The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 Read online

They Will Not

  Understand Art

  They Will Consider Their Failure

  As Creators

  Only As A Failure

  Of The World

  Not Being Able To Love Fully

  They Will BELIEVE Your Love

  Incomplete

  AND THEN THEY WILL HATE

  YOU

  And Their Hatred Will Be Perfect

  Like A Shining Diamond

  Like A Knife

  Like A Mountain

  LIKE A TIGER

  LIKE Hemlock

  Their Finest

  ART

  4:30 A.M.

  the fields rattle

  with red birds;

  it is 4:30 in

  the morning,

  it is always

  4:30 in the morning,

  and I listen for

  my friends:

  the garbagemen

  and the thieves,

  and cats dreaming

  red birds

  and red birds dreaming

  worms,

  and worms dreaming

  along the bones of

  my love,

  and I cannot sleep,

  and soon morning will come,

  the workers will rise,

  and they will look for me

  at the docks,

  and they will say,

  “he is drunk again,”

  but I will be asleep,

  finally,

  among the bottles and

  sunlight,

  all darkness gone,

  my arms spread like

  a cross,

  the red birds

  flying,

  flying,

  roses opening in the smoke,

  and

  like something stabbed and

  healing,

  like

  40 pages through a bad novel,

  a smile upon

  my idiot’s face.

  The Simplicity of Everything in Viet Nam

  man shot through back while

  holding robes of a young priest

  who looks like a woman,

  and here we hang:

  moon-bright

  neatly gloved,

  motorcycles everywhere, bees asleep,

  nozzles rusted,

  climate awry,

  and we shake our bones,

  blind skin there,

  and the soldier falls dead,

  another dead soldier,

  the black robe of a young priest

  who looks like a woman

  is now beautifully red,

  and the tanks

  come on through.

  The Night They Took Whitey

  bird-dream and peeling wallpaper

  symptoms of grey sleep

  and at 4 a.m. Whitey came out of his room

  (the solace of the poor is in numbers

  like Summer poppies)

  and he began to scream help me! help me! help me!

  (an old man with hair as white as any ivory tusk)

  and he was vomiting blood

  help me help me help me

  and I helped him lie down in the hall

  and I beat on the landlady’s door

  (she is as French as the best wine but as tough as

  an American steak) and

  I hollered her name, Marcella! Marcella!

  (the milkman would soon be coming with his

  pure white bottles like chilled lilies)

  Marcella! Marcella! help me help me help me,

  and she screamed back through the door:

  you polack bastard, are you drunk again? then

  Promethean the eye at the door

  and she

  sized up the red river in her rectangular brain

  (oh, I am nothing but a drunken polack

  a bad pinch-hitter a writer of letters to the newspapers)

  and she spoke into the phone like a lady ordering bread and

  eggs,

  and I held to the wall

  dreaming bad poems and my own death

  and the men came…one with a cigar, the other needing a

  shave,

  and they made him stand up and walk down the steps

  his ivory head on fire (Whitey, my drinking pal—

  all the songs, Sing Gypsy, Laugh Gypsy, talk about

  the war, the fights, the good whores,

  skid-row hotels floating in wine,

  floating in crazy talk,

  cheap cigars and anger)

  and the siren took him away, except the red part

  and I began to vomit and the French wolverine screamed

  you’ll have to clean it up, all of it, you and Whitey!

  and the steamers sailed and rich men on yachts

  kissed girls young enough to be their daughters,

  and the milkman came by and stared

  and the neon lights blinked selling something

  tires or oil or underwear

  and she slammed her door and I was alone

  ashamed

  it was the war, the war forever, the war was never over,

  and I cried against the peeling walls,

  the weakness of our bones, our sotted half-brains,

  and morning began to creep into the hall—

  toilets flushed, there was bacon, there was coffee,

  there were hangovers, and I too

  went in and closed my door and sat down and waited for the

  sun.

  The Japanese Wife

  O lord, he said, Japanese women,

  real women, they have not forgotten,

  bowing and smiling

  closing the wounds men have made;

  but American women will kill you like they

  tear a lampshade,

  American women care less than a dime,

  they’ve gotten derailed,

  they’re too nervous to make good:

  always scowling, belly-aching,

  disillusioned, overwrought;

  but oh lord, say, the Japanese women:

  there was this one,

  I came home and the door was locked

  and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife

  and chased me under the bed

  and her sister came

  and they kept me under that bed for two days,

  and when I came out, at last,

  she didn’t mention attorneys,

  just said, you will never wrong me again,

  and I didn’t; but she died on me,

  and dying, said, you can wrong me now,

  and I did,

  but you know, I felt worse then

  than when she was living;

  there was no voice, no knife,

  nothing but little Japanese prints on the wall,

  all those tiny people sitting by red rivers

  with flying green birds,

  and I took them down and put them face down

  in a drawer with my shirts,

  and it was the first time I realized

  that she was dead, even though I buried her;

  and some day I’ll take them all out again,

  all the tan-faced little people

  sitting happily by their bridges and huts

  and mountains—

  but not right now,

  not just yet.

  Sundays Kill More Men Than Bombs

  due to weekend conditions, and although there’s

  too much smog, everything’s jammed

  and it’s worse than masts down in a storm

  you can’t go anywhere

  and if you do, they are all staring through glass windows

  or waiting for dinner, and no matter how bad it is

  (not the glass, the dinner)

  they’ll spend more time talking about it

  than eating it,

  and that’s why my wife got rid of me:

  I was a boor and didn’t know when to smile

&nbs
p; or rather (worse) I did,

  but didn’t, and one afternoon

  with people diving into pools

  and playing cards

  and watching carefully shaven T.V. comedians

  in starched white shirts and fine neckties

  kidding about what the world had done to them,

  I pretended a headache

  and they gave me the young lady’s bedroom

  (she was about 17)

  and hell, I crawled beneath her sheets

  and pretended to sleep

  but everybody knew I was a cornered fake,

  but I tried all sorts of tricks—

  I tried to think of Wilde behind bars,

  but Wilde was dead;

  I tried to think of Hem shooting a lion

  or walking down Paris streets

  medallioned with his wild buddies,

  the whores swooning to their beautiful knees,

  but all I did was twist within her young sheets,

  and from the headboard, shaking in my nervous storm,

  several trinkets fell upon me—

  elephants, glass dogs with seductive stares,

  a young boy and girl carrying a pail of water,

  but nothing by Bach or conducted by Ormandy,

  and I finally gave it up, went into the john

  and tried to piss (I knew I would be constipated

  for a week), and then I walked out,

  and my wife, a reader of Plato and e.e. cummings

  ran up and said, “ooooh, you should have seen

  BooBoo at the pool! He turned backflips and sideflips

  and it was the funniest thing you’ve

  EVER seen!”

  I think it was not much later that the man came

  to our third floor apartment

  about seven in the morning

  and handed me a summons for divorce,

  and I went back to bed with her and said,

  don’t worry, it’s all right, and

  she began to cry cry cry,

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,

  and I said, please stop,

  remember your heart.

  but that morning when she left

  about 8 o’clock she looked

  the same as ever, maybe even better.

  I didn’t even bother to shave;

  I called in sick and went down

  to the corner bar.

  The Loser

  and the next I remembered I’m on a table,

  everybody’s gone: the head of bravery

  under light, scowling, flailing me down…

  and then some toad stood there, smoking a cigar:

  “Kid you’re no fighter,” he told me,

  and I got up and knocked him over a chair;

  it was like a scene in a movie, and

  he stayed there on his big rump and said

  over and over: “Jesus, Jesus, whatsamatta wit

  you?” and I got up and dressed,

  the tape still on my hands, and when I got home

  I tore the tape off my hands and

  wrote my first poem,

  and I’ve been fighting

  ever since.

  On a Night You Don’t Sleep

  at the sea at the beach in the dark there was somebody

  sitting in a car along the shore and playing this drum

  as if in Africa and the cops rode by on the sidewalk

  and I went down to the disappointing sea

  and saw two blue lights in the water and a boat

  and a man walked by in a white shirt and squatted by the

  shore and got up and walked along the shore

  and then another man came and followed him:

  they both walked along the shore by the water

  one 12 feet behind the other and I watched them until

  they disappeared and then I got up and walked through

  the sand to the cement and through a bar door I saw a

  negro singing with a light on his face

  he wailed a strange song and the sound of the song twisted

  in the air and everything was empty and dry and easy

  and I got into my car and drove back to the hot city

  but I knew I would always remember the time

  and the catch of it—the way the night hung undisturbed

  with people walking on it like some quiet rug

  and a small boat rocking bravely by bulldogging water

  and the colored pier lights like a broken mind sick in the sea.

  An Empire of Coins

  the legs are gone and the hopes—the lava of outpouring,

  and I haven’t shaved in sixteen days

  but the mailman still makes his rounds and

  water still comes out of the faucet and I have a photo of

  myself with glazed and milky eyes full of simple music

  in golden trunks and 12 oz. gloves when I made the semi-finals

  only to be taken out by a German brute who should have been

  locked in a cage for the insane and allowed to drink blood.

  Now I am insane and stare at the wallpaper as one would stare

  at a Cézanne or an early Picasso (he has lost it), and I sent out

  the girls for beer, the old girls who barely bother to wipe

  their asses and say, well, I guess I won’t comb my hair today:

  it might bring me luck! well, anyway, they wash the dishes and

  chop the wood, and the landlady keeps saying let me in, I can’t

  get in, you’ve got the lock on, and what’s all that singing and

  cussing in there? but she only wants a piece of ass, she pretends

  she wants the rent

  but she’s not gonna get either one of ’em.

  meanwhile the skulls of the dead are full of beetles and

  old football scores like S.C. 16, N.D. 14 on a John

  Baker field goal.

  I can see the fleet from my window, the sails and the guns,

  always

  the guns poking their eyes in the sky looking for trouble like

  young

  L.A. cops who haven’t yet shaved and the young sailors out

  there sex-hungry, trying to act tough, trying to act like men

  but really closer to their mother’s nipples than to a true evaluation

  of existence. I say, god damn it, that

  the legs are gone and the outpourings too. inside my brain

  rats snip and snipe and

  pour oil

  to burn and fire out early dreams.

  darling, says one of the girls, you’ve got to snap out of it,

  we’re running out of MONEY. how do you want

  your toast?

  light or dark?

  a woman’s a woman, I say, and I put my binoculars between

  her

  kneecaps and I can see where

  empires have fallen.

  I wish I had a brush, some paint, some paint and a brush, I say.

  why? asks one of the

  whores

  BECAUSE RATS DON’T LIKE OIL! I scream.

  (I can’t do it. I don’t belong here. I listen to radio programs

  and people’s voices and I marvel that they can get excited

  and interested over nothing) and I flick out the lights, I

  crash out the lights, and I pull the shades down, I

  tear the shades down as I light my last cigar

  then dream jump from the Empire State Building

  into the thickheaded bullbrained mob with the hard-on attitude;

  already forgotten the dead of Normandy, Lincoln’s stringy

  beard,

  all the bulls that have died to flashing red capes,

  all the love that has died in women and men

  while fools have been elevated to the trumpet’s succulent sneer

  and I have fought (red-handed and drunk

  in slop-pitted alleys)
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  the bartenders of this rotten land.

  and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can’t laugh when the whole

  thing

  is so ridiculous

  that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits,

  the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets…are interesting?

  in the dark I hear hands reaching for the last of my money

  like mice nibbling at paper, automatic, while I slumber,

  a false drunken God asleep at the wheel…

  a quarter rolls across the floor, and I remember all the faces and

  the football heroes, and everything has meaning, and an editor writes me, you are good

  but

  you are too emotional

  the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,

  study it and put it to sleep in the abstract.

  is there anything less abstract

  than dying everyday and

  on the last day?

  the door closes and the last of the great whores are gone

  and they are all great, somehow no matter how they have

  killed me, they are great, and I smoke quietly

  thinking of Mexico, of the decaying horses and dead bulls,

  of Havana and Spain and Normandy, of the jabbering insane,

  of the Kamikaze

  winning whether they lived or died,

  of my dead friends, of no more friends

  ever; and the voice of my Mexican buddy saying, you won’t die

  you won’t die in this war, you’re too smart, you’ll take care

  of yourself.

  I keep thinking of the bulls. the rotting bulls, dying everyday.

  the whores are gone. the shells have stopped for a minute.

  fuck everybody.

  All I Know

  All I know is this: the ravens kiss my mouth,

  the veins are tangled here,

  the sea is made of blood.

  All I know is this: the hands reaching out,

  my eyes are closed, my ears are closed,