The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (8 page)

for Jane, after a dream

I passed a helicopter

crashed in the street today,

where stunned and suddenly grief-torn

passers-by tried to explain

over and over, a hundred ways, what

had happened. Some cried over the pilot,

others stole money from his wallet—

I heard the one responsible for his death

claiming the pilot didn't need it any more,

and whether he spoke of the pilot's

money or his life wasn't clear.

The scene had a subaqueous timbre

that I recognize now as a light

that shines in the dreams I have when I sleep

on my back and wake up half-drowned.

However I tried to circumnavigate

this circus of fire and mourning—

the machine burst ajar like a bug,

the corpse a lunch pail

left open and silly music coming out—

I couldn't seem to find a way

that didn't lead straight to the heart of the trouble

and involve me forever in their grief.

for Glenna K, 1922–1979

Who wouldn't have been afraid

of your face?—watching me

from another world through your cheap

frame on the dresser, while your daughter

wept and I made hysterical

love to her, trying

to banish your ghost that wandered

with its smashed head through this life

I never invited you to.

Who wouldn't have wanted to drive you out of her,

seeing how your memory, grown

sharp as flint in grief, carved

her face a little more every

day into yours?

I thought you were watching me out of her eyes,

I thought every night I heard the telephone

clatter to the floor again,

and your daughter

scream so she couldn't stop.

And for months afterward

you came to me like

nobody—secondhand,

through a daughter's hindsight,

her unblinking, horrified love,

as night

after night the room filled

with the dark and the air

burned with your murdered presence,

until I couldn't possibly make love to the dark gold

woman, vessel of your self, the torn

strings of your motherhood dripping

from her like an ocean

where she drowned but couldn't die.

Who would drag us before some tribe of elders

to be scorned,

or have anything but pity

on us, that we turned to other lovers

and lost each other?

Glenna,

forgive me: tonight, in a moment

of learning that is as clear

and absolute as ice, and hurts

as much to be inside of,

I see how much like him

I've become, the man

who beat you until you died with something

they never found—

walking in an anger of love

and hatred through these streets

just as the geraniums

of light around the baseball

diamonds are coming on—

oh, God, inside me I carry a black

night you climb through like

the moon in which the Asians

see a woman:

higher

and smaller, Glenna, farther

and farther away,

and nothing

will ever bring you back.

And nothing will ever get rid of you.

In 1972 I crossed Kansas on a bus

with a dog apparently pursued to skinniness

painted on its side, an emblem

not entirely inappropriate, considering

those of us availing ourselves

of its services—tossed

like rattles in a baby's hand,

sleeping the sleep of the ashamed

and the niggardly, crying out

or keeping our counsel as we raced over the land,

flailing at dreams

or lying still. And I awoke to see

the prairie, seized by the cold and the early hour,

continually falling away beside us, and a fire

burning furiously in the dark: a house

posted about by tiny figures—

firemen; and a family

who might have been calling out to God

just then for a witness.

But more than witness, I remember now

something I could only have imagined

that night: the sound of the reins breaking

the bones in the farmer's hands

as the horses reared and flew back into the flames

he wanted to take them away from.

My thoughts are like that,

turning and going back where nothing wants them,

where the door opens and a road

of light falls through it

from behind you and pain

starts to whisper with your voice;

where you stand inside your own absence,

your eyes still smoky from dreaming,

the ruthless iron press

of love and failure making

a speechless church out of your dark

and invisible face.

You and I—we agitate

to say things, to dress every gash

with a street address or a relative.

We are found in the places of transport at an hour

when only the criminals are expected to depart.

We are blind and we don't know that our mouths

are moving as we place a hand to stay

the janitor's mop—
I'll tell you the story

of my life, you'll make a million—

blind and we don't know that our parents are dead

as we enter the photo-booths.

In there is the quiet like the kernel of a word:

in there everything we were going to say

is taken from us and we are given

four images of ourselves. What are we going

to do with these pictures? They hold

no fascination for the abandoned,

but only for us, who have

relinquished them to the undertow

that held us, too, but let us go,

so that the hospitals opened like great vaults

for us and we stepped from bed to bed

on the faces of the diseased, the beloved,

moving like light over a necklace

of excruciations—
I'll tell you

the story of my life
,

you'll make a million…

this is what it means to be human,

to witness the heart of a moment like a photograph,

the present standing up through itself relentlessly like a fountain,

the clock showering the intersection with minutes

even as it gathers them to its face

in the so often alluded

to Kingdom of Heaven—

to watch one of those minutes open

like a locket and brandish a picture

of everyone we ever loved who drowned,

while the unendurable generosity of everything

sells everything out. Would you like

to dance? Then here, dance with the terror

that now is forever,

my feet are stumps. The band is just

outbreaking now with one that goes

all the evidence / the naughty evidence / persuades

the lovers endearing by the ponds /

the truants growing older in the sleazy arcades /

there's no banishing / of anything /

only con- / quering within /

make it enough / make it enough / or eat

suffering without end

Outside the spring

afternoon

is occurring, my love,

just as our voices

are going home from us

to the plains, and the shapes

of ourselves, as we impose

them on this one, prepare

to blend with other

afternoons, possibly in

this very room

as tiny dusts uplifted

in the bands of sunlight,

or in other still chambers.

I don't want you to be afraid

as we stand here losing

our lives, unable to speak,

soon to enter the dream

of once having touched

this portion, that smoothness

of flesh now buried dead

and having heard the lovely

tones ascending on a voice

merely speaking; there is

the chance there will be

the singing of the voiceless,

unraveling into the unenclosed

emptiness a silence

drawn taut so

slowly its

high music encounters

us before

it begins, and we are dancing.

You were as blind to me

as your footprints last Friday,

but I saw you dancing

with that girl who wasn't me—

because I don't dance

and laugh in that terrible

style with every stranger.

But you are no stranger.

But you were strange when you were dancing,

and the room turned all yellow

and the glass I was holding

spilled burgundy wine.

I got out by the side door

and I leaned on a box,

and I saw you at the end

of every street,

and in the Flame Inn

I watched the men shooting

eight-ball and mule-kicking

the jukebox till it worked.

On the wall they had many,

many wooden plaques

bearing humorous sayings

that I will never say

to you even if you begged me,

not even if you came out

of a prison, and begged me.

There was something I can't bring myself

to mention in the way the light

seemed trapped by the clouds,

the way the road dropped

from pavement to dirt and the land from pine

to scrub—

the red-headed vultures on dead animals,

the hatred of the waitress breaking

a cup and kicking the shards across the café

that looked out on the mountain and on the white smear

of the copper mine that sustained these people.

I claim there was something you wouldn't

have wanted to speak of either,

a sense of some violent treasure

like uranium waiting to be romanced

out of the land…

They sat under white umbrellas,

two or three together, elbows on card tables

at the dirt roads leading to the mines,

rising each at his turn to walk

around a while with a sign

announcing they were on strike,

their crystalline and indelible

faces in the hundred-degree

heat like the faces of slaughtered hogs,

and God forgive me,

I pulled to the side of the road and wrote this poem.

He bears a rakish feather

through the streets in a hat

on his head and has had

several drinks, and is crying.

He totters at the change

of traffic lights.

I do not know if he has just

been orphaned, or what.

From a room above the stores

the insistent test-tone

of the Emergency Broadcasting

System stares at him, and he

cannot stop hearing it.

The perfectly desolate afternoon's

single utterance is this sound

like an ambulance across

the mild lake whose driver

swims while the siren cries.

It is putting the man

in the feathered hat at

the intersection under arrest.

I do not know if he has just

been informed, or what.

I know it is my radio, but

I am only beginning to understand

whose orphanhood, whose tears.

I take

you by your arm of stained glass

while the moon turns warm and wet

as the kitchen window of a distant

restaurant in the beautiful

moments after closing,

and we walk up and down—

oh! don't we promenade?

Every radio in the town

plays the same station through doorways

thrown wide to the elements and we are

buoyed and relayed how tenderly along

this underground railroad of tuneful oldies.

It is a nighttime filled

with animals, bubbles, tiny lights.

Now we do not fear treachery,

now we are not asking ourselves how

will we know if the insect lies,

how will we know if the fire lies.

The ache of our loving just

throttles us speechless inside the midnight,

though the radios are all crying out

that the weather tomorrow in

the mountains will be unprecedented.

I used to sneak into the movies without paying
.

I watched the stories but I failed to see the dark
.

I went to college and drank everything they gave me
,

and I never paid for any of that water

on which I drifted as if by grace until

after the drownings, when in the diamond light

of seven-something
A.M.
, as the spring was tearing

me up in Cartajena, only praying

on my knees before the magnifying ark

of the Seventh St. Hotel could possibly save me
,

until falling on my face before the daughter

of money while the world poured from the till

brought the moment's length against the moment's height
,

and paying was what I was earning and eating and wearing
.

This to the best of my recollection

my uncle said in 1956,

moving against my father like a bear

on fire as the evening of his visit

killed the rum. He'd come from Alaska

or some place like that, the Antarctic, maybe,

and he left in a hot rage, screaming by the door

that nothing would save me from my awful father,

just as he, my uncle, had been saved

by nothing. Thirteen weeks from then, he died.

“This family's full of the dead,” my father told me.

I was eight. I used to make excuses

to join him in the washroom as he bathed

in the mornings, soaping himself carefully

so as not to splash the automatic pistol

wrapped in plastic he rested near to hand.

At a certain point, the sun came through the blinds

and shafted the toilet bowl, filling it with light

as he spoke of killing everyone, often taking

the pistol from its wrap and holding its mouth

against his breast, explaining that no safety

lay anywhere, unless he should shoot the fear

that stood up on its hind legs in his heart.

Such things were always on TV—I thought

that one world merged in the next, and I resolved

to win the great Congressional Medal of Honor,

to make a name on the stage, and die a priest.

In the war the bullets yanked the fronds

from palms and the earth ate them up like acid

before our eyes. When dead men hit the ground

they came alive, they spoke in tongues, holding

babies that came from nowhere in their arms.

We were all afraid of the earth. My father's fear

turned it like a plow, delivering

dogs and bugs, bright music, and a feminine

whispering of our names. My comrades fled,

but I was healed by everything that happened,

the midnight Rapid Transit stations

of hand grenades made moonlight as I moved

from life to life, getting off and shouting

whatever the signs said, getting on again,

received like lightning, changing everything.

My body disappeared. The enemy

knew me as a ghost who dropped a shadow

the size of night and turned the air to edges.

I am your grand companion of surprise,

big-time harbinger canceling everyone's

business in a constant dream of all

the starring roles and franchises the great

Congressional Medal of Honor winners win.

Wounded twice, then decorated more

than any other in my regiment,

I stood at home plate, vomit on my blouse

and whiskey in my blood, and heard the dirt

of my home town falling grain by grain

out of the afternoon, while everyone's

rahrahrahs affected me like silence.

The mayor handed me a four-by-four-

inch cardboard box a colonel handed
him;

I threw it at the vast face of the crowd,

screaming I wanted only the Medal of Honor…

I lose the thread of my existence here.

I see me strange and drugged against my will,

telling my life story to a room,

traveling the aisles of an asylum

out there in Maine, among the aborigines.

They must have set me loose, or I escaped:

I see myself in a forest-bordered field,

unchanged and wearing my uniform—

free; yet somehow jailed by old desires

and saying what a soldier says: For home,

nothing. Comrades, for you, these hoarded rations.

With four monstrosities in uniforms

like mine, I pulverized guitars and wept

for the merriment of many. Brothers,

when shadows lengthen, and they lower down

the American flag and close our government,

another country rises like a mist

by garbagey coliseums on the warehouse

side of town to listen to that rock

and roll: God speaking with the Devil's voice,

unbreathable air of manacles, a storm

to bless your multicolored lips with sperm.

We sundered them until they brought their bones

forth from the flesh and laid them at our feet,

screaming their lungs shut tight as fists,

shedding their homes forever, leaving name

and tongue and mind and sending us their heads

through the mails in the night. We ran it past the edge,

we gave them something everyone could dance to—

whatever is most terrible is most real—

the Bible fights, the fetuses burning in light-bulbs,

the cunnilingual, intravenous

swamp of love. Three times I died on stage,

and the show went on while doctors snatched

me back from Chinatown with their machines.

We struck it rich. Without a repertoire,

without a name or theme, we toured the land

and eighty thousand perished. We were
real
,

but not one company recorded us:

everywhere we went they passed a law.

We toured the land—sweet, burning Texacos,

the adrenaline darkness palpitates frantically,

the highway eats itself all night, the radio's

wheedling bebop fails in the galactic

soup near dawn; the Winnebago shimmers,

everything tastes like puke, the eight-ball

bursts, nobody

knows how to drink in this fuckin town…

One night I heard our music end

abruptly in the middle of a number

and looked around me at a gigantic silence.

I felt the pounding, saw the screams, but all

was like the long erasure of a wind

calming and disturbing everything

on its route through stunned fields of hay.

My bodyguards tried with huge gentleness to lead

me off, but I threw myself outside, rolling

through a part of town I'd never seen—

the flat gray streets looked Hebrew, and the windows

held out the paraphernalia of old age,

porcelain Jesuses gesturing from the shadows

of porcelain vases, surrounded by medicines.

A rain began. I strained myself to hear

the trashcans say their miserable names,

but nothing. At the brink

of stardom high over the United States,

untouchable as God but better known,

I stumbled over streets that might've been rubber,

deaf as a cockroach, finished as a singer.

Brothers, I spilled myself along the roads.

Mold grew on me as I dampened in alleys.

I began in ignorance. How could I know

that whoever is grinding up his soul is making

himself afresh? That the ones who run away

get nearer all the time? Look here or there,

it's always the horizon, the dull edge

of earth dicing your plan like a potato.

Does water break the light, or light the water?

Which do you choose: what is or what is?

I painted myself black and let that color

ride through virgins like the penises

they dream of while their fathers sleep. I lied.

I cheated like a shark. I robbed the dead.

Nothing healed me, just as nothing healed

my uncle of himself—but he was healed,

while I grew phosphorescent with a kind

of cancer that I carried like a domino,

a tiny badge discovering me…

Oh please my love I want to rock and roll with you

Feel it feel it

feel it all night like a shoe…

Ten years I wasted all I had, and then

ten years I lived correctly—held a job

in a factory that made explosions,

where deafness was an asset. I did well,

I never missed a day, I polished late,

honed my skills, received promotions—in the end

I built explosions for atomic bombs,

forty-three I built myself, which one of these

days will deafen you, as I am deafened.

I wrenched the fraternal orders with my tale

of sorrowful delinquency—the Elks,

the Lions, Moose; those animals, they loved

the crippled rock'n'roller with the heart

wrung out as empty as his former mind,

and variously and often they cited me.

I walked the malls with an expanded chest,

took my sips with my pinkie cocked,

firing dry martinis at my larynx

and yearning for the strength of soul it takes

to suck a bullet from an actual

pistol, hating my own drained face

as I intimidated mirrors, or stood

in a jail of lies before the Eagle Scouts,

an alarm clock going off inside an alarm clock

in a lump of iron inside a lump of iron:

hating myself for having become my father.

At night I prayed aloud to God and Jesus

to place me on a spaceship to the moon—

Heaven, I told Them constantly, my mind

is tired of me, and I would like to die.

Take me to ground zero take me to ground zero

where in the midst of detonation it is useless

to demonstrate quod erat demonstrandum,

this was my ceaseless prayer, until my lips

were muscles and my heart could talk,

telling it over and over to itself;

until they fired me and drove me to the edge

of things, and dumped my prayer into the desert.

Drinking cactus milk and eating sand,

I wandered until I saw the monastery

standing higher and higher, at first a loose

mirage, but soon more real than I was.

There I fell on my face, and let light carry

me into the world—just as my uncle told it

nine million years ago when I was eight—

and the prison of my human shape exploded,

my heart cracked open and the blood poured out

over stones that got up and walked when it touched them.

High in the noon, some kind of jet plane winked

like a dime; I saw it also flashed

over the vast, perfumed, commercial places

filled with stupid but well-intentioned people,

the wreckages and ambushes of love

putting themselves across, making it pay

in the margins of the fire, in the calm spaces,

taken across the dance-floor by a last romance,

kissing softly in a hallucination strewn

with bus tickets and an originless music—

and now death comes to them, a little boy

in a baseball cap and pyjamas, doing things

to the locks of the heart…This was my vision.

Here I saw the truth of the horizon,

the way of coming and going in this life.

I never drifted up from my beginning:

I rose as inexorably as heat.

Brothers, I reached you, and you took me in.

You saw me when I was invisible,

you spoke to me when I was deaf,

you thanked me when I was a secret,

and how will I make of myself something

at this hour when I am already made?

Never a famous hero, a star, a priest—

my mind decides a little faster than

the world can talk, and what I dreamed was only

the darker sketch of what I would become.

It's 1996. I'm forty-eight.

I am a monk who never prays. I am

a prayer. The pilgrim comes to hear me;

the banker comes, the bald janitors arrive,

the mothers lift their wicked children up—

they wait for me as if I were a bus,

with or without hope, what's the difference?

One guy manipulates a little calculator,

speaking to it as to a friend. Sweat

is delivered from its mascara,

sad women read about houses…

and now the deaf approach, trailing the dark smoke

of their infirmity behind them as they leave it

and move toward the prayer that everything

is praying: the summer evening a held bubble,

every gesture riveting the love,

the swaying of waitresses, the eleven television

sets in a storefront broadcasting a murderer's face—

these things speak the clear promise of Heaven.