The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (5 page)

We understand well that we must hold

our lives up in our arms like the victims

of solitary, terrible accidents,

that we must still hold our lives to their promises

and hold ourselves up to our lives

to be sure always they are larger,

wholer, realer than we ourselves, though we

must carry them.

We on this train with our lives in our laps

are waiting patiently for the next moment

and maybe we will be lifted away by our lives

as are the moments we rise up to hold with us,

or maybe we will just slacken

above our drinks in the club car chatting baseball,

all of us headed

to apply for the same job, all of us qualified,

all of us turning now into snowflakes

too delicate,

yet each holding in itself a tiny

stark particle of darkness

and weight, the heart's cinder

turning over.

The dust almost motionless

in this narrowness, this stillness,

yet how unlike a coffin

it is, sometimes letting a live one in,

sometimes out

and the air,

though paused, impends not a thing,

the silence isn't sinister,

and in fact not much goes on

at the Ariel Book Shop today,

no one weeps in the back

room full of books, old books, no one

is tearing the books to shreds, in fact

I am merely sitting here

talking to no one, no one being here,

and I am blameless.

More,

I am grateful for the job,

I am fond of the books and touch them,

I am grateful that King St. goes down

to the river, and that the rain

is lovely, the afternoon green.

If the soft falling away of the afternoon

is all there is, it is nearly

enough, just

let me hear the beautiful clear voice

of a woman in song passing

toward silence, and then

that will be all for me

at five o'clock.

I will walk

down to see the untended

sailing yachts of the Potomac

bobbing hopelessly in another silence,

the small silence that gets to be a long

one when the past stops talking

to you because it is dead,

and still you listen,

hearing just the tiny

agonies of old boats

on a cloudy day, in cloudy water.

Talk to it. Men are talking to it

by Cape Charles, for them it's the same

silence with fishing lines in their hands.

We are all looking at the river bearing the wreckage

so far away. We wonder how

the river ever came to be so

gray, and think that once there were

some very big doings on this river,

and now that is all over.

The moon swells

and its yellow darkens

nearer the horizon

and soon all

the aluminum rooftops

shall appear, orange

and distinct beside

the orange sun,

while the diamond

flares in its vacuum

within. It is simple

to be with the shovel,

thoughtless, inhabited

by this divorce,

it is good

the luminous

machinery, silenced,

waits, nice

that the conveyor

belts choked with sand

convey nothing.

When I return home to

coffee at

7:45 the lithe

young girls will be going

to high school, pulling

to their mouths stark

cigarettes through

Arizona's sunlight.

These last few months

have been awful, and when

around five the roosters

alone on neighboring

small farms begin

to scream like humans

my heart just lies down,

a stone.

This is the middle of the night.

There are no stars. It's been lightly snowing

a while, and it is silent. Many men are sleepless,

and for some, within, it is blazing noon.

The commander cries in the street dirt,

the apprentice rides on the mayor.

And yet one pool of light

is succeeded by another tonight,

as always, amid silence, beneath the lamps,

but even these impenetrable things

waver, and aren't quite real,

and we take no comfort from them.

For the fathers parade as leering women,

the entrails of pets drape the sewer-grates.

Our shadows are black stumps.

Some of us fire

with our mouths open,

amazed, firing.

The cup is overturned by the dagger

and blood dots the window-glass.

This is the way of it

for many men this quiet night of snow.

The snow descends in a sparkling light but many are blind,

walking out without jackets as if into the sun,

and they would not say anything of the snow,

but would say only this

of the weather, that something falling burns on them.

The supermarkets

of Los Angeles are blinding,

they are never closed,

they are defended

by the mountains

on the North, on

the Southeast by the

desert and on

the West by the large,

sad Pacific Ocean.

We enter such

brilliance as we entered

the world, without

shopping list, perfectly.

It is unpleasant,

but each is thinking

he may be here

to escape still worse.

What? There is nothing

out there other

than late winter,

Hollywood, the moments

before morning.

We are never alone

here: above our heads, though

close enough nearly

to touch, is television,

in which may be disclosed

our own faces. They do not

become us. They are

the little faces we wore

as children, now wrinkled,

as if we were not grown

but only aged. We want

to cleanse those wrinkles

of accumulate filth,

these faces whose names

are being withheld, so tiny

in the relaxed fist of

Los Angeles, hearing

Los Angeles singing

to the murdered. We see

the eyes, and we see

what the eyes see,

we see the mouths moving

in utter silence, but of

course we know exactly

what the mouths are saying.

It is a fine, beautiful

and lovely time of warm dusk,

having perhaps just a touch

too much

enveloping damp;

but nice, with its idle strollers,

of whom I am one,

and it's true,

their capacity for good

is limitless, you can tell.

And then—ascending

over the roofs, the budded tips

of trees, in the twilight, very whole

and official,

its black

markings like a face

that has loomed in every city

I have known—it arrives,

the gigantic yellow warrant

for my arrest,

one sixth the size

of the world. I'm speaking

of the moon. I would not give

you a fistful of earth for

the entire moon, I might as well tell you.

For across the futile and empty

street, in the excruciating

gymnasium, they

are commencing—

degrees are being bestowed

on the deserving,

whereas I'm the incalculable

dullard in the teeshirt here.

Gentlemen of the moon:

I don't even have

my real shoes on. These are some reformed

hoodlum's shoes, from the Goodwill. Let

me rest, let me rest in the wake

of others' steady progress,

closing my eyes,

closing my heart,

shutting the door

in face after face

that has nourished me.

There is a part

of this poem where you must

say it with me, so

be ready, together we will make

it truthful, as there is gracefulness

even in the motioning of those

leafless trees, even in

such motion as descent. Fired,

I move downward through it all again

in an aquarium of debt, submerging

with the flowering electric

company, with March the 10th, 1971,

its darkness, justice and mercy

like clownfish, funnily striped.

Let them both as a matter of policy

redevour the light that

escapes them, Shakespeare

had just candles, lamps,

Milton had only the

dark, and what difference? as

poetry, like failure, is fathered

in any intensity of light, and light

in all thicknesses of darkness,

as your voice, you out there,

wakes now, please, to say

it with me: There

are descents more final, less graceful

than this plummeting

from employment; it is the middle of a false

thaw, the ice undercoating

of a bare branch is

in the midst of falling. Where

can it all be put except

in this poem, under us, breaking this fall,

itself falling

while breaking it? Look

at this line, stretching out, breaking even as it

falls to this next, like a suicide,

the weather singing

past his face, and arising to kill him

this first last line in weeks.

They hold out their hands crushed

by misfortunes and I kiss

my fingers, touch my lips.

When they talk I can't help it,

I recede,

the words fall down and break.

I shut all the windows of my house

and look out onto the green lawn and am ashamed.

Students, for me, life

is just the ice-pick lying

beside the letter from the County Clerk

of Court, and the hesitation

of a hand between them,

hand I can't get

my own hand out of.

And the world—it's merely this place

of unfair vending machines

and women with short hair dyed red

who order another, and weep, and are unmasked.

Then later the world

is a repetitive street.

The hour is too late,

all, all is closed.

The red-haired woman touches the single

discolored tile in the bathroom.

She touches the marks the elastic

makes on her belly, her shoes awry.

She journeys

into the vast bed.

She reaches to the lamp

and makes it dark, relaxing.

She is not rising or even moving

but like many people at the verge of the dream

she feels as though she begins, now, to fly.

Several of those faces on the avenue

are blossoming

into that light thrown always toward them

off the interminable, blue

backstretches

they gaze upon hopefully.

And from what separate, enraged oceans

can they possibly expect

to save themselves,

and for what? At times I say, obviously

this window opens

upon the seas and the blindnesses, it is from

this very window

that the signal will at last be issued for

the taking of our own lives.

Other times I suspect

that among the trembling inner organs

of a captured bird, people

are climbing into buses in the morning fog,

and I observe

a woman, how the movements of her parts

conspire to propel her

from grayness into grayness, vague

injustices attending her

steps until I wonder

what

can they possibly mean, down there,

by their arms and legs?—

until I wonder

what the voices must mean when they are singing.

The manager lady of this

apartment dwelling has a face

like a baseball with glasses and pathetically

repeats herself. The man next door

has a dog with a face that talks

of stupidity to the night, the swimming pool

has an empty, empty face.

My neighbor has his underwear on

tonight, standing among the parking spaces

advising his friend never to show

his face around here again.

I go everywhere with my eyes closed and two

eyeballs painted on my face. There is a woman

across the court with no face at all.

They're perfectly visible this evening,

about as unobtrusive as a storm of meteors,

these questions of happiness

plaguing the world.

My neighbor has sent his child to Utah

to be raised by the relatives of friends.

He's out on the generous lawn

again, looking like he's made

out of phosphorus.

The manager lady has just returned

from the nearby graveyard, the last

ceremony for a crushed paramedic.

All day, news helicopters cruised aloft

going whatwhatwhatwhatwhat.

She pours me some boiled

coffee that tastes like noise,

warning me, once and for all,

to pack up my troubles in an old kit bag

and weep until the stones float away.

How will I ever be able to turn

from the window and feel love for her?—

to see her and stop seeing

this neighborhood, the towns of earth,

these tables at which the saints

sit down to the meal of temptations?

And so on—nap, soup, window,

say a few words into the telephone,

smaller and smaller words.

Some TV or maybe, I don't know, a brisk

rubber with cards nobody knows

how many there are of.

Couple of miserable gerbils

in a tiny white cage, hysterical

friends rodomontading about goals

as if having them liquefied death.

Maybe invite the lady with no face

over here to explain all these elections:

life. Liberty. Pursuit.

Maybe invite the lady with no face

over here to read my palm,

sit out on the porch here in Arizona

while she touches me.

Last night, some kind

of alarm went off up the street

that nobody responded to.

Small darling, it rang for you.

Everything suffers invisibly,

nothing is possible, in your face.

The center of the world is closed.

The Beehive, the 8-Ball, the Yo-Yo,

the Granite and the Lightning and the Melody.

Only the Incognito Lounge is open.

My neighbor arrives.

They have the television on.

It's a show about

my neighbor in a loneliness, a light,

walking the hour when every bed is a mouth.

Alleys of dark trash, exhaustion

shaped into residences—and what are the dogs

so sure of that they shout like citizens

driven from their minds in a stadium?

In his fist he holds a note

in his own handwriting,

the same message everyone carries

from place to place in the secret night,

the one that nobody asks you for

when you finally arrive, and the faces

turn to you playing the national anthem

and go blank, that's

what the show is about, that message.

I was raised up from tiny

childhood in those purple hills,

right slam on the brink of language,

and I claim it's just as if

you can't do anything to this moment,

that's how inextinguishable

it all is. Sunset,

Arizona, everybody waiting

to get arrested, all very

much an honor, I assure you.

Maybe invite the lady with no face

to plead my cause, to get

me off the hook or name

me one good reason.

The air is full of megawatts

and the megawatts are full of silence.

She reaches to the radio like St. Theresa.

Here at the center of the world

each wonderful store cherishes

in its mind undeflowerable

mannequins in a pale, electric light.

The parking lot is full,

everyone having the same dream

of shopping and shopping

through an afternoon

that changes like a face.

But these shoppers of America—

carrying their hearts toward the bluffs

of the counters like thoughtless purchases,

walking home under the sea,

standing in a dark house at midnight

before the open refrigerator, completely

transformed in the light…

Every bus ride is like this one,

in the back the same two uniformed boy scouts

de-pantsing a little girl, up front

the woman whose mission is to tell the driver

over and over to shut up.

Maybe you permit yourself to find

it beautiful on this bus as it wafts

like a dirigible toward suburbia

over a continent of saloons,

over the robot desert that now turns

purple and comes slowly through the dust.

This is the moment you'll seek

the words for over the imitation

and actual wood of successive

tabletops indefatigably,

when you watched a baby child

catch a bee against the tinted glass

and were married to a deep

comprehension and terror.