over someone’s evanescent beauty
and design after design
they fade like kingdoms with no writing
and, look, I wheeze my way
up to the station of Sahara’s
incomparable privacy
and churn the air into a dark cocoon
of effortless forgetting –
why should I shiver on the altar of enlightenment?
why should I want to smile forever?
EARLY MORNING AT MT. BALDY
Alarm awakened me at 2:30 a.m.:
got into my robes
kimono and hakama
modelled after the 12th-century
archer’s costume:
on top of this the koroma
a heavy outer garment
with impossibly large sleeves:
on top of this the ruksu
a kind of patchwork bib
which incorporates an ivory disc:
and finally the four-foot
serpentine belt
that twists into a huge handsome knot
resembling a braided challah
and covers the bottom of the ruksu:
all in all
about 20 pounds of clothing
which I put on quickly
at 2:30 a.m.
over my enormous hard-on
LEAVING MT. BALDY
I came down from the mountain
after many years of study
and rigorous practice.
I left my robes hanging on a peg
in the old cabin
where I had sat so long
and slept so little.
I finally understood
(some of them practitioners)
I had no gift
for Spiritual Matters.
‘Thank You, Beloved’
I heard a heart cry out
as I entered the stream of cars
on the Santa Monica Freeway,
westbound for L.A.
A number of people
have begun to ask me angry questions
about The Ultimate Reality.
I suppose it’s because
they don’t like to see
old Jikan smoking.
– 1999
THE LUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD
Then a lot of things happened. I was struck on the head by an atheist. I never recovered my sense of confidence. Even today I am frightened by the smallest things. Old Mother Hubbard moved into the wound and produced her brood. For many years my head was laced up. I pretended to help everyone.
I sobered up. I faced my misery. Pine trees appeared, grey mountains, misty vistas in the early morning, people with interesting lives. G-d, your life is interesting, I never stopped saying. I never stopped shaking my head in convivial disbelief.
There’s so much I want to tell you. I’m the luckiest man in the world. I learned to skin a rabbit with very few incisions and a lot of elbow grease. Easter is my big season. The whole thing comes off in one swoop and you stuff it with Kleenex and sell it.
Saturday night really is, as they say, ‘the loneliest night of the week.’ I hunker down with my radio and a few balls of twine, in case I want to tie something up. I let the cabin get very cold and I rejoice in my good fortune. Sometimes a spider will descend on its hideous wet thread and threaten my hard-earned disinterest.
My advice is highly valued. For instance, don’t piss on a large pine cone. It may not be a pine cone. If you are not clear about which spiders are poisonous, kill them all. The daddy longlegs is not a true spider: it actually belongs to the Seratonio crime family. Although insects value their lives, and even though their relentless industry is an example for all of us, they rarely have a thought about death, and when they do, it is not accompanied by powerful emotions, as it is with you and me. They hardly discriminate between life and death. In this sense they are like mystics, and like mystics, many are poisonous. It is difficult to make love to an insect, especially if you are well endowed. As for my own experience, not one single insect has ever complained. If you are not sure which mystics are poisonous, it is best to kill the one you come across with a blow to the head using a hammer, or a shoe, or a large old vegetable, such as a petrified giant daikon radish.
– Mt. Baldy, 1997
THE PARTY WAS OVER THEN TOO
When I was about fifteen
I followed a beautiful girl
into the Communist Party of Canada.
There were secret meetings
and you got yelled at
if you were a minute late.
We studied the McCarran Act
passed by the stooges in Washington
and the Padlock Law
passed by their lackeys in colonized Quebec;
and they said nasty shit
about my family
and how we got our money.
They wanted to overthrow
the country that I loved
(and served, as a Sea Scout).
And even the good people
who wanted to change things,
they hated them too
and called them social fascists.
They had plans for criminals
like my uncles and aunties
and they even had plans
for my poor little mother
who had slipped out of Lithuania
with two frozen apples
and a bandana full of monopoly money.
They never let me get near the girl
and the girl never let me get near the girl.
She became more and more beautiful
until she married a lawyer
and became a social fascist herself
and very likely a criminal too.
But I admired the Communists
for their pig-headed devotion
to something absolutely wrong.
It was years before I found
something comparable for myself:
I joined a tiny band of steel-jawed zealots
who considered themselves
the Marines of the spiritual world.
It’s just a matter of time:
We’ll be landing this raft
on the Other Shore.
We’ll be taking that beach
on the Other Shore.
THIS IS IT
This is it
I’m not coming after you
I’m going to lie down for half an hour
This is it
I’m not going down
on your memory
I’m not rubbing my face in it any more
I’m going to yawn
I’m going to stretch
I’m going to put a knitting needle
up my nose
and poke out my brain
I don’t want to love you
for the rest of my life
I want your skin
to fall off my skin
I want my clamp
to release your clamp
I don’t want to live
with this tongue hanging out
and another filthy song
in the place
of my baseball bat
This is it
I’m going to sleep now darling
Don’t try to stop me
I’m going to sleep
I’ll have a smooth face
and I’m going to drool
I’ll be asleep
whether you love me or not
This is it
The New World Order
of wrinkles and bad breath
It’s not going to be
like it was before
eating you
with my eyes closed
hoping you won’t get up
and go away
It’s going to be something else
Something worse
Something sillier
Something like this
only shorter
THIS ISN’T CHINA
Hold
me close
and tell me what the world is like
I don’t want to look outside
I want to depend on your eyes
and your lips
I don’t want to feel anything
but your hand
on the old raw bumper
I don’t want to feel anything else
If you love the dead rocks
and the huge rough pine trees
Okay I like them too
Tell me if the wind
makes a pretty sound
I’ll close my eyes and smile
Tell me if it’s a good morning
or a clear morning
Tell me what the fuck
kind of morning it is
and I’ll buy it
And get the dog
to stop whining and barking
This isn’t China
nobody’s going to eat it
Okay go if you must
I’ll create the cosmos
by myself
I’ll let it all stick to me
every dismal pine cone
every boring pine needle
And I’ll broadcast my affection
from this shaven dome
360 degrees
to all the dramatic vistas
to all the mists and snows
that move across
the shining mountains
to the women bathing
in the stream
and combing their hair
on the roofs
to the voiceless ones
who have petitioned me
from their surprising silence
to the poor in heart
though they be rich
to all the thought-forms
and leaking mental objects
that you get up here
at the end of your ghostly life
– after a photo by Hazel Field
TAKANAWA PRINCE HOTEL BAR
Slipping down into the Pure Land
into the Awakened State of Drunk
into the furnace blue Heart of the
one one one true Allah the Beloved
Companion of Dangerous Moods –
Slipping down into the 27 Hells
of my own religion my own sweet
dark religion of drunk religion
my bended knee of Poetry my robes
my bowl my scourge of Poetry
my final circumcision after
the circumcision of the flesh
and the circumcision of the heart
and the circumcision of the yearning
to Return to be Redeemed
to be Washed to be Forgiven Again
the Final Circumcision the Final
and Great Circumcision –
Broken down awhile
and cowarding
in the blasting rays
of Hideous Enlightenment
but now finally surrendered to the Great
Resignation of Poetry
and not the kind of Wise Experience
or the false kisses of Competitive
Insight, but my own sweet dark
religion of Poetry my booby prize
my sandals and my shameful prayer
my invisible Mexican candle
my useless oils to clean the house
and remove my rival’s spell
on my girlfriend’s memory –
O Poetry my Final Circumcision:
All the pain was in fearing
and ignoring the girl’s voice
and the girl’s touch and the girl’s
fragrant humbling girlishness
which was lost three wars ago –
And O my love I love you again
I am your dog your cat
your Cleopatran snake
I am bleeding painlessly
from the Final Formless Circumcision
as I push up your dress a little way
and kiss your miraculously
lactating knee
And may all of you who watch
and G-d forbid!
are in a suffering predicament
as I go sliding down to Love –
may you speedily be embraced by
the girlishness of your own
dark girlish religion
SEISEN IS DANCING
Seisen has a long body.
Her shaved head
threatens the skylight
and her feet go down
into the apple cellar.
When she dances for us
at one of our infrequent
celebrations,
the dining hall,
with its cargo of weightless monks
and nuns,
bounces around her hips
like a Hula Hoop.
The venerable old pine trees
crack out of sentry duty
and get involved,
as do the San Gabriel Mountains
and the flat cities
of Claremont, Upland
and the Inland Empire.
Ocean speaks to ocean
saying, What the hell,
let’s go with it, rouse ourselves.
The Milky Way undoes its spokes
and cleaves to Seisen’s haunches,
as do the worlds beyond,
and worlds unborn,
not to mention darkest holes
and random flying mental objects
like this poem,
fucking up the atmosphere.
It’s all going round her hips,
and what her hips enclose;
it’s all lit up by her face,
her ownerless expression.
And then there’s this aching fool
over here, no, over here
who thinks that
Seisen’s still a woman
who’s trying to find a place to stand
where Seisen isn’t Dancing.
MOVING INTO A PERIOD
We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind. The family will appear again as the Foundation, much honoured, much praised, but those of us who have been pierced by other possibilities, we will merely go through the motions, albeit the motions of love. The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.
You and I, who yearn for blameless intimacy, we will be unwilling to speak even the first words of inquisitive delight, for fear of reprisals. Everything desperate will live behind a joke. But I swear that I will stand within the range of your perfume.
How severe seems the moon tonight, like the face of an Iron Maiden, instead of the usual indistinct idiot.
If you think Freud is dishonoured now, and Einstein, and Hemingway, just wait and see what is to be done with all that white hair, by those who come after me.
But there will be a Cross, a sign, that some will understand; a secret meeting, a warning, a Jerusalem hidden in Jerusalem. I will be wearing white clothes, as usual, and I will enter The Innermost Place as I have done generation upon generation, to entreat, to plead, to justify. I will enter the chamber of the Bride and the Bridegroom, and no one will follow me.
Have no doubt, in the near future we will be seeing and hearing much more of this sort of thing from people like myself.
MY CONSORT
There is this huge woman,
(O G-d she’s beautiful)
this huge woman
who, even though she is all women,
has a very specific character;
this huge woman
who sometimes comes to me
very early in the morning
and plucks me out of my ski
n!
We ‘roll around heaven’
several miles above the pine trees
and there’s no space between us,
but we’re not One
or anything like that.
We’re two huge people,
two immense bodies
of tenderness and delight,
with all the pleasures felt and magnified
to match our size.
Whenever this happens
I am usually ready to forgive everyone
who doesn’t love me enough
including you, Sahara,
especially you.
HISTORIC CLAREMONT VILLAGE
I don’t remember
lighting this cigarette
and I don’t remember
if I’m here alone
or waiting for someone.
I don’t remember when
I’ve ever seen so many
beautiful men and women
walking back and forth
in Historic Claremont Village.
I must have been working out
because I don’t remember
how I got these muscles;
and this serene expression:
I must have done my time
reflecting on the bullshit.
Children are pulled quickly
past my bench
but the young are deeply
interested
in the fate
of this unusually bulky presence
in their secret cemeteries,
and they twist around
to look back at me.
The bench says,
“You’re going to blow away.”
The wallet says,
“You’re sixty-two.”
The seven-storey
Nissan Pathfinder says,
“Try to put your key
in that silver place behind
the steering wheel.
It’s called the ignition.”
– March 2, 1997
DISTURBED THIS MORNING
Ah. That.
That’s what I was so disturbed
about this morning:
my desire has come back,
and I want you again.
I was doing so fine,
I was above it all.
The boys and girls were beautiful
and I was an old man, loving everyone.
And now I want you again,
I want your absolute attention,
your underwear rolled down in a hurry