If money made the mind more sane,
Or money mellowed in the bowel
The hunger beyond hunger’s pain,
Or money choked the mortal growl
And made the groaner grin again,
Or did the laughing lamb embolden
To loll where has the lion lain,
I’d go make money and be golden.
Nor sex will salve the sickened soul,
Which has its holy goal an hour,
Holds to heart the golden pole,
But cannot save the silver shower,
Nor heal the sorry parts to whole.
Love is creeping under cover,
Where it hides its sleepy dole,
Else I were like any lover.
Many souls get lost at sea,
Others slave upon a stone:
Engines are not eyes to me,
Inside buildings I see bone.
Some from city to city flee,
Famous labors make them lie;
I cheat on that machinery,
Down in Arden I will die.
Art is short, nor style is sure:
Though words our virgin thoughts betray,
Time ravishes that thought most pure,
Which those who know, know anyway;
For if our daughter should endure,
When once we can no more complain,
Men take our beauty for a whore,
And like a whore, to entertain.
The city’s hipper slickers shine,
Up in the attic with the bats;
The higher Chinamen, supine,
Wear a dragon in their hats:
He who seeks a secret sign
In a daze or sicker doze
Blows the flower superfine;
Not a poppy is a rose.
If fame were not a fickle charm,
There were far more famous men:
May boys amaze the world to arm,
Yet their charms are changed again,
And fearful heroes turn to harm;
But the shambles is a sham.
A few angels on a farm
Fare more fancy with their lamb.
No more of this too pretty talk,
Dead glimpses of apocalypse:
The child pissing off the rock,
Or woman withered in the lips,
Contemplate the unseen Cock
That crows all beasts to ecstasy;
And so the Saints beyond the clock
Cry to men their dead eyes see.
Come, incomparable crown,
Love my love is lost to claim,
O hollow fame that makes me groan;
We are a king without a name:
Regain thine angel’s lost renown,
As, in the mind’s forgotten meadow,
Where brightest shades sleep under stone,
Man runs after his own shadow.
New York, March 1949
After All, What Else Is There to Say?
When I sit before a paper
writing my mind turns
in a kind of feminine
madness of chatter;
but to think to see, outside,
in a tenement the walls
of the universe itself
I wait: wait till the sky
appears as it is,
wait for a moment when
the poem itself
is my way of speaking out, not
declaiming of celebrating, yet,
but telling the truth.
New York, Early 1949
Sometime Jailhouse Blues
Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath,
As I lay my body down
Between the ache of breath and breath,
Golden slumber in the bone.
Thought’s a stone, though sweet or sorry,
Run-down from an uphill climb:
Money, money, work and worry,
And all the aimless toil of Time.
Sometime I look up in light
And see the weary sun go West;
Sometime I see the moon at night
Go hidden in her cloudy rest.
Sometime tears of death will blind
All that was worldly, wise or fair,
And visioned by the death of mind
My ghost will wander in the air,
And gaze upon a ghostly face,
Not knowing what was fair or lost,
Remembering not what flesh lay waste,
Or made him kind as ghost to ghost.
Brooklyn, April 24, 1949
Please Open the Window and Let Me In
Who is the shroudy stranger of the night,
Whose brow is mouldering green, whose reddened eye
Hides near the window trellis in dim light,
And gapes at old men, and makes children cry?
Who is the laughing walker of the street,
The alley mummy, stinking of the bone,
To dance unfixed, though bound in shadow feet,
Behind the child that creeps on legs of stone?
Who is the hungry mocker of the maze,
And haggard gate-ghost, hanging by the door,
The double mummer in whose hooded gaze
World has beckoned unto world once more?
Paterson, May 1949
Tonite all is well… What a
terrible future. I am twenty-three,
year of the iron birthday,
gate of darkness. I am ill,
I have become physically and
spiritually impotent in my madness this month.
I suddenly realized that my head
is severed from my body;
I realized it a few nights ago
by myself,
lying sleepless on the couch.
Paterson, Summer 1949
Fyodor
The death’s head of realism
and superhuman iron mask
that gapes out of The Possessed,
sometimes: Dostoievski.
My original version of D.
before I read him, as the dark
haunted-house man, wild, agèd,
spectral Russian. I call him
Dusty now but he is
Dostoyevsky What premonitions
I had as a child.
Paterson, June 1949
Epigram on a Painting of Golgotha
On a bare tree in a hollow place,
A blinded form’s unhaloed face;
Sight, where Heaven is destroyed,
The hanging visage of the void.
New York, Summer 1949
“The road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena.”
—Thos. Hardy
I attempted to concentrate
the total sun’s rays in
each poem as through a glass,
but such magnification
did not set the page afire.
New York, Summer 1949
Metaphysics
This is the one and only
firmament; therefore
it is the absolute world.
There is no other world.
The circle is complete.
I am living in Eternity.
The ways of this world
are the ways of Heaven.
New York, Mid-1949
In Death, Cannot Reach What Is Most Near
We know all about death that
we will ever know because
we have all experienced
the state before birth.
Life seems a passage between
two doors to the darkness.
Both are the same and truly
eternal, and perhaps it may
be said that we meet in
darkness. The nature of time
is illuminated by this
meeting of eternal ends.
It is amazing to think that
thought and personality
of man is perpetuat
ed in
time after his passage
to eternity. And one time
is all Time if you look
at it out of the grave.
New York, Mid-1949
This Is About Death
Art recalls the memory
of his true existence
to whoever has forgotten
that Being is the one thing
all the universe shouts.
Only return of thought to
its source will complete thought.
Only return of activity
to its source will complete
activity. Listen to that.
Mid-1949
Hymn
No hyacinthine imagination can express this clock of meat bleakly pining for its sweet immaterial paradise which I have celebrated in one gone dithyramb after another and have elevated to that highest place in the mind’s angelical empyrean which shall in the course of hot centuries to come come to be known as the clock of light:
the very summa and dove of the unshrouding of finality’s joy whence cometh purely pearly streams of reves and honey-thoughts and all like dreamy essences our hearts therefrom so filled with such incomparable and crownly creaminess one never knew whence it came,
whether from those foul regions of the soul the ancients named Malebolge or the Dank or the icicle-like crystal roads of cloudless sky called Icecube or Avenue where the angels late fourteen there convened hang on and raptly gaze on us singing down
in mewing voices liturgies of milk and sweet cream sighing no longer for the strawberries of the world whence in pain and wit’s despair they had ascended stoops of light up the celestial fire escape no more to sit suffering as we do one and all on the thorn
nor more we shall when the final gate is opened and the Diamond Seraph armed with 3 forks of lightning 7 claps of thunder 11 bursts of laughter and a thousand tears rolling down his silken cheeks bares his radiant breast and asks us in the Name of the Lord to share that Love in Heaven which on Earth was so disinherited.
September 1949
Sunset
The whole blear world
of smoke and twisted steel
around my head in a railroad
car, and my mind wandering
past the rust into futurity:
I saw the sun go down
in a carnal and primeval
world, leaving darkness
to cover my railroad train
because the other side of the
world was waiting for dawn.
New York-Paterson, November 1949
Ode to the Setting Sun
The Jersey Marshes in rain, November evening, seen from Susquehanna Railroad
The wrathful East of smoke and iron
Crowded in a broken crown;
The Archer of the Jersey mire
Naked in a rusty gown;
Railroad creeping toward the fire
Where the carnal sun goes down.
Apollo’s shining chariot’s shadow
Shudders in the mortal bourn;
Amber shores upon the meadow
Where Phaëthon falls forlorn
Fade in somber chiaroscuro,
Phantoms of the burning morn.
Westward to the world’s blind gaze,
In funeral of raining cloud,
The motionless cold Heavens blaze,
Born out of a dying crowd;
Daybreak in the end of days,
Bloody light beneath the shroud.
In vault dominion of the night
The hosts of prophecy convene,
Till, empire of the lark alight,
Their bodies waken as we dream,
And put our raiment on, and bright
Crown, still haloed though unseen.
Under the earth there is an eye
Open in a sightless cave,
And the skull in Eternity
Bares indifference to the grave:
Earth turns, and the day must die,
And the sea accepts the wave.
My bones are carried on the train
Westward where the sun has gone;
Night has darkened in the rain,
And the rainbow day is done;
Cities age upon the plain
And smoke rolls upward out of stone.
New York-Paterson, November 1949–1950
Paterson
What do I want in these rooms papered with visions of money?
How much can I make by cutting my hair? If I put new heels on my shoes, bathe my body reeking of masturbation and sweat, layer upon layer of excrement
dried in employment bureaus, magazine hallways, statistical cubicles, factory stairways,
cloakrooms of the smiling gods of psychiatry;
if in antechambers I face the presumption of department store supervisory employees,
old clerks in their asylums of fat, the slobs and dumbbells of the ego with money and power
to hire and fire and make and break and fart and justify their reality of wrath and rumor of wrath to wrath-weary man,
what war I enter and for what a prize! the dead prick of commonplace obsession,
harridan vision of electricity at night and daylight misery of thumb-sucking rage.
I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins,
eyes and ears full of marijuana,
eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border
or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman;
rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun;
rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati;
rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies;
rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver,
pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain,
come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage,
streetcorner Evangel in front of City Hall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions,
with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp,
screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world,
blood streaming from my belly and shoulders
flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways
by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.
New York, November 1949
Bop Lyrics
When I think of death
I get a goofy feeling;
Then I catch my breath:
Zero is appealing,
Appearances are hazy.
Smart went crazy,
Smart went crazy.
*
A flower in my head
Has fallen through my eye;
Someday I’ll be dead:
I love the Lord on high,
I wish He’d pull my daisy.
Smart went crazy,
Smart went crazy.
*
I asked the lady what’s a rose,
She kicked me out of bed.
I asked the man, and so it goes,
He hit me on the head.
Nobody knows,
Nobody knows,
At least nobody’s said.
*
The time I went to China
To lead the boy scout troops,
They sank my ocean liner,
And all I said was “Oops!”
*
All the doctors think I’m crazy;
The truth is really that I’m lazy:
I made visions to beguile ’em
Till they put me in th’asylum
*
I’m a pot and God�
�s a potter,
And my head’s a piece of putty.
Ark my darkness,
Lark my looks,
I’m so lucky to be nutty.
New York, March-December 1949
A Dream
I waked at midmost in the night,
Dim lamp shuddering in the bell,
House enwracked with natal light
That glowed as in a ghostly shell.
I rose and darked the hornlike flare,
And watched the shadows in the room
Crawl on walls and empty air
Through the window from the moon.
I stared in phantom-attic dark
At such radiant shapes of gloom,
I thought my fancy and mind’s lark
So cried for Death that He had come.
As sleepy-faced night walkers go,
Room to room, and down the stair,
Through the labyrinth to and fro,
So I paced sleepless in nightmare.
I walked out to the city tower,
Where, as in a stony cell,
Time lay prisoned, and twelfth hour
Complained upon the midnight bell.
I met a boy on the city street,
Fair was his hair, and fair his eyes,
Walking in his winding sheet,
As fair as was my own disguise.
He walked his way in a white shroud,
His cheek was whiter than his gown.
He looked at me, and spoke aloud,
And all his voice was but a groan:
“My love is dreaming of me now,
For I have dreamed him oft so well
That in my ghostly sleep I go
To find him by the midnight bell.
And so I walk and speak these lines
Which he will hear and understand.
If some poor wandering child of time
Finds me, let him take my hand,
And I will lead him to the stone,
And I will lead him through the grave,
But let him fear no light of bone,
And let him fear no dark of wave,
And we will walk the double door
That breaks upon the ageless night,
Where I have come, and must once more