in nineteen sixty-two.
THE GREAT EVENT
It’s going to happen very soon. The great event that will end the horror. That will end the sorrow. Next Tuesday, when the sun goes down, I will play the Moonlight Sonata backwards. This will reverse the effects of the world’s mad plunge into suffering for the last 200 million years. What a lovely night that will be. What a sigh of relief, as the senile robins become bright red again, and the retired nightingales pick up their dusty tails, and assert the majesty of creation!
THE PARIS SKY
The Paris sky
is blue and bright
I want to fly
with all my might
Her legs are long
her heart is high
The chains are strong
but so am I
THE STORY THUS FAR
Things blew all over the place on the day that I was born. It was windy. Dried leaves crashed against the walls of the Homeopathic Hospital. I was alive. I was alive in the horror.
The Givers huddled over me like a football team. They started to give me things and then to take them away. The things that didn’t fit they chucked back into the Funnel of the Void. The gifts were many and many were the warnings that went with them.
We are giving you a great heart but if you drink wine you will begin to hate the world. The moon is your sister but if you take sleeping pills you will find yourself in the company of unhappy women. Every time you grab at love you will lose a snowflake of your memory.
My mother was lying not far away and I heard her cry, “He isn’t mine!” My noble parent cried to my ears alone from her bed of blood and water. I heard her say it and I thanked her for the truth with a shriek of joy. I was not born into a family. I was fully protected.
The hammers fell on infants everywhere but I was saved on a river in the beautiful autumn land of Egypt.
THE SWEETEST LITTLE SONG
You go your way
I’ll go your way too
THING
I am this thing that needs to sing
I love to sing
to my beloved’s other thing
and to my own dear sweet G-d
I love to sing to Him and her
and to my baby’s lower fur
which is so holy
that I want to crawl on my knees
off a high cliff
and sail around singing
in the wind
which is so friendly
to my feathery spirit
I am this thing
that wants to sing
when I am up against the spit
and scorn of judges
O G-D I want to sing
I Am
THIS THING THAT NEEDS TO SING
STANZAS FOR H.M.
O perfect gentleman, and champion
of the Royal Throne; O unbroken stone
of Sinai’s heart; O Hero of Verdun;
our greatest poet until now unknown,
whose banner over death has always flown
in wilds of poverty and solitude;
I thank you for the years you spent alone
with nothing to hang on to but a mood
of glory, searching words that Love could not elude
(We lost you for a while. The doctors tried
their hopeful science on a chosen soul,
but this chosen soul was sitting by the side
of G-d, and touched by Him, hale and whole,
though broken in men’s eyes, in His control.)
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
