The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (9 page)

The world will burst like an intestine in the sun,

the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,

but there will always be somebody riding the bus

through these intersections strewn with broken glass

among speechless women beating their little ones,

always a slow alphabet of rain

speaking of drifting and perishing to the air,

always these definite jails of light in the sky

at the wedding of this clarity and this storm

and a woman's turning—her languid flight of hair

traveling through frame after frame of memory

where the past turns, its face sparking like emery,

to open its grace and incredible harm

over my life, and I will never die.

Solter my neighbor rocks his lover through the human night,

softly and softly, so as not to tell the walls,

the walls the friends of the spinster. But I'm only a spinster,

I'm not a virgin. I have made love. I have known desire.

I followed desire through the museums.

We seemed to float along sculptures,

along the clicking ascent

of numerals in the guards' hands. Brave works

by great masters were all around us.

And then we came out of a tunnel into one of those restaurants

where the natural light was so unnatural

as to make heavenly even our fingernails and each radish.

I saw everyone's skull beneath the skin,

I saw sorrow painting its way out of the faces,

someone was telling a lie and I could taste it,

and I heard the criminal tear-fall,

saw the dog

who dances with his shirt rolled up to his nipples,

the spider…

Why are their mouths small tight circles,

the figures of Africa, New Guinea, New Zealand,

why are their mouths astonished kisses beneath drugged eyes,

why is the eye of the cantaloupe expressionless

but its skin rippling with terror,

and out beyond Coney Island in the breathless waste

of Atlantia, why

does the water move when it is already there?

My neighbor's bedsprings struggle

—soon she will begin to scream—

I think of them always

traveling through space,

riding their bed so

softly it staves the world through the air

of my room—it is their right,

because we freely admit how powerful the sight is,

we say that eyes stab and glances rake,

but it is not the sight

that lets us taste the salt on someone's shoulder in the night,

the musk of fear in the morning,

the savor of falling in the falling

elevators in the buildings of rock,

it is the dark that lets us it is the dark. If

I can imagine them then

why can't I imagine this?

You might as well take a razor

to your pecker as let a woman in your heart.

First they do the wash and then they kill you.

They flash their lights and teach your wallet to puke.

They bring it to you folded—if you see her

stepping between the coin laundry and your building

over the slushy street and watch the clothing steam,

you can't wait to open up the door when she puts

the stairs behind her and catch that warmth between you.

It changes into a baby. “Here's to the little shitter,

the little linoleum lizard.” Once he peed on me

when I was changing him—that one got a laugh

from the characters I wasted all my chances with

at Popeye's establishment when it was over

by the Wonderland. But it's destroyed

now and I understand one of those shopping malls

that are like great monuments of blindness

and folly stands there. And next door,

the grimy restaurants of men with movies

where they used to wear human faces,

the sad people from space. But that was never me,

because everything in those days depended on my work.

“Listen, I'm going to work,” was all I could say,

and drunk or sober I would put on the uniform

of Texaco and wade into my life.

I felt like a man of honor and substance,

but the situation was dancing underneath me—

once I walked into the living room at my sister's

and saw that the two of them, her and my sister,

had turned sometime behind my back not exactly

fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons

moving across the television in front of them,

surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas

standing up next to the iron on the board.

I stepped out into the yard of bricks

and trash and watched the light light

up the blood inside each leaf,

and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm

on this mother? Where do you turn it on?

I think you understand how I felt.

I'm not saying everything changed in the space

of one second of seeing two women, but I did

start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted

she be sexy. I just wanted to live.

And I did: some nights were so

sensory I felt the starlight landing on my back

and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers—

but the strategies of others broke my promise.

At closing time once, she kept talking to a man

when I was trying to catch her attention to leave.

It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines

and black masses and black hydrants filled

with black water. When the lights came on

you could see all kinds of intentions in the air.

I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass,

but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife

and I took out his guts and I said, “Here they are,

motherfucker, nigger, here they are.”

There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on.

At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me

from the end of the world where I saw her standing,

and the way the sacred light played across her face

all I can tell you is I had to be a diamond

of ice to manage. Right down the middle from beginning to end

my life pours into one ocean: into this prison

with its empty ballfield and its empty

preparations for Never Happen.

If she ever comes to visit me, to hell with her,

I won't talk to her, and my son can entertain

himself. God kill them both. I'm sorry for nothing.

I'm just an alien from another planet.

I am not happy. Disappointment

lights its stupid fire in my heart,

but two days a week I staff

the Max Security laundry above the world

on the seventh level, looking at two long roads

out there that go to a couple of towns.

Young girls accelerating through the intersection

make me want to live forever,

they make me think of the grand things,

of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies.

Sometimes I stand against the window for hours

tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal

meth I believe I'll drift out of my body.

Jesus Christ, your doors close and open,

you touch the maniac drifters, the fireaters,

I could say a million things about you

and never get that silence out of time

that happens when the blank muscle hangs

between its beats—that is what I mean

by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth,

where nothing bad has happened.

I'm not anyone but I wish I could be told

when you will come to save us. I have written

several poems and several hymns, and one

has been performed on the religious

ultrahigh frequency station. And it goes like this.

I wish to tell about a time

That's gone,

When I looked at the wheat and thought it was the sea.

I rode to town. The light was gold. I heard them

Speak of the future—around them the dogs dreamed.

It was Sunday, and in our town

The church bells then were so arranged

As to play “Amazing Grace” upon the drugged

Air and clenched hearts of August. And all the time

The wheat in its inlets of honey

Perished and replaced itself imperceptibly

And the horses swam slowly through the fields.

I breathed something thick and terrible

Riding home toward the falling sun, a wild

Musical heat of sorrow and youth that made

A great strength up and down me. I

Was desire—what lived in the sad, slow

Thighs of young girls the dull breeze

Pressed their aprons to embrace? The same

Pitchblende dying between mine? Whatever

It was, I believed it whirled the Earth,

In faith and troth, whatever it was—

Mingling of phosphor and lodestone

Drawn through our hearts—caught fire,

And didn't it ride the horse and me, but we

Rode through it also? All

Were in town: I stood in the house of my birth,

In the silence of its sun-struck rooms,

The only house to have known my cries,

The only house to have witnessed these beginnings,

And thought, How far from home!

Whatever it was, I took to sea

To drown it—but it was only

The downslope of eighteen hundred forty-seven,

The dead-flowery twilight of my nineteenth summer—

And it set me adrift. The sea

Was not the sea. It was a gray, austere dumb land

Of messages without a word,

Tumbling its seed, holding out its hands

Around our senseless faiths, the faiths that placed us

In this chasm between the torn hopes

Behind us and the hopes, fragile as cobwebs, on the other shore.

Watch on and watch off, in the green illumination

Froth cast unreasonably out of dark water, I sighted

Our lesser selves ever attending our passage,

The demons, the criminals, the fools

We demonically, criminally, foolishly believed

Lay back of us: it wasn't to ferry cargo but to create

Jetsam that we'd put ourselves in danger.

And when we'd arrived, whatever it was—

The time, it was the time—

Drove me to cheat my brothers, to search

The purses of my mates while the merchant

S.S.
John Adams
slept in St. George's Channel,

To forge my name to the bill of lading,

To steal my captain's skewbald quarter stallion

And strike across the Irish countryside.

Our fourth day in that country

Brought us to the thick of Kildare County,

A Yankee sailor on a stolen quarter horse,

The sailor in rags and waving a bill of lading

For a hold of goods, the horse consumed

And starved and marked such as no Irishman

Could remember—skewbald, he'd be named

In Boston, where our captain

Had traded for him before I stole him—

And the several tribes

Gathered for a festive day of races laughed

Inside their whiskers at this creature and scraped bare

Their birthrights to wager against him.

Their eyes like sapphires strewn in the sun,

Their purses sighing and crying along their bellies,

The spittle doing a jig along the strands

Of their old beards: the men

Of the large-boned clans had black hair

That came up out of the throats

Of their shirts and ate their faces,

While the little fellows like me were of a blonder

More shall we say humanified strain of farmer,

But all were truly horsemen—never having to touch

Their animals but always smelling just like them,

Telling a horse's life and death in a hoof,

Everyone wagering with a loud word

On some half-extinguished, half-Highlands nag

Raised by the spoon-to-mouth from an ugly

Head parting her mother's hindquarters.

And drunk! These people sweated

Into their saddles a stench of barley liquor

That felled the bugs of summer coming near,

And fed, as well, two quarts of thick brown beer

To their favored stallions in the morning trough.

Now they whacked their kegs, and yodeled around

Amongst themselves incomprehensibly,

Looking at me with mingled pity and greed,

Cracking also the tubs of white

Butter and slapping fistfuls onto bread for me,

For I was their bread and butter now, and entitled.

I'd judge their fervid offerings had made me heavy

By three pounds more by the time the charge

Of musket shot exploded into the still

Moment above our horses' heads, and the last

Kildare County Cup broke from the gate.

Was there ever a race where any rider but had

One chance, no time, and everything to lose?

I see how our tears wash none of it away,

How our cries call back no one into our arms,

But I've learned that whenever at last the sobbing breaks

From my chest into the sound of weeping, my cross breaks;

The river of grief carries itself away,

Laying down its rude memento of ash—such stories

As I tell about that afternoon

In a strange country in a young time,

And such, no doubt, as others tell

Considerably otherwise, of an iron

Afternoon when a villain flogged a county

Of its heart's savings, and the songs

That claim I raced him all over England and Spain,

The songs that give him a silver bridle,

A mane of gold, a saddle beyond worth,

And the songs sung of a gigantic wager

Regretted to the core of grief—

I bet on Griselda

I bet on the bay

If I'd bet on old Stewball

I'd be a free man today—

I know

Even the bravest of that village had to sleep

In the darkness that night, I know

How the fiddles went rotten in the sacks,

I know the revelry blackened and trickled away

Before any of the candles could be lit,

But I gained. I gained a great amount. I gained

The sums and worthy items they had placed

Against my ridiculous skewbald horse—an amount

Exactly measured to my daring and their greed,

And I say it though it takes from my modesty

And lends them sympathy, because it's true.

Oh, I was a bold crossroader and they were all monkeys

The day I drove the fastest horse in Ireland,

And as I came not the width

Of a finger from the smear of their faces along the rail,

The flayed mounts bellowing toward the line,

The light in the atmospheric dust like light

Going down to the springs of the sea,

I saw, as if the world had ceased in front of them,

The blind eyes made of tears

In the face of a lad who'd wagered everything:

Things not belonging to him, things that could never be replaced,

That his mother cherished and his father

Had worked away his hands to keep—all

Just memories turning to stone as I clipped past

Like a razor through the dreams of an Irish village.

And I thought then

That if God made pain it so repented Him

He climbed the Cross and drank it to the last

Nail in the cup and ate the bloody dregs

In vain, for we go on hurting.

But why should he have wept to lose his wealth

Or I to have laughed, holding it in my hands?—when

It was nothing

Next to what held us, and lay before us,

What couldn't be won or lost, but only spent;

More than a feeling, less than a thing: a fact,

A murky element, a medium, a sea

Of fadeless dew upon the leaf

Of the mind—

Time! Time that gives everything but itself,

Time that steals everything but the heart—

It caught in the throat

To see it light down all around us like a young girl's dress,

And we were the mystery underneath it:

Oh, it was summer! But it was dusk.