On Love, Page 2

while we talked of things that didn’t matter

  and the streetcar rocked and howled its color

  which we didn’t notice except as a thing beside the eve

  as we mentioned sex through palsies,

  pither, the red fire, pither the eustachian tube!

  gone are the days, gone is the green bugdead ivy

  and the words we said tonight that didn’t matter;

  X 12, Cardinal and Gold

  GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD!

  your eyes are gold

  your hair is gold

  your love is gold

  your grave is gold

  and the streets go past like people walking

  and the bells ring like bells ringing;

  your hands are gold and your voice is gold

  and all the children walking

  and the trees growing and the idiots selling papers

  34256780000 oh while you are

  eustachian tube

  red fire

  greenbugdead

  ivy

  cardinal and gold

  and the words we said tonight

  are going away

  over the trees

  down by the streetcar

  and I have closed the book

  with the red red lion

  down by the gates of gold.

  for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough

  I pick up the skirt,

  I pick up the sparkling beads

  in black,

  this thing that moved once

  around flesh,

  and I call God a liar,

  I say anything that moved

  like that

  or knew

  my name

  could never die

  in the common verity of dying,

  and I pick

  up her lovely

  dress,

  all her loveliness gone,

  and I speak

  to all the gods,

  Jewish gods, Christ-gods,

  chips of blinking things,

  idols, pills, bread,

  fathoms, risks,

  knowledgeable surrender,

  rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad

  without a chance,

  hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,

  I lean upon this,

  I lean on all of this

  and I know:

  her dress upon my arm:

  but

  they will not

  give her back to me.

  for Jane

  225 days under grass

  and you know more than I.

  they have long taken your blood,

  you are a dry stick in a basket.

  is this how it works?

  in this room

  the hours of love

  still make shadows.

  when you left

  you took almost

  everything.

  I kneel in the nights

  before tigers

  that will not let me be.

  what you were

  will not happen again.

  the tigers have found me

  and I do not care.

  notice

  the swans drown in bilge water,

  take down the signs,

  test the poisons,

  barricade the cow

  from the bull,

  the peony from the sun,

  take the lavender kisses from my night,

  put the symphonies out on the streets

  like beggars,

  get the nails ready,

  flog the backs of the saints,

  stun frogs and mice for the cat of the soul,

  burn the enthralling paintings,

  piss on the dawn,

  my love

  is dead.

  my real love in Athens

  and I remember the knife,

  the way you touch a rose

  and come away with blood

  and how you touch love the same way,

  and how when you want to come onto the freeway

  the trucks rail you on the inner lane

  moonlight and roaring

  running down your bravery,

  making you touch the brakes

  and small pictures come to your mind:

  pictures of Christ hung there

  or Hiroshima,

  or your last wife

  frying an egg.

  the way you touch a rose

  is the way you lean against the coffin-sides

  of the dead,

  the way you touch a rose

  and see the dead whirling back

  underneath your fingernails;

  the knife

  Gettysburg, the Bulge, Flanders,

  Attila, Muss—

  what can I make of history

  when it narrows down

  to the three o’clock shadow

  under a leaf?

  and if the mind grows harrowed

  and the rose bites

  like a dog,

  they say

  we have love . . .

  but what can I make of love

  when we are all born

  at a different time and place

  and only meet

  through a trick of centuries

  and a chance three steps

  to the left?

  you mean

  a love I have not met

  is less than a selfishness

  I call near?

  can I say now

  with rose-blood upon the edge of mind,

  can I say now as the planets whirl

  and they shoot tons of force into the end of space

  to make Columbus look like an idiot-child,

  can I say now

  that because I have screamed into a night

  and they have not heard,

  can I say now

  that I remember the knife

  and I sit in a cool room

  and rub my fingers to the whistle of the clock

  and calmly think of

  Ajax and sputum

  and railroad hens across the golden rails,

  and my real love is in Athens

  600

  A or B,

  as outside my window

  pigeons stumble as they fly

  and through a door

  that outwaits an empty room,

  roses can’t get

  in or out,

  or love or moths or lightning—

  I would neither break upon sighing

  or smile; could nothings

  like moths and men

  exist like orange sunlight upon paper

  divided by nine?

  Athens is now many miles

  and one death away,

  and the tables are dirty as hell

  and the sheets and the dishes,

  but I’m laughing: that’s not real;

  but it is, divided by nine

  or one hundred:

  clean laundry is love

  that does not scratch itself

  and sigh.

  sleeping woman

  I sit up in bed at night and listen to you

  snore

  I met you in a bus station

  and now I wonder at your back

  sick white and stained with

  children’s freckles

  as the lamp divests the unsolvable

  sorrow of the world

  upon your sleep.

  I cannot see your feet

  but I must guess that they are

  most charming feet.

  who do you belong to?

  are you real?

  I think of flowers, animals, birds

  they all seem more than good

  and so clearly

  real.

  yet you cannot help being a

  woman. we are each selected to be

  something. the spider, the cook.

  the elephant. it is as if we were each

  a p
ainting and hung on some

  gallery wall.

  —and now the painting turns

  upon its back, and over a curving elbow

  I can see ½ a mouth, one eye and

  almost a nose.

  the rest of you is hidden

  out of sight

  but I know that you are a

  contemporary, a modern living

  work

  perhaps not immortal

  but we have

  loved.

  please continue to

  snore.

  a party here—machineguns, tanks, an army fighting against men on rooftops

  if love could go on like tarpaper

  or even as far as meaning goes

  but it won’t work

  can’t work

  there are too many snot-heads

  too many women who hide their legs

  except for special bedrooms

  there are too many flies on the

  ceiling and it’s been a hot

  Summer

  and the riots in Los Angeles

  have been over for a week

  and they burned buildings and killed policemen and

  whitemen and

  I am a whiteman and I guess I did not get particularly

  excited because I am a whiteman and I am poor

  and I pay for being poor

  because I do as few handstands for somebody else as

  possible

  and so I’m poor because I choose it and I guess it’s

  not as uncomfortable that

  way

  and so I ignored the riots

  because I figured both the black and the white

  wanted many things that did not interest

  me

  plus having a woman here who gets very excited about

  discrimination the Bomb segregation

  you know you know

  I let her go on until finally the talk

  wearies me

  for I don’t care too much for the

  standard answer

  or the lonely addled creatures who like to join a

  CAUSE simply because a cause lifts them out of their

  dribbling

  imbecility into a stream of

  action. me, I like time to think, think, think . . .

  but it was a party here, really, machineguns, tanks,

  the army fighting against men on rooftops . . .

  the same thing we accused Russia of doing. well, it’s

  a lousy game, and I don’t know what to do, except

  if it’s like a friend of mine said I said one night when

  I was drunk: “Don’t ever kill anybody, even if it seems

  like the last or the only thing to do.”

  laugh. all right. it might make you happy

  that I even have a stream of remorse when I kill a

  fly. an ant. a flea. yet I go on. I kill them and

  go on.

  god, love is more strange than numerals more strange

  than

  grass on fire more strange than the dead body of a child

  drowned in the bottom of a tub, we know so

  little, we know so much, we don’t know

  enough.

  anyhow, we go through our movements, bowel,

  sometimes

  sexual, sometimes heavenly, sometimes bastardly, or

  sometimes we walk through a museum to see what is

  left of us or it, the sad strictured palsy of glassed

  and frozen and sterile madhouse background

  enough to make you want to walk out into the sun again

  and look around, but in the park and on the streets

  the dead keep on moving through as if they were already

  in a museum. maybe love is sex. maybe love is a bowl of

  mush. maybe love is a radio shut off.

  anyway, it was a party.

  a week ago.

  today I went to the track with roses in my eyes. dollars in

  my

  pocket. headlines in the alley. it’s over a hundred miles by

  train,

  one way. a party of drunks coming back, broke again, the

  dream

  shot again, bodies wobbling; yakking in the barcar and I’m

  in there

  too, drinking, scribbling what’s left of hope in the dim light,

  the

  barman was a Negro and I was white. bad fix. we made

  it.

  no party.

  the rich newspapers keep talking about “The Negro

  Revolution” and

  “The Breakdown of the Negro Family.” the train hit town,

  finally,

  and I got rid of the 2 homosexuals who were buying me

  drinks, and I

  went to piss and make a phonecall and as I came through

  the

  entranceway to the Men’s crapper here were 2 Negroes at a

  shoeshine

  stand shining the shoes of whitemen and the whitemen let

  them do

  it.

  I walked down to a Mexican bar

  and had a few whiskeys and when I left the barmaid gave

  me a

  little slip of paper with her name, address and phone

  number upon

  it, and when I got outside I threw it into the gutter

  got into my car and drove down into Western Los

  Angeles

  and everything looked the same the same as it always

  did

  and at Alvarado and Sunset I slowed to 40

  I saw a policeman fat on his cycle

  looking prompt and heinous

  and I was disgusted with myself and

  everyone, all the little any of us

  had done, love, love, love,

  and the towers swayed like old stripteasers

  praying for the lost magic, and I drove on in

  shining the shoes of every Negro and Gringo in

  America, including

  my own.

  for the 18 months of Marina Louise

  sun sun

  is my little

  girl

  sun

  on the carpet—

  sun sun

  out the

  door

  picking a

  flower

  waiting for me

  to rise

  and

  play.

  an old man

  emerges

  from his

  chair,

  battle-wrecked,

  and she looks

  and only

  sees

  love, which I

  become

  through her

  majesty

  and infinite

  magic

  sun.

  poem for my daughter

  (they tell me that I am now a

  responsible citizen, and through sun stuck on Northern

  windows of dust

  red camellias are flowers crying while

  babies are crying.)

  I spoon it

  in: strained chicken noodle dinner

  junior prunes

  junior fruit dessert

  spoon it in and

  for Christ’s sake

  don’t blame the

  child

  don’t blame the

  govt.

  don’t blame the bosses or the

  working classes—

  spoon it down

  through these arms and chest

  like electrocuted

  wax

  a friend phones:

  “Whatya gonna do now, Hank?”

  “What the hell ya mean, what am I gonna

  do?”

  “I mean ya got responsibility, ya gotta bring the

  kid up

  right.”

  feed her:

  spoon it

  down:

  a place in Be
verly Hills

  and never any need for unemployment compensation

  and never to sell to the highest

  bidder

  never to fall in love with a soldier or a killer of any

  kind

  to appreciate Beethoven and Jellyroll Morton and

  bargain dresses

  she’s got a

  chance:

  there was once the

  Theoric Fund and now there’s the

  Great Society

  “Are ya still gonna play the horses? are ya still gonna

  drink? are ya still gonna—”

  “yes.”

  telephone, waving flower in the wind & the dead bones of

  my heart—

  now she sleeps beautifully like

  boats on the Nile

  maybe some day she will

  bury me

  that would be very nice

  if it weren’t a

  responsibility.

  answer to a note found in the mailbox

  “love is like a bell

  tell me, have you

  heard it in her voice?”

  love is not like a bell

  that’s poetic, true,

  but I’ve heard something in her voice

  that in the puke of my misery

  that in death’s head sitting in the window

  grinning its broken yellow teeth

  has risen me to a climate I have seldom

  known—

  “here, a flower. I bring flower.”

  I hear something in her voice

  that has nothing to do with sweating and tricky and

  bleeding armies

  that has nothing to do with the factory boss with broken

  eyes

  I am not picking at your words:

  you have your bell

  I have this and maybe you have this

  too:

  “I bring shoes. shoe. shoe. here is

  shoe!”

  it is more than learning what a shoe is

  it is more than learning what I am or what she

  is

  it is something else

  that maybe we who have lived a long time have almost

  forgotten

  that a child should come from the swamps of my pain

  bearing flowers, actually bearing flowers,

  christ, this is almost too much

  that I should be allowed to see with eyes and touch and

  laugh,

  this knowledgeable beast of me

  frowns inside

  but soon finds the effort too much to hide