiggle his ears.

Flags fly at half-mast all over the nation

For the fallen, each flagpole a pinprick,

So many pinpricks it becomes pain—

Three thousand continental miles from sea to sea

Reforested with half-flying flags. How unsuitable

For being on its knees Old Glory is,

Bomb burst and cheer on its knees under

Incomparable American skies, the famous North American light.

The famous humidity. Condensation frosts the bottom inch

Of the windshield, the first air conditioner day.

A rainbow of stainless steel, the Gateway Arch,

Takes off and lands, takes off and lands, takes off

And rises sixty stories, and swoops back and lands

A little way down the levee. A railroad bridge

Filigrees across the brown sumptuous river.

Humid flags sog at half-mast.

Bitter bitter bitter bitter

Cries a bird somewhere out over the river

At dusk, as darkness filters down through the soft evening

On Ste. Genevieve, near St. Louis. Remember,

The creek out there somewhere in the dark

Burbles, remember. You cannot see:

But close your eyes anyway, and smell.

The houses when you open your eyes are watching the news.

Unshaved men in suits walk ahead of others in masks.

It might be the men one sees strolling

Together outside Claridge's in London followed

At a submissive distance by their veiled wives,

But in Central America—hostages and their slaves

By relay satellite. Rank as the odor in urine

Of asparagus from the night before,

This is empire waking drunk, and remembering in the dark.

 

Above the Third World, looking down on a fourth:

Life
's aerial photograph of a new radio telescope

Discoloring an inch of mountainside in Chile,

A Martian invasion of dish receivers.

The tribes of Israel in their tents

Must have looked like this to God—

A naive stain of wildflowers on a hill,

A field of ear trumpets listening for Him,

Stuck listening to space like someone blind …

If there was a God.

There never is.

Almond-eyed shepherd warriors

Softly pluck their harps and stare off into space,

And close their eyes and dream.

In one tent, the Ark;

The chip of kryptonite.

They dream a recurring dream

About themselves as superpowers, and their origin.

Man is the only animal that dreams of outer space,

Epitome of life on earth,

The divine mammal which can dream

It is the chosen people of the universe

No more. But once you have got up high enough to look down,

Once you have got out far enough to look back,

The earth seems to magnify itself

In intensely sharp focus against the black,

Beautiful blind eye milky blue.

That we are alone, that we are not, are unimaginable.

We turn a page of
Life
,

Lying open in the grass,

To a pink earthworm slowly crossing the Milky Way

At nearly the speed of light—red-shifted protein!

The rest is unimaginable,

Like the silence before the universe.

The last nanosecond of silence twenty billion years ago

Before the big bang is endless.

 

A row of Federal houses with one missing,

The radicals' bomb factory, now blue sky,

An elegantly preserved “landmark block”

Address the last quake of the sixties' underground leveled;

Leaving a prize street with an empty lot

Worth its weight in caviar, stripped naked

Between the wound-pale windowless raw side walls

Of the neighbors, left homeless in a flash

Whose value grows and grows. The years roll by,

Gray as big grains of butter-sweet beluga,

Real estate booms. The lot is still empty.

The purchaser still waits for permission to build.

No yellow ribbons yet for the hostages, tied

To the door knockers, sashed around the trees,

Which will become the symbol of support

For them, the Americans held in Iran. Surreal,

The Shah's dying of cancer in Cairo; his body

Escaped the revolution only to find

His insides turning into caviar,

The peacock and his court of torturers.

Marvelous, how time takes care of things;

Shad are running in the river with their

Delicious roe after years of none,

And seemingly hopeless pollution. There is hope.

The Landmarks Commission tells the community

The latest compromise design succeeds,

Protects the past, the unity of the block,

Your wishes went into it, etc.,

The way the mind negotiates a dream.

Gradually, Versailles bricks up the hole;

A million-dollar Bastille seals it off;

Till fountains rise from the swimming pool that fills

The garden space and the vast moment when

The daughter whose parents were gone for the summer heard

A thud while shopping, knew her friends were dead,

Smiled at the cashier, blankly turned

And walked away in the silence before the sirens.

 

The body on the bed is made of china,

Shiny china vagina and pubic hair.

The glassy smoothness of a woman's body!

I stand outside the open door and stare.

I watch the shark glide by … it comes and goes—

Must constantly keep moving or it will drown.

The mouth slit in the formless fetal nose

Gives it that empty look—it looks unborn;

It comes into the room up to the bed

Just like a dog. The smell of burning leaves,

Rose bittersweetness rising from the red,

Is what I see. I must be twelve. That fall.

 

Cold drool on his chin, warm drool in his lap, a sigh,

The bitterness of too many cigarettes

On his breath: portrait of the autist

Asleep in the arms of his armchair, age thirteen,

Dizzily starting to wake just as the sun

Is setting. The room is already dark while outside

Rosewater streams from a broken yolk of blood.

All he has to do to sleep is open

A book; but the wet dream is new, as if

The pressure of
De bello Gallico

And Willa Cather face down on his fly,

Spread wide, one clasping the other from behind,

Had added confusion to confusion, like looking

For your glasses with your glasses on.

A mystically clear, unknowing trance of being …

And then you feel them—like that, his first wet dream

Seated in a chair, though not his first.

Mr. Hobbs, the Latin master with

A Roman nose he's always blowing, who keeps

His gooey handkerchief tucked in his jacket sleeve,

Pulls his hanky out, and fades away.

French, English, math, history: masters one

By one arrive, start to do what they do

In life, some oddity, some thing they do,

Then vanish. The darkness of the room grows brighter

The darker it gets outside, because of the moonlight.

O adolescence! darkness of a hole

The silver moonlight fills to overflowing!