Pine sticks, and pushed them
Into her sides. Her breath rose
And she died. The executioners
Rolled her off onto the ground.
A light snow began to fall
And covered the mangled body,
And the executives, astonished, withdrew.
The other world is like a thorn
In the ear of a tiny beast!
The fingers of the executives are too thick
To pull it out!
It is like a jagged stone
Flying toward them out of the darkness.
II
THE VARIOUS ARTS OF POVERTY AND CRUELTY
When we think of it with this knowledge, we see that we have been locked up, and led blindfold, and it is the wise of this world who have shut and locked us up in their art and their rationality, so that we have had to see with their eyes.
—Boehme
Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness and they died.
—old liturgy
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child, and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
—Freud
COME WITH ME
Come with me into those things that have felt this despair for so long—
Those removed Chevrolet wheels that howl with a terrible loneliness,
Lying on their backs in the cindery dirt, like men drunk and naked,
Staggering off down a hill at night to drown at last in a pond.
Those shredded inner tubes abandoned on the shoulders of thruways,
Black and collapsed bodies, that tried and burst, and were left behind.
And those curly steel shavings, scattered about on garage benches,
Sometimes still warm, gritty when we hold them,
Who have given up, and blame everything on the government;
And those roads in South Dakota that feel around in the darkness. . . .
THOSE BEING EATEN BY AMERICA
The cry of those being eaten by America,
Others pale and soft being stored for later eating
And Jefferson
Who saw hope in new oats
The wild houses go on
With long hair growing from between their toes
The feet at night get up
And run down the long white roads by themselves
The dams reverse themselves and want to go stand alone in the desert
Ministers who dive headfirst into the earth
The pale flesh
Spreading guiltily into new literatures
That is why these poems are so sad
The long-dead running over the fields
The mass sinking down
The light in children’s faces fading at six or seven
The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved
WRITTEN IN DEJECTION NEAR ROME
What if these long races go on repeating themselves
Century after century, living in houses painted light colors
On the beach,
Black spiders,
Having turned pale and fat,
Men walking thoughtfully with their families,
Vibrations
Of exhausted violin-bodies,
Horrible eternities of sea pines!
Some men cannot help but feel it,
They will abandon their homes
To live on rafts tied together on the ocean;
Those on shore will go inside tree trunks,
Surrounded by bankers whose fingers have grown long and slender,
Piercing through rotting bark for their food.
LISTENING TO PRESIDENT KENNEDY LIE ABOUT THE CUBAN INVASION
There is another darkness,
A darkness in the fences of the body,
And in moles running, and telephone wires,
And the frail ankles of horses;
Darkness of dying grass, and yellow willow leaves;
There is the death of broken buttonholes,
Of brutality in high places,
Of lying reporters,
There is a bitter fatigue, adult and sad.
THE GREAT SOCIETY
Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain;
Hands developed with terrible labor by apes
Hang from the sleeves of evangelists;
There are murdered kings in the lightbulbs outside movie theaters;
The janitor sits troubled by the boiler,
And the hotelkeeper shuffles the cards of insanity.
The President dreams of invading Cuba.
Bushes are growing over the outdoor grills,
Vines over the yachts and the leather seats.
The city broods over ash cans and darkening mortar.
On the far shore, at Coney Island, dark children
Play on the chilling beach: a sprig of black seaweed,
Shells, a skyful of birds,
While the mayor sits with his head in his hands.
SUDDENLY TURNING AWAY
Someone comes near, the jaw
Tightens, bullheads bite
The snow, moments of intimacy waved away,
Half-evolved antennas of the sea snail
Sink to the ground.
The sun
Glints on us! But the shadows
Of not-love come.
It cannot be stood against.
And we suffer. The gold discs
Fall from our ears.
The sea grows cloudy.
THREE PRESIDENTS
Andrew Jackson
I want to be a white horse!
I want to be a white horse on the green mountains!
A horse that runs over wooden bridges, and sleeps
In abandoned barns. . . .
Theodore Roosevelt
When I was President, I crushed snails with my bare teeth.
I slept in my underwear in the White House.
I ate the Cubans with a straw, and Lenin dreamt of me every night.
I wore down a forest of willow trees. I ground the snow,
And sold it.
The mountains of Texas shall heal our cornfields,
Overrun by the yellow race.
As for me, I want to be a stone! Yes!
I want to be a stone laid down thousands of years ago,
A stone with almost invisible cracks!
I want to be a stone that holds up the edge of the lake house,
A stone that suddenly gets up and runs around at night,
And lets the marriage bed fall; a stone that leaps into the water,
Carrying the robber down with him.
John F. Kennedy
I want to be a stream of water falling—
Water falling from high in the mountains, water
That dissolves everything,
And is never drunk, falling from ledge to ledge, from glass to glass.
I want the air around me to be invisible, resilient,
Able to flow past rocks.
I will carry the boulders with me to the valley.
Then ascending I will fall through space again:
Glittering in the sun, like the crystal in sideboards,
Goblets of the old life, before it was ruined by the Church.
And when I ascend the third time, I will fall forever,
Missing the earth entirely.
HEARING MEN SHOUT AT NIGHT ON MACDOUGAL STREET
How strange to awake in a city,
And hear grown men shouting in the night!
On the farm the darkness wins,
And the small ones nestle in their graves of cold:
Here is a boiling that only exhaustion subdues,
A bitter moiling of muddy waters
At which the voices of white men feed!
The sea is a street, and mud boils up
When the anchor is lifted, for now at midnight th
ere is about to sail
The first New England slave-ship with the Negroes in the hold.
THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION
1
Here Morgan dies like a dog among whispers of angels;
The saint is born among tin cans in the orchard;
A rose receives the name of “The General Jackson.”
Here snow-white blossoms bloom in the bare homes
Of bankmen, and with a lily the Pope meets
A delegation of waves, and blesses the associations
Of the ocean; I walk with a coarse body through winds
That carry the birds on their long roads to the poles,
And see the ghost of Locke above the railroad tracks.
2
Snow fell all night on a farmyard in Montana.
And the Assyrian lion blazed above the soybean fields.
The last haven of Jehovah, down from the old heavens,
Hugged a sooty corner of the murdered pine.
Arabic numerals
Walked the earth, dressed as bankers and sportsmen,
And at night diamonds in slippers invade our sleep.
Black beetles, bright as Cadillacs, toil down
The long dusty road into the mountains of South Dakota.
3
One night we find ourselves near the giant’s house.
At dawn, mist blows over the great meadow.
Outside the steps, we find an aunt and uncle
Dead for twenty years working with hoes.
In their beds are small old men growing from the ground.
A mill grinding. We go in. Chairs
In the great room, hacked from redwood.
Tiny loaves of bread with ears lie on the President’s table.
Steps coming! The Father will soon return!
ANDREW JACKSON’S SPEECH
Dido to Aeneas: “I have broke faith with the ashes of Sichaeus!”
I heard Andrew Jackson say, as he closed his Virgil:
“The harsh ravishers in Detroit, inheritors of the soot
Of chimney boys, when they raised the mighty poor,
Broke faith with the cinders of Sichaeus.
“I shot to save the honour of my wife;
And I would shoot again, to save my people.
The Republic lies in the blossoms of Washington.
“The poor have been raised up by the Revolution.
Washington, riding in cold snow at Valley Forge,
Warned the poor never to take another husband.”
His voice rose in the noisy streets of Detroit.
SLEET STORM ON THE MERRITT PARKWAY
I look out at the white sleet covering the still streets
As we drive through Scarsdale—
The sleet began falling as we left Connecticut,
And the winter leaves swirled in the wet air after cars
Like hands suddenly turned over in a conversation.
Now the frost has nearly buried the short grass of March.
Seeing the sheets of sleet untouched on the wide streets,
I think of the many comfortable homes stretching for miles,
Two and three stories, solid, with polished floors,
With white curtains in the upstairs bedrooms,
And small perfume flagons of black glass on the windowsills,
And warm bathrooms with guest towels, and electric lights—
What a magnificent place for a child to grow up!
And yet the children end in the river of price-fixing,
Or in the snowy field of the insane asylum.
The sleet falls—so many cars moving toward New York—
Last night we argued about the Marines invading Guatemala in 1947,
The United Fruit Company had one water spigot for two hundred families,
And the ideals of America, our freedom to criticize,
The slave systems of Rome and Greece, and no one agreed.
III
THE VIETNAM WAR
AFTER THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, ALL THINGS HAPPEN AT ONCE
Now we enter a strange world, where the Hessian Christmas
Still goes on, and Washington has not reached the other shore;
The Whiskey Boys
Are gathering again on the meadows of Pennsylvania
And the Republic is still sailing on the open sea.
I saw a black angel in Washington dancing
On a barge, saying, “Let us now divide kennel dogs
And hunting dogs”; Henry Cabot Lodge, in New York,
Talking of sugarcane in Cuba; Ford,
In Detroit, drinking mother’s milk;
Henry Cabot Lodge, saying, “Remember the Maine!”
Ford, saying, “History is bunk!”
And Wilson saying, “What is good for General Motors . . .”
Who is it, singing? Don’t you hear singing?
It is the dead of Cripple Creek;
Coxey’s army
Like turkeys are singing from the tops of trees!
And the Whiskey Boys are drunk outside Philadelphia.
ASIAN PEACE OFFERS REJECTED WITHOUT PUBLICATION
These suggestions by Asians are not taken seriously.
We know Rusk smiles as he passes them to someone.
Men like Rusk are not men only—
They are bombs waiting to be loaded in a darkened hangar.
Rusk’s assistants eat hurriedly,
Talking of Teilhard de Chardin,
Longing to get back to their offices
So they can cling to the underside of the steel wings shuddering faintly in the high altitudes.
They land first, and hand the coffee cup to the drawn pilot.
They start the projector, and show the movie about the mad professor.
Lost angels huddled on a night branch!
The waves crossing
And recrossing beneath—
The sound of the rampaging Missouri—
Bending the reeds again and again—something inside us
Like a ghost train in the Rockies
About to be buried in snow!
Its long hoot
Making the owl in the Douglas fir turn his head . . .
WAR AND SILENCE
The bombers spread out, temperature steady
A Negro’s ear sleeping in an automobile tire
Pieces of timber float by saying nothing
•
Bishops rush about crying, There is no war,
And bombs fall,
Leaving a dust on the beech trees
•
One leg walks down the road and leaves
The other behind, the eyes part
And fly off in opposite directions
•
Filaments of death grow out.
The sheriff cuts off his black legs
And nails them to a tree
COUNTING SMALL-BONED BODIES
Let’s count the bodies over again.
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
The size of skulls,
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
Maybe we could get
A year’s kill in front of us on a desk!
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring, for a keepsake forever.
AS THE ASIAN WAR BEGINS
There are longings to kill that cannot be seen,
Or are seen only by a minister who no longer believes in God,
Living in his parish like a crow in its nest.
And there are flowers with murky centers,
Impenetrable, ebony, basalt . . .
Conestogas go past, over the Platte, their contents
Hidden from us, murderers riding under the canvas . . .
Give us a glimpse of what we cannot see,
Our enemies, the soldiers and the poor.
&
nbsp; AT A MARCH AGAINST THE VIETNAM WAR
WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 27, 1965
Newspapers rise high in the air over Maryland
We walk about, bundled in coats
and sweaters in the late November sun
Looking down, I see feet moving
Calmly, gaily,
Almost as if separated from their bodies
But there is something moving in the dark somewhere
Just beyond
The edge of our eyes: a boat
Covered with machine guns
Moving along under trees
It is black,
The hand reaches out
And cannot touch it—
It is that darkness among pine boughs
That the Puritans brushed
As they went out to kill turkeys
At the edge of the jungle clearing
It explodes
On the ground
We long to abase ourselves
We have carried around this cup of darkness
We have longed to pour it over our heads
We make war
Like a man anointing himself
HATRED OF MEN WITH BLACK HAIR