The Collected Poems (18 page)

they raise tin axes and with a bow light as a brow kill leaves and shadows
so only the drum the drum crashes recalling their former pride and rage

they gave up history and fell into the sloth of showcases
they're lying in glass-topped vaults next to faithful stones

They who lost—near the governor's mansion in Santa Fe
(a long one-story building of warm burnt ocher brown
wood columns protruding roofbeams a sharp shadow hangs on)
they sell beads amulets of the rain and fire god little Kiva temples
two straws of a ladder sticking up on which the harvest descends

buy the god echo he's cheap and keeps a pregnant silence
swaying on the arms stretched out to us
from the Neolithic age

 

Even dreams are shrinking
     where are the sleepy processions of our grandparents
when colorful as birds wanton as birds they ascended high
on the imperial steps and a thousand chandeliers were glittering
and grandpa now familiar only with his cane pressed a silver sword
to his side and an unloved grandmother who was kind enough
to take on for him the countenance of his first love

   to them
Isaiah used to speak from clouds like wisps of tobacco smoke
   and they saw how Saint Teresa
pale as a communion wafer carried a real basket of firewood

their terror was great as a horde of Tartars
and happiness in a dream like golden rain

my dream—the doorbell I'm shaving in the bathroom I open the door
a collector hands me the bill for the gas and electricity
I have no money I go back to the bathroom pondering
the figure 63, 50
     I lift my eyes and see my face
so real in the mirror that I wake up with a scream

if only once I would dream of a hangman's red coat
or a queen's necklace I would be grateful to dreams

 

A poet past his prime
an odd phenomenon

he looks in the mirror
he smashes the mirror

on a moonless night
he drowns his birth certificate in a black pond

he spies on the young
imitates the way they rock their hips

he chairs a meeting
of independent Trotskyites
incites them to arson

he writes letters
to the President of the Solar System
full of intimate confessions

a poet of a certain age
in the middle of an uncertain age

instead of cultivating
pansies and onomatopoeias
he sows spiky exclamations
invectives and treatises

he reads Isaiah and
Das Kapital
by turns
then in the frenzy of discussion
gets his quotes mixed up

a poet in the nebulous season
between the departure of Eros
and a Thanatos not yet risen from stone

he smokes hash
but doesn't see
either infinity
or flowers
or waterfalls
he sees a procession
of hooded monks
climbing a rocky mountain
carrying burned-out torches

the poet of a certain age
recalls warm childhood
a wild youth
a disreputable manhood

he plays
at Freud
he plays
at hope
he plays
at red and black
he plays
at flesh
and blood
he plays and loses
is seized with false mirth

only now does he understand his father
he cannot forgive his sister
who eloped with an actor
he envies his younger brother
and bent over a picture of his mother
he tries once more
to persuade her to conceive

dreams
trivial pubertal
the catechism priest
protruding objects
and the unattainable Jadzia

at dawn he examines
his hand
astonished by skin
that looks like bark

against the fresh blue sky
the white tree of his veins

 

During a pop concert
Mr Cogito mulls over
the aesthetics of noise

an idea in itself
quite appealing

being a god means
to hurl thunderbolts

or less theologically
to swallow the elements' tongue

to substitute an earthquake
for Homer
a stone avalanche
for Horace

to drag from guts
what's in the guts
terror and hunger

to lay bare the paths
of intestines
to lay bare the paths
of the breath
to lay bare the paths
of desire

to play mad love songs
on a red throat

the trouble is
that a cry eludes form
is poorer than a voice
which rises
and falls

a cry touches silence
but by way of hoarseness
not by way of the desire
to describe silence

its darkness blazes
with inarticulacy

it rejected the grace of humor
because it knows no half-tones

it is like a knife blade
driven into a mystery

it does not wrap itself
around the mystery
never finds its shapes

expresses emotional truths
from a wildlife reservation

it seeks the paradise lost
in a new jungle of order

prays for a violent death
and this will be granted

 

Mircea Eliade is right
we are—despite it all
an advanced society

magic and gnosis
flourish as never before

fake paradises
fake infernos
are for sale on every corner

plastic instruments of torture
were discovered in Amsterdam

a virgin from Massachusetts
received a baptism of blood

Seventh Day catatonics
stand on the runways
the fourth dimension will grab them
or an ambulance with a hoarse siren

along Telegraph Avenue
shoals of beards swim
in the sweet smell of nirvana

Joe Dove dreamed
that he was a god
and a god nothingness
he fell slow as a feather
from the Eiffel Tower

an underage philosopher
and acolyte of De Sade
deftly cuts open
a pregnant woman's belly
and paints in blood on a wall
sacred verses of annihilation

in addition oriental orgies
forced and a little tedious

from this fortunes grow
branches of industry
branches of crime

diligent little ships sail
in search of new spices

engineers of visual depravation
labor without rest

panting alchemists of hallucination
manufacture
new thrills
new colors
new moans

and an art of aggressive epilepsy
is born

with time
debauchers will go gray
and consider atonement

then there will arise
new prisons
new asylums
new cemeteries

but this is a vision
of a better future

for now
magic
flourishes
as never before

 

This little cosmology of fired clay
slightly larger than a hand comes from Boeotia
at the top her head like the holy mountain Meru
from which hair falls—the earth's great rivers
her neck is the heavens warmth pulses there
sleepless constellations
a necklace of clouds

on her belly the square earth
under guard of a double sun

in the display case the abandoned Mother

watches with the astonished eye of a star

 

The true history of the prince Minotaur is told in the yet undeciphered script Linear A. He was—despite later rumors—the authentic son of King Minos and Pasiphaë. The little boy was born healthy, but with an abnormally large head—which fortune-tellers read as a sign of his future wisdom. In fact with the years the Minotaur grew into a robust, slightly melancholy idiot. The king decided to give him up to be educated as a priest. But the priests explained that they couldn't accept the feeble-minded prince, for that might diminish the authority of religion, already undermined by the invention of the wheel.

Minos then brought in the engineer Daedalus, who was fashionable in Greece at the time as the creator of a popular branch of pedagogical architecture. And so the labyrinth arose. Within its system of pathways, from elementary to more and more complicated, its variations in levels and rungs of abstraction, it was supposed to train the Minotaur prince in the principles of correct thinking.

So the unhappy prince wandered along the pathways of induction and deduction, prodded by his preceptors, gazing blankly at ideological frescos. He didn't get them at all.

Having exhausted all his resources, King Minos resolved to get rid of this disgrace to the royal line. He brought in (again from Greece, which was known for its able men) the ace assassin Theseus. And Theseus killed the Minotaur. On this point myth and history agree.

Through the labyrinth—now a useless primer—Theseus makes his way back carrying the big, bloody head of the Minotaur with its goggling eyes, in which for the first time wisdom had begun to sprout—of a kind ordinarily attributed to experience.

 

He is writing his memoirs. In them he tries to explain the position of the hero in a system of necessity, to reconcile the mutually contradictory concepts of existence and fate.

The fire is crackling cheerfully in the hearth; in the kitchen his wife is bustling—a gushy girl who couldn't bear him a son but consoles herself that she will enter history anyway. Preparations are underway for a dinner to which the local priest has been invited as well as the pharmacist who is now Prometheus's closest friend.

The fire crackles in the hearth. On the wall a stuffed eagle and a letter of gratitude from a tyrant of the Caucasus, who succeeded in burning a rebel city thanks to Prometheus's invention.

Prometheus chuckles to himself. This is now his only way of expressing his quarrel with the world.

 

Reading old chronicles, epics, and biographies, Mr Cogito sometimes feels persuaded of the physical presence of long deceased persons.

   
CALIGULA SAYS:
Among all the citizens of Rome
I loved only one
my horse—Incitatus

when he entered the Senate
his coat's unblemished toga
shone immaculate among lily-livered purple-clad murderers

Incitatus had many virtues
he never spoke in public
he had the nature of a Stoic
I think in his stable at night he must have read the philosophers

I loved him so much one day I decided to crucify him
but his noble anatomy would not allow it

he accepted his consul's rank indifferently
he wielded power in the best possible way
that is he didn't wield it at all

we failed to incline him to a steady relationship
with my dear wife Caesonia
and so sadly no line of centaur-emperors arose

that's why Rome fell

I decided to have him pronounced a god
but on the ninth day before the calends of February
Cherea Cornelius Sabinus and other fools stonewalled my pious plan

he received the news of my death calmly

he was thrown out of the palace and banished

he bore that blow with dignity

he died without progeny
slaughtered by a thick-skinned butcher from the municipality of Antium

about the posthumous fate of his flesh
Tacitus has nothing to say

 

The priests have a problem
on the borderline of ethics and accounts

what to do with the pieces of silver
which Judas flung at their feet

the sum was entered
in the expenses column
chroniclers will put it
in the legends column

it wouldn't be right to enter it
under the rubric of unforeseen revenue
dangerous to bring it to the treasury
it might contaminate the silver

it wouldn't be appropriate
to use it to buy a candlestick for the temple
or to distribute it among the poor

after long deliberation
they decide to acquire a potter's field
and to establish upon it
a cemetery for pilgrims

to return—as it were
money for death
to death

the solution
was tactful
so why does
the name of this place
rend the air down the ages

akeldama
akeldama
that is field of blood

 

Baruch Spinoza of Amsterdam
was seized by a desire to reach God

in his attic while polishing
lenses
he suddenly pierced a veil
and stood face to face

he spoke at length
(and when he spoke
his mind expanded
and his soul also)
he put questions
on human nature

—God stroked his beard absently

he inquired into the first cause

—God looked off into infinity

he asked after the final cause

—God cracked his knuckles
cleared his throat

when Spinoza fell silent
God spake

—you're a good talker Baruch
I like your geometrical Latin
and the clarity of your syntax
the symmetry of your proofs

but let us speak
of Things Truly
Great

—look at your hands
scarred and shaking

—you ruin your eyes
by sitting in the dark

—you eat poorly
you dress badly

—buy a new house
forgive Venetian mirrors
for reflecting surfaces

—forgive flowers in the hair
the song sung by drunkards

—manage your income well
like your friend Descartes

—be cunning
like Erasmus