Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand
All wars are useless to the dead
My hands are knotted in the rope
and I cannot sound the bell
My hands are frozen to the switch
and I cannot throw it
The foot is in the wheel
When it’s finished and we’re lying
in a stubble of blistered flowers
eyes gaping, mouths staring
dusted with crushed arterial blues
I’ll have done nothing
even for you?
1968
TO FRANTZ FANON
Born Martinique, 1925; dead Washington D.C., 1961.
I don’t see your head
sunk, listeningto the throats
of the torturers and the tortured
I don’t see your eyes
deep in the blacknessof your skull
they look off from meinto the eyes
of rats and haunted policemen.
What I see best is the length
of your fingers
pressing the pencil
into the barred page
of the French child’s copybook
with its Cartesian squaresits grilled
trap of holy geometry
where your night-sweats streamed out
in language
and your death
a black streak on a white bed
in L’Enfant’s city where
the fever-bush sweats off
its thick
petalsyear after year
on the mass grave
of revolt
1968
CONTINUUM
Waking thickheaded by crow’s light
I see the suitcase packed
for your early plane; nothing to do
but follow the wristwatch hands
round to the hour. Life is like money
—you said, finishing the brandy from the cracked
plastic bathroom cup last night—
no use except for what you can get with it.
Yet something wants us delivered up
alive, whatever it is,
that causes me to edge the slatted blind
soundlessly up, leaving you
ten minutes’ more sleep, while I look
shivering, lucidifying, down
at that street where the poor are already getting started
and that poster streaking the opposite wall
with the blurred face of a singer whose songs
money can’t buy nor air contain
someone yet unloved, whose voice
I may never hear, but go on hoping
to hear, tonight, tomorrow, someday,
as I go on hoping to feel
tears of mercy in the of course impersonal rain.
1968
ON EDGES
When the ice starts to shiver
all across the reflecting basin
or water-lily leaves
dissect a simple surface
the word ‘drowning’ flows through me.
You built a glassy floor
that held me
as I leaned to fish for old
hooks and toothed tin cans,
stems lashing out like ties of
silk dressing-gowns
archangels of lake-light
gripped in mud.
Now you hand me a torn letter.
On my knees, in the ashes, I could never
fit these ripped-up flakes together.
In the taxi I am still piecing
what syllables I can
translating at top speed like a thinking machine
that types out ‘useless’ as ‘monster’
and ‘history’ as ‘lampshade’.
Crossing the bridge I need all my nerve
to trust to the man-made cables.
The blades on that machine
could cut you to ribbons
but its function is humane.
Is this all I can say of these
delicate hooks, scythe-curved intentions
you and I handle? I’d rather
taste blood, yours or mine, flowing
from a sudden slash, than cut all day
with blunt scissors on dotted lines
like the teacher told.
1968
VIOLENCE
No one knows yet
what he is capable of. Thus: if you
(still drawing me, mouth to mouth
toward the door) had pushed
a gun into my hand
would my fingers have burned, or not,
to dry ice on that metal?
if you’d said, leaving
in a pre-dawn thunderstorm
use this when the time comes
would I have blurted my first no that night
or, back without you, bundled
the cold bulk into a drawer
in a cocoon of nightgowns
printed with knots of honeysuckle …
Still following you as if your body
were a lantern, an angel of radar,
along the untrustworthy park
or down that block where the cops shoot to kill—
could I have dreamed a violence
like that of finding
your burnt-out cigarettes
planted at random, charred
fuses in a blown-up field?
1968
THE OBSERVER
Completely protected on all sides
by volcanoes
a woman, darkhaired, in stained jeans
sleeps in central Africa.
In her dreams, her notebooks, still
private as maiden diaries,
the mountain gorillas move through their life term;
their gentleness survives
observation. Six bands of them
inhabit, with her, the wooded highland.
When I lay me down to sleep
unsheltered by any natural guardians
from the panicky life-cycle of my tribe
I wake in the old cellblock
observing the daily executions,
rehearsing the laws
I cannot subscribe to,
envying the pale gorilla-scented dawn
she wakes into, the stream where she washes her hair,
the camera-flash of her quiet
eye.
1968
NIGHTBREAK
Something brokenSomething
I needBy someone
I loveNext year
will I remember what
This angerunreal
yet
has to be gone through
The sun to set
on this anger
I go on
head downinto it
The mountain pulsing
Into the oildrumdrops
the ball of fire.
Time is quietdoesn’t break things
or even woundThings are in danger
from peopleThe frail clay lamps
of Mesopotamia
row on row under glass
in the ethnological section
little hollows for dried-
up oilThe refugees
with their identical
tales of escapeI don’t
collect what I can’t useI need
what can be broken.
In the bed the pieces fly together
and the rifts fillor else
my body is a listof wounds
symmetrically placed
a village
blown openby planes
that did notfinish the job
The enemy haswithdrawn
between raidsbecome invisible
there are
no agencies
of relief
the darkness becomes utter
Sleepcracked and flaking
sif
ts over the shakentarget.
What breaksis night
not dayThe white
scarsplitting
over the east
The crack weeping
Time for the pieces
to move
dumbly back
toward each other.
1968
GABRIEL
There are no angelsyet
here comes an angelone
with a man’s faceyoung
shut-offthe dark
side of the moonturning to me
and saying:I am the plumed
serpentthe beast
with fangs of fireand a gentle
heart
But he doesn’t say thatHis message
drenches his body
he’d want to kill me
for using words to name him
I sit in the bare apartment
reading
words stream past mepoetry
twentieth-century rivers
disturbed surfacesreflecting clouds
reflecting wrinkled neon
but cloggedand mostly
nothing alive left
in their depths
The angel is barely
Speakingto me
Once in a horn of light
he stoodor someone like him
salutations in gold-leaf
ribboning from his lips
Today againthe hair streams
to his shoulders
the eyes reflectsomething
like a lost countryor so I think
but the ribbon has reeled itself
up
he isn’t giving
or taking any shit
We glance miserably
across the roomat each other
It’s truethere are moments
closer and closer together
when words stickin my throat
‘the art of love’
‘the art of words’
I get your message Gabriel
justwill you stay looking
straight at me
awhile longer
1968
LEAFLETS
1.
The big star, and that other
lonely on black glass
overgrown with frozen
lesions, endless night
the Coal Sack gaping
black veins of ice on the pane
spelling a word:
Insomnia
not manic but ordinary
to start out of sleep
turning off and on
this seasick neon
vision, this
division
the head clears of sweet smoke
and poison gas
life without caution
the only worth living
love for a man
love for a woman
love for the facts
protectless
that self-defense be not
the arm’s first motion
memory not only
cards of identity
that I can live half a year
as I have never lived up to this time—
Chekhov coughing up blood almost daily
the steamer edging in toward the penal colony
chained men dozing on deck
five forest fires lighting the island
lifelong that glare, waiting.
2.
Your face
stretched like a mask
begins to tear
as you speak of Che Guevara
Bolivia, Nanterre
I’m too young to be your mother
you’re too young to be my brother
your tears are not political
they are real water, burning
as the tears of Telemachus
burned
Over Spanish Harlem the moon
swells up, a fire balloon
fire gnawing the edge
of this crushed-up newspaper
now
the bodies come whirling
coal-black, ash-white
out of torn windows
and the death columns blacken
whispering
Who’d choose this life?
We’re fighting for a slash of recognition,
a piercing to the pierced heart.
Tell me what you are going through—
but the attention flickers
and will flicker
a matchflame in poison air
a thread, a hair of light
sum of all answer
to the Know that I exist! of all existing things.
3.
If, says the Dahomeyan devil,
someone has courage to enter the fire
the young man will be restored to life.
If, the girl whispers,
I do not go into the fire
I will not be able to live with my soul.
(Her face calm and dark as amber
under the dyed butterfly turban
her back scarified in ostrich-skin patterns.)
4.
Crusaders’ wind glinting
off linked scales of sea
galloping at the fortress
Acre, bloodcaked, lionhearted
raw vomit curdling in the sun
gray walkers walking
straying with a curbed intentness
in and out the inclosures
the gallows, the photographs
of dead Jewish terrorists, aged 15
their fading faces wide-eyed
and out in the crusading sunlight
gray strayers still straying
dusty paths
the mad who live in the dried-up moat
of the War Museum
what are we coming to
what wants these things of us
who wants them
5.
The strain of being born
over and over has torn your smile into pieces
often I have seen it broken
and then re-membered
and wondered how a beauty
so anarch, so ungelded
will be cared for in this world.
I want to hand you this
leaflet streaming with rain or tears
but the words coming clear
something you might find crushed into your hand
after passing a barricade
and stuff in your raincoat pocket.
I want this to reach you
who told me once that poetry is nothing sacred
no more sacred that is
than other things in your life—
to answer yes, if life is uncorrupted
no better poetry is wanted.
I want this to be yours
in the sense that if you find and read it
it will be there in you already
and the leaflet then merely something
to leave behind, a little leaf
in the drawer of a sublet room.
What else does it come down to
but handing on scraps of paper
little figurines or phials
no stronger than the dry clay they are baked in
yet more than dry clay or paper
because the imagination crouches in them.
If we needed fire to remind us
that all true images
were scooped out of the mud
where our bodies curse and flounder
then perhaps that fire is coming
to sponge away the scribes and time-servers
and much that you would have loved will be lost as well
before you could handle it and know it
just as we almost miss each other
in the ill cloud of mistrust, who might have touched
hands quickly, shared food or given blood
for each other. I am thinking how we can use what we have
to i
nvent what we need.
Winter–Spring 1968
THE RAFTS
For David, Michael and David
Down the river, on rafts you came
floating. The three of you
and others I can’t remember.
Stuck to your sleeves, twists of
blurred red rag, old bandages, ribbons
of honor.Your hands dragged me
aboard.
Then I sprawled
full length on the lashed poles
laughing, drenched, in rags.
The river’s rising!
they yelled on shore
thru megaphones.
Can’t you see
that water’s mad, those rafts
are children’s toys, that crowd
is heading nowhere?
My lips
tasted your lips and foreheads
salty with sweat,
then we were laughing, holding off
the scourge of dead branches
overhanging from shore as your
homemade inventions
danced
along
1968
III
Ghazals (Homage
To Ghalib)
7/12/68
For Sheila Rotner
The clouds are electric in this university.
The lovers astride the tractor burn fissures through the hay.
When I look at that wall I shall think of you
and of what you did not paint there.
Only the truth makes the pain of lifting a hand worthwhile:
the prism staggering under the blows of the raga.
The vanishing-point is the point where he appears.
Two parallel tracks converge, yet there has been no wreck.
To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable
is to throw away the search for the one necessary word.
When you read these lines, think of me
and of what I have not written here.