A fine snug house when all is said and done.
But night makes me uneasy: floor by floor
Rooms never guessed at open from the gloom
First as thin smoky lines, ghost of a door
Or lintel that develops like a print
Darkening into full embodiment
– Boudoir and oubliette, room on room on room.
And I have met or I believed I met
People in some of them, though they were not
The kind I need. They looked convincing, yet
There always was too much of the phantom to them.
Meanwhile, and even when I walked right through them,
I was talking, talking to myself. Of what?
Fact was, the echo of each word drowned out
The next word spoken, and I cannot say
What it was I was going on about.
It could be I was asking, Do these rooms
Spring up at night-time suddenly, like mushrooms,
Or have they all been hiding here all day?
4
Dream sponsors:
Charles Manson, tongue
playing over dry lips,
thinking a long thought;
and the Furies, mad
puppety heads appearing
in the open transom above
a forming door, like heads
of kittens staring angrily
over the edge of their box:
‘Quick, fetch Medusa,’
their shrewish voices,
‘Show him Medusa.’
Maybe I won’t turn away,
maybe I’m so cool
I could outstare her.
5
The door opens.
There are no snakes.
The head
is on the table.
On the table
gold hair struck
by light from
the naked bulb,
a dazzle in which
the ground of dazzle
is consumed, the
hair burning
in its own gold.
And her eyes
gaze at me,
pale blue, but
blank as the eyes
of zombie or angel,
with the stunned
lack of expression
of one
who has beheld
the source of everything
and found it
the same as nothing.
In her dazzle I
catch fire
self-delighting
self-sufficient
self-consuming
till
I burn out
so heavy
I sink into
darkness into
my foundations.
6
Down in the cellars, nothing is visible
no one
Though there’s a sound about me of many breathing
Light slap of foot on stone and rustle of body
Against body and stone.
And when later
I finger a stickiness along the ridges
Of a large central block that feels like granite
I don’t know if it’s my own, or I shed it,
Or both, as if priest and victim were only
Two limbs of the same body.
The lost traveller.
For this is the seat of needs
so deep, so old
That even where eye never perceives body
And where the sharpest ear discerns only
The light slap and rustle of flesh on stone
They, the needs, seek ritual and ceremony
To appease themselves
(Oh, the breathing all around me)
Or they would tear apart the life that feeds them.
7
I am the man on the rack.
I am the man who puts the man on the rack.
I am the man who watches the man who puts the man on the rack.
8
Might it not have been
a thought-up film
which suddenly ceases
the lights go up
I can see only
this pearl-grey chamber
false and quiet
no audience here
just the throned one
nothing outside the bone
nothing accessible
the ambush and taking of
meaning were nothing
were
inventions of Little Ease
I sit
trapped in bone
I am back again
where I never left, I sit
in my first instant, where
I never left
petrified at my centre
9
I spin like a solitary star, I swoon.
But there breaks into my long solitude
A bearded face, it’s Charlie, close as close,
His breath that stinks of jail – of pain and fungus,
So close that I breathe nothing else.
Then I recall as if it were my own
Life on the hot ranch, and the other smells.
Of laurel in the sun, fierce, sweet; of people
– Death-sweat or lust-sweat they smelt much the same.
He reigned in sultry power over his dream.
I come back to the face pushed into mine.
Tells me he’s bound to point out, man,
That dreams don’t come from nowhere: it’s your dream
He says, you dreamt it. So there’s no escape.
And now he’s squatting at a distance
To wait the taunt’s effect, paring his nails,
From time to time glancing up sideways at me,
A sly mad look. Yes, but he’s not mad either.
He’s gone too far, Charlie you’ve overdone it.
Something inside my head turns over.
I think I see how his taunt can be my staircase,
For if I brought all of this stuff inside
There must be an outside to bring it from.
Outside the castle, somewhere, there must be
A real Charles Manson, a real woman crying,
And laws I had no hand in, like gravity.
About midnight. Where earlier there had seemed
A shadowy arch projected on the bone-like stone,
I notice, fixing itself,
Easing itself in place even as I see it,
A staircase leading upward.
Is that rain
Far overhead, that drumming sound?
Boy, what a climb ahead.
At the bottom, looking back, I find
He is, for now at any rate, clean gone.
10
My coldness wakes me,
mine, and the kitchen chair’s.
How long have I sat here? I
went to sleep in bed.
Entering real rooms perhaps,
my own spectre, cold,
unshivering as a flight of
flint steps that leads nowhere,
in a ruin, where the wall
abruptly ends, and the steps too
and you stare down at the broken
slabs far below, at the ivy
glinting over bone-chips which must
at one time have been castle.
11
Down panic, down. The castle is still here,
And I am in the kitchen with a beer
Hearing the hurricane thin out to rain.
Got to relax if I’m to sleep again.
The castle is here, but not snug any more,
I’m loose, I rattle in its hollow core.
And as for that parade of rooms – shed, jail,
Cellar, each snapping at the next one’s tail –
That raced inside my skull for half the night,
I hope I’m through with that. I flick the light.
And though the dungeon will be there for good
(What laid those stones?) at leas
t I found I could,
Thrown down, escape by learning what to learn;
And hold it that held me.
Till I return.
And so to bed, in hopes that I won’t dream.
… …
I drift, doze, sleep. But toward dawn it does seem,
While I half-wake, too tired to turn my head,
That someone stirs behind me in the bed
Between two windows on an upper floor.
Is it a real man muttering? I’m not sure.
Though he does not seem phantom-like as yet,
Thick, heavily breathing, with a sweet faint sweat.
So humid, we lie sheetless – bare and close,
Facing apart, but leaning ass to ass.
And that mere contact is sufficient touch,
A hinge, it separates but not too much.
An air moves over us, as calm and cool
As the green water of a swimming pool.
What if this is the man I gave my key
Still, is a dream of that same man?
No, real.
Comes from outside the castle, I can feel.
The beauty’s in what is, not what may seem.
I turn. And even if he were a dream
– Thick sweating flesh against which I lie curled –
With dreams like this, Jack’s ready for the world.
1973–4
An Amorous Debate
Leather Kid and Fleshly
Birds whistled, all
Nature was doing something while
Leather Kid and Fleshly
lay on a bank and
gleamingly discoursed
like this:
‘You are so strong,’ she said, ‘such
a firm defence of hide against
the ripple of skin, it
excites me, all those
reserves suggested, though I do hope
that isn’t a prosthetic device
under your glove is it?’
‘Let’s fuck,’ he said.
She snuggled close, zipping
him open, unbuckling away
till he lay before her
a very
Mars unhorsed but
not doing much of
anything without his horse.
‘Strange,’ she said, ‘you
are still encased in your
defence. You have
a hard cock but there is
something like the
obduracy of leather
still in your countenance
and your skin, it is like
a hide under hide.’
Then she laid the fierce
pale river of her body
against his, squashing
her lily breasts against
his hard male nipples, inserting
her thighs between his till
he fired a bit and
embracing her with some feeling
moved his head to suck at
the nearest flesh to
his mouth which turned out
to be his own arm.
Then a tremor passed
through his body, the sheen
fell from him, he
became wholly sensitive
as if his body had
rolled back its own foreskin.
(He began to sweat.)
And they melted one
into the other
forthwith
like the way the Saône
joins the Rhône at Lyon.
Autobiography
The sniff of the real, that’s
what I’d want to get
how it felt
to sit on Parliament
Hill on a May evening
studying for exams skinny
seventeen dissatisfied
yet sniffing such
a potent air, smell of
grass in heat from
the day’s sun
I’d been walking through the damp
rich ways by the ponds
and now lay on the upper
grass with Lamartine’s poems
life seemed all
loss, and what was more
I’d lost whatever it was
before I’d even had it
a green dry prospect
distant babble of children
and beyond, distinct at
the end of the glow
St Paul’s like a stone thimble
longing so hard to make
inclusions that the longing
has become in memory
an inclusion
Yoko
All today I lie in the bottom of the wardrobe
feeling low but sometimes getting up
to moodily lumber across rooms
and lap from the toilet bowl, it is so sultry
and then I hear the noise of firecrackers again
all New York is jaggedy with firecrackers today
and I go back to the wardrobe gloomy
trying to void my mind of them.
At last deep in the stairwell I hear a tread,
it is him, my leader, my love.
I run to the door and listen to his approach.
Now I can smell him, what a good man he is,
I love it when he has the sweat of work on him,
as he enters I yodel with happiness,
I throw my body up against his, I try to lick his lips,
I care about him more than anything.
After we eat we go for a walk to the piers.
I leap into the standing warmth, I plunge into
the combination of old and new smells.
Here on a garbage can at the bottom, so interesting,
what sister or brother I wonder left this message I sniff.
I too piss there, and go on.
Here a hydrant there a pole
here’s a smell I left yesterday, well that’s disappointing
but I piss there anyway, and go on.
I investigate so much that in the end
it is for form’s sake only, only a drop comes out.
I investigate tar and rotten sandwiches, everything, and go on.
And here a dried old turd, so interesting
so old, so dry, yet so subtle and mellow.
I can place it finely, I really appreciate it,
a gold distant smell like packed autumn leaves in winter
reminding me how what is rich and fierce when excreted
becomes weathered and mild
but always interesting
and reminding me of what I have to do.
My leader looks on and expresses his approval.
I sniff it well and later I sniff the air well
a wind is meeting us after the close July day
rain is getting near too but first the wind.
Joy, joy,
being outside with you, active, investigating it all,
with bowels emptied, feeling your approval
and then running on, the big fleet Yoko,
my body in its excellent black coat never lets me down,
returning to you (as I always will, you know that)
and now
filling myself out with myself, no longer confused,
my panting pushing apart my black lips, but unmoving,
I stand with you braced against the wind.
from
THE PASSAGES OF JOY
(1982)
Expression
For several weeks I have been reading
the poetry of my juniors.
Mother doesn’t understand,
and they hate Daddy, the noted alcoholic.
They write with black irony
of breakdown, mental institution,
and suicide attempt, of which the experience
does not always seem first-hand.
It is ve
ry poetic poetry.
I go to the Art Museum
and find myself looking for something,
though I’m not sure what it is.
I reach it, I recognize it,
seeing it for the first time.
An ‘early Italian altar piece’.
The outlined Virgin, her lips
a strangely modern bow of red,
holds a doll-sized Child in her lap.
He has the knowing face of an adult,
and a precocious forelock curling
over the smooth baby forehead. She
is massive and almost symmetrical.
He does not wriggle, nor is he solemn.
The sight quenches, like water
after too much birthday cake.
Solidly there, mother and child
stare outward, two pairs of matching eyes
void of expression.
Sweet Things
He licks the last chocolate ice cream
from the scabbed corners of his mouth.
Sitting in the sun on a step
outside the laundromat,
mongoloid Don turns his crewcut head
and spies me coming down the street.
‘Hi!’ He says it with the mannered
enthusiasm of a fraternity brother.
‘Take me cross the street!?’ part
question part command. I hold
the sticky bunch of small fingers in mine
and we stumble across. They sell
peaches and pears over there,
the juice will dribble down your chin.
He turns before I leave him,
saying abruptly with the same
mixture of order and request
‘Gimme a quarter!?’ I
don’t give it, never have, not to him,
I wonder why not, and as I
walk on alone I realize
it’s because his unripened mind
never recognizes me, me
for myself, he only says hi