Have I come so far for this
I wondered as I waited in the pure cold
ready at last to argue for my silence
Tell me master
do my lips move
or where does it come from
this soft total chant that drives my soul
like a spear of salt into the rock
Give me back my house
Give me back my young wife
O N E O F T H E N I G H T S I
D I D N ' T K I L L M Y S E L F
You dance on the day you saved
my theoretical angels
daughters of the new middle-class
who wear your mouths like Bardot
Come my darlings
the movies are true
I am the lost sweet singer whose death
in the fog your new high-heeled boots
have ground into cigarette butts
I was walking the harbour this evening
looking for a 25-cent bed of water
but I will sleep tonight
with your garters curled in my shoes
like rainbows on vacation
with your virginity ruling
the condom cemeteries like a 2nd chance
I believe I believe
Thursday December 1 2th
is not the night
and I will kiss again the slope of a breast
little nipple above me
like a sunset
B U L L E T S
Listen all you bullets
that never hit:
a lot of throats are growing
in open collars
like frozen milk bottles
on a 5 a.m. street
throats that are waiting
for bite scars
but will settle
for bullet holes
You restless bullets
lost in swarms
from undecided wars:
fasten on
these nude throats
that need some
decoration
I've done my own work:
I had 3 jewels
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
I 1 73
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
T H E B I G W O R L D
The big world will find out
about this farm
the big world will learn
the details of what
I worked out in the can
And your curious life with me
will be told so often
that no one will believe
you grew old
• 74 I
F R O N T L A W N
The snow was falling
over my penknife
There was a movie
in the fireplace
The apples were wrapped
in 8-year-old blond 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
I 175
K E R E N S K Y
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 rilles in the lawyer's attic:
and then the magic, the So-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
176 I
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.
I 177
A N O T H E R N I G H T W I T H
T E L E S C O P E
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
