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

  wrapped in plastic he rested near to hand.

  At a certain point, the sun came through the blinds

  and shafted the toilet bowl, filling it with light

  as he spoke of killing everyone, often taking

  the pistol from its wrap and holding its mouth

  against his breast, explaining that no safety

  lay anywhere, unless he should shoot the fear

  that stood up on its hind legs in his heart.

  Such things were always on TV—I thought

  that one world merged in the next, and I resolved

  to win the great Congressional Medal of Honor,

  to make a name on the stage, and die a priest.

  In the war the bullets yanked the fronds

  from palms and the earth ate them up like acid

  before our eyes. When dead men hit the ground

  they came alive, they spoke in tongues, holding

  babies that came from nowhere in their arms.

  We were all afraid of the earth. My father’s fear

  turned it like a plow, delivering

  dogs and bugs, bright music, and a feminine

  whispering of our names. My comrades fled,

  but I was healed by everything that happened,

  the midnight Rapid Transit stations

  of hand grenades made moonlight as I moved

  from life to life, getting off and shouting

  whatever the signs said, getting on again,

  received like lightning, changing everything.

  My body disappeared. The enemy

  knew me as a ghost who dropped a shadow

  the size of night and turned the air to edges.

  I am your grand companion of surprise,

  big-time harbinger canceling everyone’s

  business in a constant dream of all

  the starring roles and franchises the great

  Congressional Medal of Honor winners win.

  Wounded twice, then decorated more

  than any other in my regiment,

  I stood at home plate, vomit on my blouse

  and whiskey in my blood, and heard the dirt

  of my home town falling grain by grain

  out of the afternoon, while everyone’s

  rahrahrahs affected me like silence.

  The mayor handed me a four-by-four-

  inch cardboard box a colonel handed him;

  I threw it at the vast face of the crowd,

  screaming I wanted only the Medal of Honor…

  I lose the thread of my existence here.

  I see me strange and drugged against my will,

  telling my life story to a room,

  traveling the aisles of an asylum

  out there in Maine, among the aborigines.

  They must have set me loose, or I escaped:

  I see myself in a forest-bordered field,

  unchanged and wearing my uniform—

  free; yet somehow jailed by old desires

  and saying what a soldier says: For home,

  nothing. Comrades, for you, these hoarded rations.

  With four monstrosities in uniforms

  like mine, I pulverized guitars and wept

  for the merriment of many. Brothers,

  when shadows lengthen, and they lower down

  the American flag and close our government,

  another country rises like a mist

  by garbagey coliseums on the warehouse

  side of town to listen to that rock

  and roll: God speaking with the Devil’s voice,

  unbreathable air of manacles, a storm

  to bless your multicolored lips with sperm.

  We sundered them until they brought their bones

  forth from the flesh and laid them at our feet,

  screaming their lungs shut tight as fists,

  shedding their homes forever, leaving name

  and tongue and mind and sending us their heads

  through the mails in the night. We ran it past the edge,

  we gave them something everyone could dance to—

  whatever is most terrible is most real—

  the Bible fights, the fetuses burning in light-bulbs,

  the cunnilingual, intravenous

  swamp of love. Three times I died on stage,

  and the show went on while doctors snatched

  me back from Chinatown with their machines.

  We struck it rich. Without a repertoire,

  without a name or theme, we toured the land

  and eighty thousand perished. We were real,

  but not one company recorded us:

  everywhere we went they passed a law.

  We toured the land—sweet, burning Texacos,

  the adrenaline darkness palpitates frantically,

  the highway eats itself all night, the radio’s

  wheedling bebop fails in the galactic

  soup near dawn; the Winnebago shimmers,

  everything tastes like puke, the eight-ball

  bursts, nobody

  knows how to drink in this fuckin town…

  One night I heard our music end

  abruptly in the middle of a number

  and looked around me at a gigantic silence.

  I felt the pounding, saw the screams, but all

  was like the long erasure of a wind

  calming and disturbing everything

  on its route through stunned fields of hay.

  My bodyguards tried with huge gentleness to lead

  me off, but I threw myself outside, rolling

  through a part of town I’d never seen—

  the flat gray streets looked Hebrew, and the windows

  held out the paraphernalia of old age,

  porcelain Jesuses gesturing from the shadows

  of porcelain vases, surrounded by medicines.

  A rain began. I strained myself to hear

  the trashcans say their miserable names,

  but nothing. At the brink

  of stardom high over the United States,

  untouchable as God but better known,

  I stumbled over streets that might’ve been rubber,

  deaf as a cockroach, finished as a singer.

  Brothers, I spilled myself along the roads.

  Mold grew on me as I dampened in alleys.

  I began in ignorance. How could I know

  that whoever is grinding up his soul is making

  himself afresh? That the ones who run away

  get nearer all the time? Look here or there,

  it’s always the horizon, the dull edge

  of earth dicing your plan like a potato.

  Does water break the light, or light the water?

  Which do you choose: what is or what is?

  I painted myself black and let that color

  ride through virgins like the penises

  they dream of while their fathers sleep. I lied.

  I cheated like a shark. I robbed the dead.

  Nothing healed me, just as nothing healed

  my uncle of himself—but he was healed,

  while I grew phosphorescent with a kind

  of cancer that I carried like a domino,

  a tiny badge discovering me…

  Oh please my love I want to rock and roll with you

  Feel it feel it

  feel it all night like a shoe…

  Ten years I wasted all I had, and then

  ten years I lived correctly—held a job

  in a factory that made explosions,

  where deafness was an asset. I did well,

  I never missed a day, I polished late,

  honed my skills, received promotions—in the end

  I built explosions for atomic bombs,

  forty-three I built myself, which one of these

  days will deafen you, as I am deafened.

  I wrenched the fraternal orders with my tale

  of sorrowful delinquency—th
e Elks,

  the Lions, Moose; those animals, they loved

  the crippled rock’n’roller with the heart

  wrung out as empty as his former mind,

  and variously and often they cited me.

  I walked the malls with an expanded chest,

  took my sips with my pinkie cocked,

  firing dry martinis at my larynx

  and yearning for the strength of soul it takes

  to suck a bullet from an actual

  pistol, hating my own drained face

  as I intimidated mirrors, or stood

  in a jail of lies before the Eagle Scouts,

  an alarm clock going off inside an alarm clock

  in a lump of iron inside a lump of iron:

  hating myself for having become my father.

  At night I prayed aloud to God and Jesus

  to place me on a spaceship to the moon—

  Heaven, I told Them constantly, my mind

  is tired of me, and I would like to die.

  Take me to ground zero take me to ground zero

  where in the midst of detonation it is useless

  to demonstrate quod erat demonstrandum,

  this was my ceaseless prayer, until my lips

  were muscles and my heart could talk,

  telling it over and over to itself;

  until they fired me and drove me to the edge

  of things, and dumped my prayer into the desert.

  Drinking cactus milk and eating sand,

  I wandered until I saw the monastery

  standing higher and higher, at first a loose

  mirage, but soon more real than I was.

  There I fell on my face, and let light carry

  me into the world—just as my uncle told it

  nine million years ago when I was eight—

  and the prison of my human shape exploded,

  my heart cracked open and the blood poured out

  over stones that got up and walked when it touched them.

  High in the noon, some kind of jet plane winked

  like a dime; I saw it also flashed

  over the vast, perfumed, commercial places

  filled with stupid but well-intentioned people,

  the wreckages and ambushes of love

  putting themselves across, making it pay

  in the margins of the fire, in the calm spaces,

  taken across the dance-floor by a last romance,

  kissing softly in a hallucination strewn

  with bus tickets and an originless music—

  and now death comes to them, a little boy

  in a baseball cap and pyjamas, doing things

  to the locks of the heart…This was my vision.

  Here I saw the truth of the horizon,

  the way of coming and going in this life.

  I never drifted up from my beginning:

  I rose as inexorably as heat.

  Brothers, I reached you, and you took me in.

  You saw me when I was invisible,

  you spoke to me when I was deaf,

  you thanked me when I was a secret,

  and how will I make of myself something

  at this hour when I am already made?

  Never a famous hero, a star, a priest—

  my mind decides a little faster than

  the world can talk, and what I dreamed was only

  the darker sketch of what I would become.

  It’s 1996. I’m forty-eight.

  I am a monk who never prays. I am

  a prayer. The pilgrim comes to hear me;

  the banker comes, the bald janitors arrive,

  the mothers lift their wicked children up—

  they wait for me as if I were a bus,

  with or without hope, what’s the difference?

  One guy manipulates a little calculator,

  speaking to it as to a friend. Sweat

  is delivered from its mascara,

  sad women read about houses…

  and now the deaf approach, trailing the dark smoke

  of their infirmity behind them as they leave it

  and move toward the prayer that everything

  is praying: the summer evening a held bubble,

  every gesture riveting the love,

  the swaying of waitresses, the eleven television

  sets in a storefront broadcasting a murderer’s face—

  these things speak the clear promise of Heaven.

  Passengers

  The world will burst like an intestine in the sun,

  the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,

  but there will always be somebody riding the bus

  through these intersections strewn with broken glass

  among speechless women beating their little ones,

  always a slow alphabet of rain

  speaking of drifting and perishing to the air,

  always these definite jails of light in the sky

  at the wedding of this clarity and this storm

  and a woman’s turning—her languid flight of hair

  traveling through frame after frame of memory

  where the past turns, its face sparking like emery,

  to open its grace and incredible harm

  over my life, and I will never die.

  THE VEIL

  ONE

  The Rockefeller Collection of Primitive Art

  Solter my neighbor rocks his lover through the human night,

  softly and softly, so as not to tell the walls,

  the walls the friends of the spinster. But I’m only a spinster,

  I’m not a virgin. I have made love. I have known desire.

  I followed desire through the museums.

  We seemed to float along sculptures,

  along the clicking ascent

  of numerals in the guards’ hands. Brave works

  by great masters were all around us.

  And then we came out of a tunnel into one of those restaurants

  where the natural light was so unnatural

  as to make heavenly even our fingernails and each radish.

  I saw everyone’s skull beneath the skin,

  I saw sorrow painting its way out of the faces,

  someone was telling a lie and I could taste it,

  and I heard the criminal tear-fall,

  saw the dog

  who dances with his shirt rolled up to his nipples,

  the spider…

  Why are their mouths small tight circles,

  the figures of Africa, New Guinea, New Zealand,

  why are their mouths astonished kisses beneath drugged eyes,

  why is the eye of the cantaloupe expressionless

  but its skin rippling with terror,

  and out beyond Coney Island in the breathless waste

  of Atlantia, why

  does the water move when it is already there?

  My neighbor’s bedsprings struggle

  —soon she will begin to scream—

  I think of them always

  traveling through space,

  riding their bed so

  softly it staves the world through the air

  of my room—it is their right,

  because we freely admit how powerful the sight is,

  we say that eyes stab and glances rake,

  but it is not the sight

  that lets us taste the salt on someone’s shoulder in the night,

  the musk of fear in the morning,

  the savor of falling in the falling

  elevators in the buildings of rock,

  it is the dark that lets us it is the dark. If

  I can imagine them then

  why can’t I imagine this?

  Talking Richard Wilson Blues, by Richard Clay Wilson

  You might as well take a razor

  to your pecker as let a woman in your heart.

  First they do the wash and then they kill you.

  They flash th
eir lights and teach your wallet to puke.

  They bring it to you folded—if you see her

  stepping between the coin laundry and your building

  over the slushy street and watch the clothing steam,

  you can’t wait to open up the door when she puts

  the stairs behind her and catch that warmth between you.

  It changes into a baby. “Here’s to the little shitter,

  the little linoleum lizard.” Once he peed on me

  when I was changing him—that one got a laugh

  from the characters I wasted all my chances with

  at Popeye’s establishment when it was over

  by the Wonderland. But it’s destroyed

  now and I understand one of those shopping malls

  that are like great monuments of blindness

  and folly stands there. And next door,

  the grimy restaurants of men with movies

  where they used to wear human faces,

  the sad people from space. But that was never me,

  because everything in those days depended on my work.

  “Listen, I’m going to work,” was all I could say,

  and drunk or sober I would put on the uniform

  of Texaco and wade into my life.

  I felt like a man of honor and substance,

  but the situation was dancing underneath me—

  once I walked into the living room at my sister’s

  and saw that the two of them, her and my sister,

  had turned sometime behind my back not exactly

  fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons

  moving across the television in front of them,

  surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas

  standing up next to the iron on the board.

  I stepped out into the yard of bricks

  and trash and watched the light light

  up the blood inside each leaf,

  and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm

  on this mother? Where do you turn it on?

  I think you understand how I felt.

  I’m not saying everything changed in the space

  of one second of seeing two women, but I did

  start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted

  she be sexy. I just wanted to live.

  And I did: some nights were so

  sensory I felt the starlight landing on my back

  and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers—

  but the strategies of others broke my promise.