Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

  as if time were no problem,

  and they come up to you:

  a car full of young,

  laughing,

  and you watch them go

  until

  somebody behind you honks

  and you are shaken back

  into what is left

  of your life.

  pitiful, self-pity,

  and your foot is to the floor

  and you catch the young ones,

  you pass the young ones

  and holding the wheel like all love gone

  you race to the beach

  with them

  brandishing your cigar and your steel,

  laughing,

  you will take them to the ocean

  to the last mermaid,

  seaweed and shark, merry whale,

  end of flesh and hour and horror,

  and finally they stop

  and you go on

  toward your ocean,

  the cigar biting your lips

  the way love used to.

  vegas

  there was a frozen tree that I wanted to paint

  but the shells came down

  and in Vegas looking across at a green sunshade

  at 3:30 in the morning,

  I died without nails, without a copy of the Atlantic Monthly,

  the windows screamed like doves moaning the bombing of Milan

  and I went out to live with the rats

  but the lights were too bright

  and I thought maybe I’d better go back and sit in a

  poetry class:

  a marvelous description of a gazelle

  is hell;

  the cross sits like a fly on my window,

  my mother’s breath stirs small leaves

  in my mind;

  and I hitch-hiked back to L.A. through hangover clouds

  and I pulled a letter from my pocket and read it

  and the truckdriver said, what’s that?

  and I said, there’s some gal up North who used to

  sleep with Pound, she’s trying to tell me that H.D.

  was our greatest scribe; well, Hilda gave us a few pink

  Grecian gods in with the chinaware, but after reading her

  I still have 140 icicles hanging from my bones.

  I’m not going all the way to L.A., the truckdriver said.

  it’s all right, I said, the calla lilies nod to our minds

  and someday we’ll all go home

  together.

  in fact, he said, this is as far

  as we go.

  so I let him have it; old withered whore of time

  your breasts taste the sour cream of dreaming…

  he let me out

  in the middle of the desert;

  to die is to die is to die,

  old phonographs in cellars,

  joe di maggio,

  magazines in with the onions…

  an old Ford picked me up

  45 minutes later

  and, this time,

  I kept my mouth

  shut.

  the house

  they are building a house

  half a block down

  and I sit up here

  with the shades down

  listening to the sounds,

  the hammers pounding in nails,

  thack thack thack thack,

  and then I hear birds, and

  thack thack thack

  and I go to bed,

  I pull the covers to my throat;

  they have been building this house

  for a month, and soon it will have

  its people…sleeping, eating,

  loving, moving around,

  but somehow

  now

  it is not right,

  there seems a madness,

  men walk on its top with nails in their mouths

  and I read about Castro and Cuba,

  and at night I walk by

  and the ribs of house show

  and inside I can see cats walking

  the way cats walk,

  and then a boy rides by on a bicycle,

  and still the house is not done

  and in the morning the men

  will be back

  walking around on the house

  with their hammers,

  and it seems people should not build houses

  anymore,

  it seems people should stop working

  and sit in small rooms

  on second floors

  under electric lights without shades;

  it seems there is a lot to forget

  and a lot not to do

  and in drugstores, markets, bars,

  the people are tired, they do not want

  to move, and I stand there at night

  and look through this house and the

  house does not want to be built;

  through its sides I can see the purple hills

  and the first lights of evening,

  and it is cold

  and I button my coat

  and I stand there looking through the house

  and the cats stop and look at me

  until I am embarrassed

  and move North up the sidewalk

  where I will buy

  cigarettes and beer

  and return to my room.

  side of the sun

  the bulls are grand as the side of the sun

  and although they kill them for the stale crowds,

  it is the bull that burns the fire,

  and although there are cowardly bulls as

  there are cowardly matadors and cowardly men,

  generally the bull stands pure

  and dies pure

  untouched by symbols or cliques or false loves,

  and when they drag him out

  nothing has died

  something has passed

  and the eventual stench

  is the world.

  the talkers

  the boy walks with his muddy feet across my

  soul

  talking about recitals, virtuosi, conductors,

  the lesser known novels of Dostoevsky;

  talking about how he corrected a waitress,

  a hasher who didn’t know that French dressing

  was composed of so and so;

  he gabbles about the Arts until

  I hate the Arts,

  and there is nothing cleaner

  than getting back to a bar or

  back to the track and watching them run,

  watching things go without this

  clamor and chatter,

  talk, talk, talk,

  the small mouth going, the eyes blinking,

  a boy, a child, sick with the Arts,

  grabbing at it like the skirt of a mother,

  and I wonder how many tens of thousands

  there are like him across the land

  on rainy nights

  on sunny mornings

  on evenings meant for peace

  in concert halls

  in cafes

  at poetry recitals

  talking, soiling, arguing.

  it’s like a pig going to bed

  with a good woman

  and you don’t want

  the woman any more.

  a pleasant afternoon in bed

  red summers and black satin

  charcoal and blood

  ringing the sheets

  while snails are stepped on

  and moths go batty

  trying to put on the eyes

  of lightbulbs in

  artificial cities;

  I light her a cigarette

  and she blows up a plasma

  of relaxation

  to prove we’ve both been

  good lovers—

  white on black, and in black;

  and her toes strike dark

  intersections

  in my beefy sheets

&nbsp
; she says, that elevator boy…

  y’know him?

  I say yes.

  a bastard…beats his wife.

  I put my hand

  flat to the surface

  where the curve goes down.

  damn for an OLD man,

  you sure likes to play!

  I reach over and pick up

  the bottle, suck it down

  flat on my back,

  the suds like soap

  gagging me with gulp-dull

  sounds, and she’s listening,

  eyes rolling

  like newsreel cameras,

  and suddenly I have got to laugh,

  I spiral out a whale-stream

  of foam and liquid

  majestic against the wallpaper

  not knowing why,

  and she laughs

  looking down at my flat madness,

  she laughs

  holding her cigarette

  high in the air

  with one arm

  smoke sifting off

  ignored

  and we are in bed together

  laughing

  and we don’t care,

  about anything

  and it is very

  very funny.

  the priest and the matador

  in the slow Mexican air I watched the bull die

  and they cut off his ear, and his great head held

  no more terror than a rock.

  driving back the next day we stopped at the Mission

  and watched the golden red and blue flowers pulling

  like tigers in the wind.

  set this to metric: the bull, and the fort of Christ:

  the matador on his knees, the dead bull his baby;

  and the priest staring from the window

  like a caged bear.

  you may argue in the market place and pull at your

  doubts with silken strings: I will only tell you

  this: I have lived in both their temples,

  believing all and nothing—perhaps, now, they will

  die in mine.

  love & fame & death

  it sits outside my window now

  like an old woman going to market;

  it sits and watches me,

  it sweats nervously

  through wire and fog and dog-bark

  until suddenly

  I slam the screen with a newspaper

  like slapping at a fly

  and you could hear the scream

  over this plain city,

  and then it left.

  the way to end a poem

  like this

  is to become suddenly

  quiet.

  my father

  he carried a piece of

  carbon, a blade and a whip

  and at night he

  feared his head

  and covered it with blankets

  until one morning in Los Angeles

  it snowed

  and I saw the snow

  and I knew that my father

  could control nothing,

  and when

  I got somewhat larger

  and took my first boxcar

  out, I sat there in

  the lime

  the burning lime

  of having nothing

  moving into the desert

  for the first time

  I sang.

  the bird

  red-eyed and dizzy as I

  the bird came flying

  all the way from Egypt

  at 5 o’clock in the morning,

  and Maria almost stumbled on her spikes:

  what was it, a rocket?

  and we went upstairs.

  I poured two glasses of port

  and we sat there as the money-grubbers

  were belled out of their miserable nests

  and Maria went in and watered

  the bowl

  and I sat there rubbing my three-day beard

  thinking about the crazy bird

  and it came out like this:

  all that really mattered was

  going someplace

  the faster the better

  because it left less waiting

  to die. Maria came out

  and peeled back the covers

  and I tore off my greasy clothes

  and crawled beneath the sweaty sheets,

  closing my eyes to the sound and the sunlight,

  and I heard her drop her spiked feet

  and her frozen toes walked the backs of my calves

  and I named the bird

  Mr. America

  and then quickly I went to sleep.

  the singular self

  there are these small cliffs

  above the sea

  and it is night, late night;

  I have been unable to sleep,

  and with my car above me

  like a steel mother

  I crawl down the cliffs,

  breaking bits of rock

  and being scratched by witless

  and scrabby seaplants,

  I make my way down

  clumsy, misplaced,

  an oddity on the shore,

  and all around me are the lovers,

  the two-headed beasts

  turning to stare

  at the madness

  of a singular self;

  shamed, I move on through them

  to climb a row of wet boulders that

  break the sea-stroke

  into sheaths of white;

  the moonlight is wet

  on the bald stone

  and now that I’m there

  I don’t want to be there

  the sea stinks

  and makes flushing sounds

  like a toilet

  it is a bad place to die;

  any place is a bad place to die,

  but better a yellow room

  with known walls and dusty

  lampshades; so…

  still stupidly off-course

  like a jackal in a land of lions,

  I make my way back through

  them, through their blankets

  and fires and kisses and sandy thumpings,

  back up the cliff I climb

  worse off, kicking clods,

  and there the black sky, the black sea

  behind me

  lost in the game,

  and I have left my shoes down there

  with them 2 empty shoes,

  and in the car

  I start the engine,

  headlights on I back away,

  swing left drive East,

  climb up the land and out,

  bare feet on worn ribbed rubber

  out of there

  looking for

  another place.

  a 340 dollar horse and a hundred dollar whore

  don’t ever get the idea I am a poet; you can see me

  at the racetrack any day half drunk

  betting quarters, sidewheelers and straight thoroughs,

  but let me tell you, there are some women there

  who go where the money goes, and sometimes when you

  look at these whores these onehundreddollar whores

  you wonder sometimes if nature isn’t playing a joke

  dealing out so much breast and ass and the way

  it’s all hung together, you look and you look and

  you look and you can’t believe it; there are ordinary women

  and then there is something else that wants to make you

  tear up paintings and break albums of Beethoven

  across the back of the john; anyhow, the season

  was dragging and the big boys were getting busted,

  all the non-pros, the producers, the cameramen,

  the pushers of Mary, the fur salesmen, the owners

  themselves, and Saint Louie was running this day:

  a sidewheeler that broke when he got in close;

  he
ran with his head down and was mean and ugly

  and 35 to 1, and I put a ten down on him.

  the driver broke him wide

  took him out by the fence where he’d be alone

  even if he had to travel four times as far,

  and that’s the way he went it

  all the way by the outer fence

  traveling two miles in one

  and he won like he was mad as hell

  and he wasn’t even tired,

  and the biggest blonde of all

  all ass and breast, hardly anything else

  went to the payoff window with me.

  that night I couldn’t destroy her

  although the springs shot sparks

  and they pounded on the walls.

  later she sat there in her slip

  drinking Old Grandad

  and she said

  what’s a guy like you doing

  living in a dump like this?

  and I said

  I’m a poet

  and she threw back her beautiful head and laughed.

  you? you…a poet?

  I guess you’re right, I said, I guess you’re right.

  but still she looked good to me, she still looked good,

  and all thanks to an ugly horse

  who wrote this poem.

  II

  Crucifix in a Deathhand

  Poems 1963-1965

  the dark is empty;

  most of our heroes have been

  wrong

  view from the screen

  I cross the room

  to the last wall

  the last window

  the last pink sun

  with its arms around the world

  with its arms around me

  I hear the death-whisper of the heron

  the bone-thoughts of sea-things

  that are almost rock;

  this screen caved like a soul

  and scrawled with flies,

  my tensions and damnations

  are those of a pig,