If I thought of my words as changing minds,
hadn’t my mind also to suffer changes?
They measure fever, swab the blisters of the throat,
but the cells of thought go rioting on ignored.
It’s the inner ghost that suffers, little spirit
looking out wildly from the clouded pupils.
When will we lie clearheaded in our flesh again
with the cold edge of the night driving us close together?
12/20/68: I
There are days when I seem to have nothing
but these frayed packets, done up with rotting thread.
The shortest day of the year, let it be ours.
Let me give you something: a token for the subway.
(Refuse even
the most beloved old solutions.
That dead man wrote, grief ought to reach the lips.
You must believe I know before you can tell me.
A black run through the tunnelled winter, he and she,
together, touching, yet not side by side.
12/20/68: II
Frost, burning. The city’s ill.
We gather like viruses.
The doctors are all on their yachts
watching the beautiful skin-divers.
The peasant mind of the Christian
transfixed on food at the year’s turning.
Thinking of marzipan
forget that revolutionary child.
Thought grown senile with sweetness.
You too may visit the Virgins.
In the clear air, hijacked planes
touch down at the forbidden island.
5/4/69
Pain made her conservative.
Where the matches touched her flesh, she wears a scar.
The police arrive at dawn
like death and childbirth.
City of accidents, your true map
is the tangling of all our lifelines.
The moment when a feeling enters the body
is political. This touch is political.
Sometimes I dream we are floating on water
hand-in-hand; and sinking without terror.
PIERROT LE FOU
1.
Suppose you stood facing
a wall
of photographs
from your unlived life
as you stand looking at these
stills from the unseen film?
Yourself against a wall
curiously stuccoed
Yourself in the doorway
of a kind of watchman’s hut
Yourself at a window
signaling to people
you haven’t met yet
Yourself in unfamiliar clothes
with the same eyes
2.
On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles.
I speak the French language like a schoolgirl of the ’forties.
Those roads remind me of Beauce and the motorcycle.
We rode from Paris to Chartres in the March wind.
He said we should go to Spain but the wind defeated me.
France of the superhighways, I never knew you.
How much the body took in those days, and could take!
A naked lightbulb still simmers in my eyeballs.
In every hotel, I lived on the top floor.
3.
Suppose we had time
and no money
living by our wits
telling stories
which stories would you tell?
I would tell the story
of Pierrot Le Fou
who trusted
not a woman
but love itself
till his head blew off
not quite intentionally
I would tell all the stories I knew
in which people went wrong
but the nervous system
was right all along
4.
The island blistered our feet.
At first we mispronounced each others’ names.
All the leaves of the tree were scribbled with words.
There was a language there but no-one to speak it.
Sometimes each of us was alone.
At noon on the beach our shadows left us.
The net we twisted from memory kept on breaking.
The damaged canoe lay on the beach like a dead animal.
You started keeping a journal on a coconut shell.
5.
When I close my eyes
other films
have been there all along
a market shot:
bins of turnips, feet
of dead chickens
close-up: a black old woman
buying voodoo medicines
a figure of terrible faith
and I know her needs
Another film:
an empty room stacked with old films
I am kneeling on the floor
it is getting dark
they want to close the building
and I still haven’t found you
Scanning reel after reel
tundras in negative,
the Bowery
all those scenes
but the light is failing
and you are missing
from the footage of the march
the railway disaster
the snowbound village
even the shots of the island
miss you
yet you were there
6.
To record
in order to see
if you know how the story ends
why tell it
To record
in order to forget
the surface is always lucid
my shadows are under the skin
To record
in order to control
the eye of the camera
doesn’t weep tears of blood
To record
for that is what one does
climbing your stairs, over and over
I memorized the bare walls
This is my way of coming back
1969
LETTERS: MARCH 1969
1.
Foreknown. The victor
sees the disaster through and through.
His soles grind rocksalt
from roads of the resistance.
He shoulders through rows
of armored faces
he might have loved and lived among.
The victory carried like a corpse
from town to town
begins to crawl in the casket.
The summer swindled on
from town to town, our train
stopping and broiling on the rails
long enough to let on who we were.
The disaster sat up with us all night
drinking bottled water, eating fruit,
talking of the conditions that prevailed.
Outside along the railroad cut
they were singing for our death.
2.
Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.
How little it takes
to restore composure.
White napkins, a tray
of napoleons and cherry tarts
compliments of the airline
which has flown us out of danger.
They are torturing the journalist we drank with
last night in the lounge
but we can’t be sure of that
here overlooking the runway
three hours and twenty minutes into another life.
If this is done for us
(and this is done for us)
if we are well men wearing bandages
for disguise
if we can choose our scene
stay out of earshot
break the roll and pour
from the clean carafe
if we can desert like soldiers
abjure like thieves
we may well purchase new virtues at the gate
of the other world.
3.
“I am up at sunrise
collecting data.
The reservoir burns green.
Darling, the knives they have on this block alone
would amaze you.
When they ask my profession I say
I’m a student of weapons systems.
The notes I’m putting together are purely
of sentimental value
my briefcase is I swear useless
to foreign powers, to the police
I am not given I say
to revealing my sources
to handling round copies
of my dossier for perusal.
The vulnerable go unarmed.
I myself walk the floor
a ruinously expensive Swiss hunter’s knife
exposed in my brain
eight blades, each one for a distinct purpose,
laid open as on the desk
of an importer or a fence.”
4.
Six months back
send carbons you said
but this winter’s dashed off in pencil
torn off the pad too fast
for those skills. In the dawn taxi
in the kitchen
burning the succotash
the more I love my life the more
I love you. In a time
of fear. In a city
of fear. in a life
without vacations the paisley fades
winter and summer in the sun
but the best time is now.
My sick friend writes: what’s love?
This life is nothing, Adrienne!
Her hands bled onto the sill.
She had that trick of reaching outward,
the pane was smashed but only
the Calvinist northwind
spat in from the sea.
She’s a shot hero. A dying poet.
Even now, if we went for her—
but they’ve gone with rags and putty to fix the pane.
She stays in with her mirrors and anger.
I tear up answers
I once gave, postcards
from riot and famine go up on the walls
valentines stuck in the mirror
flame and curl, loyalties dwindle
the bleak light dries our tears
without relief. I keep coming back to you
in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and
I have no carbons. Prince of pity,
what eats out of your hand?
the rodent pain, electric
with exhaustion, mazed and shaken?
I’d have sucked the wound in your hand to sleep
but my lips were trembling.
Tell me how to bear myself,
how it’s done, the light kiss falling
accurately
on the cracked palm.
1969
PIECES
1. Breakpoint
The music of words
received as fact
The steps that wouldn’t hold us both
splintering in air
The self withheld in an urn
like ashes
To have loved you better than you loved yourself
—whoever you were, to have loved you—
And still to love but simply
as one of those faces on the street
2. Relevance
That erudition
how to confront it
The critics wrote answers
the questions were ours
A breast, a shoulder
chilled at waking
The cup of yoghurt
eaten at noon
and no explanations
The books we borrowed
trying to read each other’s minds
Paperbacks piling
on both sides of the fireplace
and piled beside the bed
What difference could it make
that those books came
out of unintelligible pain
as daylight out of the hours
when that light burned
atop the insurance tower
all night like the moon
3. Memory
Plugged-in to her body
he came the whole way
but it makes no difference
If not this then what
would fuse a connection
(All that burning intelligence about love
what can it matter
Falling in love on words
and ending in silence
with its double-meanings
Always falling and ending
because this world gives no room
to be what we dreamt of being
Are we, as he said
of the generation that forgets
the lightning-flash, the air-raid
4. Time and Place
Liquid mist burning off
along the highway
Slap of water
Light on shack boards
Hauling of garbage
early in the wet street
Always the same, wherever waking,
the old positions
assumed by the mind
and the new day forms
like a china cup
hard, cream-colored, unbreakable
even in our travels
5. Revelation
This morning: read Simone Weil
on the loss of grace
drank a glass of water
remembered the dream that woke me:
some one, some more than one
battering into my room
intent to kill me
I crying your name
its two syllables
ringing through sleep
knowing it vain
knowing
you slept unhearing
crying your name
like a spell
like signs executed
by the superstitious
who are the faithful of this world
1969
OUR WHOLE LIFE
Our whole life a translation
the permissible fibs
and now a knot of lies
eating at itself to get undone
Words bitten thru words
meanings burnt-off like paint
under the blowtorch
All those dead letters
rendered into the oppressor’s language
Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts
like the Algerian
who has walked from his village, burning
his whole body a cloud of pain
and there are no words for this
except himself
1969
YOUR LETTER
blinds me
like the light of that surf
you thrust your body in
for punishment
or the river of fiery fenders
and windshields
you pour yourself into
driving north to S.F.
on that coast of chrome and oil
I watch for any signal
the tremor of courage
in the seismograph
a flash
where I thought the glare
was steady, smogged & tame
1969
STAND UP
Stand up in my nightgown at the window
almost naked behind black glass
Off from the line of trees the road
beaten, bare, we walked
in the light of the bare, beaten moon.
Almost, you spoke to me. The road
swings past swampground
the soft spots of the earth
you might sink through into location
where their cameras are set up
the underg
round film-makers waiting to make their film
waiting for you
their cameras pivot toward your head and the film burns
but you’re not talking
If I am there you have forgotten my name
you think perhaps ‘a woman’
and you drift on, drifter, through the frames
of the movie they are making of this time.
A whole soundtrack of your silence
a whole film
of dark nights and darker rooms
and blank sheets of paper, bare …
1969
THE STELAE
For Arnold Rich
Last night I met you in my sister’s house
risen from the dead
showing me your collection
You are almost at the point of giving things away
It’s the stelae on the walls I want
that I never saw before