G.o.d appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing heart of Paterson.
Arctic, 1956
READY TO ROLL
To Mexico! To Mexico! Down the dovegrey highway, past Atomic City police, past the firey border to dream cantinas!
Standing on the sunny metropolitan plateau, stranger prince on the street, dollars in my pocket, alone, free -- genitals and thighs and b.u.t.tocks under skin and leather.
Music! Taxis! Marijuana in the slums! Ancient s.e.xy parks!
Continental boulevards in America! Modern downtown for a dollar! Dungarees in Les Amba.s.sadeurs Dungarees in Les Amba.s.sadeurs! And here"s a hard brown c.o.c.k for a quarter!
Drunkenness! and the long night walks down brown streets, eyes, windows, buses, interior charnels behind the Cathedral, lost squares and hungry tacos, a calf"s head cooked and picked apart for meat, and the blackened inner roofs and tents of the Thieves"
Market, street crisscrossed on street, a naked hipster labyrinth, stealing, pausing, loitering, noticing drums, purchasing nothing but a broken aluminum coffee pot with a doll"s arm sticking up out of the mouth.
Haha! what do I want? Change of solitude, spectre of drunkenness in paranoiac taxicabs, fear and gaiety of unknown lovers coming around the empty streetcorner dark-eyed and watching me make it there alone under the new hip moon.
S.F. 1956
WROTE THIS LAST NIGHT
Listen to the tale of the sensitive car who was coughed up out of earth in Pittsburgh.
She screamed like a Swedish Prime Minister on her first flight down the red neon highway, she couldn"t stand the sirens and blind lights of the male cars Fords Oldsmobiles Studebakers -- her a.s.sembly line foreman had prophecied wild wreck on Sunset Boulevard headlights & eyeb.a.l.l.s broken fenders & bones.
She rode all over Mexico avoiding Los Angeles praying to be an old junkie in a bordertown graveyard with rattley doors and yellow broken windowpanes bent license plate weak brakes & unsaleable motor worn out by the slow b.u.t.tocks of teen-age nightmare panting under the impoverished jissom of the August moon, Anything but that final joyride with the mad producer and his bombsh.e.l.l intellectual star on the last night up from Mexicali.
SQUEAL
He rises he stretches he liquefies he is hammered again He"s divided in shares he litters the floor of the Bourse He"s cut by adamantine snips and sent by railway car Acc.u.mulated on the margin by bony Goldfinger has various Visions of being an automobile consolidates The fortune of spectral lawyers heirs weep over him He melts he undergoes remarkable metamorphoses peculiar Hallucinations he coughs up debentures beaten By immense hammers in a vast loft pours in fire spurts Upward in molten forges he levels he dreams and he cools And the present adjusted steel squints.
A hunchback tuberculosis salesman drives him cackling to St Louis In the rain Hack no will of his own Creep next resale Crank San Pedro tomorrow St Joe Squeak will it never end Hohokus -- Crashes into a dirty locomotive the b.a.s.t.a.r.d never Mind stock averages decline slightly here"s the mechanic Blam the junkyard Help the smelter later a merger pressure acc.u.mulates He"s had it now Eek he"s an airplane Whine he wants to go home Suddenly he dives on the market like a bomb.
1958
AMERICAN CHANGE
The first I looked on, after a long time far from home in mid Atlantic on a summer day Dolphins breaking the gla.s.sy water under the blue sky, a gleam of silver in my cabin, fished up out of my jangling new pocket of coins and green dollars -- held in my palm, the head of the feathered indian, old Buck-Rogers eagle eyed face, a gash of hunger in the cheek gritted jaw of the vanished man begone like a Hebrew with hairlock combed down the side -- O Rabbi Indian what visionary gleam 100 years ago on Buffalo prairie under the molten cloud shot sky, "the same clear light 10000 miles in all directions"
but now with all the violin music of Vienna, gone into the great slot machine of Kansas City, Reno -- The coin seemed so small after vast European coppers thick francs leaden pesetas, lira endless and heavy, a miniature primeval memorialized in 5c. nickle candy- store nostalgia of the redskin, dead on silver coin, with s.h.a.ggy buffalo on reverse, hump-backed little tail incurved, head b.u.t.ting against the rondure of Eternity, c.o.c.k forelock below, bearded shoulder muscle folded below muscle, head of prophet, bowed, vanishing beast of Time, h.o.a.r body rubbed clean of wrinkles and shining like polished stone, bright metal in my forefinger, ridiculous buffalo -- to New York.
Dime next I found, Minerva, s.e.xless cold & chill, ascend- ing G.o.ddess of money -- and was it the wife of Wallace Stevens, truly?
and now from the locks flowing the miniature wings of speedy thought, executive d.y.k.e, Minerva, G.o.ddess of Madison Avenue, forgotten useless dime that can"t buy hot dog, dead dime -- Then we"ve George Washington, less primitive, the snub- nosed quarter, smug eyes and mouth, some idiot"s design of the s.e.xless Father, naked down to his neck, a ribbon in his wig, high fore- head, Roman line down the nose, fat checked, still showing his falsetooth ideas -- O Eisenhower & Washington -- O Fathers -- No movie star dark beauty -- O thou Bignoses -- Quarter, remembered quarter, 40c. in all -- What"ll you buy me when I land -- one icecream soda? -- poor pile of coins, original reminders of the sadness, forgotten money of America -- nostalgia of the first touch of those coins, American change, the memory in my aging hand, the same old silver reflec- tive there, the thin dime hidden between my thumb and forefinger All the struggles for those coins, the sadness of their re- appearance my reappearance on those fabled sh.o.r.es and the failure of that Dream, that Vision of Money reduced to this haunting recollection of the gas lot in Paterson where I found half a dollar gleaming in the gra.s.s -- I have a $5 bill in my pocket -- it"s Lincoln"s sour black head moled wrinkled, forelocked too, big eared, flags of announce- ment flying over the bill, stamps in green and spiderweb black, long numbers in racetrack green, immense promise, a girl, a hotel, a busride to Albany, a night of brilliant drunk in some faraway corner of Manhattan a stick of several teas, or paper or cap of Heroin, or a $5 strange present to the blind.
Money money, reminder, I might as well write poems to you -- dear American money -- O statue of Liberty I ride en- folded in money in my mind to you -- and last Ahhh! Washington again, on the Dollar, same poetic black print, dark words, The United States of America, innumer- able numbers R956422481 One Dollar This Certificate is Legal Tender (tender!) for all debts public and private My G.o.d My G.o.d why have you foresaken me Ivy Baker Priest Series 1935 F and over, the Eagle, wild wings outspread, halo of the Stars encircled by puffs of smoke & flame -- a circle the Masonic Pyramid, the sacred Swedenborgian Dollar America, bricked up to the top, & floating surreal above the triangle of holy outstaring Eye sectioned out of the aire, shining light emitted from the eyebrowless triangle -- and a desert of cactus, scattered all around, clouds afar, this being the Great Seal of our Pa.s.sion, Annuit Coeptes, Annuit Coeptes, Novis Ordo Seculorum, the whole surrounded by green spiderwebs designed by T-Men to prevent foul counterfeit --
ONE
S.S United States, 1958"BACK ON TIMES SQUARE, DREAMING OF TIMES SQUARE"
Let some sad trumpeter stand on the empty streets at dawn and blow a silver chorus to the buildings of Times Square, memorial of ten years, at 5 AM, with the thin white moon just visible above the green & grooking McGraw Hill offices a cop walks by, but he"s invisible with his music The Globe Hotel, Garver lay in grey beds there and hunched his back and cleaned his needles -- where I lay many nights on the nod from his leftover b.l.o.o.d.y cottons and dreamed of Blake"s voice talking -- I was lonely, Garver"s dead in Mexico two years, hotel"s vanished into a parking lot And I"m back here -- sitting on the streets again -- The movies took our language, the great red signs A DOUBLE BILL OF Ga.s.sERS Teen Age Nightmare Hooligans of the Moon But we were never nightmare hooligans but seekers of the blond nose for Truth Some old men are still alive, but the old Junkies are gone -- We are a legend, invisible but legendary, as prophecied
NY 1958
MY SAD SELF
To Frank O"HaraSometimes when my eyes are red I go up on top of the RCA Building and gaze at my world, Manhattan -- my buildings, streets I"ve done feats in, lofts, beds, coldwater flats -- on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind, its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men walking the size of specks of wool -- Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine, sun go down over New Jersey where I was born & Paterson where I played with ants -- my later loves on 15th Street, my greater loves of Lower East Side, my once fabulous amours in the Bronx faraway -- paths crossing in these hidden streets, my history summed up, my absences and ecstasies in Harlem -- -- sun shining down on all I own in one eyeblink to the horizon in my last eternity -- matter is water.
Sad, I take the elevator and go down, pondering, and walk on the pavements staring into all man"s plategla.s.s, faces, questioning after who loves, and stop, bemused in front of an automobile shopwindow standing lost in calm thought, traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me waiting for a moment when. . . .
Time to go home & cook supper & listen to the romantic war news on the radio . . . all movement stops & I walk in the timeless sadness of existence, tenderness flowing thru the buildings, my fingertips touching reality"s face, my own face streaked with tears in the mirror of some window -- at dusk -- where I have no desire for bonbons -- or to own the dresses or j.a.panese lampshades of intellection -- Confused by the spectacle around me, Man struggling up the street with packages, newspapers, ties, beautiful suits toward his desire Man, woman, streaming over the pavements red lights clocking hurried watches & movements at the curb -- And all these streets leading so crosswise, honking, lengthily, by avenues stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums thru such halting traffic screaming cars and engines so painfully to this countryside, this graveyard this stillness on deathbed or mountain once seen never regained or desired in the mind to come where all Manhattan that I"ve seen must disappear.
NY 1958
The music of the spheres -- that ends in Silence The Void is a grand piano a million melodies one after another silence in between rather an interruption of the silence Tho the music"s beautiful Bong Bong Bon----- gn.o.b gn.o.b gno-----
THE circle of forms Shrinks and disappears back into the piano.
BATTLESHIP NEWSREEL
I was high on tea in my foc"sle near the forepeak hatch listening to the stars envisioning the kamakazis flapping and turning in the soiled clouds ackack burst into fire a vast hole ripped out of the bow like a burning lily we dumped our oilcans of nitroglycerine among the waving octapi dull thud and boom of thunder undersea the cough of the tuburcular machinegunner flames in the hold among the cans of ether the roar of battleships far away rolling in the sea like whales surrounded by dying ants the screams the captain mad Suddenly a golden light came over the ocean and grew large the radiance entered the sky a deathly chill and heaviness entered my body I could scarce lift my eye and the ship grew sheathed in light like an overexposed photograph fading in the brain.
1959
I BEG YOU COME BACK & BE CHEERFUL
Tonite I got hi in the window of my apartment chair at 3: AM gazing at Blue incandescent torches bright-lit street below clotted shadows looming on a new laid pave -- as last week Medieval rabbiz plodded thru the brown raw dirt turned over -- sticks & cans and tired ladies sitting on spanish garbage pails -- in the deadly heat -- one month ago the fire hydrants were awash -- the sun at 3 P.M. today in a haze -- now all dark outside, a cat crosses the street silently -- I meow and she looks up, and pa.s.ses a pile of rubble on the way to a golden shining garbage pail (phosphor in the night & alley stink) (or door-can mash) -- Thinking America is a chaos Police clog the streets with their anxiety, Prowl cars creak & halt: Today a woman, 20, slapped her brother playing with his infant bricks -- toying with a huge rock -- "Don"t do that now! the cops! the cops!"
And there was no cop there -- I looked around my shoulder -- a pile of c.r.a.p in the opposite direction.
Tear gas! Dynamite! Mustaches!
I"ll grow a beard and carry lovely bombs, I will destroy the world, slip in between the cracks of death And change the Universe -- Ha!
I have the secret, I carry Subversive salami in my ragged briefcase "Garlic, Poverty, a will to Heaven,"
a strange dream in my meat: Radiant clouds, I have heard G.o.d"s voice in my sleep, or Blake"s awake, or my own or the dream of a delicatessen of snorting cows and bellowing pigs -- The chop of a knife a finger severed in my brain -- a few deaths I know -- O brothers of the Laurel Is the world real?
Is the Laurel a joke or a crown of thorns? -- Fast, pa.s.s up the a.s.s Down I go Cometh Woe -- the street outside, me spying on New York.
The dark truck pa.s.ses snarling & vibrating deep --
Leaving us flying like birds into Time -- eyes and car headlights -- The shrinkage of emptiness in the Nebulae These Galaxies cross like pinwheels & they pa.s.s like gas -- What forests are born.
September 15, 1959
TO AN OLD POET IN PERU