The poet spoke of the everlasting universe
Of things . . . of gleams of a remoter world
Which visit the soul in sleep . . .
Of a desert peopled by storms alone . . .
The streets were strewn with broken umbrellas
Which looked like funereal kites
This little Chinese girl might have made.
The bars on MacDougal Street were emptying.
There had been a fistfight.
A man leaned against a lamppost arms extended as if crucified,
The rain washing the blood off his face.
In a dimly lit side street,
Where the sidewalk shone like a ballroom mirror
At closing time—
A well-dressed man without any shoes
Asked me for money.
His eyes shone, he looked triumphant
Like a fencing master
Who had just struck a mortal blow.
How strange it all was . . . The world’s raffle
That dark October night . . .
The yellowed volume of poetry
With its Splendors and Glooms
Which I studied by the light of storefronts:
Drugstores and barbershops,
Afraid of my small windowless room
Cold as a tomb of an infant emperor.
The Devils
You were a “victim of semiromantic anarchism
In its most irrational form.”
I was “ill at ease in an ambiguous world
Deserted by Providence.” We drank gin
And made love in the afternoon. The neighbors’
TVs were tuned to soap operas.
The unhappy couples spoke little.
There were interminable pauses.
Soft organ music. Someone coughing.
“It’s like Strindberg’s Dream Play,” you said.
“What is?” I asked and got no reply.
I was watching a spider on the ceiling.
It was the kind St. Veronica ate in her martyrdom.
“That woman subsisted on spiders only,”
I told the janitor when he came to fix the faucet.
He wore dirty overalls and a derby hat.
Once he had been an inmate of a notorious state institution.
“I’m no longer Jesus,” he informed us happily.
He believed only in devils now.
“This building is full of them,” he confided.
One could see their horns and tails
If one caught them in their baths.
“He’s got Dark Ages on his brain,” you said.
“Who does?” I asked and got no reply.
The spider had the beginnings of a web
Over our heads. The world was quiet
Except when one of us took a sip of gin.
Crepuscule with Nellie
for Ira
Monk at the Five Spot
late one night.
“Ruby, My Dear,” “Epistrophy.”
The place nearly empty
Because of the cold spell.
One beautiful black transvestite
alone up front,
Sipping his drink demurely.
The music Pythagorean,
one note at a time
Connecting the heavenly spheres,
While I leaned against the bar
surveying the premises
Through cigarette smoke.
All of a sudden, a clear sense
of a memorable occasion . . .
The joy of it, the delicious melancholy . . .
This very strange man bent over the piano
shaking his head, humming . . .
“Misterioso.”
Then it was all over, thank you!
Chairs being stacked up on tables,
their legs up.
The prospect of the freeze outside,
the long walk home,
Making one procrastinatory.
Who said Americans don’t have history,
only endless nostalgia?
And where the hell was Nellie?
Two Dogs
for Charles and Holly
An old dog afraid of his own shadow
In some Southern town.
The story told me by a woman going blind,
One fine summer evening
As shadows were creeping
Out of the New Hampshire woods,
A long street with just a worried dog
And a couple of dusty chickens,
And all that sun beating down
In that nameless Southern town.
It made me remember the Germans marching
Past our house in 1944 .
The way everybody stood on the sidewalk
Watching them out of the corner of the eye,
The earth trembling, death going by . . .
A little white dog ran into the street
And got entangled with the soldiers’ feet.
A kick made him fly as if he had wings.
That’s what I keep seeing!
Night coming down. A dog with wings.
Evening Talk
Everything you didn’t understand
Made you what you are. Strangers
Whose eye you caught on the street
Studying you. Perhaps they were the all-seeing
Illuminati? They knew what you didn’t,
And left you troubled like a strange dream.
Not even the light stayed the same.
Where did all that hard glare come from?
And the scent, as if mythical beings
Were being groomed and fed stalks of hay
On these roofs drifting among the evening clouds.
You didn’t understand a thing!
You loved the crowds at the end of the day
That brought you so many mysteries.
There was always someone you were meant to meet
Who for some reason wasn’t waiting.
Or perhaps they were? But not here, friend.
You should have crossed the street
And followed that obviously demented woman
With the long streak of blood-red hair
Which the sky took up like a distant cry.
The Betrothal
I found a key
In the street, someone’s
House key
Lying there, glinting,
Long ago; the one
Who lost it
Is not going to remember it
Tonight, as I do.
It was a huge city
Of many dark windows,
Columns and domes.
I stood there thinking.
The street ahead of me
Shadowy, full of peril
Now that I held
The key. One or two
Late strollers
Unhurried and grave
In view. The sky above them
Of an unearthly clarity.
Eternity jealous
Of the present moment,
It occurred to me!
And then the moment was over.
Frightening Toys
History practicing its scissor-clips
In the dark,
So everything comes out in the end
Missing an arm or a leg.
Still, if that’s all you’ve got
To play with today . . .
This doll at least had a head,
And its lips were red!
Frame houses like grim exhibits
Lining the empty street
Where a little girl sat on the steps
In a flowered nightgown, talking to it.
It looked like a serious matter,
Even the rain wanted to hear about it,
So it fell on her eyelashes,
And made them glisten.
The Big War
We played war during the war,
Margaret. Toy soldiers were in big demand,
The kind made from clay.
The lead ones they melted into bullets, I suppose.
You never saw anything as beautiful
As those clay regiments! I used to lie on the floor
For hours staring them in the eye.
I remember them staring back at me in wonder.
How strange they must have felt
Standing stiffly at attention
Before a large, uncomprehending creature
With a mustache made of milk.
In time they broke, or I broke them on purpose.
There was wire inside their limbs,
Inside their chests, but nothing in the heads!
Margaret, I made sure.
Nothing at all in the heads . . .
Just an arm, now and then, an officer’s arm,
Wielding a saber from a crack
In my deaf grandmother’s kitchen floor.
Death, the Philosopher
He gives excellent advice by example.
“See!” he says. “See that?”
And he doesn’t have to open his mouth
To tell you what.
You can trust his vast experience.
Still, there’s no huff in him.
Once he had a most unfortunate passion.
It came to an end.
He loved the way the summer dusk fell.
He wanted to have it falling forever.
It was not possible.
That was the big secret.
It’s dreadful when things get as bad as that—
But then they don’t!
He got the point, and so, one day,
Miraculously lucid, you, too, came to ask
About the strangeness of it all.
Charles, you said,
How strange you should be here at all!
First Thing in the Morning
To find a bit of thread
But twisted
In a peculiar way
And fallen
In an unlikely place
A black thread
Before the mystery
Of a closed door
The greater mystery
Of the four bare walls
And catch oneself thinking
Do I know anyone
Who wears such dark garments
Worn to threads
First thing in the morning?
The White Room
The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.
They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me,
And then didn’t.
Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild
Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
More and more dark houses
Hushed and abandoned.
There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The thought of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.
The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn’t leave her room much.
The sun pointed to one or two
Things that had survived
The long night intact.
The simplest things,
Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People described as “perfect.”
Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins, a hand mirror,
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn’t it.
Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light—
And the trees waiting for the night.
Winter Sunset
Such skies came to worry men
On the eve of great battles
With clouds soaked in blood
Fleeing the armies of the night,
An old woman was summoned
Who could predict the future,
But she kept her mouth shut
Even when shown the naked sword.
In what remained of the light,
The white village church
Clutched its bird-shaped weathervane
Above the low rooftops.
A small child, who had been
Nursing at his mother’s breast,
Hid his face from her
The Pieces of the Clock Lie Scattered
So, hurry up!
The evening’s coming.
The grownups are on the way.
There’ll be hell to pay.
You forgot about time
While you sought its secret
In the slippery wheels,
Some of which had teeth.
You meant to enthrall
The girl across the hall.
She drew so near,
Her breast brushed your ear.
She ought to have gone home,
But you kept telling her
You’ll have it together again
And ticking in no time.
Instead, you’re under the table
Together, searching the floor.
Your hands are trembling,
And there’s a key in the door.
The Immortal
You’re shivering, O my memory.
You went out early and without a coat
To visit your old schoolmasters,
The cruel schoolmasters and their pet monkeys.
You took a wrong turn somewhere.
You met an army of gray days,
A ghost army of years on the march.
It was the bread they fed you,
The kind it takes a lifetime to chew.
You found yourself again on that street
Inside that small, rented room
With its single dusty window.
Outside it was snowing quietly,
Snowing and snowing for days on end.
You were ill and in bed.
Everyone else had gone to work.
The blind old woman next door,
Whose sighs and heavy steps you’d welcome now,
Had died mysteriously in the summer.
You had your own heartbeat to attend to.
You were perfectly alone and anonymous.
It would have taken months for anyone
To begin to miss you. The chill
Made you pull the covers up to your chin.
You remembered the lost arctic voyagers,
The evening snow erasing their footprints.
You had no money and no job.
Both of your lungs were hurting; still,
You had no intention of lifting a finger
To help yourself. You were immortal!
Outside, the same dark snowflake
Seemed to be falling over and over again.
You studied the cracked walls,
The maplike water stain on the ceiling,
Trying to fix in your mind its cities and rivers.
Time had stopped at dusk.
You were shivering at the thought
Of such great happiness.
At the Corner
The fat sisters
Kept a candy store
Dim and narrow
With dusty jars
Of jawbreaking candy.
We stayed thin, stayed
Glum, chewing gum
While staring at the floor,
The shoes of many strangers
Rushing in and out,
Making the papers outside
Flutter audibly
Under the lead weights,
Their headlines
Screaming in and out of view.
Cabbage
She was about to chop the head
In half,
But I made her reconsider
By telling her:
“Cabbage symbolizes mysterious love.”
Or so said one Charles Fourier,
Who said many other strange and wonderful things,
So that people called him mad behind his back,
Whereupon I kissed the back of her neck
Ever so gently,
Whereupon she cut the cabbage in two
With a single stroke of her knife.
The Initiate
St. John of the Cross wore dark glasses
When he passed me on the street.
St. Therese of Ávila, beautiful and grave,