The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (6 page)

We work in this building and we are hideous

in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes

woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels

and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us,

turning and returning like the spray of light that goes

around dance-halls among the dancing fools.

My office smells like a theory, but here one weeps

to see the goodness of the world laid bare

and rising with the government on its lips,

the alphabet congealing in the air

around our heads. But in my belly's flames

someone is dancing, calling me by many names

that are secret and filled with light and rise

and break, and I see my previous lives.

The terminal flopped out

around us like a dirty hankie,

surrounded by the future population

of death row in their disguises—high

school truant, bewildered Korean refugee—

we complain that Bus 18 will never arrive,

when it arrives complain what an injury

is this bus again today, venerable

and destined to stall. When it stalls

at 16th and McDowell most of us get out

to eat ourselves alive in a 24-hour diner

that promises not to carry us beyond

this angry dream of grease and the cries

of spoons, that swears our homes

are invisible and we never lived in them,

that a bus hasn't passed here in years.

Sometimes the closest I get to loving

the others is hating all of us

for drinking coffee in this stationary sadness

where nobody's dull venereal joking breaks

into words that say it for the last time,

as if we held in the heavens of our arms

not cherishable things, but only the strength

it takes to leave home and then go back again.

I am looking out over

the bay at sundown and getting

lushed with a fifty-nine-

year-old heavily rouged cocktail

lounge singer; this total stranger.

We watch the pitiful little

ferry boats that ply between this world

and that other one touched

to flame by the sunset,

talking with unmanageable

excitement about the weather.

The sky and huge waters turn

vermilion as the cheap-drink hour ends.

We part with a grief as cutting

as that line between water and air.

I go downstairs and I go

outside. It is like stepping into the wake

of a tactless remark, the city's stupid

chatter hurrying to cover up

the shocked lull. The moon's

mouth is moving, and I am just

leaning forward to listen

for the eventual terrible

silence when he begins,

in the tones of a saddened

delinquent son returned

unrecognizable, naming

those things it now seems

I might have done

to have prevented his miserable

life. I am desolate.

What is happening to me.

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover

tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.

It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,

Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,

streaming with hatred in the heat

as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin

to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,

and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.

August,

you're just an erotic hallucination,

just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,

are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,

this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,

the bogus moon of tenderness and magic

you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

One of these days under the white

clouds onto the white

lines of the goddamn PED

X-ING I shall be flattened,

and I shall spill my bag of discount

medicines upon the avenue,

and an abruptly materializing bouquet

of bums, retirees, and Mexican

street-gangers will see all what

kinds of diseases are enjoying me

and what kind of underwear and my little

old lady's legs spidery with veins.

So Mr. Young and Lovely Negro Bus

Driver I care exactly this: zero,

that you see these things

now as I fling my shopping

up by your seat, putting

this left-hand foot way up

on the step so this dress rides up,

grabbing this metal pole like

a beam of silver falling down

from Heaven to my aid, thank-you,

hollering, “Watch det my medicine

one second for me will you dolling,

I'm four feet and det's a tall bus

you got and it's hot and I got

every disease they are making

these days, my God, Jesus Christ,

I'm telling you out of my soul.”

The small, high wailing

that envelops us here,

distant, indistinct,

yet, too, immediate,

we take to be only

the utterances of loose fan

belts in the refrigerating

system, or the shocked hum

that issues from the darkness

of telephone receivers;

but it speaks to us

so deeply we think it

may well be the beseeching

of the stars, the shameless

weeping of coyotes

out on the Mohave.

Please.

Please, stop listening

to this sound, which

is actually the terrible

keening of the ones

whose hearts have been broken

by lives spent in search

of its source,

by our lives of failure,

spent looking everywhere

for someone to say these words.

We mourn this senseless planet of regret,

droughts, rust, rain, cadavers

that can't tell us, but I promise

you one day the white fires

of Venus shall rage: the dead,

feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each

of us will have his resurrected one to tell him,

“Greetings. You will recover

or die. The simple cure

for everything is to destroy

all the stethoscopes that will transmit

silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness

is in learning to admit

solitude as one admits

the bayonet: gracefully,

now that already

it pierces the heart.

Living one: you move among many

dancers and don't know which

you are the shadow of;

you want to kiss your own face in the mirror

but do not approach,

knowing you must not touch one

like that. Living

one, while Venus flares

O set the cereal afire,

O the refrigerator harboring things

that live on into death unchanged.”

They know all about us on Andromeda,

they peek at us, they see us

in this world illumined and pasteled

phonily like a bus station,

they are with us when the streets fall down fraught

with laundromats and each of us

closes himself in his small

San Francisco without recourse.

They see you with your face of fingerprints

carrying your instructions in gloved hands

trying to touch things, and know you

for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains,

trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape

past the window of this then that dark

closed business establishment.

The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music

converged on by ambulance sirens

and they understand everything.

They're on your side. They forgive you.

I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves,

who are as diamonds to the Andromedans,

who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds:

namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains,

their expressions lodged among the drugs

and sunglasses, each gazing down too long

into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony.

O Andromedans they don't know what to do

with themselves and so they sit there

until they go home where they lie down

until they get up, and you beyond the light years know

that if sleeping is dying, then waking

is birth, and a life

is many lives. I love them because they know how

to manipulate change

in the pockets musically, these whose faces the seasons

never give a kiss, these

who are always courteous to the faces

of presumptions, the presuming streets,

the hotels, the presumption of rain in the streets.

I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,

lonesome behind the face

that is certainly not the face

of the person one meant to become.

My luck has been so all but

perfect I can imagine

nothing that might be added

save perhaps one or two more

such truly astonishing

visions as these fine hairs—

blossoms, really, these little

originations of life in

the parched world, this excellent

sparse grove that is lucked on,

never sought and found, just here

above the navel, just here where

I touch for one second

and then I must recover.

Also, if my good luck is not

yet quite too far beyond

that prudently afforded

my sort, I would like

to have several more

of these buttocks, precisely

duplicated, naturally

presenting as it fades this pale

impression of my fingers

on the left one. And may I have

the bodies with them, too? This

is actually the most unnerving

and celestial of girls, it's

not enough that she was in

the living room now as I entered,

why couldn't she have been in

the room I just left, as well

as all the other rooms at once?

Do you see what foul lurches

underproduction leaves us in?

And so suppose this girl were

to become lost? Lost! Would you

want to witness my running

into all the rooms exclaiming

year after year Whatever

shall I do? Lately I have been

noticing how everything

loved must reach the touch

of grief to the lover—it is

an unusual prize geranium

that does not die—but perhaps

one or two more of this girl,

of course with these arresting—

oh, my, these prosecuting

and sentencing!—thin arms,

each finely braceleted or

just plain covered with twenty-

dollar bills, emeralds, alarm

devices and this bewildering

soft skin could be managed?

The towels rot and disgust me on this damp

peninsula where they invented mist

and drug abuse and taught the light to fade,

where my top-quality and rock-bottom heart

cries because I'll never get to kiss

your famous knees again in a room made

vague by throwing a scarf over a lamp.

Things get pretty radical in the dark:

the sailboats on the inlet sail away;

the provinces of actuality

crawl on the sea; the dusk now tenderly

ministers to the fallen parking lots—

the sunset instantaneous on the fenders,

memory and peace…the grip of chaos…

Dunking one

adjacent a disturbed

old woman in the elevated

train station donut shop,

you think: Heavenly lady,

I'm drinking coffee

and you're dripping mucus,

is that the story?—but say nothing,

fearing either reply. Curious

days, these, spent

in fear of replies, in horror

of doorways, sleep, friendships,

and what napkins!—wordless

white interrogations wanting

the whole story, again,

from the beginning;

napkins like the vast, anemic

dawns that find you awake

by the window, trying to

remember how it goes,

failing: the disastrously loved

one's face some Martian's

now, the swell architecture of the old

houses similarly permutating

in memory's half-light,

and boxes?—What

can you do save drift

motherless through these tears when

the cardboard box remembers

the legend of the distant

store in a cool dry place

where all are freed of desire

and change, the fat man

simply standing, selling

nothing, the others silent,

every edge gleaming

with the perfect, acrylic veneer

of reality? But does a box

dream, or is it you who dreams,

and is this truly a dream of reality

or only a memory of sanity?

Turn around. Look back. Now

remember: there they drank wine

with you a last time,

there they cried with you a last time,

now the shelter is only a hailstone

that fell there,

for already they've folded away the voices,

already they've put away the light,

now that this one

whom we told

nothing

goes away saying I hear your words,

I will seek these things,

I will know by these signs.