You offer other objects
I have seen time and time again
I think you think you are giving me
something precious
The stelae are so unlike you
swart, indifferent, incised with signs
you have never deciphered
I never knew you had them
I wonder if you are giving them away
1969
SNOW
when it comes down turning
itself in clusters before the flat
light of the shortest day
you see how all turns away
from us how we turn
into our shadows you can see
how we are tested
the individual crystal on the
black skirt of the maxi-coat
under the lens
was it a whole day or just a lifetime
spent studying crystals
on the fire escape while the ’Sixties
were running out
could you see
how the black ladder spun away from us
into whiteness
how over and over
a star became a tear
if no two are alike
then what are we doing
with these diagrams of loss
1969
THE WILL TO CHANGE
1.
For L D., Dead 11/69
That Chinese restaurant was a joke
with its repeating fountains
& chopsticks in tissue paper
The vodka was too sweet
the beancurd too hot
You came with your Egyptian hieroglyph
your angel’s smile
Almost the next day
as surely as if shot
you were thin air
At the risk of appearing ridiculous—
we take back this halfworld for you
and all whose murders accrue
past your death
2.
For Sandra Levinson
Knocked down in the canefield
by a clumsily swung machete
she is helped to her feet
by Fidel
and snapped by photographers
the blonde Yanqui in jeans
We’re living through a time
that needs to be lived through us
(and in the morning papers
Bobby Seale, chalked
by the courtroom artist
defaced by the gag)
3.
For D.J.L.
Beardless again, phoning
from a storefront in Yorkville
… we need a typewriter, a crib
& Michael’s number …
I swim to you thru dead
latitudes of fever
… accepting the discipline …
You mean your old freedom
to disappear—you miss that?
… but I can dig having lost it …
David, I could dig losing everything.
Knowing what you mean, to make that leap
bite into the fear, over & over
& survive. Hoarding my ‘liberty’
like a compulsive—more
than I can use up in a lifetime—
two dozen oranges in the refrigerator
for one American weekend
4.
At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes
from the Feast of San Gennaro
gaze thru the dark
All night the A-train forages
under our bedroom
All night I dream of a man
black, gagged, shackled, coffined
in a courtroom where I am
passive, white & silent
though my mouth is free
All night I see his eyes
iridescent under torture
and hear the shuddering of the earth
as the trains tear us apart
5.
The cabdriver from the Bronx
screaming: ‘This city’s GOTTA die!’
dynamiting it hourly from his soul
as surely as any terrorist
Burning the bodies of the scum on welfare
ejaculating into the flames
(and, said Freud,
who welcomed it when it was done?)
the professors of the fact
that someone has suffered
seeking truth in a mist of librium
the artists talking of freedom
in their chains
1969–1970
THE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE
UNMADE BED
Cruelty is rarely conscious
One slip of the tongue
one exposure
among so many
a thrust in the dark
to see if there’s pain there
I never asked you to explain
that act of violence
what dazed me was our ignorance
of our will to hurt each other
•
In a flash I understand
how poems are unlike photographs
(the one sayingThis could be
the otherThis was
The image
isn’t responsible
for our uses of it
It is intentionless
A long strand of dark hair
in the washbasin
is innocent and yet
such things have done harm
•
These snapshots taken by ghetto children
given for Christmas
Objects blurring into perceptions
No ‘art,’ only the faults
of the film, the faults of the time
Did mere indifference blister
these panes, eat these walls,
shrivel and scrub these trees—
mere indifference? I tell you
cruelty is rarely conscious
the done and the undone blur
into one photograph of failure
•
This crust of bread we try to share
this name traced on a window
this word I paste together
like a child fumbling
with paste and scissors
this writing in the sky with smoke
this silence
this lettering chalked on the ruins
this alphabet of the dumb
this feather held to lips
that still breathe and are warm
1969
IMAGES FOR GODARD
1.
Language as city: : Wittgenstein
Driving to the limits
of the city of words
like a comic strip
to newer suburbs
casements of shockproof glass
where no one yet looks out
or toward the coast where even now
the squatters in their shacks
await eviction
When all conversation
becomes an interview
under duress
when we come to the limits
of the city
my face must have a meaning
2.
To know the extremes of light
I sit in this darkness
To see the present flashing
in a rearview mirror
blued in a plateglass pane
reddened in the reflection
of the red Triomphe
parked at the edge of the sea
the sea glittering in the sun
the swirls of nebula
in the espresso cup
raindrops, neon spectra
on a vinyl raincoat
3.
To love, to move perpetually
as the body changes
a dozen times a day
the temperature of the skin
the feeling of rise & fall
deadweight & buoyancy
the eye sunk inward
the eye bleeding with speech
(‘for that moment at least
I wás you—’)
To be stopped, to shoot the same scene
over & over
4.
At the end of Alphaville
she says I love you
and the film begins
that you’ve said you’d never make
because it’s impossible
‘things as difficult to show
as horror & war & sickness are’
meaning:love,
to speak in the mouth
to touch the breast
for a woman
to know the sex of a man
That film begins here
yet you don’t show it
we leave the theatre
suffering from that
5.
Interior monologue of the poet:
the notes for the poem are the only poem
the mind collecting, devouring
all these destructibles
the unmade studio couch the air
shifting the abalone shells
the mind of the poet is the only poem
the poet is at the movies
dreaming the film-maker’s dream but differently
free in the dark as if asleep
free in the dusty beam of the projector
the mind of the poet is changing
the moment of change is the only poem
1970
A VALEDICTION
FORBIDDING MOURNING
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control.
A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
1970
SHOOTING SCRIPT
PART I: 11/69–2/70
1.
We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.
Inside this shell, a tide waiting for someone to enter.
A monologue waiting for you to interrupt it.
A man wading into the surf. The dialogue of the rock with the breaker.
The wave changed instantly by the rock; the rock changed by the wave returning over and over.
The dialogue that lasts all night or a whole lifetime.
A conversation of sounds melting constantly into rhythms.
A shell waiting for you to listen.
A tide that ebbs and flows against a deserted continent.
A cycle whose rhythm begins to change the meanings of words.
A wheel of blinding waves of light, the spokes pulsing out from where we hang together in the turning of an endless conversation.
The meaning that searches for its word like a hermit crab.
A monologue that waits for one listener.
An ear filled with one sound only.
A shell penetrated by meaning.
2. Ghazal V
Adapted from Mirza Ghalib.
Even when I thought I prayed, I was talking to myself; when I found the door shut, I simply walked away.
We all accept Your claim to be unique; the stone lips, the carved limbs, were never your true portrait.
Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
Now tell me your story till the blood drips from your lashes. Any other version belongs to your folklore, or ours.
To see the Tigris in a water-drop … Either you were playing games with me, or you never cared to learn the structure of my language.
3.
The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up.
Where we lay and breakfasted. The stains of tea. The squares of winter light projected on the wool.
You, sleeping with closed windows. I, sleeping in the silver nitrate burn of zero air.
Where it can snow, I’m at home; the crystals accumulating spell out my story.
The cold encrustation thickening on the ledge.
The arrow-headed facts, accumulating, till a whole city is taken over.
Midwinter and the loss of love, going comes before gone, over and over the point is missed and still the blind will turns for its target.
4.
In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning.
In rafts they came over the sea; on the island they put up those stones by methods we can only guess at.
If the vegetation grows as thick as this, how can we see what they were seeing?
It is all being made clear, with bulldozers, at Angkor Wat.
The verdure was a false mystery; the baring of the stones is no solution for us now.
Defoliation progresses; concrete is poured, sheets of glass hauled overland in huge trucks and at great cost.
Here we never travailed, never took off our shoes to walk the final mile.
Come and look into this cellar-hole; this is the foundling of the woods.
Humans lived here once; it became sacred only when they went away.
5.
Of simple choice they are the villagers; their clothes come with them like red clay roads they have been walking.
The sole of the foot is a map, the palm of the hand a letter, learned by heart and worn close to the body.
They seemed strange to me, till I began to recall their dialect.
Poking the spade into the dry loam, listening for the tick of broken pottery, hoarding the brown and black bits in a dented can.
Evenings, at the table, turning the findings out, pushing them around with a finger, beginning to dream of fitting them together.
Hiding all this work from them, although they might have helped me.
Going up at night, hiding the tin can in a closet, where the linoleum lies in shatters on a back shelf.
Sleeping to dream of the unformed, the veil of water pouring over the wet clay, the rhythms of choice, the lost methods.
6.
You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and keep moving through the bad light.
At this time of year when faces turn aside, it is amazing that your eyes are to be met.
A bad light is one like this, that flickers and diffuses itself along the edge of a frontier.
No, I don’t invest you with anything; I am counting on your weakness as much as on your strength.
This light eats away at the clarities I had fixed on; it moves up like a rodent at the edge of the raked paths.
Your clarities may not reach me; but your attention will.
It is to know that I too have no mythic powers; it is to see the liability of all my treasures.
You will have to see all this for a long time alone.
You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and keep trying to move through the bad light.
7.
Picking the wax to crumbs in the iron lip of the candelabrum.
Fingering down the thread of the maze where the green strand cuts across the violent strand.
Picking apart the strands of pain; a warp of wool dipped in burning wax.
When the flame shrinks to a blue bead, there is danger; the change of light in a flickering situation.
Stretched on the loom the light expands; the smell of a smell of burning.
When the change leaves you dark, when the wax cools in the socket, when I thought I prayed, when I was talking to myself under the cover of my darkness.
Someone who never said, “What do you feel?” someone who sat across from me, taking the crumbs of wax as I picked them apart and handed them over.
PART II: 3–7/70
8.
For Hugh Seidman
A woman waking behind grimed blinds slatted across a courtyard she never looks into.
Thinking of the force of a waterfall, the slash of cold air from the thickest water of the falls, slicing the green and ochre afternoon inwhich he turns his head and walks away.