The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (10 page)

Last night I dreamed

I was chased by wolves

through the snow,

and though they were gaining,

I was running,

but when I woke up

I did not have the use

of my legs. More

than my parents

I love to raise my hands

to my face and feel them

against my eyes.

When I woke

from the nightmare

of running, I was afraid

that sitting up in bed

might be a dream

and the light from the street

a dream in blindness

and the dark room a dream

in an iron lung.

After I was hurt

the nurse took me down

to the basement

to see it. It looked

like a gigantic oven,

and they were baking

all but the head,

and so that he would know

who I was, she shouted

in his ear, Ernest, Ernest,

here's a little boy

who will never walk again.

The monastery is quiet. Seconal

drifts down upon it from the moon.

I can see the lights

of the city I came from,

can remember how a boy sets out

like something thrown from the furnace

of a star. In the conflagration of memory

my people sit on green benches in the park,

terrified, evil, broken by love—

to sit with them inside that invisible fire

of hours day after day while the shadow of the milk

billboard crawled across the street

seemed impossible, but how

was it different from here,

where they have one day they play over

and over as if they think

it is our favorite, and we stay

for our natural lives,

a phrase that conjures up the sun's

dark ash adrift after ten billion years

of unconsolable burning? Brother Thomas's

schoolgirl obsession with the cheap

doings of TV starlets breaks

everybody's heart, and the yellow sap

of one particular race of cactus grows

tragic for the fascination in which

it imprisons Brother Toby—I can't witness

his slavering and relating how it can be changed

into some unprecedented kind of plastic—

and the monastery refuses

to say where it is taking us. At night

we hear the trainers from the base

down there, and see them blotting out the stars,

and I stand on the hill and listen, bone-white with desire.

It was love that sent me on the journey,

love that called me home. But it's the terror

of being just one person—one chance, one set of days—

that keeps me absolutely still tonight and makes me listen

intently to those young men above us

flying in their airplanes in the dark.

The dawn is a quality laid across

the freeway like the visible

memory of the ocean that kept all this

a secret for a hundred million years.

I am not moving and I am not standing still.

I am only something the wind strikes and clears,

and I feel myself fade like the sky,

the whole of Ohio a mirror gone blank.

My jacket keeps me. My zipper

bangs on my guitar. Lord God help me

out by the lake after the shift at Frigidaire

when I stop laughing and taste how wet the beer

is in my mouth, suddenly recognizing the true

wedding of passage and arrival I am invited to.

When the tide lay under the clouds

of an afternoon and gave them back to themselves

oilier a little and filled with anonymous boats,

I used to sit and drink at the very edge of it,

where light passed through the liquids in the glasses

and threw itself on the white drapes

of the tables, resting there like clarity

itself, you might think,

right where you could put a hand to it.

As drink gave way to drink, the slow

unfathomable voices of luncheon made

a window of ultraviolet light in the mind,

through which one at last saw the skeleton

of everything, stripped of any sense or consequence,

freed of geography and absolutely devoid

of charm; and in this originating

brightness you might see

somebody putting a napkin against his lips

or placing a blazing credit card on a plastic tray

and you'd know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say.

Our love has been.

I see the rain.

Nothing

is abstract any more:

I nearly expect one of these

droplets loose tonight on the avenues of wind

to identify itself as my life.

Now love is not a feeling

like wrath or sadness, but an act

like murdering the stars.

And now the limp suits

drying out on the railings of hotels,

and the sorrows

drifting like perfume,

and telephones ringing in the darkness

and milk

tears shining on rouged cheeks.

While nearby

sighs the sea like God, the sea of breath, the resolute

gull ocean trembling its boats.

A petal dripping off a dead flower, dew on the benches, a dead shoe.

They've got to hate whoever did it and leave town.

They've got to find the red issue of the magazine.

They've got to place their hands on it so the bones shine through.

They've got to admit it's the window of Hell.

They've got to put their lips down and inhale its nicotine.

It used to be life fell apart every

so often, every year or two, now every morning.

Can you imagine? Once they were professors.

They told who danced and who needed pity.

They had skin. They didn't have ropes

of muscle for a face. But the dot became a tunnel,

the tunnel a journey, the journey a reason and a life.

We must start to forgive and not stop

for a single minute, maybe not even to love.

We must look down

out of this age spent telling stories

about each tree, each rock, each

person who is a bird, or a fish, or walks in their fur,

and see our brothers and sisters.

There is no such thing as danger,

no such thing as a false move,

but they are afraid;

the stores have everything

and everything salutes

its own reflection—shiny, shiny

life that we call

shelf life,

but they are afraid;

the eight-ball is a meatball in whiskey heaven; the motorcycles

stand out front in the sun like spears,

and they are afraid.

I have seen you walking out

of blue smoke…

like dreamed streetlights,

like parlor fans

in a dream, the palm trees burn…

and seen you favored by a wet wind

oh where was it, in Ben Suc, a village that is no more,

and I have seen you

halfway there, bandaged,

reaching a fingertip toward a cigaret,

ambushed by the NVA

at the battle of LZ X-ray,

bent and weeping over your failures

or floating like an advertisement

in a hole of praise

or holding your ears and turning away from the lion

flying out of a mortar,

and on the outskirts of town I've seen a man

standing at the door of the very last house…

He won't get

there in time. Time will get there in him.

Whatever discovery he is about to make,

something about sorrow and loneliness it would stand

to reason, about how our necks

burn fiercely because we keep stepping on our chains,

he goes on

to make it.

He goes on

to see it arriving on the steel point of the moment

and see it passing with the ponderous

drift of roulette,

he goes on to see what

a translucence, only a foretelling,

is something as stationary as a house…

I have slept, and dreamed all the things you might have done,

I have gone out walking,

abysmally sad and utterly alone

because these lives aren't like the lives in movies

and nothing is expressed—nothing's pressed out,

I tell you!—of our wordless darkness in our art,

have walked with the crickets singing

and the faucets going on and off and the telephones ringing

in the mysterious houses,

and I've gone on

past the tracks and the sheds and the wharf

to the place with the waitress and the empty heads

and a few late truckers at the counter like piled stones,

and I've shouted for you and thought

how like your name this house is

with me outside of it and nobody talking

and pollen all over my hands

and fishes in my eyes and my feet moving through the world.

From mind to mind

I am acquainted with the struggles

of these stars. The very same

chemistry wages itself minutely

in my person.

It is all one intolerable war.

I don't care if we're fugitives,

we are ceaselessly exalted, rising

like the drowned out of our shirts…

Everything is water:

the pigeon trying to work his mutilated

wing; the crowd that draws a brand of peace

from his circular dance before the theater;

the woman in an aluminum hat who rises

out of the sidewalk on an elevator softly

through metal doors that part above her like water—

telling myself that no one can walk on the water,

nobody can take these little ones softly

enough against his chest. The flood rises

and the pigeon shows us how to die before the theater,

where terror is only the aftermath of peace

full of sharks, the mutilated

surface over the falling deep, only water.

In every house

a cigaret burns,

an ash descends.

In the ludicrous breeze

of an electric fan

the papers talk,

and little vague

things float over

the floor. When

you turn the TV

on it says, “Killed

by FBI sharpshooters,”

it says, “Years he was with

the organization.”

I have a friend

on the fourth tier

of a parking ramp.

To one ear he holds

a revolver, to the

other a telephone. TV

cameras move

this way and that way

on the neighboring roofs.

We all know this guy,

he's one of us,

you can see him

changing his position

slowly on the news.

When you turn the TV on

it says, “Everything I owned,

all I loved, in 1947,”

then there's a preacher

saying that on the bluffs

of Hell the shadows

are terrible—there

when a spirit turns

from the firelight

he sees the shadow

of a man murdering

another man, and knows

the shadow is his.

We're all waiting

for our friend's

head to explode.

We must go down

to see him plainly,

stand still on the street

knowing his name

as the heat peels a film

from our eyes and

we see, finally,

the colors of neon,

the fluorescence

of gas stations ticking

like lightning,

the pools of light,

the sirens moving

through water,

everything

locked in a kind

of amber. But we

who appear to have

escaped from a fire

are still burning.

When the cameras turn

to look at us

we feel so invisible,

we do not feel
seen
,

calling him home

with a star

in every voice,

calling his name,

stranger,

oh! stranger.

Of all the movies that have made me sweat

The ones that make me most uncomfortable

Are those in which a terrible fool pretends to be

Someone they aren't—

A man, a woman, a gentile, a cop, dog, mannequin, tree.

Of all the movies that have made me uncomfortable—

All those with cliffs; with triggers; with creeping gauges and

Sand that slowly covers up the fingers; fog

That binds and makes even of standing

Still a rending and departure; and slow, blown tracers—

Those that have really made me sweat are the ones

The professors are moving past, and looking in, and seeing

The dark shells of heads,

And above them,

Where our dreams and the smoke

Of our thinking,

Where our sighs and untended and escaping

Souls must be drifting,

The beam of projection like something

We are in the jaws of.

And the professors

Go by, pointing at this one or that one.

They pick out the dancer and tell her she can't dance,

They explain the rules to the poet and dismiss him,

They drag the clerk out under the fluorescent light,

They put numerals on the storekeeper's fingertips,

They read the
TV Guide
to the mothers and fathers

And lay wounds upon the sons and chasms beside the daughters.

This is the kind of movie that drives me crazy,

The movies through which the professors move,

Face-owners, eyes of lichen, impossible to impress, dead inside,

Looking for somebody they can trust again,

Someone to make them feel betrayed one more time.