The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills Read online

  and the cat-sides of the room

  come in upon me

  and I would scream,

  but they have places for people

  who scream;

  and the cat walks

  the cat walks forever

  in my brain.

  ants crawl my drunken arms

  O ants crawl my drunken arms

  and they let Van Gogh sit in a cornfield

  and take Life out of the world with a

  shotgun,

  ants crawl my drunken arms

  and they set Rimbaud

  to running guns and looking under rocks

  for gold,

  O ants crawl my drunken arms,

  they put Pound in a nuthouse

  and made Crane jump into the sea

  in his pajamas,

  ants, ants crawl my drunken arms

  as our schoolboys scream for Willie Mays

  instead of Bach,

  ants crawl my drunken arms

  through the drink I reach

  for surfboards and sinks, for sunflowers

  and the typewriter falls like a heart-attack

  from the table

  or a dead Sunday bull,

  and the ants crawl into my mouth

  and down my throat,

  I wash them down with wine

  and pull up the shades

  and they are on the screen

  and on the streets

  climbing church towers

  and into tire casings

  looking for something else

  to eat.

  a literary discussion

  Markov claims I am trying

  to stab his soul

  but I’d prefer his wife.

  I put my feet on the coffee table

  and he says,

  I don’t mind you putting

  your feet on the coffee table

  except that the legs are wobbly

  and the thing

  will fall apart

  any minute.

  I leave my feet on the table

  but I’d prefer his wife.

  I would rather, says Markov,

  entertain a ditch-digger

  or a newsvendor

  because they are kind enough

  to observe the decencies

  even though

  they don’t know

  Rimbaud from rat poison.

  my empty beercan

  rolls to the floor.

  that I must die

  bothers me less than

  a straw, says Markov,

  my part of the game

  is that I must live

  the best I can.

  I grab his wife as she walks by,

  and then her can is against my belly,

  and she has fine knees and breasts

  and I kiss her.

  it is not so bad, being old, he says,

  a calmness sets in, but here’s the catch:

  to keep calmness and deadness

  separate; never to look upon youth

  as inferior because you are old,

  never to look upon age as wisdom

  because you have experience. a

  man can be old and a fool—

  many are, a man can be young

  and wise—few are. a—

  for Christ’s all sake, I wailed,

  shut up!

  he walked over and got his cane and

  walked out.

  you’ve hurt his feelings, she said,

  he thinks you are a great poet.

  he’s too slick for me, I said,

  he’s too wise.

  I had one of her breasts out.

  it was a monstrous

  beautiful

  thing.

  watermelon

  and the windows opened that night,

  a ceiling dripped the sweat

  of a tin god,

  and I sat eating a watermelon,

  all false red,

  water like slow running of rusty

  tears,

  and I spit out seeds

  and swallowed seeds,

  and I kept thinking

  I am a fool

  I am a fool

  to eat this watermelon,

  but I kept eating

  anyhow.

  for one I knew

  Of all the iron beds in paradise

  yours was the most cruel

  and I was smoke in your mirror

  and you sluiced your hair with jade,

  but you were a woman and I was a

  boy, but boy enough for an iron bed

  and man enough for wine

  and you.

  now I am a man,

  man enough for all,

  and you are, you

  are

  old

  not now so cruel,

  now your iron bed

  is empty.

  when Hugo Wolf went mad–

  Hugo Wolf went mad while eating an onion

  and writing his 253rd song; it was rainy

  April and the worms came out of the ground

  humming Tannhäuser, and he spilled his milk

  with his ink, and his blood fell out to the walls

  and he howled and he roared and he screamed, and

  downstairs

  his landlady said, I knew it, that rotten son

  of a

  bitch has dummied up his brain, he’s jacked-off

  his last piece

  of music and now I’ll never get the rent, and someday

  he’ll be famous

  and they’ll bury him in the rain, but right now

  I wish he’d shut

  up that god damned screaming—for my money he’s

  a silly pansy jackass

  and when they move him out of here, I hope they

  move in a good solid fisherman

  or a hangman

  or a seller of

  Biblical tracts.

  riot

  the reason for the riot was we kept getting beans

  and a guard grabbed a colored boy who threw his on the floor

  and somebody touched a button

  and everybody was grabbing everybody;

  I clubbed my best friend behind the ear

  somebody threw coffee in my face

  (what the hell, you couldn’t drink it)

  and I got out to the yard

  and I heard the guns going

  and it seemed like every con had a knife but me,

  and all I could do was pray and run

  and I didn’t have a god and was fat from playing

  poker for pennies with my cellmate,

  and the warden’s voice started coming over the cans,

  and I heard later, in the confusion,

  the cook raped a sailor,

  and I lost my shaving cream, a pack of smokes

  and a copy of The New Yorker;

  also 3 men were shot,

  a half dozen knifed,

  35 put in the hole,

  all yard privileges suspended,

  the screws as jittery as L.A. bookies,

  the prison radio off,

  real quiet,

  visitors sent home,

  but the next morning

  we did get our mail—

  a letter from St. Louis:

  Dear Charles, I am sorry you are in prison,

  but you cannot break the law,

  and there was a pressed carnation,

  perfume, the looming of outside,

  kisses and panties,

  laughter and beer,

  and that night for dinner

  they marched us all back down

  to the beans.

  meanwhile

  neither does this mean

  the dead are

  at the door

  begging bread

  before

  the stockpiles

  blow

  like all the

  storms and hell


  in one big love,

  but anyhow

  I rented a 6 dollar a week

  room

  in Chinatown

  with a window as large as the

  side of the world

  filled with night flies and neon,

  lighted like Broadway

  to frighten away rats,

  and I walked into a bar and sat down,

  and the Chinaman looked at my rags

  and said

  no credit

  and I pulled out a hundred dollar bill

  and asked for a cup of Confucius juice

  and 2 China dolls with slits of eyes

  just about the size of the rest of them

  slid closer

  and we sat

  and we

  waited.

  a poem is a city

  a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers

  filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,

  filled with banality and booze,

  filled with rain and thunder and periods of

  drought, a poem is a city at war,

  a poem is a city asking a clock why,

  a poem is a city burning,

  a poem is a city under guns

  its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,

  a poem is a city where God rides naked

  through the streets like Lady Godiva,

  where dogs bark at night, and chase away

  the flag; a poem is a city of poets,

  most of them quite similar

  and envious and bitter…

  a poem is this city now,

  50 miles from nowhere,

  9:09 in the morning,

  the taste of liquor and cigarettes,

  no police, no lovers, walking the streets,

  this poem, this city, closing its doors,

  barricaded, almost empty,

  mournful without tears, aging without pity,

  the hardrock mountains,

  the ocean like a lavender flame,

  a moon destitute of greatness,

  a small music from broken windows…

  a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,

  a poem is the world…

  and now I stick this under glass

  for the mad editor’s scrutiny,

  and night is elsewhere

  and faint gray ladies stand in line,

  dog follows dog to estuary,

  the trumpets bring on gallows

  as small men rant at things

  they cannot do.

  the cat

  the hunter goes by my window

  4 feet locked in the bright stillness of a

  yellow and blue

  night.

  cruel strangeness takes hold in wars, in

  gardens—

  the yellow and blue night explodes before

  me, atomic, surgical,

  full of starlit

  devils…

  then the cat leaps up on the

  fence, a tubby dismay,

  stupid, lonely,

  whiskers like an old lady in the

  supermarket

  and naked as the

  moon.

  I am temporarily

  delighted.

  hermit in the city

  Idle in the forest of my room

  with tungsten trees, owl boiling coffee,

  webs cowled in gold over windows

  staring outward into hell;

  cigarette breath: statues of perfection,

  not stuffed or whirled in cancers

  of ranting;

  engines and wheels crawl to gaseous

  ends along the sabre-tooth;

  my trees climb with monkey-rhyme,

  climb out through the ceiling

  breaking TV antennas and

  the dull howl of canned laughter,

  canned humor, canned death;

  idle, idle in this forest,

  calla lilies, grass, stone,

  all nighttime level peace

  of no bombers or faces,

  and I dream the stone dream,

  the grass dream,

  the river running through my

  fingerbones

  one hundred and fifty years away,

  leaving shots of grit and gold

  and radium,

  lifted and turned

  by dizzied fish

  and dropped,

  raising flecks of sand

  in my sleep…

  The owl spits his coffee,

  my monkeys chit the gibberish plan,

  and my walls,

  my walls help endure the seizing.

  II

  I dreamed I drank an Arrow shirt

  and stole a broken

  pail

  all-yellow flowers

  through the venetian blinds I saw a fat man in a brown coat

  (with a head I can only describe as like a marshmallow)

  drag the casket from the hearse: it was battleship gray

  with all-yellow flowers.

  they put it on a roller that was hidden in purple drape

  and the marshmallow-man and one pin-crisp bloodless woman

  walked for him up the incline…and!—

  gore-bell-horror-sheer-sheen-world-ending-moment!—

  almost losing IT there, once—

  I could see the body rolling out

  like one loose dice in a losing game—the arms waving

  windmills and legs kicking autumn footballs.

  they made it into the church

  and I remained outside

  opening my brain to living sunlight.

  in the room with me she was singing and rolling her

  long golden hair. (this is true Arturo, and that is what

  makes it so simple.)

  “I just saw them take in a body,”

  I fashioned to her.

  it’s autumn, it’s trees, it’s telephone wires,

  and she sings some song I can’t understand, some High Mass

  of Life.

  she went on singing but I wanted to die

  I wanted yellow flowers like her golden hair

  I wanted yellow-singing and the sun.

  this is true, and that is what makes it so strange:

  I wanted to be opened and untangled, and

  tossed away.

  what seems to be the trouble, gentlemen?

  the service was bad

  and the bellboy kept bringing in towels

  at the wrong moment.

  drunk, I finally clubbed him along

  the side of the head.

  he was a little man and he fell

  like an October leaf,

  quite done,

  and when the fuzz came up

  I had the sofa in front of the door

  and the chain on,

  the 2nd movement of Brahms’ First Symphony

  and had my hand halfway up the ass

  of a broad old enough to be my grandmother

  and they broke the god damned door,

  pushed the sofa aside;

  I slapped the screaming chippy

  and turned and asked,

  what seems to be the trouble, gentlemen?

  and some young kid who had never shaved

  brought his stick down against my head

  and in the morning I was in the prison ward

  chained to my bed

  and it was hot,

  the sweat coming down through the white

  senseless sheet,

  and they asked all sorts of silly questions

  and I knew I’d be late for work,

  which worried me immensely.

  spring swan

  swans die in the Spring too

  and there it floated

  dead on a Sunday

  sideways

  circling in current

  and I walked to the rotunda

  and overhead

  gods in chariots

  dogs, women br />
  circled,

  and death

  ran down my throat

  like a mouse,

  and I heard the people coming

  with their picnic bags

  and laughter,

  and I felt guilty

  for the swan

  as if death

  were a thing of shame

  and like a fool

  I walked away

  and left them

  my beautiful swan.

  remains

  things are good as I am not dead yet

  and the rats move in the beercans,

  the papersacks shuffle like small dogs,

  and her photographs are stuck onto a painting

  by a dead German and she too is dead

  and it took 14 years to know her

  and if they give me another 14

  I will know her yet…

  her photos stuck over the glass

  neither move nor speak,

  but I even have her voice on tape,

  and she speaks some evenings,

  her again

  so real she laughs

  says the thousand things,

  the one thing I always ignored;

  this will never leave me:

  that I had love

  and love died;

  a photo and a piece of tape

  is not much, I have learned late,

  but give me 14 days or 14 years,

  I will kill any man

  who would touch or take

  whatever’s left.

  the moment of truth

  he died a suicide in a Detroit hotel room

  on skid row

  and he was stiff when they found him,

  rat poison…

  I was managing the place then,