The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (12 page)

Every day I have to learn more about shame

from the people in old photographs

in secondhand stores, and from the people

in the photographic studies of damage and grief,

where the light assails a window and the figure's back

is all we see—or from the very faces

we never witness in these pictures, several of whom

I passed today in their windows, some hesitant,

some completely committed to worthlessness—

or even from my own face, handed up suddenly by the car's

mirror or a glass door. When I was waiting

for a bus, the man beside me

showed me a picture of a naked youth

with an erection, and the loneliness

in his face as he held this photograph

was like a light waking me from the dead.

I was more ashamed of it than I was of my own

a few days later—just tonight, in fact—

when solitude visited me on a residential street

where I stopped and waited for a woman to pass

again across her unshaded window, so that

I could see her naked.

As I stood there teaching

the night what I knew about this sort of thing,

a figure with the light coming from in front

while the axioms of the world one by one disowned me,

a private and hopeless figure, probably,

somebody simply not worth the trouble of hating,

it occurred to me it was better to be like this

than to be forced to look at a picture of it

happening to someone else. I walked on.

When I got back to the streets of noises and routines,

the places full of cries of one kind or another,

the motels of experience, a fool in every room,

all the people I've been talking about were there.

And we told one another we ought to be ashamed.

Yes, it slips down to this time, dissolves,

and begins as nothing else,

a tone, a depth, a movement, a falling,

a snow of looseness, a chime of arcs

that begins again as nothing else

and holds in itself some clarity of what it was

like a sound in a word and like water on a mirror.

It is itself. It has itself. Men go down before it

holding in themselves some clarity of what they are

like the yellow fires in soft yellow globes

of matches in a fog, that go out in a time;

and while their hearts break, while the flowers lacquered on dark

bars before the tide of the heart bloom,

it lays out on the endless flats

of calcium a solitaire

of graves with no one in them.

It's after one. You're probably alone.

All night the moon rings like a telephone

in an empty booth above our separateness.

Now is the hour one answers. I am home.

Hello, my heart, my God, my President,

my darling: I'm alarmed by the alarm

clock's iridescent face, hung like a charm

from darkness's fat ear. This accident

that was my life will have its witnesses:

now, while the world lies wholly motionless

and sorry in a crapulence of stars,

now is the hour one rises to address

the ages and history and the universe:

I swear you'll never see my face again.

How sad, how beautiful

the sea

of tumbling astronauts,

their faces barred

and planed and green amid

the deep.

I see them dancing in the kindness

of a broken answer,

by the light

of the jukebox,

by the light

of our fiery homes.

We are that sunset.

The angels envy us.

Hurts

like a mother burns

like an evil flame—

Black

knives,

the angels stand up inside themselves.

I will always love you

and think of you with bitterness,

standing on the corner with your life

passing before your eyes.

A car pulls up to the curb in front of you.

Inside it, the driver turns to strike

his woman companion repeatedly,

knocking askew her glasses.

And while your memory

speaks like a knife in the heart,

young girls with gloves made from the parts

of dead animals move

through intersections of ice—ice

collecting and collecting your face.

Betimes I held her pissed-off in mine arms

and ached, the while she paid me for her sins,

with a sweet joy like the Netherlands and its farms

flooded with haloes and angels in the gloaming.

Then how did I finally reach these executives

exiting the plushness carrying cool

musical drinks into the crystal noon

of the Goodyear Tire Company's jumped-up oasis?

The sharks and generals within my heart,

the Naugahyde. When I close my eyes

I see her smoking cigarets in the night

by the window, naked and lit up by some kind of sign

out in the street; and then she turns

her vision on the black room where I lie abed.

How did snow roofs and ice-cold aerials become

this rain following the movies down a lonely fever,

daylight-saving virulent with romance,

phone booths with their lights on in the rain,

neighbors talking ragtime while the stink

of mowing carries over the lawns

on stretchers through the rain the little griefs

to make us cry? How do you stop

creating the worthless past—day, hour, minute—

the place forgetting us, the backward-looming

mist we couldn't see when we were in it?

Waitress, afterimage of a flame,

God, she thinks, why do they make you live

in the restaurant that cannot last forever?

There are equals-signs all over the street,

and I feel like a scaly alien among you

waiting to be rescued to my home. The regret

turns all golden and I either fade

or watch it fade but in any case fail

to be touched by or to touch it. The rights

to the images of the past are confused.

There's a war over the rights to the images of the past,

an unspeakable, delirious war in the dreaming self,

a war of tears, standing by the window and listening

to a song. I will always love you and think of you with bitterness,

and when someone offers a remark in a voice

that brings back your loosened voice and your inebriated fear,

I'll be wounded along scars.

At a party in a Spanish kind of tiled house

I met a woman who had won an award

for writing whose second prize

had gone to me. For years

I'd felt a kinship with her in the sharing

of this honor,

and I told her how glad I was to talk with her,

my compatriot of letters,

mentioning of course this award.

But it was nothing

to her, and in fact she didn't remember it.

I didn't know what else to talk about.

I looked around us at a room full of hands

moving drinks in tiny, rapid circles—

you know how people do

with their drinks.

Soon after this I became

another person, somebody

I would have brushed off if I'd met him that night,

somebody I never imagined.

People will tell you that it's awful

to see facts eat our dreams, our presumptions,

but they're wrong. It is an honor

to learn to replace one hope with another.

It was the only thing that could possibly have persuaded me

that my life is not a lonely story played out

in barrooms before a vast audience of the dead.

Loving you is every bit as fine

as coming over a hill into the sun

at ninety miles an hour darling when

it's dawn and you can hear the stars unlocking

themselves from the designs of God beneath

the disintegrating orchestra of my black

Chevrolet. The radio clings to an un-

identified station—somewhere a tango suffers,

and the dance floor burns around two lovers

whom nothing can touch—no, not even death!

Oh! the acceleration with which my heart does proceed,

reaching like stars almost but never quite

of light the speed of light the speed of light.

The early inhabitants of this continent

passed through a valley of ice two miles deep

to get here, passed from creature to creature

eating them, throwing away the small bones

and fornicating under nameless stars

in a waste so cold that diseases couldn't

live in it. Three hundred million

animals they slaughtered in the space of two centuries,

moving from the Bering isthmus to the core

of squalid Amazonian voodoo, one

murder at a time; and although in the modern hour

the churches' mouths are smeared with us

and all manner of pleading goes up from our hearts,

I don't think they thought the dark and terrible

swallowing gullet could be prayed to.

I don't think they found the smell of baking

amid friends in a warm kitchen anything to be revered.

I think some of them had to chew the food

for the old ones after they'd lost all their teeth,

and that their expressions

were like those we see on the faces

of the victims of traffic accidents today.

I think they threw their spears with a sense of utter loss,

as if they, their weapons, and the enormous animals

they pursued were all going to disappear.

As we can see, they were right. And they were us.

That's what makes it hard for me now to choose one thing

over all the others; and yet surrounded by the aroma

of this Mexican baking and flowery incense

with the kitchen as yellow as the middle

of the sun, telling your usually smart-mouthed

urchin child about the early inhabitants

of this continent who are dead, I figure

I'll marry myself to you and take my chances,

stepping onto the rock

which is a whale, the ship which is about to set sail

and sink

in the danger that carries us like a mother.

In August the steamy saliva of the streets of the sea

habitation we make our summer in,

the horizonless noons of asphalt,

the deadened strollers and the melting beach,

the lunatic carolers toward daybreak—

they all give fire to my new wife's vision:

she sees me to the bone. In August I disgust her.

And her crazy mixed-up child, who eats with his mouth open

talking senselessly about androids, who comes

to me as I gaze out on the harbor wanting

nothing but peace, and says he hates me,

who draws pages full of gnarled organs and tortured

spirits in an afterworld—

but it is not an afterworld, it is this world—

how I fear them for knowing all about me!

I walk the lanes of this heartless village

with my head down, forsaking permanently

the people of the Town Council, of the ice-cream cone, of the out-of-state plate,

and the pink, pig eyes

of the demon of their every folly;

because to say that their faces are troubled,

like mine, is to fail: their faces

are stupid, their faces are berserk, but their faces

are not troubled.

Yet by the Metro

I find a hundred others just like me,

who move across a boiling sunset

to reach the fantastic darkness of a theater

I will never be his father. He will never be my son.

The massive sense of everything around us,

the sun inside our heads

in the blue and white woods, a mile away the sea

hunched dreaming over its business—under

the influences of these things

I can't keep us from drifting out of ordinariness

on a barge of light.

The princess he gives his mother's name to

fails in the invisible prison. The mangled

extraterrestrials blandly menace us, the Zargons

and such, who fall on a soft bewilderment,

and they cry tears like a little boy.

Our heartbeats make us go in search of these monsters

and of the dead generations of the forest

and of the living one, as we come up suddenly

against the border of a marsh,

where a golden heron startled by star-wanderers

lifts with the imperceptible slowness

of a shadow from what seems to be

a huge reservoir of blinking coins.

I can remember being seven years old

in the morning and going outside to play.

With the door of my home behind me,

the people who loved me, the bowl of cereal,

the rooms where the sleeping children grow up, pass

smoking cigarets through their sleeping children's rooms

and enter their graves,

I stood at the door of the world.

You are my father. I am your son.