But to return, to return to Hemingway
that cruel & gifted man.
Mercy! my father; do not pull the trigger
or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger
killing what you began.
236
When Henry swung, in that great open square,
the crowd was immense, the little clouds were white
and it was all well done.
It’s true he did it, because more to bear
of her open eyes & mute mouth at midnight
behind her little counter
by the others mangled, trying on her throat
with a lard knife: he took his shoemaker’s
and it was all well done.
For more to bear he could, ha he could not
with a lard knife. His guilty thought had had takers
and here they were at it.
And the rest got off & somehow here he swings
in the open air of an Edinburgh morning
for an impulse of mercy.
Who’s good, who’s evil, whose tail or whose wings
crosses his failing mind. The stop was mourning
and it was all well done.
237
When in the flashlights’ flare the adultering pair
sat up with horror under the crab-apple tree
(soon to be hacked away for souvenirs)
and with their breasts & brains waited, & with ears
while masked & sheeted figures silently—
‘Kneel, I-love,’ he stammered, ‘and pray,’ Henry was there.
When four shots snapped, one for the Reverend,
her sick howl, three for her, in the heads, all fatal, and
when her throat is slit so deep the backbone eddies,
her worshipful foolish letters strewn between the bodies,
her tongue & voice-box out, his calling card
tipped up by his left heel, Henry was toward.
When to the smokeless mild celestial air
they came reproved & forgiven, her soul hurrying after his,
when bright with wisdom of the risen Lord
enthroned, they swam toward where what may be IS
and with the rest Mrs Mills, larynx & tongue restored,
choiring Te Deum, Henry was not there.
238
Henry’s Programme for God
‘It was not gay, that life.’ You can’t ‘make me small,’
you can’t ‘put me down’ or take away my job.
I am immune,
although it is not gay. Why did we come at all,
consonant to whose bidding? Perhaps God is a slob,
playful, vast, rough-hewn.
Perhaps God resembles one of the last etchings of Goya
& not Valesquez, never Rembrandt no.
Something disturbed,
ill-pleased, & with a touch of paranoia
who calls for this thud of love from his creatures-O.
Perhaps God ought to be curbed.
Not only on this planet, I admit; somewhere.
Our only resource is bleak denial or
anti-potent rage,
both have been tried by our wisest. Who was it back there
who died unshriven, daring to see what more
could happen to a painter with such courage?
239
Am I a bad man? Am I a good man?
—Hard to say, Brother Bones. Maybe you both,
like most of we.
—The evidence is difficult to structure towards deliberate evil.
But what of the rest? Does it wax for wrath
in its infinite complexity?
She left without a word, for Ecuador.
I would have liked to discuss more with her this thing
through the terrible nights.
She was than Henry wiser, being younger or
a woman. She brought me Sanka and violent drugs
which were yet wholly inadequate.
My doctor doubles them daily. Am I a bad one—
I’m thinking of them fires & their perplexness—
or may a niche be found
in nothingness for completely exhausted Henry?
But it comes useless to canvass this alone,
out of her eyes and sound.
240
Air with thought thick, air scratched. The desks are hinged,
I foresee, for storing. And when a while has changed
(the people are hinged too,
for storing) … But now they are taking our exams
and the great room is busy with still Damns.
The proctor’s hinged & blue,
that’s me. The desks come out (I come not out)
I feel they do not mind.
I don’t know. Maybe the gross creation howls
with storage & returns. Rings full of towels
wheel, both fighters are blind,
nobody passes, neither—of all—at length
Miss Jewell’s eyes & Mr Torrey’s strength.
My rafters bulge with death
kindly arising from creaking bodies, from
my hundreds braining & self-burdensome
yawning down there, catching their breath.
241
Father being the loneliest word in the one language
and a word only, a fraction of sun & guns
’way ’way ago,
on a hillside, under rain, maneuvers, once,
at big dawn. My field-glasses surpass—he sang—
yours.
Wicked & powerful, shy Henry lifted his head with an offering.
Boots greeted him & it.
I raced into the bank,
my bank, after two years, with healthy cheques
& nobody seem to know me: was I ex-:
like Daddy??
O. O … I can’t help feel I lift’ the strain,
toward bottom. Games is somewhat too, but yet
certains improve
as if upon their only. We grinned wif wuv
for that which each of else was master of.
Christen the fallen.
242
About that ‘me.’ After a lecture once
came up a lady asking to see me. ‘Of course.
When would you like to?’
Well, now, she said. ‘Yes, but I have a lunch-
eon—’ Then I saw her and shifted with remorse
and said ‘Well; come on over.’
So we crossed to my office together and I sat her down
and asked, as she sat silent, ‘What is it, miss?’
‘Would you close the door?’
Now Henry was perplexed. We don’t close doors
with students; it’s just a principle. But this
lady looked beyond frown.
So I rose from the desk & closed it and turning back
found her in tears—apologizing—‘No,
go right ahead,’ I assur-
ed her, ‘here’s a handkerchief. Cry.’ She did, I did. When she got control, I said ‘What’s the matter—if you want to talk?’
‘Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.’ So.
I am her.
243
An undead morning. I … shuffle my poss’s.
Lashed here, with ears, in the narrows, memoried,
like a remaining man,
he call to him for discomfort blue-black losses,
gins & green girls, drag of the slaying weed.
Just when it began again
I will remember, soon. All will be, soon.
The little birds are crazed. Survive us, gulls.
A hiss from distant space
homes in the overcast—to their grown tune—
dead on my foaming galley. Feel my pulse.
Is it the hour to replace my face?
Dance in the gunwales to what they cannot hear
my lorn men. I b
ear every piece of it.
Often, in the ways to come,
where the sun rises and fulfils their fear,
unlashed, I’ll whistle bits.
Through the mad Pillars we are bound for home.
244
Calamity Jane lies very still
her soles to Wild Bill’s skull
whose sudden guns are gone
The pike what leapt is trash
a sun-discoloured flash she lookt on
that time That time is gone
Gold seen soils the whild hills
the braided sky A woman is kinder
Her gun was not his own
In girdle & bra go forth to war & mines
her horse (Ha! ha!) is whiffs of bone
All that was heat lightning & one vivid blunder
Turning I see in silk & pearl
pliant while the gale does down
in the canyons of summer cold
Jane, Middleton’s girl,
Yankee ladies, Joan—behold
with a hot sigh they lie down
245
A Wake-Song
(K’s first administration seen in the light of the relevant history)
Find me a sur-vivid fool, find me another
able to run the first, find me two fools
with an absence of skills
and each must do precisely sublimely the same
& pry on each other, under,—and lest this be seen
let there in their offices sub-fools
with sub-fools interfere: doing aught else—
(there is a work called The Republic): over them set
an Ivy appointee
who knows about from no & nowhere; also then
let the elected officials (none though in jail)
diarrhea about Democracy,
starting with the Harlem vicer. By a friction-vote
barely let Boston millions in, dies the opponent
(in public opinion,
the crude of the ’papers). Keep on doing that.
I personally have voted Democratic all my life
and hate foreign ideas.
1) Our contempt for our government is mildly traditional, as represented by the communistic fascists Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Edmund Wilson, and other mad-dogs.
2) Anyone’s professional experience with our officials moronic will instruct him. Although with a lawyer’s stupidity they cannot get a date right, their demands are Pharaoh’s, until you make them cringe; whom we support, whose servants they purport to be.
246
Flaps, on winter’s first day, loosely the flag
across thorns, a thorny tree like a sniper,
like our enthusiasm,
and the spread asylum in a spirit’s
which we don’ call it. Henry too drifts sag—after
what time his baby borns.
Ten feeding big birds treating with contempt
Sir squirrel, with lazy flaps of 18 inches;
Henry they do not like,
& leave. His morning’s not one the sun skimpt,
woods mild & freckled below Geriatrics.
Our old set of cinches
seem to ’ve come down in the world—what’s the phrase,
I haven’t drunk a drink in 7 days,
they’re in a flap, a bind, almost but not quite free.
To each blow something new crunched.
I wish my girl would out. The old man hunched
blind-sober on his porch like me.
247
Henry walked as if he were ashamed
of being in the body. This did not last
forever him
but many of his moments best on it he blamed;
so complex, man. He rooted in our past,
his future shrinking slim.
‘His Majesty, the Body’ Kafka wrote
a terrible half-truth. Visions of beauty drew
all him from his affairs,
O treacherous eyes! On a transatlantic boat
a lady seen not met ran him like the crew
& Captain. Thicker fears
condensed on him like ice, should he meet her.
A tiger watches from a vector. Ah,
watch we that tiger back,
and chance is King, a jacket lined with fur
for June, while viruses in the back seat clamour
for the whole man glowing black.
248
Snowy of her breasts the drifts, I do believe,
although I have not been there. Mild her voice
and often for no reason secrecies.
A healthy peasant out of this might weave
an ugly story, when we might rejoice
but let’s not bother. For size,
she’s medium. She is no mathematician.
Nor is Henry, and in that they’re one.
Of other congruence
we’ll less say. The sky begins to blond
this tiger-lily here in Sarah’s pot
blonds, with the consequences
Dream on of a private life but you won’t make it
Your fated life is public, lest we cheer,
take it easy, kid.
You lie uneasy whom we all endear
where storms come down from the mountains
The dog a rug away is munching a bone.
249
Bushes lay low. Uneven grass even lay low.
(The parking lot was tranquil.) Great sky hung dark.
We hurried. A spattering
pursued us to the orange old Chevrolet
and I was off to spit a double lecture,
tired in the cortex, flat
out but upright, wise with notes. I love storms;
I loathe this wisdom Henry gives of. Help?
Yes, to the attentive children,—
who only, at twenty, into each other’s arms
would care to be confided, but don’t dare
and who are neither men
nor not, nor women not. And sixty do not care
and they are bored with the electrifying air
& the Don & thunder-claps.
And I am bored. That’s a lie. But six are wild
quietly for the question of the length of the hairs
on the mole of his girl. Child,
250
sád sights. A crumpled, empty cigarette pack.
O empty bottle. Hey: an empty girl.
Fill ’er up, pal.
I cough my proper blood. A time advances, black
& full? when I won’t hafta. Seconal:…
no. Let’s put the road on the show.
As folk-talk (what we have for proverbs) swirl
the valid & a mad; yeah, mad, and so
the valid, man.
Often I had to mutter what hurt an’
(while sunsets rose in the clothes of the field of God)
what kin hurt on …
I fit the holster. I was not sight-seein’.
I loved her and she killed me. That be so.
I killed her all, too.
The ability of sleep leaves you forever. Odd.
So musing, they blew the whistle on The Cat
which was that.
251
Walking, Flying—I
Henry wandered: west, south, north, and East,
sometimes for money, sometimes for relief,
sometimes of pure fatigue,
sometimes a stroller through the mental feast
found him at Schwetzingen or Avila
or the Black Hills in Dakota,
found him in bizarre Tangier or outside Dublin
or inside the Palais des Papes at Avignon
where the guide suddenly sang
to show off the acoustics or in the Lakes to relax.
He admired the fantastic airway into Hong Kong
all circling peaks & waters,
and sweated in the airport appertaining to Bangkok;
but mostly trave
l is missing, by a narrow margin,
things desired: Elephanta,
the Badlands; once a dinner fellow-guest & I
reckoned up merely what each missed during his months in India:
together we made the whole subcontinent sigh.
252
Walking, Flying—II
We hit the great cities (only I missed Madras),
He missed Bhuvaneshwar & Pataliputra
without having seen which
one can scarcely claim one visited the land.
One-down-manship we practiced: Konarak both missed,
for diverse & trivial & fatal
reasons. Besides, he was travelling. I was working,
on loan from the State Department,
Henry, less unreliable O than they,
doing it again I’d do it at a saunter, like
Old Ben in Paris, when as we were young
& our country regarded as a tyke.
Travel’s a plague. But that’s no matter. So is home.
It’s paying out cash everyday that actually bugs you.
Isn’t getting rid of old friends
worth it? And the destruction of mail en route
worth anything? Accompanies the combers foam
into which we dive too.
253
Walking, Flying—III
He shopped down Siaghin, and through Sierpes,
threading Chandni-Chauk he brought off coups,
with the Champs-Elysées likewise
was Henry not unfamiliar: as of antiques
& rare books he murmured ‘Whose?’
O he askt little questions & glanced at the eyes
of the avid seller, sior.
That was in Venice. Once to me in Venice
a man told a fact. I lookt into his eyes
and I saw he wanted less:
I found myself in a position to check this fact
but didn’t: life is hard enough for everybody:
Honour wanders: I bought it.
On John R st. in Detroit he made a bargain.
He has been shopping around the streets of the world
decades & woes—and how does he show for it?
‘Ashes, ashes. All fall down.’
Siaghin was nothing. It was into the Casbah
at midnight where he was truly taken,
out of his prone for products.