O friend who pardoned everyone who came
to light your dark and dim your aureole,
accept this awkward homage to your fame
(nor Modesty supply your instant counterclaim.)
We do not know the Will or voice that made
you fly from high Decarie’s overpass;
we do not know the Hebrew you obeyed
to raise your feet so far from sand and grass
and try the air, O faithful Anabas –
but blessed be the One who saved you there,
and bless His Name, His every Alias,
Who gave you, on that insubstantial stair,
the bravest songs we have of loss and love’s repair.
Dear Henry, I know you will forgive these
lines of mine, their clumsy antique tone,
for they are true and not mere obsequies,
and for all their rhetoric overblown
a simple gesture to the man you own,
whose friendship is so rare, whose art so pure,
simplicity is dazed, then overthrown –
alarmed and shy my love must I obscure
behind the fallen grandiose of literature.
I don’t know where I’m going any more.
I find myself a table and a chair.
I wait, I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
I change the room, the country. I compare
my clattering armoured blitz to your spare
weaponry of light, your refined address –
I know you stand where none of us would dare,
I know you kneel where none of us would guess,
well ordered and alone, huge heart, self-pitiless.
WHY I LOVE FRANCE
O France, you gave your language to my children, your lovers and your mushrooms to my wife. You sang my songs. You delivered my uncle and my auntie to the Nazis. I met the leather chests of the police in Place de la Bastille. I took money from the Communists. I gave my middle age to the milky towns of the Luberon. I ran from farm dogs on a road outside of Rousillon. My hand trembles in the land of France. I came to you with a soiled philosophy of holiness, and you bade me sit down for an interview. O France, where I was taken so seriously, I had to reconsider my position. O France, every little Messiah thanks you for his loneliness. I want to be somewhere else, but I am always in France. Be strong, be nuclear, my France. Flirt with every side, and talk, talk, never stop talking about how to live without G-d.
ON THE PATH
for C.C.
On the path of loneliness
I came to the place of song
and tarried there
for half my life
Now I leave my guitar
and my keyboards
my friends and s-x companions
and I stumble out again
on the path of loneliness
I am old but I have no regrets
not one
even though I am angry and alone
and filled with fear and desire
Bend down to me
from your mist and vines
O high one, long-fingered
and deep-seeing
Bend down to this sack of poison
and rotting teeth
and press your lips
to the light of my heart
MY REDEEMER
I think of you all the time
But I can’t speak about you any more
I must love you secretly
I must come to you when I am alone
As I am now
And even now I must be careful
I want all the women
You created in your image
That is why I lower my eyes
When I pass them in the street
You can hear my prayer
The one I have no words for
The name that I cannot utter
I’m twisted with love
I hate my disguise
The mask of longing
But what can I do
Without my disguise
I wouldn’t be created
My Redeemer is a woman
Her picture is lost
We surrendered it
A hundred years ago
“Give us the Lady,” they said.
“It is too dangerous now
“to have her likeness on a wall.”
So I gave her away
And the language with her
The happy language
She invented for her name
And anyone who wants
To talk about her
Has to become like me
Humiliated and silent
Twisted with love
A specialist in boredom
And other childish matters
FIRST OF ALL
First of all nothing will happen
and a little later
nothing will happen again
A family will pass by in the night
speaking of the children’s bedtime
That will be the signal
for you to light a cigarette
Then comes a delicate moment
when the backwoods men
gather around the table
to discuss your way of life
Dismiss them with a glass of
cherry juice
Your way of life has been over
for many years
The moonlit mountains
surround your heart
and the Anointed One
with his bag and stick
can be picked out on a path
He is probably thinking of what
you said
in the schoolyard 100 years ago
This is a dangerous moment
that can plunge you into silence
for a million years
Fortunately the sound of clarinets
from a wandering klezmer
ensemble
drifts into the kitchen
Allow it to distract you
from your cheerless meditation
The refrigerator will go into
second gear
and the cat will climb onto the
windowsill
For no reason at all
you will begin to cry
Then your tears will dry up
and you will ache for a companion
I will be that companion
At first nothing will happen to us
and later on
it will happen to us again
THE CROSS
I am Theodoros
When I was too old to work
I made religious items
for the tourist shops
I broke down doors
and I put my hands on women
women from America and Paris
They were the ones
who said that I was a poet
I will not tell you about my problems
my son’s fall
or my life at sea
I carved crosses
and like everybody else
I carried one
I astonished women with my desire
I fished for them
with goggles and a spear
and I fed them
with what they had never eaten before
If you are a woman
and you follow the shavings
of this man’s effort
in the moonlight
you will see my muscled ghost
on the sea road to Vlychos
and if you are a man
on the same road
you will hear women’s voices
exactly as I heard them
coming from the water
coming from boats
and from in between the boats
and then surely
you will understand my life
and do a kindness to my
soul
by forgiving me
I pray this to the one
who fashioned me out of myself
I confess this
over the wine
to Leonardos
my Hebrew friend
who writes it down
for those to come
– Kamini, Hydra, 1980
TIRED
We’re tired of being white and we’re tired of being black, and we’re not going to be white and we’re not going to be black any longer. We’re going to be voices now, disembodied voices in the blue sky, pleasant harmonies in the cavities of your distress. And we’re going to stay this way until you straighten up, until your suffering makes you calm, and you can believe the word of G-d who has told you so many times, and in so many ways, to love one another, or at least not to torture and murder in the name of some stupid vomit-making human idea that makes G-d turn away from you, and darken the cosmos with inconceivable sorrow. We’re tired of being white and we’re tired of being black, and we’re not going to be white and were not going to be black any longer.
SOMETHING FROM THE EARLY SEVENTIES
By and all, or by and large, as you say, the reading public’s disinterest in the novel of sensibility behooves itself very well. Or to put it differently, I am very different from most of you, and the older I get, the gladder. I should have come from a different country to entertain you with the horrors of my native land, but I didn’t. I came from your very midst, or you could say, your very mist. I am your very mist. But don’t be alarmed; you are not in the presence of a verbal fidget. If I strain too easily to push a pun into a profundity, it is only because I am at the end of my tether. I’ve taken too much acid, or I’ve been too lonely, or I’ve been educated beyond my intelligence, or however you want to explain me away. It’s a pity if someone has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it. It is really amazing how famous I am to those few who truly comprehend what I am about. I am the Voice of Suffering and I cannot be comforted. Many have tried but apparently, and mercifully, I am immune to their shabby consolations. I will capture your tear without hardly trying, in the vast net of my idle prattle. I am going to tell you such a love story that will make you happy because you are not me, but who knows, you may be sobbing behind your ecstasy, as I have hinted, or even promised. I think it’s a good story. I think it’s tough. I think it’s got fibre. I’ve told it to a lot of people and they all liked it. I’m going to tell it to you. Among my credentials, I am the creator of the Black Photograph. Ask some informed commuter on the subway and he might growl scornfully: Oh yeah, he’s the guy who takes a lot of trouble setting up a picture and then holds his hand over the lens when he snaps it. I am truly amused by this fictitious traveller’s conversation and I will let his description stand for the process of my art. My art, my eternity. I will be the delight of future eyes when this grotesque parody of humanity
has evolved into something no doubt, worse. These future monsters of the unborn seed will pass many excellent vacations of intensity immersed in the emanations of my colourless rectangles. A few years back a clever New York art dealer attempted to capitalize on the most obvious aspects of my eternity, and for a few months I was a figure on Tenth Street, and the darling of a small clique of curiously small and thin people, who were devoted to promoting a “new” form of human expression called ArtScience. Some of these fanatics tried to convince me that they understood what I was doing. Needless to say, they were barking, as was Adam of the fable, up the wrong tree. Nothing anyone has ever said about the Black Photograph has ever meant a fig to me, except, of course, for Nico. She could read them. She knew what I was doing. She knew who I was. And I long for her still. I will pick my way back through the boredom and irrelevance of the last few decades and tell you of a time when I was truly alive, in the human sense, of course. In the other sense, in the realm of the Grecian Urn, in the annals of crystal and imperishable diamond, I have remained the Absolute Creator, life itself to whatever I touched, as immediate, as irresistible, as wild and undeniable as a woman’s hand on the adolescent groin. I have been, I am, and I will remain the Ch---t of Matter, and the Redeemer of the Inert. Now you may have an inkling of the spirit in which I conceived for myself the challenge of the Black Photograph. Nico perceived me immediately through all my pathetic bullshit, as some would, and should, call it. My work, among other things, is a monument to Nico’s eyes. That there was such a pair in my own time, and that I met them, forehead to forehead; that the Black Photograph sang to other irises, and yes, corneas, retinas and optic nerves, all the way down the foul leather bag to Nico’s restless heart, another human heart; that this actually happened constitutes the sole assault on my loneliness that the Eternal has ever made, and it was her.
Therefore I was in New York at a curtain time, in a certain place; actually it was The Chelsea Hotel. This clever art dealer, call him Ahab, possessed the sad misimpression that I would enjoy coming in and going out through a grimy lobby heaped and hung with the
fashionable excrement of the ambitious hustlers in the studios above: enormous reproductions of cigar boxes; pillowlike canvases billowing over their innocent frames like so many beer bellies; infantile electromagnetic devices to advertise the artist’s acquaintance with technology; mobiles, so badly constructed, that they compounded their capacity for psychic offence with a physical hazard; cognac snifters of various size, painted red and enclosed in a glass cabinet; all in the name of some dreary change of perspective, as if that’s what humanity needs; and all these tricks, all these ugly motives, all this poisonous medicine chest of Gotham cunning, promoting itself as the urgent specific to a dying culture; all this profanity made flesh; quickly accumulating layer after layer of viscous grit generated on Twenty-Third Street, and in the low heavens of the neighbourhood; – a presage of the dirty treasure’s soon-to-be-unnoticed burial under the sands of time. That’s the hotel he put me in. He thought I was one of them. Also Dylan Thomas sailed out from that lobby to pierce his eye on a rose-thorn and hence or thence to assume his rightful overstuffed easy chair in the crowded pantheon of flabby heroism. It can be quickly divined I am no friend of the age.
BUTTER DISH
Darling, I now have a butter dish
that is shaped like a cow
ARGUMENT
You might be a person who likes to argue with Eternity. A good way to begin such an Argument is:
Why do You rule against me
Why do You silence me now
When will the Truth be on my lips
And the Light be on my brow?
After some time has passed, the answer to these questions percolating upwards from the pit of your stomach, or downwards from the crown of your hat, or having been given, at last, the right pill, you might begin to fall in love with the One who asked them; and perhaps then you will cry out, as so many of our parents did:
Blessed be the One
Who has sweetened
my Argument.
MUCH LATER
Ray Charles singing You Win Again
in the sunlight
twenty years ago
Ray Charles the singer I would never be
and my young wife
‘the wife of my youth’
smiling at me from an upstairs room
in the old house
Ray Charles and Marianne
dear spirits of my Greek life
now in the sunshine of every new summer
Marianne coming down the steps
‘the woman of the house’
Ray Charles speaking fiercely
for our virgin humanity
Twenty years ago
and again in this Hollywood summer
still companions of the heart
as I measure myself once more
&
nbsp; against the high sweet standards
of my youth
– Los Angeles, 1978
ANOTHER CHRISTOPHER
There is another Christopher
Guide to Broken Ways
Rejected Christ he carries far
Yours he cannot raise
SEPARATED
I was doing something
I don’t remember what
I was standing in a place
I don’t remember where
I was waiting for someone
but I don’t remember who
It was before or it was after
I don’t remember when
And suddenly or gradually
I was removed, I was taken
to this place of reversal
and I was separated
and in the place of every part
there was the name of fear
and for a vast memorial
there was the name of grief
If you know the prayer
for one who has been so dislocated
please say it or sing it
and if there is among the words
an empty space, or among the letters
an orchard of return
please set my name firmly there
with a voice or hand
which only you command
you righteous ones
who are concerned with such matters
But hurry please
for all the parts of me
that gathered briefly around this plea
are dispersed again
and scattered on the Other Side
where the angels stand upside down
and everything is covered with dust
and everyone burns with shame
and no one is allowed to cry out
ANGRY AT 11 PM
THE THIRD INVENTION
Blindly I worked
at my third invention
taking the chances
of one who is lost,
feeling my way
to a cleaner expression