is not a vague province. There is a poetry
of the movements of cost, known or unknown .
The cost. The cost
and dazzled half sleepy eyes
Beautiful thing
of some trusting animal
makes a temple
of its place of savage slaughter
. . . . . .
Try another book. Break through
the dry air of the place
An insane god
—nights in a brothel .
And if I had .
What then?
—made brothels my home?
(Toulouse Lautrec
again. . )
Say I am the locus
where two women meet
One from the backwoods
a touch of the savage
and of T.B.
(a scar on the thigh)
The other — wanting,
from an old culture .
—and offer the same dish
different ways
Let the colors run .
Toulouse Lautrec witnessed
it: limbs relaxed
—all religions
have excluded it—
at ease, the tendons
untensed .
And so he recorded them
—a stone
thrust flint-blue
up through the sandstone
of which, broken,
but unbreakable
we build our roads .
—we stammer and elect .
Quit it. Quit this place. Go where all
mouths are rinsed: to the river for
an answer
for relief from “meaning”
A tornado approaches (We don’t have
tornados in these latitudes. What, at
Cherry Hill?)
It pours
over the roofs of Paterson, ripping,
twisting, tortuous :
a wooden shingle driven half its length
into an oak
(the wind must have steeled
it, held it hard on both sides)
The church
moved 8 inches through an arc, on its
foundations —
Hum, hum!
—the wind
where it poured its heavy plaits (the face
unshowing) from the rock’s edge —
where in the updraft,
summer days, the red-shouldered hawks ride
and play
(in the up-draft)
and the poor cotton-
spinner, over the roofs, preparing to dive
. looks down
Searching among books; the mind elsewhere
looking down .
Seeking.
II.
Fire burns; that is the first law.
When a wind fans it the flames
are carried abroad. Talk
fans the flames. They have
manoeuvred it so that to write
is a fire and not only of the blood.
The writing is nothing, the being
in a position to write (that’s
where they get you) is nine tenths
of the difficulty: seduction
or strong arm stuff. The writing
should be a relief,
relief from the conditions
which as we advance become — a fire,
a destroying fire. For the writing
is also an attack and means must be
found to scotch it — at the root
if possible. So that
to write, nine tenths of the problem
is to live. They see
to it, not by intellection but
by sub-intellection (to want to be
blind as a pretext for
saying, We’re so proud of you!
A wonderful gift! How do
you find the time for it in
your busy life? It must be a great
thing to have such a pastime.
But you were always a strange
boy. How’s your mother?)
—the cyclonic fury, the fire,
the leaden flood and finally
the cost—
Your father was such a nice man.
I remember him well .
Or, Geeze, Doc, I guess it’s all right
but what the hell does it mean?
With due ceremony a hut would be constructed consisting of twelve poles, each of a different species of wood. These they run into the ground, tie them together at the top, cover them entirely with bark, skins or blankets joined close together.
. Now here is where one sits who will address the Spirit of Fire, He-Who-Lies-With-His-Eyes-Bulging-In-The-Smoke-Hole . Twelve manittos attend him as subordinate deities, half representing animals and the others vegetables. A large oven is built in the house of sacrifice . heated with twelve large red-hot stones.
Meanwhile an old man throws twelve pipefuls of tobacco upon the hot stones, and directly another follows and pours water on them, which occasions a smoke or vapor almost powerful enough to suffocate the persons in the tent —
Ex qua re, quia sicubi fumus adscendit in altum; ita sacrificulus, duplicata altiori voce, Kännakä, kännakä! vel aliquando Hoo Hoo! faciem versus orientem convertit.
Whereupon as the smoke ascends on high, the sacrificer crying with a loud voice, Kännakä, Kännakä! or sometimes Hoo, Hoo! turns his face towards the east.
While some are silent during the sacrifice, certain make a ridiculous speech, while others imitate the cock, the squirrel and other animals, and make all kinds of noises. During the shouting two roast deer are distributed.
(breathing the books in)
the acrid fumes,
for what they could decipher .
warping the sense to detect the norm, to break
through the skull of custom
to a place hidden from
affection, women and offspring — an affection
for the burning .
It started in the car barns of the street railway company, in the paint shop. The men had been working all day refinishing old cars with the doors and windows kept closed because of the weather which was very cold. There was paint and especially varnish being used freely on all sides. Heaps of paint soaked rags had been thrown into the corners. One of the cars took fire in the night.
Breathless and in haste
the various night (of books) awakes! awakes
and begins (a second time) its song, pending the
obloquy of dawn .
It will not last forever
against the long sea, the long, long
sea, swept by winds, the “wine-dark sea” .
A cyclotron, a sifting .
And there,
in the tobacco hush: in a tepee they lie
huddled (a huddle of books)
antagonistic,
and dream of
gentleness—under the malignity of the hush
they cannot penetrate and cannot waken, to be again
active but remain—books
that is, men in hell,
their reign over the living ended
Clearly, they say. Oh clearly! Clearly?
What more clear than that of all things
nothing is so unclear, between man and
his writing, as to which is the man and
which the thing and of them both which
is the more to be valued
When discovered it was a small blaze, though it was hot but it looked as tho’ the firemen could handle it. But at dawn a wind came up and the flames (which they thought were subsiding) got suddenly out of control—sweeping the block and heading toward the business district. Before noon the whole city was doomed —
Beautiful thing
—the whole city doomed! And
the flames towering .
like a mouse, like
a red slipper, like
a star, a geranium
a cat’s tongue or —
thought, thought
that is a leaf, a
pebble, an old man
out of a story by
Pushkin .
Ah!
rotten beams tum-
bling,
. an old bottle
mauled
The night was made day by the flames, flames
on which he fed—grubbing the page
(the burning page)
like a worm—for enlightenment
Of which we drink and are drunk and in the end
are destroyed (as we feed). But the flames
are flames with a requirement, a belly of their
own that destroys—as there are fires that
smolder
smolder a lifetime and never burst
into flame
Papers
(consumed) scattered to the winds. Black.
The ink burned white, metal white. So be it.
Come overall beauty. Come soon. So be it.
A dust between the fingers. So be it.
Come tatterdemalion futility. Win through.
So be it. So be it.
An iron dog, eyes
aflame in a flame-filled corridor. A drunkenness
of flames. So be it. A bottle, mauled
by the flames, belly-bent with laughter:
yellow, green. So be it—of drunkenness
survived, in guffaws of flame. All fire afire!
So be it. Swallowing the fire. So be
the very fire. So be it. Chortling at flames
sucked in, a multiformity of laughter, a
flaming gravity surpassing the sobriety of
flames, a chastity of annihilation. Recreant,
calling it good. Calling the fire good.
So be it. The beauty of fire-blasted sand
that was glass, that was a bottle: unbottled.
Unabashed. So be it.
An old bottle, mauled by the fire
gets a new glaze, the glass warped
to a new distinction, reclaiming the
undefined. A hot stone, reached
by the tide, crackled over by fine
lines, the glaze unspoiled .
Annihilation ameliorated: Hottest
lips lifted till no shape but a vast
molt of the news flows. Drink
of the news, fluid to the breath.
Shouts its laughter, crying out—by
an investment of grace in the sand
—or stone: oasis water. The glass
splotched with concentric rainbows
of cold fire that the fire has bequeathed
there as it cools, its flame
defied—the flame that wrapped the glass
deflowered, reflowered there by
the flame: a second flame, surpassing
heat .
Hell’s fire. Fire. Sit your horny ass
down. What’s your game? Beat you
at your own game, Fire. Outlast you:
Poet Beats Fire at Its Own Game! The bottle!
the bottle! the bottle! the bottle! I
give you the bottle! What’s burning
now, Fire?
The Library?
Whirling flames, leaping
from house to house, building to building
carried by the wind
the Library is in their path
Beautiful thing! aflame .
a defiance of authority
—burnt Sappho’s poems, burned
by intention (or are they still hid
in the Vatican crypts?) :
beauty is
a defiance of authority :
for they were
unwrapped, fragment by fragment, from
outer mummy cases of papier mâché, inside
Egyptian sarcophagi .
flying papers
from old conflagrations, picked up
haphazard by the undertakers to make
moulds, layer after layer
for the dead
Beautiful thing
The anthology suppressed, revived even by
the dead, you who understand nothing
of this:
Dürer’s Melancholy, the gears
lying disrelated to the mathematics of the
machine
Useless.
Beautiful thing, your
vulgarity of beauty surpasses all their
perfections!
Vulgarity surpasses all perfections
—it leaps from a varnish pot and we see
it pass — in flames!
Beautiful thing
—intertwined with the fire. An identity
surmounting the world, its core — from which
we shrink squirting little hoses of
objection — and
I along with the rest, squirting
at the fire
Poet.
Are you there?
How shall I find examples? Some boy
who drove a bull-dozer through
the barrage at Iwo Jima and turned it
and drove back making a path for the others —
Voiceless, his
action gracing a flame
—but lost, lost
because there is no way to link
the syllables anew to imprison him
No twist of the flame
in his own image : he goes nameless
until a Niké shall live in his honor—
And for that, invention is lacking,
the words are lacking:
the waterfall of the
flames, a cataract reversed, shooting
upward (what difference does it make?)
Beautiful thing—that I
make a fool of myself, mourning the lack
of dedication
mourning its losses,
for you
Scarred, fire swept
(by a nameless fire, that is unknown even
to yourself) nameless,
drunk.
Rising, with a whirling motion, the person
passed into the flame, becomes the flame—
the flame taking over the person
—with a roar, an outcry
which none can afford (we die in silence, we
enjoy shamefacedly—in silence, hiding
our joy even from each other
keeping
a secret joy in the flame which we dare
not acknowledge)
a shriek of fire with
the upwind, whirling the room away—to reveal
the awesome sight of a tin roof (1880)
entire, half a block long, lifted like a
skirt, held by the fire—to rise at last,
almost with a sigh, rise and float, float
upon the flames as upon a sweet breeze,
and majestically drift off, riding the air,
sliding
upon the air, easily and away over
the frizzled elms that seem to bend under
it, clearing the railroad tracks to fall
upon the roofs beyond, red hot
darkening the rooms
(but not our minds)
While we stand with our mouths open,
shaking our heads and saying, My God, did
you ever see anything like that? As though
it were wholly out of our dreams, as
indeed it is, unparalleled in our most sanguine
dreams .
The person submerged
in wonder, the fire become the person .
But the pathetic library (that contained,
perhaps, not one volume of distinction)
must go down also —
BECAUSE IT IS SILENT. IT
IS SILENT BY DEFECT OF VIRTUE IN THAT IT
CONTAINS NOTHING OF YOU
That which s
hould be
rare, is trash; because it contains
nothing of you. They spit on you,
literally, but without you, nothing. The
library is muffled and dead
But you are the dream
of dead men
Beautiful Thing!
Let them explain you and you will be
the heart of the explanation. Nameless,
you will appear
Beautiful Thing
the flame’s lover —
The pitiful dead
cry back to us from the fire, cold in
the fire, crying out—wanting to be chaffed
and cherished
those who have written books
We read: not the flames
but the ruin left
by the conflagration
Not the enormous burning
but the dead (the books
remaining). Let us read .
and digest: the surface
glistens, only the surface.
Dig in—and you have
a nothing, surrounded by
a surface, an inverted
bell resounding, a
white-hot man become
a book, the emptiness of
a cavern resounding
Hi Kid
I know you just about to shot me. But honest Hon. I have really been to busy to write. Here there, and everywhere.
Bab I haven’t wrote since October so I will go back to Oct. 31, (Oh by the way are friend Madam B. Harris had a party the 31, but only high browns and yellow so I wasn’t invited)
But I pay that no mind, cause I really (pitched myself a ball) Went to the show early in the day, and then to the dance at the club, had me a (some kinded fine time) I was a feeling good believe me you. child.
But, child, Nov 1, I did crack you know yourself I been going full force on the (jug) will we went out (going to Newark) was raining, car slaped on brakes, car turned around a few times, rocked a bit and stopped facing the other way, from which we was going. Pal, believe me for the next few days. Honey, I couldn’t even pick up a half filled bucket of hot water for fear of scalding myself.
Now I don’t know which did it the jug or the car skidding but all I know is I was nowhere on nerves. But as they say alls well that ends well So Nov 15, I mean Kid I was so teaed that I didn’t know a from z I really mean I was teaed Since Nov 15 I Have been at it again ever since.
But now for the (Boys) How Raymond James People going with Sis but is in jail for giving Joseble Miller a baby.
Robert Blocker has taken his ring from Sally Mitchell
Little Sonny Jones is supposed to be the father of a girl’s baby on Liberty St.
Sally Mund Barbara H Jean C and Mary M are all supposed to be going to have kids Nelson W. a boy on 3rd St is father to 3 kids on their way.
. . . . . . . . .
P. S. Kid do you think in your next letter of your you could tell me how to get over there.
Tell Raymond I said I bubetut hatche isus cashutute Just a new way of talking kid. It is called (Tut) maybe you heard of it. Well here hoping you can read it