Poems 1959-2009 (21 page)

I am buying them for your blond hair at dawn.

I am buying them for your beautiful breasts.

I am buying them for your beautiful heart.

 

I've never been older.

It doesn't.

I can't explain.

Every November is one more.

I've used up my amount.

I've nearly run out.

I'm out of penis.

I've run out.

I look out the spaceship's vast

Expense of greenhouse glass

At the stars.

It will take a million years.

You open your head.

You look in the dictionary.

You look it up.

You look at the opposite.

You open the violin case.

You take it out.

Actually, it is a viola.

Actually, it is November.

You grab the handrails with the

Treadmill speeding up.

Oh my God. Don't stop.

It is possible that

The president traveling in an open limousine

Has been shot.

My fellow Americans, ask not

What your country can do for you in

November. The doorman

Holds the door.

The taxi

Without a driver pulls up.

 

They all claim responsibility for inventing God,

Including the ruthless suicides who call themselves God Exploding.

All the rival groups, of course, immediately take credit

For terrorist atrocities they did not commit.

One of the terrorist acts they did not commit

Was inventing rock 'n' roll, but, hey,

The birth of Elvis/Jesus is as absolute as the temperature

Of the background radiation, 4°K.

1, 2, 3, 4—I sing of a maiden that is makeles.

King of alle kinges to here sone che ches.

He cam also stille

Ther his moder was,

As dew in Aprille that fallith on the gras.

He cam also stille to his moderes bowr

As dew in Aprille that fallith on the flowr.

He cam also stille

There his moder lay,

As dew in Aprille that fallith on the spray.

Moder and maiden

Was never non but che;

Wel may swich a lady Godes moder be.

I hate seeing the anus of a beautiful woman.

I should not be looking. It should not be there.

It started in darkness and ended up a star.

Jewish stars on the L.A. freeway in Jewish cars

Take the off-ramp to the manger

Somewhere in the fields of Harlem,

Bearing gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.

Rock 'n' roll in front of the Wailing Wall and weep.

With the stump where your hand was blown off beat your chest.

Hutu rebel soldiers crucify the mountain gorillas.

Hodie Christus natus est.

 

The child stands at the window, after his birthday party,

Gray flannel little boy shorts, shirt with an Eton collar,

St. Louis, Missouri, sixty years ago,

And sees the World Trade Center towers falling.

The window is the wall

The wide world presents to prepubescence.

People on fire are jumping from the eightieth floor

To flee the fireball.

In the airplane blind-dating the south tower,

People are screaming with horror.

The airplane meeting the north tower

Erupts with ketchup.

The window is a wall

Through which the aquarium visitors can see.

Airplanes are swimming

Up to the towers of steel.

Up to the Twin Towers to feed.

People rather than die prefer to leap

From the eightieth floor to their death.

The man stands at his childhood window saving them.

Old enough to undress himself,

Gray flannel little boy shorts, shirt with an Eton collar,

He stands at the worldwide window, after the birthday party,

And sees the mountains collapsing and collapsing.

On the other side of the aquarium glass is September 11th.

Under his birthday party clothes is his underwear and the underwater.

Why bother to wash your clothes, or your skin, why bother to wash,

When you will only get dirty again?

Why bother to live when you will die?

Visitors are peering through the thick glass and taking photographs

Of ground zero—of Allah akbar in formaldehyde in a jar.

God is great. Love is hate.

 

I don't believe in anything, I do

Believe in you.

Down here in hell we do don't.

I can't think of anything I won't.

I amputate your feet and I walk.

I excise your tongue and I talk.

You make me fly through the black sky.

I will kill you until I die.

Thank God for you, God.

I do.

My God, it is almost always Christmas Eve this time of year, too.

Then I began to pray.

I don't believe in anything anyway.

I did what I do. I do believe in you.

Down here in hell they do don't.

I can't think of anything we won't.

How beautiful thy feet with shoes.

Struggling barefoot over dunes of snow forever, more falling, forever, Jews

Imagine mounds of breasts stretching to the horizon.

We send them to their breast, mouthful of orison.

I like the color of the smell. I like the odor of spoiled meat.

I like how gangrene transubstantiates warm firm flesh into rotten sleet.

When the blue blackens and they amputate, I fly.

I am flying a Concorde of modern passengers to gangrene in the sky.

I am flying to area code 212

To stab a Concorde into you,

To plunge a sword into the gangrene.

This is a poem about a sword of kerosene.

This is my 21st century in hell.

I stab the sword into the smell.

I am the sword of sunrise flying into area code 212

To flense the people in the buildings, and the buildings, into dew.

 

There was a door because I opened it.

It was the muse. It had a human face.

It had to have to make the three parts fit.

The Cosmos Poems
was fire that filled the space

With fire in
Life on Earth.
The sky

Became a blue lake I was bathing in,

But it was fire. The sun was burning. Fly

Me to the bottom where I've been. I've been

Completing
Area Code 212.

I've been in heaven in Manhattan on

The bottom. Hell is what to live can do.

One day I went downtown but it was gone.

The World Trade Center towers still return

In dreams and fall again and fall again

And rise again and people scream and burn

And jump to certain death again and then

They rise back to the hundredth floor and turn

Their cell phones on and call to say goodbye.

The firemen coming up the stairs will burn

Their way to heaven. Everyone will die

And perish, die and live. The people on

The top floors use their cell phones to call out.

Death follows birth as sunrise follows dawn.

High pressure sends a sky-high waterspout

Fire balances on top of. It begins,

The universe begins, and death begins,

And every living being burns and thins

Down to a flame that burns away and grins.

I heard them singing and set fire to it.

I hear their screams. Their corpses run in place.

They burst in flames to make the three parts fit.

My trilogy is fire that fills the space.

The muse now raised the laurel crown above

My corpse, and, praising me with what was fire

To hear, which I breathed in, which burned like love,

Now set ablaze the funerary pyre.

Dead white males greeted the arrival of

My ghost by praising me with what was fire

To hear, which I breathed in, which burned like love.

I wore the crown of laurel they require.

Beneath a crown of laurel lived a liar.

White man speak with forked tongue with his lyre.

They scream like gulls, beseeching. They scream higher

And dive down, crying, corpses on a pyre,

And rise back to the hundredth floor and turn

Their cell phones on. We call to say goodbye.

We firemen-coming-up-the-stairs will burn

Our way to heaven. Everyone will die.

You fling yourself into the arms of art.

You drool to sleep on consolation's shoulder.

A living donor offers you a heart.

The muse does. Yours got broken getting older.

The UFO that offers you the heart

Replacement is returning from out there,

Deep space, but beaming brain waves saying, Start

Down there, unsheathe the sword inside the ploughshare,

And cut the kindness from your chest, and stick

The Cosmos Poems
in the cavity.

A hummingbird of flame sips from a wick.

My tinder drinks the lightning striking me.

Exploding fireballs vaporize the gore.

The runners-on-your-mark can't live this way.

They have to make the deal so they ignore

Their death and now the flames have come to stay.

They open windows. Now the brave begin

To lead the others to the stairs to die.

The money is the cosmic insulin

The partners in the firms must make. I fly

The UFO that offers you the heart

Replacement that's arriving from out there,

Its home, while down here the red mist is art

Exploding on the sidewalk from the air.

And some jump holding hands, but most alone,

But some jump holding hands with my warm hand.

They wait inside their offices. They phone

This poem. They stay and while they do they stand.

When I consider how my days are spent,

I'd have to say I spend a lot of time

Not being dead. I know what Garbo meant.

My life is life emerging from the slime

And writing poems. Virgil took my hand.

We started up the steep path to the crest.

He turned to warn me. Did I understand

I would be meeting Dante? I confessed

I hated cold. To flee the urban light

Pollution in the night sky and see stars

Meant getting to a crest of freezing blight

And human nature inhumane as Mars,

And things far stranger that I can't describe.

I greeted Dante.
Maestro!
Dawn neared. I

Was looking in the mirror at a tribe

In tribal costumes worshipping the sky.

It made no sense on Easter morning to

Parade in feathers down Fifth Avenue,

Except the natives worship what is true,

And firemen in white gloves passed in review.

The Jewish boy had done it once again.

Wood water tanks on top of downtown flamed.

The Resurrection has returned dead men

And women to the New York sky untamed.

 

 

God begins. The universe will soon.

The intensity of the baseball bat

Meets the ball. Is the fireball

When he speaks and then in the silence

The cobra head rises regally and turns to look at you.

The angel burns through the air.

The flower turns to look.

The cover of the book opens on its own.

You do not want to see what is on this page.

It looks up at you,

Only it is a mirror you are looking into.

The truth is there, and all around the truth fire

Makes a frame.

Listen. An angel. These sounds you hear are his.

A dog is barking in a field.

A car starts in the parking lot on the other side.

The ocean heaves back and forth three blocks away.

The fire in the wood stove eases

The inflamed cast-iron door

Open, steps out into the room across the freezing floor

To your perfumed bed where as it happens you kneel and pray.

 

But we are someone else. We're born that way.

The other one we are lives in a distant city.

People are walking down a street.

They pop umbrellas open when it starts to rain.

Some stand under an apartment building awning.

A doorman dashes out into the spring shower for

A taxi with its off-duty light on that hisses right past.

The daffodils are out on the avenue center strip.

The yellow cabs are yellow as the daffodils.

One exhausted driver, at the end of his ten-hour shift headed in,

Stops for the other one

We are who hides among the poor

And looks like the homeless out on the wet street corner.

Dear friend, get in.

I will take you where you're going for free.

Only a child's Crayola

Could color a taxi cab this yellow

In a distant city full of yellow flowers.

 

At night, when she is fast asleep,

The comet, which appears not to move at all,

Crosses the sky above her bed,

But stays there looking down.

She rises from her sleeping body.

Her body stays behind asleep.

She climbs the lowered ladder.

She enters through the opened hatch.

Inside is everyone.

Everyone is there.

Someone smiling is made of silk.

Someone else was made with milk.

Her mother still alive.

Her brothers and sisters and father

And aunts and uncles and grandparents

And husband never died.

Hold the glass with both hands,

My darling, that way you won't spill.

On her little dress, her cloth yellow star