who had his left leg resting on my shoulder.
The mortal can be described
the Gunslinger finished,
That’s all mortality is
in fact.
STRUM
Are you hungry
mortal I
the Gunslinger asked
and Yes I answered reflecting.
Well then Lil,
let’s have some food
of two sorts
before we depart for Vegas.
Lil snapped
her gaudy fingers
and drink was brought
but not for the Classical Horse
who forewent drink
with a brush of his articulate hoof.
The usual he said
Usual! There’s nothing
usual about your diet Claude
Lil said, Horse chestnuts with the
spiny covering intact
and 38 stalks of celery
in a large bowl.
Claude I enquired—
Don’t enquire boy
It can be unhealthy
pass the salt
Do you get called Claude?
Why not? Listen, I,
I’m as mortal as you
born in santa fe
of a famous dike
who spelled it
with an e too.
So your name is not
Heidegger after all, then
what is it? I asked.
Lévi-Strauss.
Lévi-Strauss?
Do I look like his spouse!
No . . . I mean I’ve never
seen his wife.
You’re a very observant type
Claude replied.
Well what do you do I persisted.
Don’t persist.
I study the savage mind.
And what is that I asked.
That, intoned Claude leaning on my shoulder
is what you have
in other words, you provide
an instance
you are purely animal
sometimes purely plant
but mostly you’re just a
classification, I mean it’s conceivable
but so many documents
would have to be gone through
and dimensions of such variety
taken into account to realize what
you are, that
even if we confined ourselves
to the societies for which
the data are sufficiently full,
accurate, and comparable
among themselves
it could not be “done”
without the aid of machines.
Got it! the Slinger asked
Yea, I heard it I said
Not the same thing he said
Tell me more I said
The Horse has an interest in business,
haven’t you noticed.
Noticed? I replied
Forget it he said, remember
you’re just average fast.
The Horse is a double agent—
strum
Oh? But what about his name
Claude Lévi-Strauss is that—
Yes, you guessed it
a homonym. Don’t get bugged Amigo
strum
Here comes Lil.
OK, the Gunslinger breathed
we’re briefed
Hughes? I asked
Not now the Slinger said
here’s Lil
Slinger! that Drifter claims
he can sing you a song.
What shimmering guesswork
the Slinger smiled
and beckoned to the young guitarist.
strum
As he travels across
the cabaret may I ask
a question? Move on he said.
Are those rounds
in the .44
of your own making?
No bullets, I rarely use
ordinary ammunition.
What then?
Straight Information.
What?
You sound like the impact of a wet syllojsm
Look, into each chamber
goes one bit of my repertoire
of pure information,
into each gesture, what
you call in your innocence
“the draw”
goes Some Dark Combination
and that
shocks
the eye-sockets of my detainers
registers what my enemies
can never quite recall.
Another question.
Naturally.
What do you know
of Love?
Know? Nada, if I knew it
it couldn’t be Love.
Even a mortal knows that.
Then, what is it?
IS is not the link
it takes nine hundred years
to explain one blown
spark of Love
and you don’t have
that much time Amigo.
How can you?
Leave it friend
I was with Gladys,
in Egypt
witnessed messengers
turned into phantoms.
He pressed one long finger between
his eyes—
it beats me how you mortals
can think something is.
Hush, pues, here comes our Drifta.
STRUM
Salud, poeta
what song can you sing?
All songs but one.
A careful reply.
Then can you sing
a song of a woman
accompanied by that
your lute which this
company took to be a guitar
in their inattention.
Yes I can, but
an Absolute I have
here in my hand.
Ah yes, the Gunslinger exhaled
It’s been a long time.
The drifting singer
put one foot on a chair
and began
I shall begin he said
the Song about a woman
On a plane of this plain
stood a dark colonnade
which cast its black shadows
in the form of a conception made
where I first saw your love
her elbows at angles
her elbows at black angles
her mouth
a disturbed tanager, and
in her hand an empty damajuana,
on her arm an emotion
on her ankle a band
a slender ampersand
her accent so superb
she spoke without saying
and within her eyes
were a variety
of sparkling moments
Her thighs were monuments
of worked flesh
turned precisely to crush
what they will enclose
and in her manner is a hush
as if she shall enrage
with desire
with new fire
those maddened to taste
from her jewelled toes
to her swelled black mound
her startled faun
which has the earthy smell
of slightly gone
wild violets
O Fucking Infinity! O sharp organic thrust!
the Gunslinger gasped
and his fingers
spread across the evening atmosphere
My Sun tells me we have approached
the 24th hour
Oh wake the Horse!
Lil, will you join us
on our circuit to Vegas?
Leave this place and be done?
The stage sits at the post
its six abnormal horses driverless,
chafing their bits
their corded necks are arching
towa
rd the journey
How far is it Claude?
Across
two states
of mind, saith the Horse.
But from Mesilla said I
to Las Vegas—Vegas!
the Horse corrected
have you been asleep
... Must be more like
a thousand miles.
More like? he laughed
as we waited
for the Slinger
on his long knees
facing the burning hoop
as it rolled under
the swinging doors west
Mortal what do you mean
asked the Horse lounging and yawning
More Like!
how can distance
be more like.
Thus, in the thickening vibration
our departure took shape
and Lil
the singer holding her arm
followed us out the swinging doors
and into the stage coach we got
and the Horse was leaning out
making his pitch
distributing fake phone numbers
and baring his teeth and the singer
was whispering a lyric to Lil
who had her hand on the Slinger’s knee
and he was looking at me
And the stage its taut doubletree
transfixed and luminous shot forth
and the Horse
pulling from his pocket
his dark glasses
put them on and spoke not
and by those five missionaries
Mesilla was utterly forgot.
Prolegomenon to Book IIII
oddesse, excellently bright,
thou that mak’st a day of night.
You tell us men are numberless
and that Great and Mother
were once synonymous.
« We are bleached in Sound
as it burns by what we desire »
and we give our inwardness
in some degree to all things
but to fire we give everything.
We are drawn beneath your fieryness
which comes down to us
on the wing of Eleusian image,
and although it is truely a small heat
our cold instruments do affirm it.
So saith Denis, the polymath.
We survey the Colorado plateau.
There are no degrees of reality
in this handsome and singular mass,
or in the extravagant geometry
of its cliffs and pinnacles.
This is all water carved
the body thrust into the hydrasphere
and where the green mesas give way
to the vulcan floor, not far
from Farmington and other interferences
with the perfect night
and the glittering trail
of the silent Via Láctea
there is a civil scar
so cosmetic, one can’t see it.
A superimposition, drawn up
like the ultimate property
of the ego, an invisible claim
to a scratchy indultum
from which smoke pours forth.
But now, over the endless sagey brush
the moon makes her silvery bid
and in the cool dry air of the niht
the winde wankels across the cattle grid.
Twenty-four Love Songs
for JD
As our eyes were held together
we withstood there
the space of our returning
and passed thru a country
of heavy, laden boughs
from which we took nothing
and grew thin, and strong
along the lance of our Journey
1
It is deep going from here
from the old world to the new
from Europa home
the brilliant scrolls of the waves
wave
the runic secret of homeward
when Diego de Landa
the glyphic books destroyed
there were old towns
in our hemisphere sadness
now as then
no sense in old towns chontal
got to have
newtowns of the soul
2
Inside the late nights of last week
under the cover of our selves
you went to sleep in my arms
and last night too
you were in some alarm
of your dream
some tableau
an assembling of signs
from your troubled day glows
and trembles, your limbs
divine with sleep
gather and extend their flesh
along mine
and this I surround, all this
I had my arms around
3
My speech is tinged
my tongue has taken
a foreigner into it
Can you understand
my uncertainties grow
and underbrush and thicket
of furious sensibility
between us and wholly
unlike the marvelously burning
bush which lies at the entrance
to your gated thighs
a word of the wrong temper
it is to test that steel
across the plain between us
4
Or if the word falls—
but I didn’t mean that
too often and too soon
before it moves
carried in our mouths
into the bright orchard
of a desire we must build traps
to catch
so that we are free
we think, to answer all
who would delay us,
it is our selves dressed
as the clothed figures who beseech us
for Our lives to beware
destruction, take care is
the password to their stability
5
Carried in our mouths
the warm sperm rises
and prolongs us—as we are
everyway locked
inside the warm halls of flesh
which is in our kind
filled by a song for all lovers—
How are you? is simply
another transcendental question
I’d know you were my katalysis
had we never met, in all space
I am fixed beyond you, the cruel
is a decision of the stars, in all space
our clef is pitched together
we share
a completely trued voice
our substance carried
in our joined mouths
flows
6
The cleft in our ages
is an echoing cañon—look
I insist on my voice
Archeus become my life
and as any other extension
not to be ignored—
if you were my own time’s possession
I’d tell you to fuck off
with such vivid penetration
you’d never stop gasping
and pleasure unflawed
would light our lives, pleasure
unrung by the secretly expected
fingers of last sunday
Do you hear me, can you
please only agree with me
because poems and love
and all that happens in the street
are blown forward
on the lightest breeze
7
But you are a green plant to me
only to be acknowledged
with passion
tended by my whole attention
there is argument only in equality
on
e war we can hope to ignore
What we have done is embroidered
our two figures are
as if set forth from Bayeux
and I fly like a dragon standard
yet my soul because I left home
as you did
pulls against a martingale
and having stayed at home too
or more
how much more pulls against you
8
Now the scorpion
crawls on my shoulder
and bold as the quartered arrow
of Mars though I am
beat down, too
under the drag of what
we conjure with what
choosing among the real
with the accuracy of image
we see
the problematic figure of youth
across the Atlantic
of a past love, or passed?
and there he is, reconstituted
water dressed in a freer present
than any present past
and your eyes tonight are journals
of unburnt records
9
EYE high gloria
a fine europ ean morn ing
black coffee
for Nick in the nick of time
he gives me something for you
and Otis Redd ing
with his feet up watching
infinity roll in and Nick
his time ing
and sudden lee the lid
comes off
and we head straight for
the thing we could be in
cannabic warm
and rime ing
10
Who could have told me love