& at his equally terrified wife, monfs pregnant.
350
All the girls, with their vivacious littles,
visited him in dream: he was interested in their tops & bottoms
& even in their middles,
for years Henry had been getting away with murder,
the Sheriff mused. There’ll have to be an order
specifically to stop climbing trees,
& other people’s wives: we’ll cut off his telephone,
stroke one, and hasten his senility,
stroke two: encourage his virtues, if he has one:
ask him upstairs more frequently for tea,
stroke four, put him on the wagon, Death,
no drinks: that ought to cure him.
The progress of age helped him, to be not good but better:
he restricted his passes to passes made by letters
he drank less.
Mlle Choinais noted a definite though small improvement in Henry:
as they passed forth across the northern sea,
a degree of gentleness.
351
Animal Henry sat reading the Times Literary Supplement
with a large Jameson & a worse hangover.
Who will his demon lover
today become, he queried. Having made a dent
in the world, he insisted on special treatment,
massage at all hours.
Love in the shadows where the animals come
tickled his nerves’ ends. He put down The Times
& began a salvage operation,
killing that is the partly incoherent,
saving the mostly fine, polishing the surfaces.
Brain- & instinct-work.
On all fours he danced about his cage, poor Henry
for whom, my love, too much was never enough.
Massage me in Kyoto’s air.
The Japanese women are better than the Swedes,
more rhythmical, more piercing.
Somewhere, everywhere
a girl is taking her clothes off.
352
The Cabin, Congdon St, & the Old Gristmill
saw stretches of the long & long work done
to certain satisfactions,
including Henry’s reluctant still & still
from the notion of the work’s being a large one
in spite of the incessant additions.
During those years he met his seminars,
went & lectured & read, talked with human beings,
paid insurance & taxes;
but his mind was not on it. His mind was elsewheres
in an area where the soul not talks but sings
& where foes are attacked with axes.
Enemies his pilgrimage duly brought
to bring him down, and they almost succeeded.
He sang on like a harmful bird.
His foes are like footnotes, he figured, sought
chiefly by doctoral candidates: props, & needed,—
comic relief, —absurd.
353
These massacres of the superior peoples,
the Armenians, the Jews, the Ibos, all
(cried apoplectic Henry)
serve to remind us that culture was only a phase
through which we threaded, coming out at the other end
to the true light again of savagery.
—You feelin bad, Mr Bones? You don’t look good.
—Do I looking like a man spent years in Hell?
for that is Henry’s case:
and he remembers what he saw, how he felt & smelt,
sharp terror that increases & that stays:
the sufferings of wood
when burned are to our sufferings on the earth
as those are to our sufferings hereafter,
that is, for the Evil:
the otherwise will escape & sleep forever
except for those who in their time gave birth
to the consorts of the Devil
354
The only happy people in the world
are those who do not have to write long poems:
muck, administration, toil:
the protototality of an absence of contact
in one’s own generation, chiefly the old & the young
persisting with interest.
‘The Care & Feeding of Long Poems’ was Henry’s title
for his next essay, which will come out when
he wants it to.
A Kennedy-sponsored bill for the protection
of poets from long poems will benefit the culture
and do no harm to that kind Lady, Mrs Johnson.
He would have gone to the White House & consulted the President
during his 10 seconds in the receiving line
on the problems of long poems
Mr Johnson has never written one
but he seems a generous & able man
‘Tetelestai’ said St John.
355
Slattery’s, in Ballsbridge
Cling to me & I promise you’ll drown too,
this voyage is terminal, I’ll take your beauty down
and ruined in sea weed
then it will seem forever. I am you
you are your moan, you are your sexy moan,
we are a ’possum treed.
Difficult at midnight grew our love
as if we could not have enough, enough,
reluctant lady.
Nobody in the world knows where I am.
Your hair drags. You would have made a terrific victim
in one of Henry’s thrillers.
Weep for the fate of man, excellent lady.
He comes no near, whereas he is so lost,
a crisis in the ghost
baffles endeavour, so he would lie down.
Attend his sorry perish, excellent lady.
Withhold from him your frown.
356
With fried excitement he looked across at life
wondering if he could bear it more,
wondering,
in the middle of a short war with his wife,
deep in the middle, in short, of a war,
he couldn’t say whether to sing
further or seal his lonely throat, give himself up.
Tomorrow is his birthday, makes you think.
The London TLS
are mounting só much of him he could scream.
There was a time he marched from dream to dream
but he seems to be out of ink,
he seems to be out of everything again
save whiskey & cigarettes, both bad for him.
He clapped both hands to both ears
and resigned from the ranks of giving men.
In a minute now he’ll wake, distinct & grim.
I’m not, he cried, what I appears.
357
Henry’s pride in his house was almost fierce,
Henry, who took no pride in anything
only but work hard done:
an angry ghost appeared & leaned for years
on his front stoop; elderly Henry spread his wings
one by one by one
until the traffic could not see it more:
he’s leaving for America & things,
things.
Deep in concussion, deep in extra love,
he sorted out his extra fate. He sings
& clowns
and is wiser than the next man, in so many towns
across a continent. We must be careful of it,
the special gift,
the wardrobes wide & wider. Pained eyes, Henry’s.
Unmanly slovenly love took him at times
and passed him back.
358
The Gripe
The price he pays for sleep. Pockets of grief,
wrecked ladies, back in his own country, write
him ruined letters.
He advises in the dar
k, of woes, near the chief:
her stepfather knew her when she was ten,
since when, her soul is a sight.
With a shudder a troubled girl brought an indictment.
Can so much pain inhabit a simple body
& high-piled, most blonde hair?
A single moan emerged & filled the years.
An inability to respond, in the cheekbones,
the old woman thought.
Moments of horror in deep sleep survived.
Life as a tangle & a hopeless one,
she murmured when she woke.
Her skin showed no disaster but she could not love.
The lady already dead the love of the done
passed on to Henry & broke.
359
In sleep, of a heart attack, let Henry go.
The end of tennis. The beginning of the dark.
The beginning of the wagon.
It is the onward coming terrifies.
Now at last the effort to make him kill himself
has failed.
Take down the thing then to which he was nailed.
I am a boat was moored on the wrong shelf.
Love has wings & flies.
Amazed it could engineer such agony,
Henry tried the world again & again, falling short of the mark.
Unblock! let all griefs flow.
There are more over there than over here,
for welcome eerie. The whole city turned out
to rustle Henry home.
He’d made his peace & would no further roam.
He wondered only what it was about.
He felt the news was near.
360
The universe has gifted me with friends,
was special of it, whom I not deserve
save for my own love back
imperfectly manifested with amends
which Henry had need of, graded on a curve
by certain, Henry on the track
strapped, awaited the train. Instead came a cable
from the most beautiful woman in the United States,
devout & lovely: ‘Why do you honor me?’
she weirdly askt. Henry relaxed & stable
but busy busy made reply: ‘We awaits
a lady even more worthy of honor:
until then suffer us to make do with you,
which is forever? Gulls here beside the sea
approve poor Henry’s choice.
Allow then in our end that we make do
with the mysteries of you which are one mystery’
half-enhanced by Henry’s voice.
361
The Armada Song
They came ashore with erections
& laid the Irish maidens in large numbers
then in 1588.
Spaniards are vile & virile.
History after all is a matter of fumbles.
Man’s derelictions, man’s fate,
is a matter of sorry record. Somehow the prizes
come at the wrong times to the proper people
& vice versa.
The great ships, confused in tempest,
drove on the shoals. Accepting ladies
crowded the northern shore.
In they plunged, in half-armour, with their strength
returned to the personal. Philip’s on his own.
These fragrant maidens
are good to a man out of the sea, at length,
in a new world, and each new man, alone,
made up his own destiny.
362
And now I meet you in the thinky place,
you & I, your good brain & hot heart
counselled Henry on
in his heavy labour, O you were good to him
and he was glad to look you in the face
at Yale & Harvard
We have read the same fine writers all our lives
& hoisted the same grave problems: that gives us
somewhat in common, my dear:
allow me to bless your gift, for you are young
and Henry is old, old as a hieroglyph:
we have in common Song:
I raise my voice in your presence in your praise
and if we had been married to each other
I would have made a pass at you,
in Cambridge or New Haven: but as it is
I bless your gift & am grateful for your beauty
& high kindness to Henry.
363
I cast as feminine Miss Shirley Jones
as she was in Oklahoma! and for male
George C. Scott
as he was in The Hustler: off stage moans,
we begin with them in bed: if this relation should fail,
if it should not prove hot,
God bless our fate in the West & do me down
a potent Communist—as we all know,
the peoples in the East
have no sexual problems, have no problems
but housing & food & ideology:
all lesser problems ceased
when criminal attractive Lenin, bald,
went over the frontier in a sealed train
to take over the Revolution.
We know the issue of that, it has been told.
But the issue of Miss Jones & Mr Scott
comes at us, lovely & sane.
364
There is one book that Henry hasn’t read:
Ubu Roi. He feeling ignorant whenever his mind brings it up.
Everytime anybody says
—Mr Bones, you has read everything—he singles out instead
Ubu Roi, to prove he is an idiot
and should be, as one, blest.
O Henry in his youth read many things:
he gutted the Columbia & the Cambridge libraries
& the British Museum & the Library of Congress
but mostly he bought books to have as his own
cunningly, like extra wings:
he resorted to the Morgan for Keats’ letters
so obscure, so important, one stroke of a pen
deciding his opinion of Milton,
his editors wrong. Henry corrected his betters
as well as his lessers & would have had to say
much but for his different profession.
Back to the Folger!
365
Henry, a foreigner, lustful & old,
bearded, exasperated, lay in bed
cursing his enemies.
He loved his friends with a thick love, them to hold
to him in all his bad times, which were rife.
Henry living & dead
was full of friends & foes: he had no team-spirit.
He lashed the lapses of those who were to inherit.
He sank back exhausted.
Grimy dreams wore him out. He woke half-sane
& screamed for stronger drinks. Open the main!
Pour, if necessary, drinks down him.
I, Henry Pussy-cat, being in ill-health
& 900 years old, begin & cease,
to doubt.
When my old friend complained to my older friend
‘Why don’t you come see me more often?’
‘I’m afraid you’ll find me out.’
366
Chilled in this Irish pub I wish my loves
well, well to strangers, well to all his friends,
seven or so in number,
I forgive my enemies, especially two,
races his heart, at so much magnanimity,
can it at all be true?
—Mr Bones, you on a trip outside yourself.
Has you seen a medicine man? You sound will-like,
a testament & such.
Is you going? —Oh, I suffer from a strike
& a strike & three balls: I stand up for much,
Wordsworth & that sort of thing.
The pitcher dreamed. He threw a hazy cu
rve,
I took it in my stride & out I struck,
lonesome Henry.
These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand.
They are only meant to terrify & comfort.
Lilac was found in his hand.
367
Henry’s Crisis
In sight of a more peaceful country, just beyond,
& just in sight—ilex & magnolia, land
rimmed by a bountiful sea—
Henry took stock of where he now might be
in his own warring state. He stood perplexed
as to where to go next,
forward or backward: he could not stay still,
the decision came: his rotors floated well
to take him back or ahead.
Here he paused, though, & thought of those whom he was leaving
& those whom he would be missing without grieving
in the fair of the land ahead.
‘My friends are full’ he muttered to himself,
‘I’ll make no more, so many now are dead.
Backward is the gallant word,
and grapple to my heart the splendid rest,
to leave the new land unknown & undistressed’—
The happy rotors whirred.
368
At a gallop through his gates came monsters, buoyant
& credible & wild—his people fled
anguisht before them.
Soon the great city was all monsters, high-bred
& parti-coloured, comfy, digging in
like a really bad dream.
New rules were promulgated at the City Centre.
Those with more eyes, cast ruthlessly aside,
lurked to the suburbs.
The airport was closed down. Animals were untied.
Thought of his kind ground & lurched to a halt,
all nouns became verbs.
Was all this the result of a failure of love,
he hailed a passing stranger, a young girl
with several legs.
He heard her shout, remote, ‘You is a swirl
of ending dust, Your Majesty…’ Since when,
he’s hunkered down & begs.
369
I threw myself out helter-skelter-whiz
as goalie to head off a lucky puck.
Henry was tough on that day.