Collected Earlier Poems (25 page)

Behold: Aladdin says “Sesame!” and presto! there’s a golden trove.

Caesar calls for his Brutus down the dark forum’s colonnades.

In the jade pavilion a nightingale serenades

The Mandarin on the delicate theme of love.

A young girl rocks a cradle in the lamp’s arena of light.

A naked Papuan leg keeps up a boogie-woogie beat.

Stifling. And so, cold knees tucked snug against the night,

It comes to you all at once, there in the bed,

That this is marriage. That beyond the customs sheds

Across dozens of borders there turns upon its side

A body you now share nothing with, unless

It be the ocean’s bottom, hidden from sight,

And the experience of nakedness.

Nevertheless, you won’t get up together.

Because, while it may be light way over there,

The dark still governs in your hemisphere.

One solar source has never been enough

To serve two average bodies, not since the time

God glued the world together in its prime.

The light has never been enough.

I notice a sleeve’s hem, as my eyes fall,

And an elbow bending itself. Coordinates show

My location as paradise, that sovereign, blessed

Place where all purpose and longing is set at rest.

This is a planet without vistas, with no

Converging lines, with no prospects at all.

Touch the table-corner, touch the sharp nib of the pen

With your fingertip : you can tell such things could hurt.

And yet the paradise of the inert

Resides in pointedness;

Whereas in the lives of men

It is fleeting, a misty, mutable excess

That will not come again.

I find myself, as it were, on a mountain peak.

Beyond me there is … Chronos and thin air.

Preserve these words. The paradise men seek

Is a dead end, a worn-out, battered cape

Bent into crooked shape,

A cone, a finial cap, a steel ship’s bow

From which the lookout never shouts “Land Ho!”

All you can tell for certain is the time.

That said, there’s nothing left but to police

The revolving hands. The eye drowns silently

In the clock-face as in a broad, bottomless sea.

In paradise all clocks refuse to chime

For fear they might, in striking, disturb the peace.

Double all absences, multiply by two

Whatever’s missing, and you’ll have some clue

To what it’s like here. A number, in any case,

Is also a word and, as such, a device

Or gesture that melts away without a trace,

Like a small cube of ice.

Great issues leave a trail of words behind,

Free-form as clouds of tree-tops, rigid as dates

Of the year. So too, decked out in a paper hat,

The body viewing the ocean. It is selfless, flat

As a mirror as it stands in the darkness there.

Upon its face, just as within its mind,

Nothing but spreading ripples anywhere.

Consisting of love, of dirty words, a blend

Of ashes, the fear of death, the fragile case

Of the bone, and the groin’s jeopardy, an erect

Body at sea-side is the foreskin of space,

Letting semen through. His cheek tear-silver-flecked,

Man juts forth into Time; man is his own end.

The Eastern end of the Empire dives into night—

Throat-high in darkness. The coil of the inner ear,

Like a snail’s helix, faithfully repeats

Spirals of words in which it seems to hear

A voice of its own, and this tends to incite

The vocal chords, but it doesn’t help you see.

In the realm of Time, no precipice creates

An echo’s formal, answering symmetry.

Stifling. Only when lying flat on your back

Can you launch, with a sigh, your dry speech toward those mute,

Infinite regions above. With a soft sigh.

But the thought of the land’s vastness, your own minute

Size in comparison, swings you forth and back

From wall to wall, like a cradle’s rock-a-bye.

Therefore, sleep well. Sweet dreams. Knit up that sleeve.

Sleep as those only do who have gone pee-pee.

Countries get snared in maps, never shake free

Of their net of latitudes. Don’t ask who’s there

If you think the door is creaking. Never believe

The person who might reply and claim he’s there.

The door is creaking. A cod stands at the sill.

He asks for a drink, naturally, for God’s sake.

You can’t refuse a traveler a nip.

You indicate to him which road to take,

A winding highway, and wish him a good trip.

He takes his leave, but his identical

Twin has got a salesman’s foot in the door.

(The two fish are as duplicate as glasses.)

All night a school of them come visiting.

But people who make their homes along the shore

Know how to sleep, have learned how to ignore

The measured tread of these approaching masses.

Sleep. The land beyond you is not round.

It is merely long, with various dip and mound,

Its ups and downs. Far longer is the sea.

At times, like a wrinkled forehead, it displays

A rolling wave. And longer still than these

Is the strand of matching beads of countless days;

And nights; and beyond these, the blindfold mist,

Angels in paradise, demons down in hell.

And longer a hundredfold than all of this

Are the thoughts of life, the solitary thought

Of death. And ten times that, longer than all,

The queer, vertiginous thought of Nothingness.

But the eye can’t see that far. In fact, it must

Close down its lid to catch a glimpse of things.

Only this way—in sleep—can the eye adjust

To proper vision. Whatever may be in store,

For good or ill, in the dreams that such sleep brings

Depends on the sleeper. A cod stands at the door.

Down in the lobby three elderly women, bored,

Take up, with their knitting, the Passion of Our Lord

    As the universe and the tiny realm

Of the
pension “ Accademia
,” side by side,

With TV blaring, sail into Christmastide,

    A look out desk-clerk at the helm.

And a nameless lodger, a nobody, boards the boat,

A bottle of grappa concealed in his raincoat

    As he gains his shadowy room, bereaved

Of memory, homeland, son, with only the noise

Of distant forests to grieve for his former joys,

    If anyone is grieved.

Venetian churchbells, tea cups, mantle clocks,

Chime and confound themselves in this stale box

    Of assorted lives. The brazen, coiled

Octopus-chandelier appears to be licking,

In a triptych mirror, bedsheet and mattress ticking,

    Sodden with tears and passion-soiled.

Blown by nightwinds, an Adriatic tide

Floods the canals, boats rock from side to side,

    Moored cradles, and the humble bream,

Not ass and oxen, guards the rented bed

Where the windowblind above your sleeping head

    Moves to the sea-star’s guiding beam.

So this is how we cope, putting out the heat

Of grappa with nightstand water, carving the meat

    Of flounder instead of Christmas roast,

So that Thy earliest back-boned ancestor

Might feed and nourish us, O Savior,

    This winter night on a damp coast.

A Christmas without snow, tinsel or tree,

At the edge of a map-and-land corseted sea;

    Having scuttled and sunk its scallop shell,

Concealing its face while flaunting its backside,

Time rises from the goddess’s frothy tide,

    Yet changes nothing but clock-hand and bell.

A drowning city, where suddenly the dry

Light of reason dissolves in the moisture of the eye;

    Its winged lion, that can read and write,

Southern kin of northern Sphinxes of renown,

Won’t drop his book and holler, but calmly drown

    In splinters of mirror, splashing light.

The gondola knocks against its moorings. Sound

Cancels itself, hearing and words are drowned,

    As is that nation where among

Forests of hands the tyrant of the State

Is voted in, its only candidate,

    And spit goes ice-cold on the tongue.

So let us place the left paw, sheathing its claws,

In the crook of the arm of the other one, because

    This makes a hammer-and-sickle sign

With which to salute our era and bestow

A mute
Up Yours Even Unto The Elbow

    Upon the nightmares of our time.

The raincoated figure is settling into place

Where Sophia, Constance, Prudence, Faith and Grace

    Lack futures, the only tense that is

Is present, where either a goyish or yiddish kiss

Tastes bitter, like the city, where footsteps fade

    Invisibly along the colonnade,

Trackless and blank as a gondola’s passage through

A water surface, smoothing out of view

    The measured wrinkles of its path,

Unmarked as a broad “So long!” like the wide piazza’s space,

Or as a cramped “I love,” like the narrow alleyways,

    Erased and without aftermath.

Moldings and carvings, palaces and flights

Of stairs. Look up : the lion smiles from heights

    Of a tower wrapped as in a coat

Of wind, unbudged, determined not to yield,

Like a rank weed at the edge of a plowed field,

    And girdled round by Time’s deep moat.

Night in St. Mark’s piazza. A face as creased

As a finger from its fettering ring released,

    Biting a nail, is gazing high

Into that
nowhere
of pure thought, where sight

Is baffled by the bandages of night,

    Serene, beyond the naked eye,

Where, past all boundaries and all predicates,

Black, white or colorless, vague, volatile states,

    Something, some object, comes to mind.

Perhaps a body. In our dim days and few,

The speed of light equals a fleeting view,

    Even when blackout robs us blind.

Let me be given nourishment at your hands

Since it’s for you I perform my little dance
.

For I am the street-walker, Magdalen
,

And come the dawn I’ll be on my way again
,

The beauty queen, Miss France
.

There was a jolly miller once
,

   
Lived on the river Dee;

He worked and sang from morn till night
,

   
No lark more blithe than he
.

And this the burden of his song

   
Forever used to be
—

I care for nobody, no, not I
,

   
And nobody cares for me
.