Spring One
1.
Suffused by paint-cracking warmth in a steam-heated room,
late winter rain
slushing away through the snow, the traffic, the auto horns
bleating and shaking
their cages outside, I linger behind pulled shades
lost in the dumps
of my own stock presence; with armies caught stark on the edge
of command slowly tearing
their minds awake, I loll half-dozing, attuned to
the rise of a day
embalming the mouth, muting the whistle of play,
the twitch twitch of birds
in the melting boughs of a grimy New England day;
gripped in the bowels
of a gray tabernacular house, I lie photographing
the self -- myself,
all selves, bright and to fade, as once Mathew Brady,
in innocent camps
of suffering, snapped the tired grim lounging dying
Blue and Gray.
2.
Gray, executioner's day -- except for the gone-
to-work armies, who
can tell time on such a day? -- as when minuteless hours
congeal around
the electric lights' dimming, a man being put in a chair
to burn heart and brain,
until anyone moving at all feels the waves of the current,
again and again,
shooting straight through his own newly breakfasted body. Something
hangs in the air
which is moveless, omnivorous, sopping up emptiness, loss:
as though humanity's
power of idleness everywhere pulsed through a huge
neglected machine
whirring and wreathing itself on and on in a noiseless
opaqueness of steam
that declared by its presence the total absence of man.
What lives? Who breathes?
3.
The big city graveyards of motherly-fatherly bones
creep into the suburbs,
and farther, up to, around and way past the airports
where we arrive
faster than sound, breaking the barrier which is
ourselves, the whining
of jets with their canned human loads of pilots and passengers
set up to rise
and fall smiling at death, at the bomb, who light up the panels,
lock themselves in
and drop out, shatter, disintegrate into thin air:
a new way of dying,
just settling down to be filtered into the lungs
of the living below.
4.
The President stands up to hundreds of millions, a dog
among dogs barking
into the bags of their heads (". . . honor in war . . ."),
lapping their brains;
they listen, they roll on their backs, huffing, surprised,
feel something slip
(". . . our boys are dying for us . . ."), believing only
something has failed,
like a bad job for too long, or the man who has kept it, vanished,
leaving behind
his family but no other trace, like a dime
dropped in a sewer,
yet this man is also the nation, thrashing, distending
itself until,
no longer a man, it subsides in the dark and becomes
the thing that is gone.
5.
There are ways men think they must be they can never be,
nor even try
to become, which rule them who so agree to be ruled:
by death lure in traffic
each day, by war's death, causeless, a battle of no
excuse, an end
in abstract defeat, by headline, the deadbox clicked shut
against sight of blood
loss, heart loss, bone hacked into the groove of a vein;
or as when a man
lingers on in a monstrous self-reproduction of cells,
still breathing but blind
to his being; or as when a woman gives birth to death,
her own death and
another's which never belonged to life, doubly ended --
the ways men think
they must be, run dead on their feet till sleeping and waking
are the same murder.
6.
The fleece of morning still at the window, the juices
of living run over,
pour out of the shrilling sirens: Come to the fire,
crash the old houses,
wash them away, the indwelling unrecognized dead;
with their bone char
blacken your faces and build you new houses, singing:
Great is the flex
of my hand, the leap of my tongue, the sudden cringe
of my sweating brow
alert to the deadening lie, by the cool of my body
nakedness,
knowing itself the start and the finish of goodness,
an only life.
7.
The lessons of time wear out (in time all lessons
wear out) and I
turn back to solicit, incredulous, my own life's
burnt-out years,
seeing only the blinking of shutters on gutted ruins,
the ruins all me.
I suspect this but swear the pictures are false, the negatives
rigged -- not by me.
I'm alive -- O motherly-fatherly deeds, what have I
to do with thee?
But the thought keeps recurring, the no one I always see
looks too much like me.
To whom need I tell this, whose favor do I seek,
having always known
in my bones the truth of the lie, the hole from which all
my fine words leak?
8.
I find a man sitting inside myself and leering
pedantically.
I let him. I take on his smirk and voice, pitched low.
It relieves me
to be him -- small, ceremonious, hedgy, a stuffy
nonentity.
It is always someone quite distinct, somebody
I can name:
an insolent clerk, ogre lady or punitive person
long forgotten.
Where do they suddenly come from? What dredges them up?
I borrow them
like a dirty old jacket I like to wear because
it's so worn,
so ugly, ill-fitting, and because it becomes me.
As a child I was told,
Don't frown -- the look will stick to your face forever.
Look mom, I'm frowning.
Look dad, someone I'm not has really become me.
I'm Lon Chaney,
the hunchback of Notre Dame, the Jekyll devouring
odd Mr. Hyde!
The only nice thing about them is that they're disguises
I can easily drop,
like a secret pride, an attitude I must try out,
then quickly discard
when it gets in the way of -- what? my being myself?
That's piously said,
but what is it? The truth is it rankles, this having
to take on somebody
else's old smell, ego-fatuous speech and smile.
It punishes me.
They've gotten the upper hand and I'm fighting them all --
punitive ogre,
insolent pedant, weird little bogies, swarming through
the unkillable dark.
9.
Have you ever been taken for somebody else and felt
the oddness of being,
even briefly, not yourself? Then think what it's like,
being faced with the lie,
officially forged, that you are somebody else,
have been for years --
in the files of state officialdom, are nothing
more than a Red,
a rat-nosed hustler who may be expected to sell
secrets to Russia.
Whoever you are with whatever image of self
you've taken and shaped
through years of depression, wars and deaths, and living
by whatever view
allows you to practice a fumbling personal faith,
imagine all this
erased by the routine act of a faceless flunky,
and thereafter,
for years and years ( and, who knows, even still),
you are not only
not you, but a dossier grows in the files on someone
it has been decided
(for whatever reason -- a name, say, too much like yours
not to be yours)
is actually you, a someone who may or may not
even exist.
10.
Since you cannot even have met him, you're never aware
of him except
when you're grilled third-degree in melodramatic hearings:
"Did you ever
walk down the streets of M with a Negro?" "Did you
ever know X
or Y or Z?" (All prominent communists. ) "What
about Q and R?"
(Two rightist extremists! ) "How long have you been writing
to A, B and C?"
(Notorious Spanish Reds!) When you find yourself saying
Never or No,
the routine reply, strange on the lips of the sub-
literate griller,
is cynically, "Don't bother to lie -- we have evidence
to the contrary."
This happened unstopped in the forties and fifties; the newsreels
and tapes of the hearings
of Famous Fish Caught with Red Herrings are semi-pop items
among the sophisticates
now when grillers grow smoother, wear college ties,
invite you to dinner,
paying your air fare and hotel expenses, maybe,
then bug your phone
when your wife calls -- or is it your Red Chinese mistress
with a Bronx accent?
Instead of a hearing a permanent gray siege is laid
on all innerness.
11.
The question Who is involved -- a nameless man,
a manless name,
yourself-in-another, another-in-you, enemies,
friends, the same? --
begins a network of fantastic relations to people
(never heard of, mostly)
and to events in the past (fictitious mainly,
or never experienced),
until you become in your own eyes a tale conceived
by an idiot through
the sheerest discourtesy of self-perpetuant bureaus
so certain that real
individuals, issues, ideas no longer exist
they have to invent
artificial ones they can handle -- nullities looking
something like you.
12.
Now the unanswerable question is not who are you
but who made you up?
When you try to track down the source of the Frankenstein ape
they say is you,
you are doubly suspected for persisting to question the matter,
on the assumption,
put simply, that the innocent never cry out while the guilty
invariably must,
until, in secret suspecting everyone you've known
as malicious informers,
the infection spreads -- a word or a phrase you have dropped
to solicit a clue
incriminates you: whom you suspect suspects you.
In time you grow into
the thing you are not, the-fiction-not-even-man,
absorbed by the lies,
collective, abstract, a fear-bitten nation creates
in the guise of men.
13.
In mock-epic meter this poetry hobbles on stilts,
in boots, in prose,
to say what it has to say straight before it falls
on its face as a poem.
In this it takes after the latest revived poetic
fashion (old
as late Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Donne's London, Edwards'
and Hawthorne's New England)
of disrobing before disemboweling the conscience in public.
The hara-kirists
are not simply Asian but Puritan Jewish American
Spanish Calvinist
English Greek Russian Irish Catholic Protestant
African Poles.
I, Henny Penny, hurt here, because I swallowed
a piece of the world,
and now I am screaming because in return the world
is swallowing me.
Poet, don't look to your laurels, they're always unreal.
The world is far nuttier,
drunker, more drugged, more beautiful, vainer, impatienter,
stupider than you.
Be true to yourself, if you can, the world is never
true or untrue.
14.
In Paterson, Williams' epic, a line from the Greek
is quoted somewhere,
half defense, half apology: "A deformed verse
for a deformed time."
This much is certain: the sense and the music together
come clear when sense
has the edge in addressing the thinking ear; otherwise
it's sonic smear.
Go then, my verse, on hobble-stilt-booted feet:
better than no feet
at all to get around with -- remembering
that pathetically jolly
young sergeant having his say in a TV feature
on old Viet Nam,
the happy-go-lucky double amputee thanking
his stars for his loss
because he could teach the rookies a thing or two
they wouldn't know.
With fight-back American pride he was dancing, this man,
on his own Army-issued
detachable legs. Well, out of that viewing came bounding
this ill-natured poem
called "Mouths," recalling the other wars when amputees
weren't so lucky.
15.
Mouths
Hear us, we are young again and about to die.
There is a war again, and we, who were there before,
dream we are being given over to it,
even as our hearts rebound from it,
unspeaking, sickened, with the strength
of all our separate huge unwillingnesses,
our hundred-million-minded backward dread recoilfulness,
carried now, despite ourselves, squarely into it.
Suddenly the ground is cleared,
dug up for a moment and cleared a bit,
so the amputees may dance alone,
each with his own lost limb,
so the full-bodied may open their hungry jaws
to take in the muck, the sweet muck they died in.
Believe us, no one wants to return.
We are only here dreaming to be a while
with our own cut-off limbs, our cut-off lives,
our long unspeaking mouths telling:
We were as you are now,
living, seized, and drifting,
we are as you will be,
resisting, unremembered, dead.
16.
To the fall of the retching stump stump impersonal Anti-
Personnel bombs
instructed, Careful what you hit -- nothing personal,
unless it's enemy,
the Voice of America swings into the jungle village.
It's the daily news
coming loud and clear over the sleek little shortwave
G.I. radio.
"Recognizing his continual unflagging efforts in the cause
of world harmony,
this group of veterans and soldiers at home have given
the U.S. President
their Special Peace Award." Applause tums to radio
static forever,
since No Person's alive in the village, including the No One
who turned it on.
17.
Brute, wise man, ogre, and beauty, cripple and President;
infant, dwarf,
and pygmy; dotard, darling, enemy, friend,
intellectual giant;
ancient Egyptian, Lestrigonian, Socrates, Moses,
Marx and Hitler;
the wife you sleep with, the mother and father you no
longer live with;
the son you know from the cradle, the fool and the bore
you know at a glance;
all wear inside them -- who can tell why or how? --
an all-covering "I,"
an all-weather voluminous self that begins with the fetus's
first flimsy heartbeat
and stretches on out to the last inaudible fall
of the pulsing brain --
everyone that has ever lived, since mankind began,
has worn inside him,
indelibly fixed, an unchangeable picture of exactly
the person he is,
like the silhouette ivory cameo piece grandma wore,
having inside it
the prize tinted portrait of her as she was at sixteen --
and which, whether looked at
or not, each one of us, secretly bearing, regards
as the "real me."
18.
You can't give it up and live. You may drive yourself mad
trying to do this.
Today there's a growing fashion, not yet a rage,
to give it away,
exchange it, or squelch it forever while staying alive:
by LSD,
the bodies that tear off their skins to become all soul,
the howling drive
to break down all barriers standing between the inside
and outside of things;
by speed, by brainwave, through space, preventive wars;
harrowing hell
appeals to the mind that likes to play God for some reason;
Dante and Christ
succeeded, each in his permanent way, but the story
is they came back.
19.
As spring comes back each year with its new work and cares --
a breaking of hardness
never repaired or repairable, season of ooze,
of uneasy lures,
into wild air where streetcries and birdcalls ascend
like darting balloons;
into the lilting of summer robing, disrobing, which
people past thirty
no longer feel as a call in the blood (Do people
past thirty plan
all the wars?), the peeling of skins, mutation of genes,
degeneration
of bones, in the garden weeds rampantly growing, shooting up
even through asphalt --
comes the asking, Who will survive into summer with nothing
itself but the self
palely regarding the natural unself-regarding
fornications of objects
and bodies . . . cries in the air . . . artilleries . . . gouging
of wounds . . . rich blood
caking where dead men no longer lie . . . cattle
peacefully drinking
at home, in Vietnam . . . and, in Teotihuacan,
drawn on a pillar,
". . . a jaguar singing . . . under his mouth, water; . . . a priest
wearing
the robes of a god."
20.
The natural conservatism of thought in the human animal
must have something
to do with the body's unthinking lunge toward survival:
in spring we think
of summer's being, suns' endlessness, bushy stillness,
and stealthily,
as gold pears pull down their boughs, the sudden long
incoming fall.
And so, to keep this from stopping, to welcome all signs
of something ongoing,
as if to say, in a hushed voice's prayerful charm wish,
I'll be alive
wherever there's living still going on, I wrote quickly
this poem called"All Summer":
21.
All Summer
Why does the Princess stand looking away toward the brook?
The Prince needs her. "I am your fate," says a voice from within.
The flowers he tended for her all nod with their flametips.
Neither dares move. "Come closer --" Neither has spoken.
If she spoke -- "I cannot believe you would want me --" that's
Where her voice would falter, not with compassion or loneliness,
But with revulsion; so, not to be misunderstood,
She'd have to swallow her feelings and quickly continue,
" --you'd want me to look at you, crippled and putrid, again."
She says nothing to him, still gazing toward her and pleading,
Pleading -- when will her great green eyes accept him and when
Will her tissue-blue silks move near him, her hand ever touch him?
Though neither has moved and nothing is said between them,
The air trembles -- is it her loathing or his desire?
The flowers bend -- is it in pity for him, their gardener,
Or in shame for her silently scorning him? Soon they will wilt.
Soon they will die and soon there will be no garden.
The Prince has turned into a statue imploring the air
With hands cut off at the wrists, neither bone nor marble.
Birds roost in his huge curly head and splatter his shoulders.
Having scampered away, the Princess is now somewhere else
Combing her thick auburn hair, the Prince long forgotten --
Or will she remain to turn into (perhaps is already
Becoming, and is this why the Prince importunes her? )
That dry, almost leafless old crone of a tree by the brookside,
Standing apart in the garden, infested with larvae
Swinging great nets of gossamer hair in the breeze,
The breeze that will shortly become a strong wind, a wind
That will topple the Princess, turn all of her up by the roots
That soon as they crumble, the brook carries off to the sea?
22.
High noon. It's time to get up -- jump into my pants,
run out and dance
in the foggy streets of Providence, play God --
maybe bring out the sun!