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

  to the images of the past are confused.

  There’s a war over the rights to the images of the past,

  an unspeakable, delirious war in the dreaming self,

  a war of tears, standing by the window and listening

  to a song. I will always love you and think of you with bitterness,

  and when someone offers a remark in a voice

  that brings back your loosened voice and your inebriated fear,

  I’ll be wounded along scars.

  The Honor

  At a party in a Spanish kind of tiled house

  I met a woman who had won an award

  for writing whose second prize

  had gone to me. For years

  I’d felt a kinship with her in the sharing

  of this honor,

  and I told her how glad I was to talk with her,

  my compatriot of letters,

  mentioning of course this award.

  But it was nothing

  to her, and in fact she didn’t remember it.

  I didn’t know what else to talk about.

  I looked around us at a room full of hands

  moving drinks in tiny, rapid circles—

  you know how people do

  with their drinks.

  Soon after this I became

  another person, somebody

  I would have brushed off if I’d met him that night,

  somebody I never imagined.

  People will tell you that it’s awful

  to see facts eat our dreams, our presumptions,

  but they’re wrong. It is an honor

  to learn to replace one hope with another.

  It was the only thing that could possibly have persuaded me

  that my life is not a lonely story played out

  in barrooms before a vast audience of the dead.

  Poem

  Loving you is every bit as fine

  as coming over a hill into the sun

  at ninety miles an hour darling when

  it’s dawn and you can hear the stars unlocking

  themselves from the designs of God beneath

  the disintegrating orchestra of my black

  Chevrolet. The radio clings to an un-

  identified station—somewhere a tango suffers,

  and the dance floor burns around two lovers

  whom nothing can touch—no, not even death!

  Oh! the acceleration with which my heart does proceed,

  reaching like stars almost but never quite

  of light the speed of light the speed of light.

  Proposal

  The early inhabitants of this continent

  passed through a valley of ice two miles deep

  to get here, passed from creature to creature

  eating them, throwing away the small bones

  and fornicating under nameless stars

  in a waste so cold that diseases couldn’t

  live in it. Three hundred million

  animals they slaughtered in the space of two centuries,

  moving from the Bering isthmus to the core

  of squalid Amazonian voodoo, one

  murder at a time; and although in the modern hour

  the churches’ mouths are smeared with us

  and all manner of pleading goes up from our hearts,

  I don’t think they thought the dark and terrible

  swallowing gullet could be prayed to.

  I don’t think they found the smell of baking

  amid friends in a warm kitchen anything to be revered.

  I think some of them had to chew the food

  for the old ones after they’d lost all their teeth,

  and that their expressions

  were like those we see on the faces

  of the victims of traffic accidents today.

  I think they threw their spears with a sense of utter loss,

  as if they, their weapons, and the enormous animals

  they pursued were all going to disappear.

  As we can see, they were right. And they were us.

  That’s what makes it hard for me now to choose one thing

  over all the others; and yet surrounded by the aroma

  of this Mexican baking and flowery incense

  with the kitchen as yellow as the middle

  of the sun, telling your usually smart-mouthed

  urchin child about the early inhabitants

  of this continent who are dead, I figure

  I’ll marry myself to you and take my chances,

  stepping onto the rock

  which is a whale, the ship which is about to set sail

  and sink

  in the danger that carries us like a mother.

  Movie Within a Movie

  In August the steamy saliva of the streets of the sea

  habitation we make our summer in,

  the horizonless noons of asphalt,

  the deadened strollers and the melting beach,

  the lunatic carolers toward daybreak—

  they all give fire to my new wife’s vision:

  she sees me to the bone. In August I disgust her.

  And her crazy mixed-up child, who eats with his mouth open

  talking senselessly about androids, who comes

  to me as I gaze out on the harbor wanting

  nothing but peace, and says he hates me,

  who draws pages full of gnarled organs and tortured

  spirits in an afterworld—

  but it is not an afterworld, it is this world—

  how I fear them for knowing all about me!

  I walk the lanes of this heartless village

  with my head down, forsaking permanently

  the people of the Town Council, of the ice-cream cone, of the out-of-state plate,

  and the pink, pig eyes

  of the demon of their every folly;

  because to say that their faces are troubled,

  like mine, is to fail: their faces

  are stupid, their faces are berserk, but their faces

  are not troubled.

  Yet by the Metro

  I find a hundred others just like me,

  who move across a boiling sunset

  to reach the fantastic darkness of a theater

  Spaceman Tom and Commander Joe

  I will never be his father. He will never be my son.

  The massive sense of everything around us,

  the sun inside our heads

  in the blue and white woods, a mile away the sea

  hunched dreaming over its business—under

  the influences of these things

  I can’t keep us from drifting out of ordinariness

  on a barge of light.

  The princess he gives his mother’s name to

  fails in the invisible prison. The mangled

  extraterrestrials blandly menace us, the Zargons

  and such, who fall on a soft bewilderment,

  and they cry tears like a little boy.

  Our heartbeats make us go in search of these monsters

  and of the dead generations of the forest

  and of the living one, as we come up suddenly

  against the border of a marsh,

  where a golden heron startled by star-wanderers

  lifts with the imperceptible slowness

  of a shadow from what seems to be

  a huge reservoir of blinking coins.

  I can remember being seven years old

  in the morning and going outside to play.

  With the door of my home behind me,

  the people who loved me, the bowl of cereal,

  the rooms where the sleeping children grow up, pass

  smoking cigarets through their sleeping children’s rooms

  and enter their graves,

  I stood at the door of the world.

  You are my father. I am your son.

  Willits, California

  Meadows that wr
eck with a solitude,

  tractors that have run down and died like toys,

  even here among you

  they are embarrassed and can’t hide

  from their obscurity,

  the trembling

  ugly young girls, their lips

  making that speechless consonant they always make

  in the clouded mirrors before they carry

  their roses into the flames of evening.

  And when they arrive among mainstreets down

  on which the cheap outdated names

  are sobbed by the marquees,

  driving and stopping and getting out

  under the avalanches of sunset and walking into stores

  as cool and still as pantries—they know how it is.

  History…Sadness…A bubble

  of some old error swimming up through the years,

  and gossip that grows stale and then is venerated…

  They know who we are,

  our every pain

  outnumbered by the studious array

  of little crucifixions in the vineyards,

  they know how we begin to disbelieve

  the moon and stars,

  and the wild

  deer who blows over the road,

  and how we are visited by craft from distant worlds,

  people who come near but never land.

  Oh they know

  the tortures of sweetness,

  these young girls

  waiting under the beautiful eyes of billboards.

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

  James Hampton, 1909, Elloree, SC—1964, Washington, DC Custodian, General Services Administration; Maker of The Throne

  1

  I dreamed I had been dreaming,

  And sadness did descend.

  And when from the first dreaming

  I woke, I walked behind

  The window crossed with smoke and rain

  In Washington, DC,

  The neighbors strangling newspapers

  Or watching the TV

  Down on the rug in undershirts

  Like bankrupt criminals.

  The street where Revelation

  Made James Hampton miserable

  Lay wet beyond the glass,

  And on it moved streetcorner men

  In a steam of crossed-out clues

  And pompadours and voodoo and

  Sweet Jesus made of ivory;

  But when I woke, the headlights

  Shone out on Elloree.

  Two endless roads, four endless fields,

  And where I woke, the veils

  Of rain fell down around a sign:

  FRI & SAT JAM W/ THE MEAN

  MONSTER MAN & II.

  Nobody in the Elloree,

  South Carolina, Stop-n-Go,

  Nobody in the Sunoco,

  Or in all of Elloree, his birthplace, knows

  His name. But right outside

  Runs Hampton Street, called, probably,

  For the owners of his family.

  God, are you there, for I have been

  Long on these highways and I’ve seen

  Miami, Treasure Coast, Space Coast,

  I have seen where the astronauts burned,

  I have looked where the Fathers placed the pale

  Orange churches in the sun,

  Have passed through Georgia in its green

  Eternity of leaves unturned,

  But nothing like Elloree.

  2

  Sam and I drove up from Key West, Florida,

  Visited James Hampton’s birthplace in South Carolina,

  And saw The Throne

  At The National Museum of American Art in Washington.

  It was in a big room. I couldn’t take it all in,

  And I was a little frightened.

  I left and came back home to Massachusetts.

  I’m glad The Throne exists:

  My days are better for it, and I feel

  Something that makes me know my life is real

  To think he died unknown and without a friend,

  But this feeling isn’t sorrow. I was his friend

  As I looked at and was looked at by the rushing-together parts

  Of this vision of someone who was probably insane

  Growing brighter and brighter like a forest after a rain—

  And if you look at the leaves of a forest,

  At its dirt and its heights, the stuttering mystic

  Replication, the blithering symmetry,

  You’ll go crazy, too. If you look at the city

  And its spilled wine

  And broken glass, its spilled and broken people and hearts,

  You’ll go crazy. If you stand

  In the world you’ll go out of your mind.

  But it’s all right,

  What happened to him. I can, now

  That he doesn’t have to,

  Accept it.

  I don’t believe that Christ, when he claimed

  The last will be first, the lost life saved—

  When he implied that the deeply abysmal is deeply blessed—

  I just can’t believe that Christ, when faced

  With poor, poor people aspiring to become at best

  The wives and husbands of a lonely fear,

  Would have spoken redundantly.

  Surely he couldn’t have referred to some other time

  Or place, when in fact such a place and time

  Are unnecessary. We have a time and a place here,

  Now, abundantly.

  3

  He waits forever in front of diagrams

  On a blackboard in one of his photographs,

  Labels that make no sense attached

  To the radiant, alien things he sketched,

  Which aren’t objects, but plans.

  Of his last dated

  Vision he stated:

  “This design is proof of the Virgin Mary descending

  Into Heaven…”

  The streetcorner men, the shaken earthlings—

  It’s easy to imagine his hands

  When looking at their hands

  Of leather, loving on the necks

  Of jugs, sweetly touching the dice and bad checks,

  And to see in everything a making

  Just like his, an unhinged

  Deity in an empty garage

  Dying alone in some small consolation.

  Photograph me photograph me photo

  Graph me in my suit of loneliness,

  My tie which I have been

  Saving for this occasion,

  My shoes of dust, my skin of pollen,

  Addressing the empty chair; behind me

  The Throne of the Third Heaven

  Of the Nations Millennium General Assembly.

  i AM ALPHA AND OMEGA THE BEGiNNiNG

  AND THE END,

  The trash of government buildings,

  Faded red cloth,

  Jelly glasses and lightbulbs,

  Metal (cut from coffee cans),

  Upholstery tacks, small nails

  And simple sewing pins,

  Lightbulbs, cardboard,

  Kraft paper, desk blotters,

  Gold and aluminum foils,

  Neighborhood bums the foil

  On their wine bottles,

  The Revelation.

  And I command you not to fear.

  NEW POEMS

  Our Sadness

  There’s a sadness about looking back when you get to the end:

  a sadness that waits at the end of the street,

  a cigaret that glows with the glow of sadness

  and a cop in a yellow raincoat who says It’s late,

  it’s late, it’s sadness.

  And it’s a sadness what they’ve done to the women I loved:

  they turned Julie into her own mother, and Ruthe—

  and Ruthe I understand has been turned

  in
to a sadness…

  And when it comes time

  for all of humanity to witness what it’s done

  and every television is trained on the first people to see God and

  they say

  Houston,

  we have ignition,

  they won’t have ignition.

  They’ll have a music of wet streets

  and lonely bars where piano notes

  follow themselves into a forest of pity and are lost.

  They’ll have sadness.

  They’ll have

  sadness, sadness, sadness.

  Feet

  Obedient to the laws of meat we walk

  our feet wounded by joy

  toward our humiliating rendezvous with mirrors

  and toward the mysterious treasures tossed at our feet

  as when I crossed the yard at Florence Prison

  and heard someone calling

  Poet

  Poet

  My name is James man

  Life sentence!

  Iowa City

  The stifled musk of wood beneath linoleum

  in the tall listening stairwells of certain

  buildings stays, and the timbre the walls gave to your weeping

  and to our snide talk and marijuana coughing,

  that also stays, and some of the anger, and some of the stopped

  feeling, the stranded, geologic

  grieving of seedlings on a wind—and such we were—

  they remain. But where do they remain?—the place

  has gone, the receptacle

  of these essences is mysterious.

  I’ve returned to that same town, and nothing—

  no raking, no ghostly notes, only

  shopping malls standing where I beat you up

  and spring’s uncertain touch and stuck breath

  and women who smell like flowers or fruit or candy

  moved by delicate desires along the aisles.

  As we did, the same trains drag through town,

  summoned up out of the prairie and disappearing

  toward places waiting for their conjuring,