"Noir Cacadou or the Fatal Music of War"

• The sea was calm & pale. Almost polite.
• and it meant nothing, simply a remark after another war.
• It will mean a lot to you until the lines stop vibrating & become a thin black cry that ends.
• We'll beat the gong, yell out our uneatable tongues, wallow lasciviously in arms.
• And every dawn the whine will go back up, the black look that means love is near. We'll draw our own lines & be what the sea tries to talk about. Then afterwards we'll help each other dress, lay flowers at the dummy's feet.

"A Doppelganger"

• hide thoughtful flesh
• my yellow hair like thrashing wheat hangs wild over my forehead & blue limpets peer above my cheekbones
• and my black eyes roll & swagger down Washington street
• is it any of these my friends you visit when you think you think of me?

"Poem"

• why how can we not rush glad & wild eyes rolling nostrils flaring towards ourselves in an unknown pasture or public garden?
• it's not the blue arc we achieve nor the nervous orange poppy at the base of Huysmans' neck
• but the secret chlorophyll & the celluloid ladder hidden beneath the idea of skin.

"Entombment"

• and the yellow hearses arrive
• into which your rivulets of tears still eat their seams
• "Anything worth having is worth throwing away" they taught in the synagogues & thought He took rope to their backsides they did not shut up. Now they stand paling into a future which will melt their crosses, caught by the fish in their throats, gargoyles themselves.

"A Slow Poem"

• I wonder if you can die of sadness... What a way to go
• and the three wide windows are embarrassed by darkness
• And my books & pictures yearn toward me mentally as if they were toys or games while I stare at this green ceiling & whine helplessly of sadness... What a way to go

"In Gratitude to Masters"

• And lest the icy sun burn naked up the roots this music through the whining wind so mutes flailing gales that we are safe & seem best to ourselves despite ambiguities, for my we not call down protecting skies at will? not blind, not rigid & screaming may we not beg from subtlety's dreaming light our lack? Finding in art that strength snow clears, warming the barren earth, roots, fallow.
• Thus to the Professor fly our small hands, not spilling the soul to a confessor

"Poem"

• unenlightened by desire & satisfied by very real dreams
• not knowing, in our clever smile, who really felt the cold.

"Song"

• I'm going to New York! (to my friends! mes semblables!) I suppose I'll walk back West. But for now I'm gone forever! the city's hung with flashlights! the Ferry's unbuttoning its vest!

"A Pathetic Note"

• and be careful crossing the streets
• Keep photographing the instant so that in my hysteria I will know what it is like there
• and while my teeth rot & my eyes seem incapable of the images I'd hoped, I will know you are at least all right
• While I write this 11 windows stare, clothes hanging on the wall stir testily. The ceiling's miles away. I'm sitting on the floor. Since I last saw you things are worse.
• It is evening. Other people's lights are going on, I think. But not your friend's.

"Poem"

• My day retches admist its studies & you are rigid with hauteur for months.
• I spill your whiskey: you are beautiful! When my back is turned you still love me. Mirrors go blind in our flame.

"Windows"

• This space so clear & blue does not care what we put into it
• Even our hearts leap up when we fall in love with the void
• There is no spring breeze to soften the sky... In the street no perfume stills the merciless arc of the lace-edged skirt.

"A Byzantine Place"

• How excited I am! My piggy heart is at a traffic intersection
• However I run a mirror slaps me in the face

"My Face in the Street"

• As still oh my people as still life I'm your bowl of bread & your black thought

"A Sketch of Mallarme"

• They're not funny / the unfled flights, the unlaughed laughs
• then it was easier / only the flesh was sad & these white silences hadn't pinned me down
• it's forever I write because the struggle may knock the breath out of me / I want someone to know

"The Naked Element"

• I climb on pierstakes / higher eagles / to love in an airplane of clouds & we do wingdings on the wind / get bloody rolling over stars / it's all in your heart & here / if I please / you are all my love

"Lines Across the United States"

• I don't want to smoke / we're going too fast / our windows hurt the air
• I'm sitting all night / I didn't buy a pillow / my watch got broken last week / I've not done much / I've loved too little / & I'm tired of running

"Jack Rogers"

• & your voice in my typewriter attempts to tease the wit out of serious situations, so we won't be wrong goosing psychiatrists for the sake of our guts
• I want your voice in my ear so the sun will be hotter & as Bermudas make us dizzy we'll clamber over mountains as red & yellow as clowns, shouting

"Poem"

• whenever my dreams' eyes conceal all courses / a flashing uncertainty floods my caprices / only by hazardous pain can I choose tears I am still crying wake my tired rowing

"Voyage a Paris"

• None of your elevators! I will climb the Seine. And the Nile. The world's a baseball in your mitt, in my fingers a balloon.

"A Party Full of Friends"

• but Jack quickly & rather avariciously amended "it's her birthday," then fell deliberately silent / as / Larry paced the floor
• Oh Larry! "Ouch" he cried (the latter) "the business isn't very good between Boston & New York! when I'm not painting I'm writing & when I'm not writing I'm suffering"
• indeed you are, I added hastily with real admiration before anyone else could get into the poem, but Arnie, damn him! had already muttered "yes you are" not understanding the fun of idle protest.
• John yawked onto the ottoman, having eyes

"A curse"

• for that flower is mine will banish from my heart as he falls to root & rain waters strength from his limbs free my muscles my admiring eyes, bah!

"A Portrait"

• rattling against the boy's pink ear & upon the flowing water, the plashing thoughts, the clouds hailing & farewelling that incendiary face
• In the midst of concrete water's most insipid, thought tends to take a dive, no elevator; there's no awning for the heart.
• that I was one of those ones who left sharp toys in their daddies' beds in their mummies' towels & got the maids fired
• he beats upon Love a merciless tattoo, burrows his 3-day stubble into those white thighs, and She, perforce, depressed
• My lips are moist with playgrounds, little girls've touched my knees. And all the stars, when I look up, are on my eyes.

"Mr. O'Hara's Sunday Morning Service"

• there, the sun will seem properly chilly & the wind will not compromise us with any silly sentiment
• I will walk about on the heaving grass rather shakily & observe the model airplanes lofted by dry blue currents
• follow the glider straining its little spirit into swoops that clumsily break & bounce to earth with a grunt
• so all through dinner our clear anxious eyes remain aloft

"The Soldier"

• I'm humming death's Arab songs
• I tear up pictures & throw my books out the window like a nun in heat the blood forces through my hands & feet & head & groin
• Like a crazed dog that hears someone else's trumpet I go yapping after pals & cannot bear to pant alone for I can imagine how the hermit dies

"Parties"

• the anchovy eye
• the mirror has a streak across its face as if a cake of soap had slipped
• & the candles tremble perhaps with lust perhaps simply because they are cold anyhow they everyone we've been to bed with
• open the ventilator open the door the sky is peering through the venetian blinds Kenny you're having a wonderful party but I am dying / in the middle of a martini in the middle of a dance oh don't ask me to clean up the place no tomorrow no airplanes just flies

"In the Street of Children the Sun is Cold"

• no child can die fast enough to know: love dies in the bright praise of its double

"Form & Utterance"

• the wind is very warm in June
• a hearse wanders suggestively by. it's the end!

"Round Objects"

• the marmalade jar swells
• let us rest in the grasses, covered with scented bugs. sand admires the perfect vamp & lip, the tractor reels in the sum.
• quenches our eyes (the gingko reminder)

"A Virtuosos"

• the dopy audience
• and while millions of rosebuds fall from our pianist's aching hammers nobody thinks of anything but those clattering bleeding teeth

"A Classical Last Act"

• for the interim w re priming the pump of forgetting, tears & lavaliers, the throttling of all extraneous decoration in favor of emotional impertinence & structural wailing, to be not so dry as bone & not so facile as an artesian well
• & it is just like the subway: we've at last found an empty car, open doors are swaying for miles ahead, & the conductor's in a perfect tantrum, eh?
• "I love yuh!" screams the dying man as his sockets grow black & his lips fall to bleeding with foam under sky
• the analogous excitements of his breath, our death

"The Ideal Bar"

• the jasmine blinker of your breath opposed across the bar your whiskey eyes
• we were the pink chair of plush rolling its tongue to the window, night, & the bastards who lived below the hall
• for the bellyaches of venery

"The Painter's Son"

• but! his bony fist's splinter beautifully on the tough heart of art

"A Military Ball"

• rollicking with laughter at pretty things & not even regretting our rompers as naked we dance towards the silliness of our pain, not acknowledging the boom & buzz of the band, the endless explosion of its music, or the easy toss of your & my heart on the baize, the ocean, the sward
• not the glamor of your uniform by mine, but these game convolutions of your voice above the dark

"Poem"

• must we summer voyages & hear festivals, sun looming always larger & over the sill?

"Serenade"

• oh I don't know, say, say it's your fingernails scratching down my neck

"Vernissage Jane Freilicher"

• the bell jars the white walls & a wind sweeping the plains
• eyes drowning in hand-me-downs
• a city of ants for a navel
• but today's sun streams like a midnight harpist across the islands of artistic weariness

"Shelter"

• and there are tears & jobations everywhere
• we fall into a valley of silence where the blood audibly drips from ventricle to vial
• brave sentiments crush us in their orchestra arms

"It is a Weak Cold Morning & I Roll"

• I peer at the paper & your face growls back, yes

"Poem"

• are you aware that snow's flying from the heat of my eyes about your touchy feet?
• and if I could be compassionate as a horse you'd hate my whinny, try to trap me in blue meadows like the stallion across the street who's a sucker for clover
• pearl of the indian floor & black H above my heart, why do you always whine & drunkenly sob, telephone, catch me in your cloud as if we were high on a hill?
• over there the sun is burning up & you wonder what land this is, what love

"On a Friend's Being Insulted"

• shake out the lice of words like a banner through the ferrying air as roars the flame of our together

"The Puritan"

• the eye vomits to think of it & the gun trembles in my hand
• to go to bed, and be in love, is to shoot the same bird slower than with a stranger
• fly to Africa! learn Eskimo! at least seek someone with an air of redolence, yellow eyes, or a breath ripened in garlic!

"A Romantic Poet to his Muse"

• and nightingales slit each others' throats, the many tongued to death
• the lady who lifts her window to the ominous silence of lust streams blood from her fingers & is dumb with the beauty of her being
• like a moon plunging in the New Guinea ocean her heart moans unceasingly for the knife

"A Greek Girl at Riis Beach"

• the girl fishes up the sea
• she tugs the ribbon, dirty ribbon holding her & then tumbling jet hair falls into wind flashing with the sun's rays, the stinging tails & arrows of the jumping rabid ocean
• her eyes in the wilderness gather fishes, dreaming salmon leap over cheekbones into the hot spring of her blood & her lips, wet with the flavor & the subtle scales, glitter against the horizon. birds flush from her sweating palms, aieee! barracuda! tarpon! ray!

"Poets up in the Air"

• copulates with the fancy ewes that escape from a Ford pickup, severally
• and it doesn't have to be spring, the wind opens like a glass door. John & I, sitting at canasta

"I Walk Through the Rain"

• ponderous columns atop which the sleepy eggplants shine in the moon of her peering out at the mysterious night & that's me

"Chanty"

• personification leaves me dippy
• to be fed only once a day & irregularly?
• serious as a lady's handbag
• let not that old devil start to rise

"Grace & George, an Eclogue"

• Grace & George are showing themselves some scenery & history. The Alps are rising under them like escalators & their blonde hair is tossing in the waves of an advancing sea of problems
• Grace: I saw the waning tulip of night fade into a gossamer shroud. I was all alone
• the moon has meanwhile really come out as if summoned
• on the floor of the star-strewn lake where a million hints of hibiscus whisper "wordsworth!" in tune
• the frightful distinction of line between freedom which is tartar & slavery which is self
• "I had not cried these several years." a tree topples down the slope & is planks on the silver, frothing & sighing
• and the crawling diagram falters in the eye of human dispassion & grows less relentless
• a breath of snow crumbles across southern Italy towards the pair, who...
• how has our hero wandered?
• faster & faster pleasure has wounded me
• could you have meant less, could you have trapped me & forgiven me, could you have relented & freed me? is that the meaning of these faces in your eyes, the same faces though infinitely varied & hung?
• I remember only the betrayal within myself which I sought like a seed
• and, like a malarial mist, our personal tombstones are wreathed with the iddity of enormous circumstance, which is the substance of life
• when to the azure of our several beds we leave "our private walks & arborways, common pleasures, to walk abroad & recreate yourselves"
• it is as well to stroll on the edge of an abyss like the great Atlantic; uncharted it gave comfort to the last garganttuan sea monsters & in the clear light of the oceanographer did not fail to sink the Titanic

"It's the Blue"

• there was smoke, bubbles, et cetera. "oh how we love punctuation! don't we?" was what Myers thought voluntarily when he found the body of that, wow! particular marionette on its wet back.
• the yellow haired revolver of his smile
• so glassy an image of our whitest nights under slipping trees. yet waldemar must say "pooof! you are in love with affairs, messy feeder!"
• even in this sordid oval
  
  , water freezes into mirror of life. "if this actor isn't dead" cries john to waldemar "then I am!"
• and if a bubble splits the skin of that tightening pool he can but scream his despair to hoarse tiles calling this moment. any friend would beg him not to ring the police, but they reach for him when he's alone to press the buzzer & giggle as he hands forth his clever wrists. "divine absurd!" cries john "I've always embraced you!" the coppers stamping uniform skies. that's not death.

"Poem"

• my decision is to say yes, it's yes always from these brown lips, sublime monotony & ease of
• and the final tinkle is his surname on her skull
• it is enough to know what not to do.
• the beasts drink her blood where it floats on ice, but they all come back to nest & even the neighbors know how I smell in the springtime
• it's a habit acquired in youth, nice to animals

"A Darkened Palette"

• the rooftops are all cluttered up, an old cat lies out in the rain sop / belly-up, and the rouge cheeks
• sliding & beaming & fast riding the ropes of our eyes if night only filled the bowls of our sight / with its rumbling tulips of coffee. i cannot light above -- oh nellie take the kettle off, pour ink upon the cattle & beware the lamp that would finger night's melting heat upon the empty paper sky, its itchy purple belly.
• the cat is going up in smoke, quite young, and singing in the black with shiny claws to trace the leafy trees, its choice.

"Poem"

• "it's only me knocking on the door of your heart" whined the radio while I bawled feverishly, eating an orange, salting it up a little.
• a gelatin light squeezed windows I had watched all night at, bored, lordy was I bored.
• no, I was really nuts, miserable. I called jane & john & al & waldemar & grace & then I got scared, hung up, screamed!
• and couldn't get out a window because I'd locked them all, because I'm 6 flights up. and it's been a terribly cold winter, radio's been broke.

"The Beach in April"

• not to be palatial like a Spanish busboy & not to be scrumptious, that's not you, Jane said, frowning & left hand pounded sand under my eyes, fine free spinning / knifting the space between sea & horizon, spine I was to fill with Mercedes Benz ears
• as her nylon ruffles spat from under her skirt blowing forth like flags
• my eyes worked quietly at their pearls
• the perfect pressure of our hearts
• changing roadsters rampant into lipstick maroon
• me, Jane, trapped in the bamboo. our freezing feet.

"A Wind at Night"

• as our dreams burst feebly out of her cracked eyes

"Prose for the Times"

• faces aureoled at his shoulders & elbows
• "I'm sorry, but I don't feel like one just now, if you don't mind," I said, thinking of many things, chiefly, perhaps, of childhood, when I would make myself vomit so I wouldn't have to go to parties.
• "you needn't be afraid of me," I said, turning. "I don't love you."

"Tent-digging on the Vacant Lakes We Appled"

• I love the cracked tooth of an old aunt, I melt when an orange weeps its grenadine & raises aloft a sweetmeat under the marquee

"Maurice Ravel"

• indestructible you have become by his hands
• the harmful distances of silence
• waltzing him round, always with love & discrimination self-taught
• his wrist dripped oases
• if, at the untellable hour of quiet, he had not put fingernail to waterglass

"Red"

• red ringlets in the sunset! what buttery nostalgias you joke, what pianistic sallies into the past! up to my ears in elephants!
• we're not artificial are we?
• & when winter comes, we won't go inside & drink watered rum?
• that upcoming acid's already eating into the rippling vermilion situation, but I will contain you this moment which is not so cheap as blood

"A Sunday Supplement"

• we loved our bodies, navyblue sneakers, Frank Sinatra & pistachio frappes, it's all in our heart & dirtied there / without a bath of tears or war

"Kra Kra"

• I never got a whiff of a nut by myself. / I like it by myself.
• that slipped from under the mustaches in afternoon thunder
• though it's fun to amuse someone & one is amused, I guess. but it's embarrassingly less.
• you locked up my hen

"A Protestant Saint"

• & the days that are dead like rusty sewing machines, silent & on the fritz, still jangle in his left ear
• he thinks he holds his lover's voice by telephone through strife & hurricano
• the night is moony
• but it's really his mother, a way of punishing him for pissing on that tea rose
• the window rests upon the city's velvet cushion. he lies on a green couch, writhing / says that he has fantasies God

"Latinus"

• and that day she burst in flames, her charred tiara in the rattled streets

"The War"

• and it is so. black souls inside black eyes.
• no mirrored world. you part the curtain; the muzzle stares into heaven of its own choosing
• I'm back & you drop plates, seeing the puffs of dust spring from a door that's dead to my white clenches.

"Study of Women 2"

• it was one of those transcontinental firsts
• the wallpaper rippled
• the dear man who had watered her flower away

"August Afternoon, A College"

• "then pass me gently into this silence of mashers & rollerskates where the red-white-and-blue so coolly flips"

"The Azure Waves Grumble & Languish"

• the azuure waves grumble & languish upon the shoulders of California
• glazing the ghosts of our sons, poor yellow Americans, so that we seem to see them, see
• it is murderous, winds pitching snow at our backs & we so old, having come down the other side of the mountain to be greeted only by the rampant sea.
• no glade, no homes, no harbor, and nothing yet said, just the drear expanse of mortal heaving & yawning.
• dear friend, whose gnarled company's my total, don't you fear its rough contemplation?

"Fish Smells in the Hallway"

• fish smells in the hallway because it is Friday & cheap, drifts down the bannisters & there's spinach in my bathtub left from last night. the rye I just bought will scream when the top comes off, making two people ugly, but I must get to the dinner

"Rooftops Blocks Away from Me"

• I am dashed on rocks at sea
• the careless sun removes itself / night imitates this ease / my painful eyes were made in Delft & cannot see the trees
• night the wind is tossing cities / I am walking always fear / strangers' lubricated pities fail to ease me here
• the labryinthine love

"A Wreath for John Wheelwright"

• these shadows, lengthening into the mind
• the rarest musicians are today the flightiest, push me never, hurry me not
• so the parallel structure of the eyes must cluster like a snowberry or crash head on into its own clarity w/ all its might
• do you fence the plains at 14 & not remember your dad?
• do you remember who got away? how they all got back home base & all the flags flew & the newspapers boomed for weeks?
• in the futuristic flatness of the nasal earth which, a bowl of dust, seemed to ruminate ironically
• its embracing rust, the dawn that smelled like an orangery
• black cacti

"See the Tents & the Tanks & the Trees of March"

• the wind screams forth as if everything were stone
• in the middle of fields I was composed of fire but I have become more & more mountainous, O my soul

"Intermezzo"

• which is the mystery of melting things
• a cloudly langour fanned his heart into the air
• unlike the others, he was smiling, his lips spattered with snow
• the taught child always pays attention, dark, to the morning ices, their distracted peculiar fruits as they cry out to be wrapped in aluminium foil, & the savage one stands beside him asking for him as if to be younger were to be a priest
• you wish to be heard above the massed forgetfulness
• let's call it "Everything"
• you see me very clearly, don't you, here on the floor of the world looking for my recording apparatus
• didn't you know I was poison, to be cut & heaped?
• won't someone drown me in rainbow trout, and masturbate & pray for me until I am entirely gone into flowers?
• oh great bed of the world, don't I deserve you? your great hands closing over my thighs in the slender kiss of your unweeping blue?
• take me, as if I were wounded, into the sky
• then, facing total blackness, I am at last my self.

"Clouds"

• how will I be able to keep you if you don't disgust me a little? why do you wear lipstick with trousers that are stained & stain?
• I want you to stop making me sick. I want you to go away & not stay away. could you bring me razor blades when you come back? and a sandwich of begonias & glass?

"Causerie de Gaspe Peninsula"

• "sometimes I think I have too many breasts"
• 'your name is mud'

"Light Cavalry"

• striating roars in a heart trembling with nostalgias & their sweaters of foresight & funicular pain-is-a-fir-tree. while the milk of manhattan's algae grazes its own slopes we shore in love that's tubular
• but I'd love to be you & sick
• and when he stares into your knees they just close up like mountains of seas, "I'm-a-little-drunk-dear-phone-calls," mountainous ease is what I mean of the medical profession. "own towns" they will tell you, but it's hormones make you fountainous, not manipulation
• how can I the miraculous scenery of my life dissaude?
• "who wages a war with a dark brown gift, a war" surely knows the weight of his love. grand opera.

"Addict-Love"

• and I latch onto that which utterly paralyzes my undecipherable prepuce
• void myself like someone punching oboes
• Jews pulsate through my framework like a crayon left on the swooning tombstone that's like a sarong under one of those palm trees sucking low & long over the lagoon at midnight neat the lip of the moon, see it sluggish, see it slapdash, see it slumbrous, as it will die

"Perfumes"

• for, you see, having appointments is nice. and isn't it distressing to see them all in one day as if one didn't know who one's friends were? like a picture of Shem?
• I didn't think that I wanted to go but I went for a swim in the sunset. beautiful women! are you in Onset?
• and the dark sand of garrulous love
• and it's no wonder that she leaves in haste, knowing that her beauty's nothing to her just as the wet grass doesn't help the ground & Nothing's interested in the sewer
• no, she has never really gone away. she's intimate, and long as a good day.

"Joseph"

• let me escape to me enormous tent in a trance, let me faint across the wind
• from now on I shall refuse to walk ahead of anybody. when I was very free, seared of myself, and set out to contaminate worlds, my body gave pleasure that was not mine to become famous for, not yet a disgusting air, nor ambiguous in fault
• I am a prophet still, and you are host in this affair

"Spleen"

• O golden earth of my bony shoulders, must we always fall upwards!
• isn't it wonderful to be alive? aren't they glad? and when I exert myself the tendons stand out, rigid as neon, grinning tightly as they struggle
• it's amusing to see the sun wither so many germs after you've been asleep, really preoccupied with hell. I love to think of their delicacy as they flutter along my stomach

"The Weekend"

• tonight we improvised a conversation between two drunks with lisps & afterwards made jello but it had pineapple in it
• the snow was whirling like a picture frame

"The Lights over the Door"

• where the prisoners are flipping like cradled fish
• the tulips are absolutely crawling like young girls who know men
• you must not be brazen with me, my darling, I know you fell down inside the ice-cream cone & like to drown yourself when the lights go out. orange taxis! and the absence of breath odor.

"Bridlepath"

• there was gin somewhere but who can find it?

"Light Conversation"

• at dusk we dove into an hexagonal pool in the black-leafed wood-hole. "are you out fruiting?"

"Green Words, A Sestina"

• then I sat down on the sun to watch a tree like moss escape the sky
• the cat finds everything mysterious but the sun, how he purrs & claws just to watch the sky!
• the grapes are drying in the sun. and the sky is its own black cat which it strokes, as it does me

"A Little on his Recentness"

• and where you thought there was a mirror it was only me, leaving
• I wonder if Margaret is still alive?
• no. I am always with you, with your brooding Ekaterinburg looks; something was settled in my heart & it was not a farm or the borshch, or an engine leaving the station its "Aha!" in its cloud of soot

"Dear Bobby"

• since you have gone the sullen heart's made no discoveries & the time of day's not hateful, not sublime, it just keeps falling in a heap between each vacant thundering sleep
• Chaucer calls this illness / Troilus' simple tears; it thrives in utter stillness & nourishes my fears
• I wonder if you will see this before you leave for Corfu, will your lips say this in Paris / which I love to so embarrass? you must pardon love my mood which is dolorous & crude & would be a subtle shout of breath upon your thighs

"A Face over a Book"

• a simple sentence lingers on the streets
• the sun has never come out for me, and my books turn red with air

Etc.

• disfigure the quiet snow
• green, the vast swards of a remembered cafeteria
• my eyes are red from reading. I didn't shave this morning, I was that distracted by the snow
• and the leaves came down & down, like memories of past happiness, the more thought of the more dry & tough
• wrinkled lips, huddling in the doorway of the Brazilian Embassy
• Saigon had never looked more like a department store, all careless & bathetic, like a pill on a tongue
• and all the buildings fall on the tired feet
• as the heart knows what it knows & isn't, & tries to be art
• and I remember that you felt me worth 24 of your hours
• a long history of affection & regret; I'm hiding under your wrinkled mountain
• & the waterfalls were still as flames
• the voices began, like so many daggers
• like a crown of screams, as clearly as sand pouring through glass in the winter desert
• and the clear yellow paper of the sky
• I walk the country in wet shoes while you are in the quarry, oh New York! under the same sun which is whiter there & blue at night
• o golden mountain, perfect as the glistening rain!
• if you don't understand something, you say I am it
• I offer you these arms which have protected animals & these thighs which have bumped them & these lips which have loved them as I love you. and I accept the man, for who does not love all, cannot love me, though it pains me not to be unique & I would be the only animal who ever rested, bleating, in your arms
• I love you more than duty, most for looks, and more than hillsides covered with their own plangent fragrance which is just as much from bottles
• for all that's duty & desire is dust
• yet I never wholly fear the romance of my interior self no matter how asleep I am, how nearly dead
• damp new air & fluttering snow
• and the synthetic aura of 5 minute coffee, that Romanticism, tasting of lips & of brown morning whiskey
• here is the edge of the water where the delicate crabs drift like shells
• with all the salt falling like a fountain across your mottled flesh
• and where the sands sting you they gleam like matchsticks in the noon
• you are standing in the doorway on the green threshold while it licks feet that are burning to spread & flutter
• I don't eat wheat & I wear my violin strings around my neck in case I need them
• sweet nursery rhyme describing manna & how far away all that is good is & music, too
• oh heart described you are being pushed out of existence by a mysterious swelling
• he rode home in Cadillacs, lonely, feeling that the lacks of the Life of Fame adored left him handsome, nervous, bored
• I am virtuous, though wrong in the head, and love you dearly
• all life's beautiful things he'd lost!
• from the bedroom to the bed, from the bed into his head crept green fantasies of death & be couldn't control his breath
• in an ecstasy of sweat he streams & shouting asks her if she's real
• we look like dead leaves
• your flesh is familiar / O night sunk in the perfume of clouds! wandering in spacious loneliness like so many exiled Popes. you are their breath, night, while they pray, you are the love we run from, through the day. trees breathe softly in your hair
• as the windows rattle against summer
• I get depressed because I'm so easily distracted from sex. it's not something you can keep your mind on without losing it.
• I'm not a pastoral type any more, I take the subway back & forth from beds to days or bed-in-the-day-time
• how cheerful it is to be weeping in the springtime!
• "I'm tired of imitating those whom I no longer respect."
• and it is tiring to make balloons out of rubber bands
• so purple in her spinning blood-flecked eyes
• the sea lapping along, and then the laps seeing, and the See collapsing
• Baby Katherine is only two weeks old. she loves wearing make-up.
• my back is peeling & the tar melts underfoot as I cross the street. sweaty foreheads wipe on my shirt as I pass. the sun hits a building & shines off onto my face. the sun licks my feet through my moccasins as I feel my way along the asphalt... for a moment I enter the cavernous vault & its deadish cold. for a moment I suck off every man in the Manhattan Storage & Warehouse Co. then, refreshed, again to the streets! to the generous sun & the vigorous heat of the city.
• you hear the grass walking by. eyes the color of black coffee. the will is a very strong swimmer, freshly greased. a tired hand is laid across the railroad tracks.
• you have carried yourself to a new world, put off the final applause.
• snow is covering us like plaster
• it is 1:55 in cambridge, pale & spring cool, it is. evenings in jim's place with jimmy & listening to lenya sing all day long. yes, I would like another beer & bert brecht is a great poet, and kurt weill, he is a genius too.
• terrifying as a game at recess when the bullies were on the other side. and when they were on our side it was worse.
• no more walks by the Charles "the alluvial river" drifting through a town that's pretty because it is so flat.
• will these poems ever get written?
• and elsewhere, as snows dirty, we'll sit for long long days & talk & play the phonograph & heat the coffee. and silent, go to a bar.
• the marvelous is like taking off your earmuffs at the North Pole
• flower! you are like synthetic feelings, full of tomorrow & yesterdays & Tuesday, you are loved by those who grew you, but I loath you, daffodil! I am green as the grass towards you & I loathe eery crinkling sentiment of your still-bulbous flesh.
• o sun! must you leave me here alone? will you abandon me, and soon the forsythia will be out & everything will be yellow?
• I am too late, from wandering; and grass is growing in my heart, the tough, indiscriminate grass which knows no color but the wind.
• what if one of us could be the greatest lover in history -- could one of us without the other do it? I doubt it / and so much has been written about us already
• we fornicated once in storms lashed to the mast in sheets & later you proudly showed me the elephants' burial ground
• our consuming passion, you said was knowledge & it was written down / someone was always listening & through the long history of love a volume of words moved glacially between us
• at war with one another we fell together
• it's always been rather like spring, hasn't it? and Roman poetry
• all I can remember is a French description of your eyes
• he sailed backwards to Europe discovering islands, the pale ones & the ones like elephants & those like pearls
• but the trees shall stand never so high as in his native land
• I wonder why they sip& toddy still in back of Beacon Hill & tote their pain into the swan-ridden Public Gardens
• life sappeth the spirit
• [the nun] is most apparent in high heels
• and summer greets him like a god through fog
• yes it is light beneath & in the chestnut of the heart, the lake so clear & dappling yet with sorrow, yet & yet, a poem & a simple leaf
• the reason I loved you from the first moment we met is because you seemed to hold a certain hostility towards me which I mistook for wisdom. I thought you really knew me instinctively
• I think you thought I loved you blindly, but actually I was just wondering whether you loved me or just saw through me to yourself
• you see, even now, I am never ironic
• now I know probably as much as I will ever know of living. how perfect & horrible it is! not life, but my self
• I guess I'm trying to appeal to you, but you won't be able to cry. if you were here, I would just smile & try not to look wistful, and the effort would allow us both to think of each other
• so few people ever wish to know anything! or you know already.
• I see you smiling, I see you chewing your lower lip at cocktails. I see you always your mink, your CHEMISTS FOR CUSTOM--miss lang: perfumes, your performance as miss northern lights, tes poemes, ma carissima, my insincerity, your insincerity, my meanness, your meanness back, yaks, dolors, secrets, / and now you are foreign to me. that is horrible.