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

  At closing time once, she kept talking to a man

  when I was trying to catch her attention to leave.

  It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines

  and black masses and black hydrants filled

  with black water. When the lights came on

  you could see all kinds of intentions in the air.

  I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass,

  but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife

  and I took out his guts and I said, “Here they are,

  motherfucker, nigger, here they are.”

  There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on.

  At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me

  from the end of the world where I saw her standing,

  and the way the sacred light played across her face

  all I can tell you is I had to be a diamond

  of ice to manage. Right down the middle from beginning to end

  my life pours into one ocean: into this prison

  with its empty ballfield and its empty

  preparations for Never Happen.

  If she ever comes to visit me, to hell with her,

  I won’t talk to her, and my son can entertain

  himself. God kill them both. I’m sorry for nothing.

  I’m just an alien from another planet.

  I am not happy. Disappointment

  lights its stupid fire in my heart,

  but two days a week I staff

  the Max Security laundry above the world

  on the seventh level, looking at two long roads

  out there that go to a couple of towns.

  Young girls accelerating through the intersection

  make me want to live forever,

  they make me think of the grand things,

  of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies.

  Sometimes I stand against the window for hours

  tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal

  meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body.

  Jesus Christ, your doors close and open,

  you touch the maniac drifters, the fireaters,

  I could say a million things about you

  and never get that silence out of time

  that happens when the blank muscle hangs

  between its beats—that is what I mean

  by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth,

  where nothing bad has happened.

  I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told

  when you will come to save us. I have written

  several poems and several hymns, and one

  has been performed on the religious

  ultrahigh frequency station. And it goes like this.

  The Skewbald Horse

  I wish to tell about a time

  That’s gone,

  When I looked at the wheat and thought it was the sea.

  I rode to town. The light was gold. I heard them

  Speak of the future—around them the dogs dreamed.

  It was Sunday, and in our town

  The church bells then were so arranged

  As to play “Amazing Grace” upon the drugged

  Air and clenched hearts of August. And all the time

  The wheat in its inlets of honey

  Perished and replaced itself imperceptibly

  And the horses swam slowly through the fields.

  I breathed something thick and terrible

  Riding home toward the falling sun, a wild

  Musical heat of sorrow and youth that made

  A great strength up and down me. I

  Was desire—what lived in the sad, slow

  Thighs of young girls the dull breeze

  Pressed their aprons to embrace? The same

  Pitchblende dying between mine? Whatever

  It was, I believed it whirled the Earth,

  In faith and troth, whatever it was—

  Mingling of phosphor and lodestone

  Drawn through our hearts—caught fire,

  And didn’t it ride the horse and me, but we

  Rode through it also? All

  Were in town: I stood in the house of my birth,

  In the silence of its sun-struck rooms,

  The only house to have known my cries,

  The only house to have witnessed these beginnings,

  And thought, How far from home!

  Whatever it was, I took to sea

  To drown it—but it was only

  The downslope of eighteen hundred forty-seven,

  The dead-flowery twilight of my nineteenth summer—

  And it set me adrift. The sea

  Was not the sea. It was a gray, austere dumb land

  Of messages without a word,

  Tumbling its seed, holding out its hands

  Around our senseless faiths, the faiths that placed us

  In this chasm between the torn hopes

  Behind us and the hopes, fragile as cobwebs, on the other shore.

  Watch on and watch off, in the green illumination

  Froth cast unreasonably out of dark water, I sighted

  Our lesser selves ever attending our passage,

  The demons, the criminals, the fools

  We demonically, criminally, foolishly believed

  Lay back of us: it wasn’t to ferry cargo but to create

  Jetsam that we’d put ourselves in danger.

  And when we’d arrived, whatever it was—

  The time, it was the time—

  Drove me to cheat my brothers, to search

  The purses of my mates while the merchant

  S.S. John Adams slept in St. George’s Channel,

  To forge my name to the bill of lading,

  To steal my captain’s skewbald quarter stallion

  And strike across the Irish countryside.

  Our fourth day in that country

  Brought us to the thick of Kildare County,

  A Yankee sailor on a stolen quarter horse,

  The sailor in rags and waving a bill of lading

  For a hold of goods, the horse consumed

  And starved and marked such as no Irishman

  Could remember—skewbald, he’d be named

  In Boston, where our captain

  Had traded for him before I stole him—

  And the several tribes

  Gathered for a festive day of races laughed

  Inside their whiskers at this creature and scraped bare

  Their birthrights to wager against him.

  Their eyes like sapphires strewn in the sun,

  Their purses sighing and crying along their bellies,

  The spittle doing a jig along the strands

  Of their old beards: the men

  Of the large-boned clans had black hair

  That came up out of the throats

  Of their shirts and ate their faces,

  While the little fellows like me were of a blonder

  More shall we say humanified strain of farmer,

  But all were truly horsemen—never having to touch

  Their animals but always smelling just like them,

  Telling a horse’s life and death in a hoof,

  Everyone wagering with a loud word

  On some half-extinguished, half-Highlands nag

  Raised by the spoon-to-mouth from an ugly

  Head parting her mother’s hindquarters.

  And drunk! These people sweated

  Into their saddles a stench of barley liquor

  That felled the bugs of summer coming near,

  And fed, as well, two quarts of thick brown beer

  To their favored stallions in the morning trough.

  Now they whacked their kegs, and yodeled around

  Amongst themselves incomprehensibly,

  Looking at me with mingled pity and greed,

  Cracking also the tubs of white

  Butter and
slapping fistfuls onto bread for me,

  For I was their bread and butter now, and entitled.

  I’d judge their fervid offerings had made me heavy

  By three pounds more by the time the charge

  Of musket shot exploded into the still

  Moment above our horses’ heads, and the last

  Kildare County Cup broke from the gate.

  Was there ever a race where any rider but had

  One chance, no time, and everything to lose?

  I see how our tears wash none of it away,

  How our cries call back no one into our arms,

  But I’ve learned that whenever at last the sobbing breaks

  From my chest into the sound of weeping, my cross breaks;

  The river of grief carries itself away,

  Laying down its rude memento of ash—such stories

  As I tell about that afternoon

  In a strange country in a young time,

  And such, no doubt, as others tell

  Considerably otherwise, of an iron

  Afternoon when a villain flogged a county

  Of its heart’s savings, and the songs

  That claim I raced him all over England and Spain,

  The songs that give him a silver bridle,

  A mane of gold, a saddle beyond worth,

  And the songs sung of a gigantic wager

  Regretted to the core of grief—

  I bet on Griselda

  I bet on the bay

  If I’d bet on old Stewball

  I’d be a free man today—

  I know

  Even the bravest of that village had to sleep

  In the darkness that night, I know

  How the fiddles went rotten in the sacks,

  I know the revelry blackened and trickled away

  Before any of the candles could be lit,

  But I gained. I gained a great amount. I gained

  The sums and worthy items they had placed

  Against my ridiculous skewbald horse—an amount

  Exactly measured to my daring and their greed,

  And I say it though it takes from my modesty

  And lends them sympathy, because it’s true.

  Oh, I was a bold crossroader and they were all monkeys

  The day I drove the fastest horse in Ireland,

  And as I came not the width

  Of a finger from the smear of their faces along the rail,

  The flayed mounts bellowing toward the line,

  The light in the atmospheric dust like light

  Going down to the springs of the sea,

  I saw, as if the world had ceased in front of them,

  The blind eyes made of tears

  In the face of a lad who’d wagered everything:

  Things not belonging to him, things that could never be replaced,

  That his mother cherished and his father

  Had worked away his hands to keep—all

  Just memories turning to stone as I clipped past

  Like a razor through the dreams of an Irish village.

  And I thought then

  That if God made pain it so repented Him

  He climbed the Cross and drank it to the last

  Nail in the cup and ate the bloody dregs

  In vain, for we go on hurting.

  But why should he have wept to lose his wealth

  Or I to have laughed, holding it in my hands?—when

  It was nothing

  Next to what held us, and lay before us,

  What couldn’t be won or lost, but only spent;

  More than a feeling, less than a thing: a fact,

  A murky element, a medium, a sea

  Of fadeless dew upon the leaf

  Of the mind—

  Time! Time that gives everything but itself,

  Time that steals everything but the heart—

  It caught in the throat

  To see it light down all around us like a young girl’s dress,

  And we were the mystery underneath it:

  Oh, it was summer! But it was dusk.

  The Basement

  Last night I dreamed

  I was chased by wolves

  through the snow,

  and though they were gaining,

  I was running,

  but when I woke up

  I did not have the use

  of my legs. More

  than my parents

  I love to raise my hands

  to my face and feel them

  against my eyes.

  When I woke

  from the nightmare

  of running, I was afraid

  that sitting up in bed

  might be a dream

  and the light from the street

  a dream in blindness

  and the dark room a dream

  in an iron lung.

  After I was hurt

  the nurse took me down

  to the basement

  to see it. It looked

  like a gigantic oven,

  and they were baking

  all but the head,

  and so that he would know

  who I was, she shouted

  in his ear, Ernest, Ernest,

  here’s a little boy

  who will never walk again.

  The Monk’s Insomnia

  The monastery is quiet. Seconal

  drifts down upon it from the moon.

  I can see the lights

  of the city I came from,

  can remember how a boy sets out

  like something thrown from the furnace

  of a star. In the conflagration of memory

  my people sit on green benches in the park,

  terrified, evil, broken by love—

  to sit with them inside that invisible fire

  of hours day after day while the shadow of the milk

  billboard crawled across the street

  seemed impossible, but how

  was it different from here,

  where they have one day they play over

  and over as if they think

  it is our favorite, and we stay

  for our natural lives,

  a phrase that conjures up the sun’s

  dark ash adrift after ten billion years

  of unconsolable burning? Brother Thomas’s

  schoolgirl obsession with the cheap

  doings of TV starlets breaks

  everybody’s heart, and the yellow sap

  of one particular race of cactus grows

  tragic for the fascination in which

  it imprisons Brother Toby—I can’t witness

  his slavering and relating how it can be changed

  into some unprecedented kind of plastic—

  and the monastery refuses

  to say where it is taking us. At night

  we hear the trainers from the base

  down there, and see them blotting out the stars,

  and I stand on the hill and listen, bone-white with desire.

  It was love that sent me on the journey,

  love that called me home. But it’s the terror

  of being just one person—one chance, one set of days—

  that keeps me absolutely still tonight and makes me listen

  intently to those young men above us

  flying in their airplanes in the dark.

  Man Walking to Work

  The dawn is a quality laid across

  the freeway like the visible

  memory of the ocean that kept all this

  a secret for a hundred million years.

  I am not moving and I am not standing still.

  I am only something the wind strikes and clears,

  and I feel myself fade like the sky,

  the whole of Ohio a mirror gone blank.

  My jacket keeps me. My zipper

  bangs on my guitar. Lord God help me

  out by the lake after the shift at Frigidaire


  when I stop laughing and taste how wet the beer

  is in my mouth, suddenly recognizing the true

  wedding of passage and arrival I am invited to.

  TWO

  The Veil

  When the tide lay under the clouds

  of an afternoon and gave them back to themselves

  oilier a little and filled with anonymous boats,

  I used to sit and drink at the very edge of it,

  where light passed through the liquids in the glasses

  and threw itself on the white drapes

  of the tables, resting there like clarity

  itself, you might think,

  right where you could put a hand to it.

  As drink gave way to drink, the slow

  unfathomable voices of luncheon made

  a window of ultraviolet light in the mind,

  through which one at last saw the skeleton

  of everything, stripped of any sense or consequence,

  freed of geography and absolutely devoid

  of charm; and in this originating

  brightness you might see

  somebody putting a napkin against his lips

  or placing a blazing credit card on a plastic tray

  and you’d know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say.

  Gray Day in Miami

  Our love has been.

  I see the rain.

  Nothing

  is abstract any more:

  I nearly expect one of these

  droplets loose tonight on the avenues of wind

  to identify itself as my life.

  Now love is not a feeling

  like wrath or sadness, but an act

  like murdering the stars.

  And now the limp suits

  drying out on the railings of hotels,

  and the sorrows

  drifting like perfume,

  and telephones ringing in the darkness

  and milk

  tears shining on rouged cheeks.

  While nearby

  sighs the sea like God, the sea of breath, the resolute

  gull ocean trembling its boats.

  The Other Age

  A petal dripping off a dead flower, dew on the benches, a dead shoe.

  They’ve got to hate whoever did it and leave town.

  They’ve got to find the red issue of the magazine.

  They’ve got to place their hands on it so the bones shine through.

  They’ve got to admit it’s the window of Hell.

  They’ve got to put their lips down and inhale its nicotine.