The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly

  It used to be life fell apart every

  so often, every year or two, now every morning.

  Can you imagine? Once they were professors.

  They told who danced and who needed pity.

  They had skin. They didn’t have ropes

  of muscle for a face. But the dot became a tunnel,

  the tunnel a journey, the journey a reason and a life.

  We must start to forgive and not stop

  for a single minute, maybe not even to love.

  We must look down

  out of this age spent telling stories

  about each tree, each rock, each

  person who is a bird, or a fish, or walks in their fur,

  and see our brothers and sisters.

  There is no such thing as danger,

  no such thing as a false move,

  but they are afraid;

  the stores have everything

  and everything salutes

  its own reflection—shiny, shiny

  life that we call

  shelf life,

  but they are afraid;

  the eight-ball is a meatball in whiskey heaven; the motorcycles

  stand out front in the sun like spears,

  and they are afraid.

  Killed in the War I Didn’t Go To

  I have seen you walking out

  of blue smoke…

  like dreamed streetlights,

  like parlor fans

  in a dream, the palm trees burn…

  and seen you favored by a wet wind

  oh where was it, in Ben Suc, a village that is no more,

  and I have seen you

  halfway there, bandaged,

  reaching a fingertip toward a cigaret,

  ambushed by the NVA

  at the battle of LZ X-ray,

  bent and weeping over your failures

  or floating like an advertisement

  in a hole of praise

  or holding your ears and turning away from the lion

  flying out of a mortar,

  and on the outskirts of town I’ve seen a man

  standing at the door of the very last house…

  He won’t get

  there in time. Time will get there in him.

  Whatever discovery he is about to make,

  something about sorrow and loneliness it would stand

  to reason, about how our necks

  burn fiercely because we keep stepping on our chains,

  he goes on

  to make it.

  He goes on

  to see it arriving on the steel point of the moment

  and see it passing with the ponderous

  drift of roulette,

  he goes on to see what

  a translucence, only a foretelling,

  is something as stationary as a house…

  I have slept, and dreamed all the things you might have done,

  I have gone out walking,

  abysmally sad and utterly alone

  because these lives aren’t like the lives in movies

  and nothing is expressed—nothing’s pressed out,

  I tell you!—of our wordless darkness in our art,

  have walked with the crickets singing

  and the faucets going on and off and the telephones ringing

  in the mysterious houses,

  and I’ve gone on

  past the tracks and the sheds and the wharf

  to the place with the waitress and the empty heads

  and a few late truckers at the counter like piled stones,

  and I’ve shouted for you and thought

  how like your name this house is

  with me outside of it and nobody talking

  and pollen all over my hands

  and fishes in my eyes and my feet moving through the world.

  The Heavens

  From mind to mind

  I am acquainted with the struggles

  of these stars. The very same

  chemistry wages itself minutely

  in my person.

  It is all one intolerable war.

  I don’t care if we’re fugitives,

  we are ceaselessly exalted, rising

  like the drowned out of our shirts…

  Street Scene

  Everything is water:

  the pigeon trying to work his mutilated

  wing; the crowd that draws a brand of peace

  from his circular dance before the theater;

  the woman in an aluminum hat who rises

  out of the sidewalk on an elevator softly

  through metal doors that part above her like water—

  telling myself that no one can walk on the water,

  nobody can take these little ones softly

  enough against his chest. The flood rises

  and the pigeon shows us how to die before the theater,

  where terror is only the aftermath of peace

  full of sharks, the mutilated

  surface over the falling deep, only water.

  The Spectacle

  In every house

  a cigaret burns,

  an ash descends.

  In the ludicrous breeze

  of an electric fan

  the papers talk,

  and little vague

  things float over

  the floor. When

  you turn the TV

  on it says, “Killed

  by FBI sharpshooters,”

  it says, “Years he was with

  the organization.”

  I have a friend

  on the fourth tier

  of a parking ramp.

  To one ear he holds

  a revolver, to the

  other a telephone. TV

  cameras move

  this way and that way

  on the neighboring roofs.

  We all know this guy,

  he’s one of us,

  you can see him

  changing his position

  slowly on the news.

  When you turn the TV on

  it says, “Everything I owned,

  all I loved, in 1947,”

  then there’s a preacher

  saying that on the bluffs

  of Hell the shadows

  are terrible—there

  when a spirit turns

  from the firelight

  he sees the shadow

  of a man murdering

  another man, and knows

  the shadow is his.

  We’re all waiting

  for our friend’s

  head to explode.

  We must go down

  to see him plainly,

  stand still on the street

  knowing his name

  as the heat peels a film

  from our eyes and

  we see, finally,

  the colors of neon,

  the fluorescence

  of gas stations ticking

  like lightning,

  the pools of light,

  the sirens moving

  through water,

  everything

  locked in a kind

  of amber. But we

  who appear to have

  escaped from a fire

  are still burning.

  When the cameras turn

  to look at us

  we feel so invisible,

  we do not feel seen,

  calling him home

  with a star

  in every voice,

  calling his name,

  stranger,

  oh! stranger.

  Someone They Aren’t

  Of all the movies that have made me sweat

  The ones that make me most uncomfortable

  Are those in which a terrible fool pretends to be

  Someone they aren’t—

  A man, a woman, a gentile, a cop, dog, mannequin, tree.

  Of all the movies that have made me uncomfortable—

  All th
ose with cliffs; with triggers; with creeping gauges and

  Sand that slowly covers up the fingers; fog

  That binds and makes even of standing

  Still a rending and departure; and slow, blown tracers—

  Those that have really made me sweat are the ones

  The professors are moving past, and looking in, and seeing

  The dark shells of heads,

  And above them,

  Where our dreams and the smoke

  Of our thinking,

  Where our sighs and untended and escaping

  Souls must be drifting,

  The beam of projection like something

  We are in the jaws of.

  And the professors

  Go by, pointing at this one or that one.

  They pick out the dancer and tell her she can’t dance,

  They explain the rules to the poet and dismiss him,

  They drag the clerk out under the fluorescent light,

  They put numerals on the storekeeper’s fingertips,

  They read the TV Guide to the mothers and fathers

  And lay wounds upon the sons and chasms beside the daughters.

  This is the kind of movie that drives me crazy,

  The movies through which the professors move,

  Face-owners, eyes of lichen, impossible to impress, dead inside,

  Looking for somebody they can trust again,

  Someone to make them feel betrayed one more time.

  The Words of a Toast

  The man wants to make love to the crippled man’s sister

  because he loves the crippled man.

  The man cries

  beside the bed of the man who cannot breathe.

  He stands in the parking lot, turning in the sun.

  He says to the restaurant, I’m closed,

  and to the sunlight, Why don’t you arrest me?

  But the spring changes so thickly among the buildings, the sun

  brightens so sharply on the walls,

  and the air tastes so sweetly of the rightness of things—

  suddenly thinking of his crippled friend: Oh, God,

  you wanted water,

  didn’t you? And you with only tears for a voice.

  What can I do now?

  What can I do for you but drink this glass of water?

  Sonnets Called “On the Sacredness”

  Close by the jerkwater rancheros tonight, the round

  gloom longs, a window in the gloom, an attitude in the window, a pleading

  in the attitude, an unwitnessed

  ravishment in the pleading. A man stands there in the window

  thinking about how naked the water looks,

  thinking the water looks like emptiness, it looks

  like nothing. His heart

  aches to think how many gamblers have broke down

  on this highway? How many princesses of ice?

  I know I’m suburban, I’ve got a shitty whiskey in my hand,

  I work a job like eating a knife…

  Everyone’s sperm all over my life,

  the sad waiting. Here’s to the simple and endless

  desperate person lifting this glass.

  If you imagine you’re at the base of a cross coming out of your chest,

  that its vertical beam is a café

  and its crossbeam a bar of inebriates running along the rear of the café,

  that you’re in a soft booth in the vertical beam of the cross

  facing a blonde over whose shoulder you happen to glance

  at the instant the TV above the bar

  broadcasts the unmistakable image of fate,

  the Vietnamese man getting a bullet shot into his ear,

  then you understand that I had to stop

  eating my squid stew. I started to cry.

  Susan tried to make

  some gesture, baby

  playing in front of the cobra’s den,

  and it was enough: I was lodged in the moment, we were the treasure.

  Sweet heat each breath of air,

  sugar of fire, and yet

  Dark said she was my date.

  She told me Don’t be late.

  I guess it is our fate

  here in the mental hospital

  of passion and forgetting

  to scream inside the dream,

  put back the suicide,

  stand upon the corner

  starkly lit by the beam

  of memory from the face

  of a friend amid the glass

  of a toast, and wait that wait.

  But I always come back to the corner of feelings and the sponge of vinegar.

  What is made with the hands rises up to seize us

  and press every word to its service

  so that I can never look at anything that hasn’t

  been talked about a thousand times already,

  but I saw him screw his face up like a child in suspense

  of some mischief, and they blew his brains out.

  Your homework is more important than Cub Scouts.

  His head jerks.

  There’s a blue-and-white menu by Susan’s left hand.

  He collapses as if full of sand.

  You’d better settle down and eat.

  At the next table before his mother

  the boy in the Cub Scout uniform settles down and eats.

  The Prayers of the Insane

  The crocuses are all closed up; the spring is cold;

  I read about prayer and think about prayer; however,

  yesterday when I put my head down I found myself

  inhabiting so completely a past

  that never happened, that when I looked up out of it

  I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it, it

  might have been a symbol for my life, this moment

  I’d entirely let slip—a steep hill, a road among pines,

  no mist, but blurred hints of it in each breath,

  no sun, but light everywhere, no shadows, because this is the shadow.

  I want to go home from this place

  to the beach that is only itself, not sand—

  “My mother held me up so my father could beat me,

  I was three years old, naked—by the ankles—I prayed,

  I fashioned some idea of a Great Power in that instant,

  and in that instant my personality was fashioned.

  I was under a lot of pressure when I set the fire.

  In the State Hospital I prayed that one of the patients

  would attack a doctor so that I could illustrate

  my intentions by a good deed. My prayer

  was brought true on the forty-seventh day of my suffering.

  Since then I’ve been moved here. My case

  is beginning to look better and better

  as I enter the twenty-seventh month of my ordeal.”

  The Discalced Carmelites of Sedona, Arizona, warn

  that we must not hope to return alive from prayer.

  On the streets our heads come along like black and white dice

  and our faces are fives.

  I bow my head to pray, and they are what I see.

  All-Night Diners

  At another table, some South Americans are singing,

  Detectives are moving across my sight.

  I am without humility tonight.

  What is my fate, what is my fate, what is my fate?

  We’re not in this disreputable hotel:

  The disreputable hotels are in us,

  And we inhabit a hole in the light.

  What is my fate, what is my fate, what is my fate?

  Their countries are being torn apart,

  and yet some of them may be here for the chess tournament.

  Oh yes, the world is sick of itself, sitting in its car,

  but after the awful rejection I suffered by you

  it was night.

  A chilly wind was taking

&
nbsp; small sticks and the like down the block

  and worrying the signs. The street I walked was lifeless

  but for three or four silent

  figures moving in their white judo suits

  toward The Center for Martial Arts…

  Think of the flayed visage of our era,

  the assassinated fathers, the naked hooks of

  glances and the slithering

  insinuations of our music,

  and all our friends who have traveled so far to meet

  their anagammaglobulinaemic, jail,

  monsoon, AK-47 fates

  in ways and places that sound

  French—laceration,

  heroin, Khe Sanh…

  Later I was nearly killed

  by a firetruck coming around a corner

  filled with men completely decked out for fighting blazes.

  There wasn’t any siren. There was a radio playing

  In the jungle

  The mighty jungle

  The lion sleeps tonight

  and they were all singing along, a dozen

  ghosts

  on a ghostly ship, steering

  God knows where, what kind of fire—

  I’m trying to explain how these islands of meaningless joy

  or the loss of someone close to me, like you,

  can make the tragedy of a whole age insignificant.

  The local priest has swept the cross from his wall

  and hung a large print of Edward Hopper’s

  Nighthawks, wherein the figures stall

  as if somebody has told a joke

  the three of them have just finished laughing at

  or made one of those comments that says it all