its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
walking the size of specks of wool—
Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,
sun go down over New Jersey where I was born
& Paterson where I played with ants—
my later loves on 15th Street,
my greater loves of Lower East Side,
my once fabulous amours in the Bronx
faraway—
paths crossing in these hidden streets,
my history summed up, my absences
and ecstasies in Harlem—
—sun shining down on all I own
in one eyeblink to the horizon
in my last eternity—
matter is water.
Sad,
I take the elevator and go
down, pondering,
and walk on the pavements staring into all man’s
plateglass, faces,
questioning after who loves,
and stop, bemused
in front of an automobile shopwindow
standing lost in calm thought,
traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me
waiting for a moment when …
Time to go home & cook supper & listen to
the romantic war news on the radio
… all movement stops
& I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,
tenderness flowing thru the buildings,
my fingertips touching reality’s face,
my own face streaked with tears in the mirror
of some window—at dusk—
where I have no desire—
for bonbons—or to own the dresses or Japanese
lampshades of intellection—
Confused by the spectacle around me,
Man struggling up the street
with packages, newspapers,
ties, beautiful suits
toward his desire
Man, woman, streaming over the pavements
red lights clocking hurried watches &
movements at the curb—
And all these streets leading
so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
by avenues
stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
thru such halting traffic
screaming cars and engines
so painfully to this
countryside, this graveyard
this stillness
on deathbed or mountain
once seen
never regained or desired
in the mind to come
where all Manhattan that I’ve seen must disappear.
New York, October 1958
Ignu
On top of that if you know me I pronounce you an ignu
Ignu knows nothing of the world
a great ignoramus in factories though he may own or inspire them or even be production manager
Ignu has knowledge of the angel indeed ignu is angel in comical form
W. C. Fields Harpo Marx ignus Whitman an ignu
Rimbaud a natural ignu in his boy pants
The ignu may be queer though like not kind ignu blows archangels for the strange thrill
a gnostic women love him Christ overflowed with trembling semen for many a dead aunt
He’s a great cocksman most beautiful girls are worshipped by ignu
Hollywood dolls or lone Marys of Idaho long-legged publicity women and secret housewives
have known ignu in another lifetime and remember their lover
Husbands also are secretly tender to ignu their buddy
oldtime friendship can do anything cuckold bugger drunk trembling and happy
Ignu lives only once and eternally and knows it
he sleeps in everybody’s bed everyone’s lonesome for ignu ignu knew solitude early
So ignu’s a primitive of cock and mind
equally the ignu has written liverish tomes personal metaphysics abstract
images that scratch the moon ‘lightningflash-flintspark’ naked lunch fried shoes adios king
The shadow of the angel is waving in the opposite direction
dawn of intelligence turns the telephones into strange animals
he attacks the rose garden with his mystical shears snip snip snip
Ignu has painted Park Avenue with his own long melancholy
and ignu giggles in a hard chair over tea in Paris bald in his decaying room a black hotel
Ignu with his wild mop walks by Colosseum weeping
he plucks a clover from Keats’ grave & Shelley’s a blade of grass
knew Coleridge they had slow hung-up talks at midnight over mahogany tables in London
sidestreet rooms in wintertime rain outside fog the cabman blows his hand
Charles Dickens is born ignu hears the wail of the babe
Ignu goofs nights under bridges and laughs at battleships
ignu is a battleship without guns in the North Sea lost O the flowerness of the moment
he knows geography he was there before he’ll get out and die already
reborn a bearded humming Jew of Arabian mournful jokes
man with a star on his forehead and halo over his cranium
listening to music musing happy at the fall of a leaf the moonlight of immortality in his hair
table-hopping most elegant comrade of all most delicate mannered in the Sufi court
he wasn’t even there at all
wearing zodiacal blue sleeves and the long peaked conehat of a magician
harkening to the silence of a well at midnight under a red star
in the lobby of Rockefeller Center attentive courteous bare-eyed enthusiastic with or without pants
he listens to jazz as if he were a negro afflicted with jewish melancholy and white divinity
Ignu’s a natural you can see it when he pays the cabfare abstracted
pulling off the money from an impossible saintly roll
or counting his disappearing pennies to give to the strange busdriver whom he admires
Ignu has sought you out he’s the seeker of God
and God breaks down the world for him every ten years
he sees lightning flash in empty daylight when the sky is blue
he hears Blake’s disembodied Voice recite the Sunflower in a room in Harlem
No woe on him surrounded by 700 thousand mad scholars moths fly out of his sleeve
He wants to die give up go mad break through into Eternity
live on and teach an aged saint or break down to an eyebrow clown
All ignus know each other in a moment’s talk and measure each other up at once
as lifetime friends romantic winks and giggles across continents
sad moment paying the cab goodbye and speeding away uptown
One or two grim ignus in the pack
one laughing monk in dungarees
one delighted by cracking his eggs in an egg cup
one chews gum to music all night long rock and roll
one anthropologist cuckoo in the Petén rainforest
one sits in jail all year and bets karmaic racetrack
one chases girls down East Broadway into the horror movie
one pulls out withered grapes and rotten onions from his pants
one has a nannygoat under his bed to amuse visitors plasters the wall with his crap
collects scorpions whiskies skies etc. would steal the moon if he could find it
That would set fire to America but none of these make ignu
it’s the soul that makes the style the tender firecracker of his thought
the amity of letters from strange cities to old friends
and the new radiance of morning on a foreign bed
A comedy of personal being his grubby divinity
Eliot probably an ignu one of the few who’s funny when he eats
Williams of Paterson a dying American ignu
Burroughs a pur
est ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger
pinkie chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts
his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars
Céline himself an old ignu over prose
I saw him in Paris dirty old gentleman of ratty talk
with longhaired cough three wormy sweaters round his neck
brown mould under historic fingernails
pure genius his giving morphine all night to 1400 passengers on a sinking ship
‘because they were all getting emotional’
Who’s amazing you is ignu communicate with me
by mail post telegraph phone street accusation or scratching at my window
and send me a true sign I’ll reply special delivery
DEATH IS A LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT
Knowledge born of stamps words coins pricks jails seasons sweet ambition laughing gas
history with a gold halo photographs of the sea painting a celestial din in the
bright window
one eye in a black cloud
and the lone vulture on a sand plain seen from the window of a Turkish bus
It must be a trick. Two diamonds in the hand one Poetry one Charity
proves we have dreamed and the long sword of intelligence
over which I constantly stumble like my pants at the age six—embarrassed.
New York, November 1958
Battleship Newsreel
I was high on tea in my fo’c’sle near the forepeak hatch listening to the stars envisioning the kamikazes flapping and turning in the soiled clouds ackack burst into fire a vast hole ripped out of the bow like a burning lily we dumped our oilcans of nitroglycerine among the waving octopi dull thud and boom of thunder undersea the cough of the tubercular machinegunner
flames in the hold among the cans of ether the roar of battleships far away
rolling in the sea like whales surrounded by dying ants the screams the captain mad
Suddenly a golden light came over the ocean and grew large the radiance entered the sky
a deathly chill and heaviness entered my body I could scarce lift my eye
and the ship grew sheathed in light like an overexposed photograph fading in the brain.
New York, 1959
V
KADDISH AND
RELATED POEMS
(1959–1960)
Kaddish
For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894–1956
I
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer—
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn—
Dreaming back thru life, Your time—and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,
the final moment—the flower burning in the Day—and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed—
like a poem in the dark—escaped back to Oblivion—
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream, trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all—longing or inevitability?—while it lasts, a Vision—anything more?
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,
Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shouldering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant—and the sky above—an old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the south, to—as I walk toward the Lower East Side —where you walked 50 years ago, little girl—from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock—
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?—toward Newark—
toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards—
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window—and the great Key lays its head of light on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk—in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater—and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now—Strange to have moved thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstoops doors and dark boys on the street, fire escapes old as you
—Tho you’re not old now, that’s left here with me—
Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe—and I guess that dies with us—enough to cancel all that comes—What came is gone forever every time—
That’s good! That leaves it open for no regret—no fear radiators, lacklove, torture even toothache in the end—
Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul—and the lamb, the soul, in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change’s fierce hunger—hair and teeth—and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin, braintricked Implacability.
Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you’re out, Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your century, done with God, done with the path thru it—Done with yourself at last—Pure —Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all—before the world—
There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more fear of Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts, loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands—
No more of sister Elanor,—she gone before you—we kept it secret—you
killed her—or she killed herself to bear with you—an arthritic heart
—But Death’s killed you both—No matter—
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and
weeks—forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth,
or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin’s at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar —by standing room with Elanor & Max—watching also the Capitalists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL’s hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead, now, and that long hair in the grave—lucky to have husbands later—
You made it—I came too—Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer—or kill —later perhaps—soon he will think—)
And it’s the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now —tho not you
I didn’t foresee what you felt—what more hideous gape of bad mouth came first—to you—and were you prepared?
To go where? In that Dark—that—in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with you?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon—Deaths-head with Halo? can you believe it?
Is
it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence, than none ever was?
Nothing beyond what we have—what you had—that so pitiful—yet Triumph,
to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower—fed to the ground—but mad, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe, shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth wrapped, sore—freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.
No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the knife—lost
Cut down by an idiot Snowman’s icy—even in the Spring—strange ghost thought—some Death—Sharp icicle in his hand—crowned with old
roses—a dog for his eyes—cock of a sweatshop—heart of electric irons.
All the accumulations of life, that wear us out—clocks, bodies, consciousness, shoes, breasts—begotten sons—your Communism—‘Paranoia’ into hospitals.
You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is Elanor happy?
Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over midnight Accountings, not sure. His life passes—as he sees—and what does he doubt now? Still dream of making money, or that might have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Immortality, Naomi?
I’ll see him soon. Now I’ve got to cut through—to talk to you—as I didn’t when you had a mouth.
Forever. And we’re bound for that, Forever—like Emily Dickinson’s horses —headed to the End.
They know the way—These Steeds—run faster than we think—it’s our own life they cross—and take with them.
Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed—Ass and face done with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, balmed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I’m hymnless, I’m Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity—
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing—to praise Thee—But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping —page beyond Psalm—Last change of mine and Naomi—to God’s perfect Darkness—Death, stay thy phantoms!