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

  fuck, don’t

  you?

  amen, I

  said.

  Soirée

  ants crawl upon paper flowers with all the insect color

  of my hatred and

  I crash out the lamp and rise to scream,

  but, lo, I am greater than garlic and faster

  than the foreigner Errico!

  in the cupboard sits my bottle

  like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers.

  I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony,

  sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere,

  the phone rings gamboling its sound

  against the odds of the crooked sea;

  I drink deeply and evenly now,

  I drink to paradise

  and death

  and the lie of love.

  at the window I watch the soldiers parachute down

  as my radio plays the Symphonie Fantastique by

  Berlioz;

  the lightning stills the ants, stiffens them with

  the fear of man, and there is a knock upon my door.

  I walk with my luger and turn the knob. everything

  is nonsense, nothing matters. the flies are upon

  the sugar, wildly in the small richness: they have

  my blithe and tinkered soul…

  THE MARCH TO THE GALLOWS!

  I laugh gaily as the chandeliers swing

  and the last of the lovers

  clutch at the straws of their lives,

  and I fire through the doorway

  as the music sinks to a lisp at the dismay

  and derangement

  of Birth.

  Notations from a Muddled Indolence

  a woman walks by and I look at her and know that her

  existence is

  depleted of thought and worms

  that she does not realize that successful men can be such

  beasts

  that she does not know that I have fallen into the sloth of

  formula

  I watch her as I sit in a dirty kitchen on a dirty

  afternoon

  she walks dreaming of oranges and

  Cadillacs

  mentally I throw her up into a palm

  tree

  physically I rape her

  spiritually I spit in her

  eye

  I realize that really she is no more say than

  some words written by a small boy in a public

  crapper

  these innumerable and astounding

  realizations

  this dirty

  life

  her skin is white and sagging

  she has on a purple

  underslip

  this is what causes

  wars

  great paintings

  suicides

  harps

  geognosy and

  hermits.

  Nothing Subtle

  there is nothing subtle about dying or

  dumping garbage, or the spider

  and this fist full of nickels and

  the barking of dogs tonight

  when the beast puffs on beer

  and moonlight,

  and asks my name

  and I hold to the wall

  not man enough to cry

  as the city dumps its sorrow

  in wine bottles and stale kisses,

  and the handcuffs and crutches and slabs

  fornicate like mad.

  I Don’t Need a Bedsheet with Slits for Eyes to Kill You in

  if it’s raining and you’re sitting behind a shade with

  a cup of curari or a dead

  antelope

  with bluer eyes than any of the beautiful blue eyes

  of any of the girls in this ugly

  town

  I’ll paint your fence green or

  unplug your drain for almost

  nothing;

  if the fog comes in like soft cleanser

  and you can see old men looking out at it

  from behind curtains

  these warm old men smoking pipes

  I will tell you stories to make your dreams

  easier;

  but if you mutilate me

  hang me alongside the scarecrow like a

  cheap Christ

  and let some schoolboy hang a sign about my

  throat

  I’m going to walk your streets of night

  with a knife

  in the rain in the snow

  on gay holidays I’ll be there

  behind you

  and when I decide finally that we will

  meet

  you will not understand

  because you did not want

  to

  and the flowers and the dogs and the

  cities and the children will not

  miss you.

  86’d

  the most binding labor

  is

  trying to make it

  under a sanctified

  banner.

  similarity of intention

  with others

  marks the fool from the

  explorer

  you can learn this at

  any

  poolhall, racetrack, bar

  university or

  jail.

  people run from rain but

  sit

  in bathtubs full of

  water.

  it is fairly dismal to know that

  millions of people are worried about

  the hydrogen bomb

  yet

  they are already

  dead.

  yet they keep trying to make

  women

  money

  sense.

  and finally the Great Bartender will lean forward

  white and pure and strong and mystic

  to tell you that you’ve had

  enough

  just when you feel like

  you’re getting

  started.

  The Ants

  I was down by the mill at last,

  and I saw a rabbit go by

  and a rotten log

  and a rotten heart,

  and I sat and smoked on a stump

  and I watched the ants;

  the ants are everywhere

  picking up the dead,

  their dead and the other dead,

  cleaning up the earth,

  and the sky was the same old

  pale blue

  like a weak water color,

  and a couple of clouds,

  fat and senseless;

  and I took out the bottle

  and the notebook

  and I was a man a thousand years old,

  and a thousand years back

  or a thousand years ahead,

  and I looked down into the oil of water

  and the sun came back

  painting blurs in my head,

  showing me who was master

  and how weak I was

  and I put my hand flat on the dirt

  palm up

  and the ants came up

  and touched

  and passed around

  so I guessed that I was not dead,

  but no, there was one,

  he came up and climbed

  and I could feel the thin hair-legs

  as he climbed

  both of us brilliant in the sunlight,

  and then down he went into the dirt,

  and he ran ahead, but the next one ran

  up my sleeve and then out,

  and then stood there in my palm, blind,

  looking up at me, and while he stood there

  another came up and touched his feelers

  and they talked about me,

  and then came a third and a fourth

  and I felt their excitement:

  this palm in the dust could be theirs,

  and I rose with a curse

 
and pinched and blew them off

  like the idiots they were:

  their time would come to share with the worm,

  but this time this time was mine!

  but no matter that I walked off into the pines

  and frightened a squirrel,

  they had said,

  they’d had their say,

  and I was done.

  Suicide

  he told me he had all the gas on

  without flame

  but when I got there

  at 11:30 p.m. the gas was flaming and

  he was drunk on the couch

  with his ragged goatee:

  “it got too much,” he told me,

  “I got to thinking

  and it got too much.”

  which is good enough, we who think

  or work with words, we who carve

  can come up against this, especially

  if we believe our early successes

  and believe the game is won.

  I think of Ernie tagging himself

  when the time was ready

  and I think of Frost

  going on,

  licking the boots of politicians,

  telling the pretty lies

  of an addled mind,

  and I think,

  well, Ernie’s won

  another round.

  I pour the kid a drink, then

  pour myself one. kid?

  hell, he’s 30. a lady’s man

  and a master of the English

  language with a

  peanut-shell soul.

  and I? and I? nothing more.

  we drink and he reels off

  petty larcenies. later I leave,

  both of us alive.

  the next Sunday, I’m told,

  my friend was in Frisco

  in a green bow tie

  reading his poems to a

  society of misplaced ladies.

  I’m told he

  gassed them to

  death.

  3:30 A.M. Conversation

  at 3:30 a.m. in the morning

  a door opens

  and feet come down the hall

  moving a body,

  and there is a knock

  and you put down your beer

  and answer.

  god damn it, she says,

  don’t you ever sleep?

  and she walks in

  her hair in curlers

  and herself in a silk robe

  covered with rabbits and birds

  and she has brought her own bottle

  to which you splendidly add

  2 glasses;

  her husband, she says, is in Florida

  and her sister sends her money and dresses,

  and she has been looking for a job

  for 32 days.

  you tell her

  you are a jockey’s agent and a

  writer of jazz and love songs,

  and after a couple of drinks

  she doesn’t bother to cover

  her legs

  with the edge of the robe

  that keeps falling away.

  they are not bad legs at all,

  in fact, very good legs,

  and soon you are kissing a

  head full of curlers,

  and the rabbits are beginning

  to wink, and Florida is a long way

  away, and she says we are not strangers

  really because she has seen me

  in the hall.

  and finally

  there is very little

  to say.

  Cows in Art Class

  good weather

  is like

  good women—

  it doesn’t always happen

  and when it does

  it doesn’t

  always last.

  a man is

  more stable:

  if he’s bad

  there’s more chance

  he’ll stay that way,

  or if he’s good

  he might hang

  on,

  but a woman

  is changed forever

  by

  children

  age

  diet

  conversation

  sex

  the moon

  the absence or

  presence of the sun

  or good times.

  a woman must be nursed

  into subsistence

  by love

  where a man can become

  stronger

  by being hated.

  I am drinking tonight in Spangler’s Bar

  and I remember the cows

  I once painted in Art class

  and they looked good

  they looked better than anything

  in here. I am drinking in Spangler’s Bar

  wondering which to love and which

  to hate, but the rules are gone:

  I love and hate only

  myself—

  the others stand beyond me

  like oranges dropped from the table

  and rolling away; it’s what I’ve got to

  decide:

  kill myself or

  love myself?

  which is the treason?

  where’s the information

  coming from?

  books…like broken glass:

  I wdn’t wipe my ass with ’em

  yet, it’s getting

  darker, see?

  (we drink here and speak to

  each other and seem knowing.)

  paint the cow with the biggest

  tits

  paint the cow with the biggest

  rump.

  the bartender slides me a beer

  it runs down the bar

  like an Olympic sprinter

  and the pair of pliers that is my hand

  stops it, lifts it,

  golden, dull temptation,

  I drink and

  stand there

  the weather bad for cows

  but my brush is ready

  to stroke up

  the green grass straw eye

  sadness takes me over

  and I drink the beer straight down

  order a shot

  fast

  to give me the guts and the love to

  go

  on.

  Practice

  I keep practicing death

  and as the worms writhe

  in agony of waiting

  I might as well have another

  drink, and I am thinking

  I am there:

  and I cross my legs

  in the patio of

  some Mexico City hotel

  in 1997

  and the birds come down

  to pick out my eyes

  and the birds fly away

  and I no longer see

  them.

  is it shotguns of cancer

  or sun-madness?

  the rotting of the heart,

  the gut, the lily.

  now there’s Hem. I always thought of Hem

  as a tough old guy frying a steak

  in some kitchen

  under a bright light. what

  happened, Ernie?

  Hem was practicing too.

  Everytime he watched a bull die

  he got ready. when he lit a cigar

  at four in the afternoon, he

  got ready.

  the bulls, the soldiers, the cities

  the towns…

  my sadness, my sadness

  (let me have this drink)

  could be strung across guitars

  everywhere

  and played for 10 minutes

  with all the generals bowing

  whores little girls again

  maids kissing my photograph

  on the plaza wall haha

  and old warriors

  rubbing their blue stiff veins

  and hopin
g for one more day

  of bravery.

  I practice for you, death:

  your wig

  that dress

  your eyes

  these teeth.

  I too am an old man frying a steak

  in a small kitchen.

  when I run out of luck

  I’ll run out of whiskey

  and when I run out of whiskey

  the land will not be green,

  and my love and my sadness…

  who needs these?

  I practice death pretty good:

  send in the bull

  send in the girl whose white flesh

  maddens men on the boulevards,

  send in Paris,

  send in a car on the freeway

  with 6 people going to a picnic,

  send in the winner of the 8th,

  send in Palm Beach and all the people

  on the sand!

  and I practice for you

  too,

  and the man sweeping the sidewalk

  and the lady in bed with me

  and the poems of Shakespeare

  and the elephants

  and the queers and the murderers,

  I practice for everybody,

  but for myself mostly.

  pouring another drink now

  at 9:30 in the morning,

  the Racing Form on the couch,

  the mailman walking toward me

  with a loveletter from a lady who

  doesn’t want to die and a letter from the

  government

  telling me to give them money;

  and I practice for the government too,