where instantly we could not find our way
and the maze of the outlands west
starts that quick
where you may touch
your finger to liberty
and look so short a space
to the columnar bust
of New York
and know those people exist
as a speck in your own lonely heart
who will shortly depart,
taking a conveyance for the
radial stretches
past girls on corners
past drugstores, tired hesitant
creatures who I also love
in all their alienation were it not so
past all equipment of country side
to temporary homes
where the wash of sea and other
populations come
once more to whisper only one thing
for all people: a late and far-away
night yearning for
and when he gets there
I want him to stay away
from the taverns of familiarity
I want him to walk by the seashore alone
in all height
which is nothing more than
a mountain. Or the hailing of a mast
with big bright eyes.
So rushing,
all the senses
come to him
as a swarm of golden bees
and their sting is the power
he uses as parts of
the oldest brain. He hears
the delicate thrush
of the water attacking
He hears the cries, falling gulls
and watches silently the gesture of grey
bygone people. He hears their cries
and messages, he never
ignores any sound.
As they come to him he places them
puts clothes upon them
and gives them their place
in their new explanation, there is never
a lost time, nor any inhabitant
of that time to go split by prisms or unplaced
and unattended,
that you may believe
is the breath he gives
the great already occurred and nightly beginning world.
So with the populace of his mind
you think his nights? are not
lonely. My God. Of his
loves, you know nothing and of his
false beginning
you can know nothing,
but this thing to be marked
again
only
he who worships the gods with his strictness
can be of their company
the cat and the animals, the bird he took
from the radiator
of my car saying it had died
a natural death, rarely seen in a bird.
To play, as areal particulars can out of the span
of Man, and of all, this man
does not
he, does, he
walks
by the sea
in my memory
and sees all things and to him
are presented at night
the whispers of the most flung shores
from Gloucester out
[1964]
FROM GEOGRAPHY
Song: The Astronauts
for clair oursler
On the bed of the vast promiscuity
of the poet’s senses is turned
the multiple world, no love is possible
that has not received the
freight of that fact
no wake permissible that has not met
the fluxes of those oceans.
the moon orbits
only for that permission.
Men with fine bones in their heads
will manipulate a recovery
and put spades into her
only to find Euripides went before them
the hymen long ago fixed
it is an old old wedding
but as you dig you will not hear
the marriage flutes
you will be killed in your sleep.
Broken.
you will be considered pirates
and killed when Hymenaeus
(who lost his voice and life
singing at a wedding
catches you asleep
in the rushes of
the windless moon
the immensely soft glow of it
will always be behind you
as you stand on its face
staring
at the strangely
inhabited world
from whence you came
from where all men with their eyes
have been satisfied
before thee
The Problem of the Poem for My Daughter, Left Unsolved
The darkness rings.
the surface form
of the face, a halo
of the face,
as it passes away in the air as she moves
between the buildings, a cut
surrounding her throat, the pearls
of the price she’ll never have to insist
she paid
a thin line red with its own distinction
some goiter
of what she has been made to understand is civilization
not the brand of the adventurous cutlass
The misery is superficial now.
I have dwelt on that quality in other poems
without attention to the obvious
drain
of social definition
the oblivious process
of a brutal economic calculus, where to
place the dark hair
save above moist eyes
the black slacks,
the desperately optimistic rouge of the fallen cheeks
(cheeks are up
when they live
both forward and
posterior, the colorado of new day not a new state . . .
where the leads are I despair to find lead mines
In the chronically vast complex
explanation, a field true,
but a field
no field hand knows
beyond the produce of it
on some citizen’s land, the horizons
sheer the top
of the head of the man
who is bent
bent is an attitude
I’ve settled on now
to define a man
whose attention is forced down
a class, distracted, not a stratum
detained from what the reaper called attention
might harvest, O false shift of season
in a vacation
but how slow, and seasonal
and the poem is an instrument of intellection
thus a condition
of the simultaneous
so the woman and myself, pass,
and her message bears a huge meanness
“the measureless crudity of the States”
A world where no thing thrives short of the total pestilence
of its spirit, and because there is no intelligence short
of the total there is no intelligence, none. There is not even one
intelligence in the land, children see the capitol of things
shifted to disneyland, no misery
which does not know all misery,
as an eye of knowledge, contrary to happiness
that quite exclusive short range and burst, as it happens
a birthday party, my daughter’s. I had gone to the supermarket
for ice cream. and saw the shocked woman
We call the intersection of time
and event the
devastation of a fortune cake
all answers pulled out
of the standard of living which is that cake
no standard
is cake
a provided nation
is no standard, rather a thorn
in the side of a more careful world
her pain affirmed (all men and women
who suffer deeply, in any way, are not
cannot be U.S. Citizens, no matter where
they live. They may live in Indiana
she carried no standard,
as I saw her: impossible to be a citizen
there is no such thing anywhere, in any country.
I could have shot her down, had she been a marine.
She was a housewife.
And leaving the scene, and the legal questions
not one male canaanite would have come forward
She was no phœnician raped broad,
there are never any ships parked by the bannock county court house
this woman was sometime willingly captured by another,
a sort of community, her husband, if she is unfortunate enough to
possess one
is probably a masonic reservist.
No woman is Helena
unless the culture has provided for the passage of pain
and no people can construct the delicacies of culture
until they imagine Helena, merely fucking in the middle
of the atlantic on the SS United States is not it, is procurement
while the full-sized poodle whines in the kennel above
back of the forward stack, the echo of the sound he makes in Berkeley
where the hippest member of the minority group as it was reported
arrived in a sports car and there it was, white, with a beret
wearing shades, sitting beside the driver, looking with disdain
on a small cur who trotted along the curb and stopped
for one brief moment of curiosity and then resumed
his policing of the bases of parking meters
These United States.
have sent forth women, hopeless divorcees,
the wrinkled millionairesses of resources dwindled
to a day dream, the exhausted mesaba of their dangling breasts
soft wax structures to support our collectively ceaseless greed
for legitimate youth, but divided states do not create women,
Amelia Earhart
was not carried off, she flew, like something familiarly
transvestite in us, a weirdly technical Icarus
she was sent for by some morse-code spiritism, this land
was never more than the bitter hardness of nouns for us
her destiny was not qualified by myth
She came in all her beauty
to a small green island
in a bag of metal, oh misfortune that to be exemplary is so difficult
she could have been a goddess because she flew, other women
marked by sex, fold out of the minds of american men
who may no longer wear the bottoms of their trousers rolled
but who are certainly all circumcised without ritual
and wear the ends of their penises rolled
and always assure their dentists they are masturbators:
the paraphernalia
of an existence, thus a human phenomenon, culture-less
(pop culture,
technologically provisioned
(those are collections of people grasping nothing
the women are
set loose to walk spiritless
their marks are deep cuts on the neck, moist eyes, sagging nylons
eyes painted to dry everything, loose figures of despair
or hard flesh prolonged by injections and tucks into an isolated youngness
a manufactured Galateability
The end
of applied genetics will be
the elimination of freely disposed
intellection, via the rule
that a science is oriented toward
Use, some predictable
breed, is the end
(Automation ends with a moral proposition, THE LESSON of
one maximum factor of it
will suggest all the correspondences:
mail food ads
the attractive stuffing
from McCalls and House Beautiful
to Havana
during any season
of famine, therefore those people will hunger more
(which people?
the natural seedbed of that morality
is plague, and all such endeavor
instructs one to move our daughters
to some green island
in the sea, we are so far from Galilee
The sum of her
shall perish, has begun
to perish in the darkside
in the prescribed field of misery
and she will hardly avoid the destruction
of her nature,
a material of birth
as a car of new life
not new, novel, the life
is older than that we know as prima materia
And soon when there is no need
for waitresses, or telephones, doctors’ wives
and automobilists, they wither
on their still green vine, no more tears
to water life, no more varicose veins
the Kaddish will be said
not as a formal memory
but for the working of a curse, venus
will be likewise a disease transmitted for a secure experience
who said if I don’t do it, someone else will
A man,
in that framed condition
of some totally onanized culture, who will
transmit with the bills of requisition
the bill that held Leda off the ground
in that throbbing moment when she saw histories of the future
in the bright feathers, knew the spines of
that ancient creature in her thighs
the engineer’s note:
Send me a little syphilis this month,
I have been reading
some old books
and in that sense
there is no loss to a man
of his earlier knowledge,
a yawn simply defines the brink of availability:
Hello there Ed, congratulations!
I’ve forgotten the details
but it sounded fabulous!
It is the night of the opening
of the new art-grocerystore and all the shoppers
were discussing theology, a science which has no subject-matter,
something about the indistinguishability of environment where all
the mistakes of logic create a different object, something
without tears, something
as I get it less like
the terrestrial entry a cave or
less similar volcano than woman
something omitting holes
a specifically anti metaphorical being
like a man protruding, an extension
no intention, space is still not conceived
(as surrounding: infinity is the inability
to conceive, the collapse
of surrounding,
female principle was structure
before and somewhat after the opening
of the art-grocerystore
So tears, or the rose enfolds
the moisture of its passion
the girl my daughter, 14 today
and such eyes, all interior, a proud thing
born in 1951, not yet bestowed with any curse, she is
Chansonette, a woman, hopefully, for nomads
a principle older than man, a running out
the tear dropped into an earth rapidly drying tonight,
the disappearance instant
into the most unimaginable laundromat, the danger
a wholly adjectival father might
worry over
in the nest of the most corrupted notion thus far: America!
of how men might, if they were noble
behave in their last moments we barely speak
except for the relatively sour hope that some nineteenth century
and romantically singular form of bloodletting
be reinstated because the man in the street hears a choir
of pioneers’ voices and thinks of brigadiers when a rightist is hurt
where he sits on the porch of his finca faraway
or of how we might
plead our case in the face of Sartre’s observation
that this is a nation where those who care
are the damned of the earth, running I will add
before the furious nations who snap at our heels
with a momentum of the centuries, and I stand
behind the pane at my window one of those hopeless men, some silly
toscanini
leading the symphony
in the street, directing the movements, I do so know
all the scores by heart, by a memory
saturated with defeat, where crisis and alienation
are no more new than any other condition but were always
bred in this strewn and used land, no cultural tricks of assimilation
to form a cover,
bunchgrass is an isolated cover,
has a slight brief flower,
and I can tell my daughter no secret.
West of Moab
The caravan wound. Past the pinto bean capitol
of the world and mesa verde.
Bitterly cold were the nights.
The journeymen slept in the lots of filling stations
and there were the interrupting lights
of semis all night long as those beasts
crept past or drew up to rest their motors
or roared on.
A modern group in cars.
They travelled north at an angle
and the tired engines whirred
moreso the rear plant of the nazi car
from the strain of the great
american desert. Past places
they went, like only mormons
and in Green River
they had coffee and talked to an old woman
whose inconsistency was radical
so demented was she