Collected Poems 1947-1997

  Times Square & Mexico—

  In my twenties I would’ve enjoyed running around these

  green woods naked.

  In my twenties I would’ve enjoyed making love naked

  by these brooks.

  Who’s the enemy, year after year?

  War after war, who’s the enemy?

  What’s the weapon, battle after battle?

  What’s the news, defeat after defeat?

  What’s the picture, decade after decade?

  Television shows blood,

  print broken arms burning skin photographs,

  wounded bodies revealed on the screen

  Cut Sound out of television you won’t tell who’s Victim

  Cut Language off the Visual you’ll never know

  Who’s Aggressor—

  cut commentary from Newscast

  you’ll see a mass of madmen at murder.

  Chicago train soldiers chatted over beer

  They, too, vowed to fight the Cottenpickin Communists

  and give their own bodies to the fray.

  Where’ve they learnt the lesson? Grammarschool

  taught ’em Newspaper Language?

  D’they buy it at Safeway with Reader’s Digest?

  “Reducing the Unreal to Unreality, and causing the one

  real Self to shine, the Guru …”

  1966 trains were crowded with soldiers.

  “… the Divine Eye, the eye that is pure Consciousness

  which has no visions. Nothing that is seen is real.”

  Passing tollgate,

  regatta of yachts on river hazed

  bend at Reading, giant smokestacks, watertowers

  feed elevators—

  “Seeing objects and conceiving God in them are mental processes, but that is not seeing God, because He is within.

  “Who am I? … You’re in truth a pure spirit but you identify it with a body …”

  The war is Appearances, this poetry Appearances

  … measured thru Newspapers

  All Phantoms of Sound

  All landscapes have become Phantom—

  giant New York ahead’ll perish with my mind.

  “understand that the Self is not a Void”

  not this, not that,

  Not my anger, not War Vietnam

  Maha Yoga a phantom

  Blue car swerves close to the bus

  —not the Self.

  Ramana Maharshi, whittle myself a walkingstick,

  waterspray irrigating the fields

  That’s not the Self—

  hard-on spring in loins

  rocking in highway chair,

  poignant flesh spasm not it Self,

  body’s speaking there,

  & feeling, that’s not Self

  Who says No, says Yes—not Self.

  Phelps Dodge’s giant white building

  highway side, not Self.

  Who? Who? both asleep & awake

  closes his eyes?

  Who opens his eyes to Sweden?

  You happy, Lady, writing yr

  checks on Howard Johnson’s counter?

  Mind wanders. Sleep, cough & sweat…

  Mannahatta’s

  tunnel-door cobbled for traffic,

  trucks into that mouth

  MAKE NO IMAGE

  Mohammedans say

  Jews have no painting

  Buddha’s Nameless

  Alone is Alone,

  all screaming of soldiers

  crying on wars

  speech politics massing armies

  is false-feigning show—

  Calm senses, seek self, forget

  thine own adjurations

  Who are you?

  to mass world armies in planet war?

  McGraw-Hill building green grown old, car fumes &

  Manhattan tattered, summer heat,

  sweltering noon’s odd patina

  on city walls,

  Greyhound exhaust terminal,

  trip begun,

  taxi-honk toward East River where

  Peter waits working

  July 22–23, 1966

  City Midnight Junk Strains

  for Frank O’Hara

  Switch on lights yellow as the sun

  in the bedroom …

  The gaudy poet dead Frank O’Hara’s bones

  under cemetery grass

  An emptiness at 8 P.M. in the Cedar Bar

  Throngs of drunken

  guys talking about paint

  & lofts, and Pennsylvania youth.

  Kline attacked by his heart

  & chattering Frank

  stopped forever—

  Faithful drunken adorers, mourn.

  The busfare’s a nickel more

  past his old apartment 9th Street by the park.

  Delicate Peter loved his praise,

  I wait for the things he says

  about me—

  Did he think me an Angel

  as angel I am still talking into earth’s microphone willy nilly

  —to come back as words ghostly hued

  by early death

  but written so bodied

  mature in another decade.

  Chatty prophet

  of yr own loves, personal

  memory feeling fellow

  Poet of building-glass

  I see you walking you said with your tie

  flopped over your shoulder in the wind down 5th Ave

  under the handsome breasted workmen

  on their scaffolds ascending Time

  & washing the windows of Life

  —off to a date with martinis & a blond

  beloved poet far from home

  —with thee and Thy sacred Metropolis

  in the enormous bliss of a long afternoon

  where death is the shadow

  cast by Rockefeller Center

  over your intimate street.

  Who were you, black suited, hurrying to meet,

  Unsatisfied one?

  Unmistakable,

  Darling date

  for the charming solitary young poet with a big cock

  who could fuck you all night long

  till you never came,

  trying your torture on his obliging fond body

  eager to satisfy god’s whim that made you

  Innocent, as you are.

  I tried your boys and found them ready

  sweet and amiable

  collected gentlemen

  with large sofa apartments

  lonesome to please for pure language;

  and you mixed with money

  because you knew enough language to be rich

  if you wanted your walls to be empty—

  Deep philosophical terms dear Edwin Denby serious as Herbert Read

  with silvery hair announcing your dead gift

  to the grave crowd whose historic op art frisson was

  the new sculpture your big blue wounded body made in the Universe

  when you went away to Fire Island for the weekend

  tipsy with a family of decade-olden friends

  Peter stares out the window at robbers

  the Lower East Side distracted in Amphetamine

  I stare into my head & look for your / broken roman nose

  your wet mouth-smell of martinis

  & a big artistic tipsy kiss.

  40’s only half a life to have filled

  with so many fine parties and evenings’

  interesting drinks together with one

  faded friend or new

  understanding social cat…

  I want to be there in your garden party in the clouds

  all of us naked

  strumming our harps and reading each other new poetry

  in the boring celestial

  Friendship Committee Museum.

  You’re in a bad mood?

  Take an Aspirin.

  In the Dumps?

  I’m falling asleep


  safe in your thoughtful arms.

  Someone uncontrolled by History would have to own Heaven,

  on earth as it is.

  I hope you satisfied your childhood love

  Your puberty fantasy your sailor punishment on your knees

  your mouth-suck

  Elegant insistency

  on the honking self-prophetic Personal

  as Curator of funny emotions to the mob,

  Trembling One, whenever possible. I see New York thru your eyes

  and hear of one funeral a year nowadays—

  from Billie Holiday’s time

  appreciated more and more

  a common ear

  for our deep gossip.

  July 29, 1966

  A Vow

  I will haunt these States

  with beard bald head

  eyes staring out plane window,

  hair hanging in Greyhound bus midnight

  leaning over taxicab seat to admonish

  an angry cursing driver

  hand lifted to calm

  his outraged vehicle

  that I pass with the Green Light of common law.

  Common Sense, Common law, common tenderness

  & common tranquillity

  our means in America to control the money munching

  war machine, bright lit industry

  everywhere digesting forests & excreting soft pyramids

  of newsprint, Redwood and Ponderosa patriarchs

  silent in Meditation murdered & regurgitated as smoke,

  sawdust, screaming ceilings of Soap Opera,

  thick dead Lifes, slick Advertisements

  for Gubernatorial big guns

  burping Napalm on palm rice tropic greenery.

  Dynamite in forests,

  boughs fly slow motion

  thunder down ravine,

  Helicopters roar over National Park, Mekong Swamp,

  Dynamite fire blasts thru Model Villages,

  Violence screams at Police, Mayors get mad over radio,

  Drop the Bomb on Niggers!

  drop Fire on the gook China

  Frankenstein Dragon

  waving its tail over Bayonne’s domed Aluminum oil reservoir!

  I’ll haunt these States all year

  gazing bleakly out train windows, blue airfield

  red TV network on evening plains,

  decoding radar Provincial editorial paper message,

  deciphering Iron Pipe laborers’ curses as

  clanging hammers they raise steamshovel claws

  over Puerto Rican agony lawyers’ screams in slums.

  October 11, 1966

  Autumn Gold: New England Fall

  Auto Poetry to Hanover, New Hampshire

  Coughing in the Morning

  Waking with a steam beast, city destroyed

  Pile drivers pounding down in rubble,

  Red smokestacks pouring chemical

  into Manhattan’s Nostrils …

  “All Aboard”

  Rust colored cliffs bulking over superhighway

  to New Haven,

  Rouged with Autumny leaves, october smoke,

  country liquor bells on the Radio—

  Eat Meat and your a beast

  Smoke Nicotine & your meat’ll multiply

  with tiny monsters of cancer,

  Make Money & yr mind be lost in a million green papers,

  —Smell burning rubber by the steamshovel—

  Mammals with planetary vision & long noses,

  riding a green small Volkswagen up three lane

  concrete road

  past the graveyard

  dotted w/tiny american flags waved in breeze,

  Washington Avenue:

  Sampans battling in waters off Mekong Delta

  Cuban politicians in Moscow, analyzing China—

  Yellow leaves in the wood,

  Millions of redness,

  gray skies over sandstone

  outcroppings along the road—

  cows by yellow corn,

  wheel-whine on granite,

  white houseroofs, Connecticut woods

  hanging under clouds—

  Autumn again, you wouldn’t know in the city

  Gotta come out in a car see the birds

  flock by the yellow bush—

  In Autumn, in autumn, this part of the planet’s

  famous for red leaves—

  Difficult for Man on earth to ’scape the snares of delusion—

  All wrong, the thought process screamed at

  from Infancy,

  The Self built with myriad thoughts

  from football to I Am That I Am,

  Difficult to stop breathing factory smoke,

  Difficult to step out of clothes,

  hard to forget the green parka—

  Trees scream & drop

  bright Leaves,

  Yea Trees scream & drop bright leaves,

  Difficult to get out of bed in the morning

  in the slums—

  Even sex happiness a long drawn-out scheme

  To keep the mind moving—

  Big gray truck rolling down highway

  to unload wares—

  Bony white branches of birch relieved of their burden

  —overpass, overpass, overpass

  crossing the road, more traffic

  between the cities,

  More sex carried near and far—

  Blinking tail lights

  To the Veterans hospital where we can all collapse,

  Forget Pleasure and Ambition,

  be tranquil and let leaves

  blush, turned on

  by the lightningbolt doctrine that rings

  telephones

  interrupting my pleasurable humiliating dream

  in the locker room

  last nite?—

  Weeping Willow, what’s your catastrophe?

  Red Red oak, oh, what’s your worry?

  Hairy Mammal whaddya want,

  What more than a little graveyard

  near the lake by airport road,

  Electric towers marching to Hartford,

  Buildingtops spiked in sky,

  asphalt factory cloverleafs spread over meadows

  Smoke thru wires, Connecticut River concrete wall’d

  past city central gastanks, glass boat bldgs,

  downtown, ten blocks square,

  North, North on the highway, soon outa town,

  green fields.

  The body’s a big beast,

  The mind gets confused:

  I thought I was my body the last 4 years,

  and everytime I had a headache, God dealt me

  Ace of Spades—

  I thought I was mind-consciousness 10 yrs before that,

  and everytime I went to the Dentist the Kosmos disappeared,

  Now I don’t know who I am—

  I wake up in the morning surrounded

  by meat and wires,

  pile drivers crashing thru the bedroom floor,

  War images rayed thru Television apartments,

  Machine chaos on Earth,

  Too many bodies, mouths bleeding on every Continent,

  my own wall plaster cracked,

  What kind of prophecy

  for this Nation

  Of Autumn leaves,

  for those children in High School, green

  woolen jackets

  chasing football up & down field—

  North of Long Meadow, Massachusetts

  Shafts of Sunlight

  Thru yellow millions,

  blue light thru clouds,

  President Johnson in a plane toward Hawaii,

  Fighter Escort above & below

  air roaring—

  Radiostatic electric crackle from the

  center of communications:

  I broadcast thru Time,

  He, with all his wires & wireless,

  only an Instant—

  Up Main Street
Northampton,

  houses gabled sunny afternoon,

  Ivy library porch—

  Big fat pants, workshirt filled w/leaves,

  painted pumpkinshead sitting Roof Corner,

  —or hanging from frontyard tree country road—

  Tape Machines, cigarettes, cinema, images,

  Two Billion Hamburgers, Cognitive Thought,

  Radiomusic, car itself,

  this thoughtful Poet—

  Interruption of brightly colored Autumn Afternoon,

  clouds passed away—

  Sky blue as a roadsign,

  but language intervenes.

  on route 9 going North—

  “Then Die, my verse” Mayakovsky yelled

  Die like the rusty cars

  piled up in the meadow—

  Entering Whately,

  Senses amazed on the hills,

  bright vegetable populations

  hueing rocks nameless yellow,

  veils of bright Maya over New England,

  Veil of Autumn leaves laid over the Land,

  Transparent blue veil over senses,

  Language in the sky—

  And in the city, brick veils,

  curtains of windows,

  Wall Street’s stage drops,

  Honkytonk scenery—

  or slum-building wall scrawled

  “Bourgeois Elements must go”—

  All the cows gathered to the feed truck in the middle of the pasture,

  shaking their tails, hungry for the yellow Fitten Ration

  that fills the belly

  and makes the eyes shine

  & mouth go Mooooo.

  Then they lie down in the hollow green meadow to die—

  In old Deerfield, Indian Tribes & Quakers

  have come & tried

  To conquer Maya-Time—

  Thanksgiving pumpkins

  remain by the highway,

  signaling yearly Magic

  plump from the ground.

  Big leaves hang and hide the porch,

  & babies scatter by the red lights

  of the bridge at Greenfield.

  The green Eagle on a granite pillar—

  sign pointing route 2A The Mohawk Trail,

  Federal Street apothecary shop & graveyard thru which

  highschool athletes

  tramp this afternoon—

  Gold gold red gold yellow gold older than painted cities,

  Gold over Connecticut River cliffs

  Gold by Iron railroad,

  gold running down riverbank,

  Gold in eye, gold on hills,

  golden trees surrounding the barn—

  Silent tiny golden hills, Maya-Joy in Autumn

  Speeding 70 MPH.

  October 17, 1966

  Done, Finished with the Biggest Cock

  Done, finished, with the biggest cock you ever saw.

  3 A.M., living room filled with quiet yellow electric,