this flower of wood
in which we rose
out of the blue sheets
you thin as horizon
reaching for lamp or book
my shirt
hungry
for everything about the other
here we steal places to stay
as we steal time
never too proud to beg,
even if we never
see the other’s grin and star again
there is nothing resigned
in this briefness
we swallow complete
I will know everything here
this cup
balanced on my chest
my eye witnessing the petal
drop away from its order,
your arm
for ever
precarious in all our fury
*
Every place has its own wisdom. Come.
Time we talked about the sea,
the long waves
‘trapped around islands’
*
There are maps now whose portraits
have nothing to do with surface
Remember the angels, floating compasses
– Portolan atlases so complex
we looked down and never knew
which was earth which was sea?
The way birds the colour of prairie
confused by the sky
flew into the earth
(Remember those women
who claimed dead miners
the colour of the coal they drowned in)
The bathymetric maps startle.
Visions of the ocean floor
troughs, naked blue deserts,
Ganges Cone, the Mascarene Basin
so one is able now
in ideal situations
to plot a stroll
to new continents
‘doing the Berryman walk’
And beneath the sea
there are
these giant scratches
of pain
the markings of
some perfect animal
who has descended
burying itself
under the glossy
ballroom
or they have to do with ascending,
what we were, the earth creatures
longing for horizon.
I know one thing
our sure non-sliding
civilized feet
our small leather shoes
did not make them
(Ah you should be happy and write)
I want the passion
which puts your feet on the ceiling
this fist
to smash forward
take this silk
somehow Ah
out of the rooms of poetry
(Listen, solitude, X wrote,
is not an absolute,
it is just a resting place)
listen in the end
the pivot from angel to witch
depends on small things
this animal, the question
are you happy?
No I am not happy
lucky though
*
Rainy Night Talk
Here’s to
the overlooked
nipples of Spain
brown Madrid aureoles
kneecaps of Ohio girls
kneeling in the palms of men
waiting to be thrown high
into the clouds
of a football stadium
Here’s to
the long legged
woman from Kansas
whispering good morning at 5,
dazed
in balcony moonlight
All that drizzle the night before
walking walking through the rain
slam her car door
and wrote my hunger out, the balcony
like an entrance
to a city of suicides.
Here’s to the long legs
driving home
in more and more rain
weaving like a one-sided
lonely conversation
over the mountains
And what were you
carrying? in your head
that night Miss
Souri? Miss Kansas?
while I put my hands
sweating
on the cold
window
on the edge
of the trough of this city?
*
Breaking down after logical rules
couldn’t be the hit and run driver
I wanted Frank Sinatra
I was thinking blue pyjamas
I was brought up on movies and song!
I could write my suite of poems
for Bogart drunk
six months after the departure at Casablanca.
I see him lying under the fan
at the Slavyansky Bazar Hotel
and soon he will see the truth
the stupidity of his gesture
he’ll see it in the space
between the whirling metal
Stupid fucker
he says to himself, stupid fucker
and knocks the bottle
leaning against his bare stomach
onto the sheet. Gin stems
out like a four leaf clover.
I used to be lucky he says
I had white suits black friends
who played the piano …
and that
was a movie I saw just once.
What about Burt Lancaster
limping away at the end of Trapeze?
Born in 1943. And I saw that six times.
(I grew up knowing I could never fly)
That’s me. You. Educated
at the Bijou. And don’t ask me
about my interpretation of ‘Madame George.’
That’s a nine minute song
a two hour story
So how do we discuss
the education of our children?
Teach them to be romantics
to veer towards the sentimental?
Toss them into the air like Tony Curtis
and make ’em do the triple somersault
through all these complexities
and commandments?
*
Oh, Rilke, I want to sit down calm like you
or pace the castle, avoiding the path of the cook, Carlo,
who believes down to his turnip soup
that you speak in the voice of the devil.
I want the long lines my friend spoke of
that bamboo which sways muttering
like wooden teeth in the slim volume I have
with its childlike drawing of Duino Castle.
I have circled your book for years
like a wave combing
&n
bsp; the green hair of the sea
kept it with me, your name
a password in the alley.
I always wanted poetry to be that
but this solitude brings no wisdom
just two day old food in the fridge,
certain habits you would not approve of.
If I said all of your name now
it would be the movement
of the tide you soared over
so your private angel
could become part of a map.
I am too often busy with things
I wish to get away from, and I want
the line to move slowly now, slowly
like a careful drunk across the street
no cars in the vicinity
but in his fearful imagination.
How can I link your flowing name
to geckoes or a slice of octopus?
Though there are Rainier beer cans,
magically, on the windowsill.
And still your lovely letters
January 1912 near Trieste.
The car you were driven in
‘at a snail’s pace’
through Provence. Wanting
‘to go into chrysalis …
to live by the heart and nothing else.’
Or your guilt—
‘I howl at the moon
with all my heart
and put the blame
on the dogs’
I can see you sitting down
the suspicious cook asleep
so it is just you
and the machinery of the night
that foul beast that sucks and drains
leaping over us sweeping our determination
away with its tail. Us and the coffee,
all the small charms we invade it with.
As at midnight we remember the colour
of the dogwood flower growing
like a woman’s sex outside the window.
I wanted poetry to be walnuts
in their green cases
but now it is the sea
and we let it drown us,
and we fly to it released
by giant catapults
of pain loneliness deceit and vanity
Rock Bottom
O lady hear me. I have no
other
voice left.
ROBERT CREELEY
*
2 a.m. The moonlight
in the kitchen
Will this be
testamentum porcelli?
Unblemished art and truth
whole hog the pig’s testament
what I know of passion
having written of it
seen my dog shiver
with love and disappear
crazy into trees
I want
the woman whose face
I could not believe in the moonlight
her mouth forever as horizon
and both of us
grim with situation
now
suddenly
we reside
near the delicate
heart
of Billie Holiday
*
You said, this
doesn’t happen so quick
I must remind you of someone
No,
though I am seduced
by this light, and
frantic arguments
on the porch,
I ain’t subtle
you run rings
round me
but this quietness
white dress long legs
arguing your body
away from me
and I with all the hunger
I didn’t know I had
*
(Inner Tube)
On the warm July river
head back
upside down river
for a roof
slowly paddling
towards an estuary between trees
there’s a dog
learning to swim near me
friends on shore
my head
dips
back to the eyebrow
I’m the prow
on an ancient vessel,
this afternoon
I’m going down to Peru
soul between my teeth
a blue heron
with its awkward
broken backed flap
upside down
one of us is wrong
he
in his blue grey thud
thinking he knows
the blue way
out of here
or me
*
(‘The space in which we have dissolved – does it taste of us?’)
Summer night came out of the water
climbed into my car and drove home
got out of the car still wet towel round me
opened the gate and walked to the house
Disintegration of the spirit
no stars
leaf being eaten by moonlight
The small creatures who are blind
who travel with the aid
of petite white horns
take over the world
Sound of a moth
The screen door in its suspicion
allows nothing in, as I allow nothing in.
The raspberries my son gave me
wild, cold out of the fridge, a few I put
in my mouth, some in my shirt pocket
and forgot
I sit here
in a half dark kitchen
the stain at my heart
caused by this gift
*
(Saturday)
The three trunks
of the walnut
the ceremonial ducks
who limbo under the fence
and creep up the lawn
Apple tree Blue and white house
I know this is beautiful
I wished to write today
about small things
that might persuade me
out of my want
The lines I read
about ‘cowardice’ and ‘loyalty’
I don’t know
if this is drowning
or coming up for air
At night
I give you my hand
like a corpse
out of the water
*
(Insomnia)
Night and its forces
step through the picket gate
from the blue bush
to the kitchen
Everywhere it moves
and we cannot sleep we cannot sleep
we damn the missionaries
their morals thin as stars
we find ourselves
within the black
circus of the fly
all night long
his sandpaper
tabasco leg
The dog sleepwalks
into the cupboard
into the garden and heart attacks
hello
I’ve had a dog dream
wake up and cannot find
my long ears
Nicotine caffeine
hungry bodies
could put us to sleep
but nothing puts us to sleep
*
How many windows have I broken?
And doors and lamps, and last month
a tumbler I smashed into a desk
then stood over the sink
digging out splinters
with an awkward left hand
I have beaten my head with stones
pieces of fence
tried to tear out my eyes
these are not exaggerations
they were acts when words failed
the way surgeons
hammer hearts gone still
now this
small parallel pain
in my finger
the invisible thing inside
circling
glass
on its voyage out
to the heart
*
(After Che-King, 11th Century BC)
If you love me and think only of me
lift your robe and ford the river Chen
catch
‘the floating world’
8.52 from Chicago
lift your skirt
through customs,
kiss me in the parking lot
*
(‘La Belle Romance’)