no more
and I have placed them
on my choices
jewels
although they performed
like bullets:
an instant of ruby
before the hands
came up
to stem the mess
And you over there
my little acrobat:
swing fast
After me
there is no care
and the air
is heavily armed
and has
the wildest aim
HITLER
Now let him go to sleep with history,
the real skeleton stinking of gasoline,
the mutt and jeff henchmen beside him:
let them sleep among our precious poppies.
Cadres of SS waken in our minds
where they began before we ransomed them
to that actual empty realm we people
with the shadows that disturb our inward peace.
For a while we resist the silver-black cars
rolling in slow parade through the brain.
We stuff the microphones with old chaotic flowers
from a bed which rapidly exhausts itself.
Never mind. They turn up as poppies
beside the tombs and libraries of the real world.
The leader’s vast design, the tilt of his chin
seem excessively familiar to minds at peace.
FRONT LAWN
The snow was falling
over my penknife
There was a movie
in the fireplace
The apples were wrapped
in 8-year-old blonde hair
Starving and dirty
the janitor’s daughter never
turned up in November
to pee from her sweet crack
on the gravel
I’ll go back one day
when my cast is off
Elm leaves are falling
over my bow and arrow
Candy is going bad
and Boy Scout calendars
are on fire
My old mother
sits in her Cadillac
laughing her Danube laugh
as I tell her that we own
all the worms
under our front lawn
Rust rust rust
in the engines of love and time
KERENSKY
My friend walks through our city this winter night,
fur-hatted, whistling, anti-mediterranean,
stricken with seeing Eternity in all that is seasonal.
He is the Kerensky of our Circle
always about to chair the last official meeting
before the pros take over, they of the pure smiling eyes
trained only for Form.
He knows there are no measures to guarantee
the Revolution, or to preserve the row of muscular icicles
which will chart Winter’s decline like a graph.
There is nothing for him to do but preside
over the last official meeting.
It will all come round again: the heartsick teachers
who make too much of poetry, their students
who refuse to suffer, the cache of rifles in the lawyer’s attic:
and then the magic, the 80-year comet touching
the sturdiest houses. The Elite Corps commits suicide
in the tennis-ball basement. Poets ride buses free.
The General insists on a popularity poll. Troops study satire.
A strange public generosity prevails.
Only too well he knows the tiny moment when
everything is possible, when pride is loved, beauty held
in common, like having an exquisite sister,
and a man gives away his death like a piece of advice.
Our Kerensky has waited for these moments
over a table in a rented room
when poems grew like butterflies on the garbage of his life.
How many times? The sad answer is: they can be counted.
Possible and brief: this is his vision of Revolution.
Who will parade the shell today? Who will kill in the name
of the husk? Who will write a Law to raise the corpse
which cries now only for weeds and excrement?
See him walk the streets, the last guard, the only idler
on the square. He must keep the wreck of the Revolution
the debris of public beauty
from the pure smiling eyes of the trained visionaries
who need our daily lives perfect.
The soft snow begins to honour him with epaulets, and to provoke the animal past of his fur hat. He wears a death, but he allows the snow, like an ultimate answer, to forgive him, just for this jewelled moment of his coronation. The carved gargoyles of the City Hall receive the snow as bibs beneath their drooling lips. How they resemble the men of profane vision, the same greed, the same intensity as they who whip their minds to recall an ancient lucky orgasm, yes, yes, he knows that deadly concentration, they are the founders, they are the bankers – of History! He rests in his walk as they consume of the generous night everything that he does not need.
ANOTHER NIGHT WITH TELESCOPE
Come back to me
brutal empty room
Thin Byzantine face
preside over this new fast
I am broken with easy grace
Let me be neither
father nor child
but one who spins
on an eternal unimportant loom
patterns of wars and grass
which do not last the night
I know the stars
are wild as dust
and wait for no man’s discipline
but as they wheel
from sky to sky they rake
our lives with pins of light
