and we beat apart after six decades …
and on an asphalt crossroad,
deal with each other in princely
gentleness once more, recalling
famous dead talks of other cities.
The windshield’s full of tears,
rain wets our naked breasts,
we kneel together in the shade
amid the traffic of night in paradise
and now renew the solitary vow
we made each other take
in Texas, once:
I can’t inscribe here… .
• • • • • •
• • • • • •
How many Saturday nights will be
made drunken by this legend?
How will young Denver come to mourn
her forgotten sexual angel?
How many boys will strike the black piano
in imitation of the excess of a native saint?
Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high
schools of melancholy night?
While all the time in Eternity
in the wan light of this poem’s radio
we’ll sit behind forgotten shades
hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.
Neal, we’ll be real heroes now
in a war between our cocks and time:
let’s be the angels of the world’s desire
and take the world to bed with us before we die.
Sleeping alone, or with companion,
girl or fairy sheep or dream,
I’ll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:
all men fall, our fathers fell before,
but resurrecting that lost flesh
is but a moment’s work of mind:
an ageless monument to love
in the imagination:
memorial built out of our own bodies
consumed by the invisible poem—
We’ll shudder in Denver and endure
though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.
So this Green Automobile:
I give you in flight
a present, a present
from my imagination.
We will go riding
over the Rockies,
we’ll go on riding
all night long until dawn,
then back to your railroad, the SP
your house and your children
and broken leg destiny
you’ll ride down the plains
in the morning: and back
to my visions, my office
and eastern apartment
I’ll return to New York.
New York, May 22–25, 1953
An Asphodel
O dear sweet rosy
unattainable desire
… how sad, no way
to change the mad
cultivated asphodel, the
visible reality …
and skin’s appalling
petals—how inspired
to be so lying in the living
room drunk naked
and dreaming, in the absence
of electricity …
over and over eating the low root
of the asphodel,
gray fate …
rolling in generation
on the flowery couch
as on a bank in Arden—
my only rose tonite’s the treat
of my own nudity.
Fall 1953
My Alba
Now that I’ve wasted
five years in Manhattan
life decaying
talent a blank
talking disconnected
patient and mental
sliderule and number
machine on a desk
autographed triplicate
synopsis and taxes
obedient prompt
poorly paid
stayed on the market
youth of my twenties
fainted in offices
wept on typewriters
deceived multitudes
in vast conspiracies
deodorant battleships
serious business industry
every six weeks whoever
drank my blood bank
innocent evil now
part of my system
five years unhappy labor
22 to 27 working
not a dime in the bank
to show for it anyway
dawn breaks it’s only the sun
the East smokes O my bedroom
I am damned to Hell what
alarmclock is ringing
New York, 1953
Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain
Liang Kai, Southern Sung
He drags his bare feet
out of a cave
under a tree,
eyebrows
grown long with weeping
and hooknosed woe,
in ragged soft robes
wearing a fine beard,
unhappy hands
clasped to his naked breast—
humility is beatness
humility is beatness—
faltering
into the bushes by a stream,
all things inanimate
but his intelligence—
stands upright there
tho trembling:
Arhat
who sought Heaven
under a mountain of stone,
sat thinking
till he realized
the land of blessedness exists
in the imagination—
the flash come:
empty mirror—
how painful to be born again
wearing a fine beard,
reentering the world
a bitter wreck of a sage:
earth before him his only path.
We can see his soul,
he knows nothing
like a god:
shaken
meek wretch—
humility is beatness
before the absolute World.
New York Public Library, 1953
Havana 1953
I
The night café—4 A.M.
Cuba Libre 20c:
white tiled squares,
triangular neon lights,
long wooden bar on one side,
a great delicatessen booth
on the other facing the street.
In the center
among the great city midnight drinkers,
by Aldama Palace
on Gómez corner,
white men and women
with standing drums,
mariachis, voices, guitars—
drumming on tables,
knives on bottles,
banging on the floor
and on each other,
with wooden clacks,
whistling, howling,
fat women in strapless silk.
Cop talking to the fat-nosed girl
in a flashy black dress.
In walks a weird Cézanne
vision of the nowhere hip Cuban:
tall, thin, check gray suit,
gray felt shoes,
blaring gambler’s hat,
Cab Calloway pimp’s mustachio
—it comes down to a point in the center—
rushing up generations late talking Cuban,
pointing a gold-ringed finger
up toward the yellowed ceiling,
other cigarette hand pointing
stiff-armed down at his side,
effeminate:—he sees the cop—
they rush together—they’re embracing
like long lost brothers—
fatnose forgotten.
Delicate chords
from the negro guitarino
—singers at El Rancho Grande,
drunken burlesque
screams of agony,
VIVA JALISCO!
I eat
a catfish sandwich
with onions and red sauce
20¢.
II
A truly romantic spot,
more guitars, Columbus Square
across from Columbus Cathedral
—I’m in the Paris Restaurant
adjacent, best in town,
Cuba Libres 30¢—
weatherbeaten tropical antiquity,
as if rock decayed,
unlike the pure
Chinese drummers of black stone
whose polished harmony can still be heard
(Procession of Musicians) at the Freer,
this with its blunt cornucopias and horns
of conquest made of stone—
a great dumb rotting church.
Night, lights from windows,
high stone balconies
on the antique square,
green rooms
paled by fluorescent houselighting,
a modern convenience.
I feel rotten.
I would sit down with my servants and be dumb.
I spent too much money.
White electricity
in the gaslamp fixtures of the alley.
Bullet holes and nails in the stone wall.
The worried headwaiter
standing amid the potted palms in cans
in the fifteen-foot wooden door looking at me.
Mariachi harmonica artists inside
getting around to Banjo on My Knee yet.
They dress in wornout sharpie clothes.
Ancient streetlights down the narrow Calle I face,
the arch, the square,
palms, drunkenness, solitude;
voices across the street,
baby wail, girl’s squeak,
waiters nudging each other,
grumble and cackle of young boys’ laughter
in streetcorner waits,
perro barking off-stage,
baby strangling again,
banjo and harmonica,
auto rattle and a cool breeze—
Sudden paranoid notion the waiters are watching me:
Well they might,
four gathered in the doorway
and I alone at a table
on the patio in the dark
observing the square, drunk.
25¢ for them
and I asked for “Jalisco”—
at the end of the song
oxcart rolls by
obtruding its wheels
o’er the music o’ the night.
Christmas 1953
Green Valentine Blues
Green Valentine Blues
I went in the forest to look for a sign
Fortune to tell and thought to refine;
My green valentine, my green valentine,
What do I know of my green valentine?
I found a strange wild leaf on a vine
Shaped like a heart and as green as was mine,
My green valentine, my green valentine,
How did I use my green valentine?
Bodies I’ve known and visions I’ve seen,
Leaves that I gathered as I gather this green
Valentine, valentine, valentine, valentine;
Thus did I use my green valentine.
Madhouse and jailhouses where I shined
Empty apartment beds where I pined,
O desolate rooms! My green valentine,
Where is the heart in which you were outlined?
Souls and nights and dollars and wine,
Old love and remembrance—I resign
All cities, all jazz, all echoes of Time,
But what shall I do with my green valentine?
Much have I seen, and much am I blind,
But none other than I has a leaf of this kind.
Where shall I send you, to what knowing mind,
My green valentine, my green valentine?
Yesterday’s love, tomorrow’s more fine?
All tonight’s sadness in your design.
What does this mean, my green valentine?
Regret, O regret, my green valentine.
Chiapas, 1954
Siesta in Xbalba
AND
Return to the States
For Karena Shields
I
Late sun opening the book,
blank page like light,
invisible words unscrawled,
impossible syntax
of apocalypse—
Uxmal: Noble Ruins
No construction—
let the mind fall down.
—One could pass valuable months
and years perhaps a lifetime
doing nothing but lying in a hammock
reading prose with the white doves
copulating underneath
and monkeys barking in the interior
of the mountain
and I have succumbed to this
temptation—
‘They go mad in the Selva—’
the madman read
and laughed in his hammock
eyes watching me:
unease not of the jungle
the poor dear,
can tire one—
all that mud
and all those bugs …
ugh… .
Dreaming back I saw
an eternal kodachrome
souvenir of a gathering
of souls at a party,
crowded in an oval flash:
cigarettes, suggestions,
laughter in drunkenness,
broken sweet conversation,
acquaintance in the halls,
faces posed together,
stylized gestures,
odd familiar visages
and singular recognitions
that registered indifferent
greeting across time:
Anson reading Horace
with a rolling head,
white-handed Hohnsbean
camping gravely
bald Kingsland drinking
out of a huge glass,
Dusty in a party dress,
Durgin in white shoes
gesturing from a chair,
Keck in a corner waiting
for subterranean music,
Helen Parker lifting
her hands in surprise:
all posturing in one frame,
superficially gay
or tragic as may be,
illumined with the fatal
character and intelligent
actions of their lives.
And I in a concrete room
above the abandoned
labyrinth of Palenque
measuring my fate,
wandering solitary in the wild
—blinking singleminded
at a bleak idea—
until exhausted with
its action and contemplation
my soul might shatter
at one primal moment’s
sensation of the vast
movement of divinity.
As I leaned against a tree
inside the forest
expiring of self-begotten love,
I looked up at the stars absently,
as if looking for
something else in the blue night
through the boughs,
and for a moment saw myself
leaning against a tree …
… back there the noise of a great party
in the apartments of New York,
half-created paintings on the walls, fame,
cocksucking and tears,
money and arguments of great affairs,
the culture of my generation …
my own crude night imaginings,
my own crude soul notes taken down
in moments of isolation, dreams,
piercings, sequences of nocturnal thought
and primitive illuminations
—uncanny feeling the white cat
sleeping on the table
will open its eyes in a moment
and be looking at me—
One might sit in this Chiapas
recording the apparitions in the field
visible from a hammock
looking out across the shadow of the pasture
in all the semblance of Eternity
… a dwarfed thatch roof
down in the grass in a hollow slope
under the tall crowd of vegetation
waiting at the wild edge:
the long shade of the mountain beyond
in the near distance,
its individual hairline of trees
traced fine and dark along the ridge
against the transparent sky light,
rifts and holes in the blue air
and amber brightenings of clouds
disappearing down the other side
into the South …
palms with lethargic feelers
rattling in presage of rain,
shifting their fronds
in the direction of the balmy wind,
monstrous animals
sprayed up out of the ground
settling and unsettling
as in water …
and later in the night
a moment of premonition
when the plenilunar cloudfilled sky
is still and small.
So spent a night
with drug and hammock
at Chichén Itzá on the Castle:—
I can see the moon
moving over the edge of the night forest
and follow its destination
through the clear dimensions of the sky
from end to end of the dark
circular horizon.
High dim stone portals,
entablatures of illegible scripture,
bas-reliefs of unknown perceptions:
and now the flicker of my lamp
and smell of kerosene on dust-
strewn floor where ant wends
its nightly ritual way toward great faces
worn down by rain.
In front of me a deathshead
half a thousand years old
—and have seen cocks a thousand
old grown over with moss and batshit
stuck out of the wall
in a dripping vaulted house of rock—
but deathshead’s here
on portal still and thinks its way
through centuries the thought
of the same night in which I sit
in skully meditation
—sat in many times before by
artisan other than me
until his image of ghostly change