Stranger Music

preparation, with the man asleep and the woman being born. I thought he could be trusted to maintain the balance. He can’t. It is too quiet for him. He has to shoot off his fucking Sunday School mouth. We’re supposed to sit back and listen to The Good Guy talking, the old crapulous Dogma of Decency. This filth cannot go unpunished. How dare he summon the widows of Asia to his side! How dare he break his vow of silence to lecture, in the name of The People, from the shit-stained marble balcony of his obscene cultural delusions! I hate him for this. He will pay for this religious advertisement. He will carry the syrup of it in his balls. He will pass this life as a teddy bear. Death to the Commissars of the Left and the Right! Death to the Commissars of Mystery! I hate his fucking face, all serious with concern. Don’t let him into the good movie, and don’t let him hear any of the merry tunes in the Music Hall. Never let him sing again. And let him sit outside with his stinking educational corpse while the stripper on the little gilded stage turns every one of us on.

THE POLITICS OF THIS BOOK

Years ago I sat in this garden, at this very table, among the ancestors of yellow daisies that surround me now. I was drugged and happy then. I wrote deep from my sunstroke. Enough of the past. It is a morning in March 1975.

The bumblebees have arrived. There are noisy birds in the rain gutter. One thread of a spider web, suddenly white, goes fishing in the sunshine. Some butterflies want to fertilize my shiny boot. A cat sharpens the top of a wall by walking across it, and then by walking back, adjusts the horizontal.

I won’t be sitting here long. I’m in a terrible hurry. I’m going to Jerusalem. I’m going with the happy Israeli soldiers and I’m going with the King of Saudi Arabia to kneel down in the place that we were promised.

A bee enters a hanging yellow flower like a woman pulling a gown over her head, shivering, struggling upwards. The sun climbs to the middle of the sky and stops. It’s noon. The bells of noon ringing loud from the cathedral tower. Great shovelfuls of sound dumped into the grave of our activity. The sound fills up every space and every thought. The past is plugged up. Layer after layer of the present seizes us, buries us in one vast amber paperweight.

I won’t be going to Jerusalem after all. You will have to go to Jerusalem alone. It is yours. It was given to you by the angels of culture and time. But I can’t go. And I can’t loosen your interest in the war. You will want to “challenge the sphincters of your cowardice under sand and fire.” Goodbye.

I will be here if you look back, at this very table, in this very garden where the bumblebee charges like a bull into the yellow trumpet, and the sun makes a dent in my black trousers, and my wife repeats on a loop “Did you smell the ambrosia of the universe in my little cunt?” and the birds tune up at last.

YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED

TO BE HERE

You’re not supposed to be here

Not supposed to be looking for me

This is the poor side of silence

This is the white noise

    of the abandoned appliance

This is The Captivity

You need details

You need the name of a street

You’re not supposed to be here

    in the Name of G-d

You’re waiting for me again

Waiting at the mouth

    of the Tunnel of Love

But where is the cold little river

Where is the painted boat

If only the hummingbird

would sip at your desire

If only the green leaves

could use your longing

If only a woman were looking

over your shoulder

at a map of the Eternal city

It seems that nothing can take you away

from this odd memorial

Nothing that’s been made or born

separate you from

    the fiction of my absence

All the Messiahs are with me in this

You’re not supposed to be here

All the Messiahs agree

You’re not supposed to be looking for me

FINAL EXAMINATION

I am almost 90

Everyone I know has died off

except Leonard

He can still be seen

hobbling with his love

COMMENTARY – FINAL EXAMINATION

I have examined his death. Although it is unstable, I doubt that we shall find the old goat nibbling again at the lacy hem of the various salvations. I am more vulgar than he was, but I never pretended to a spiritual exercise. Furthermore, his death is sexless and cannot be used in politics. There is a cheap sweet smell in the air for which he bears some responsibility. I swear to the police that I have appeared, and do appear, as one of his voices. I see in the insignificance of these pages a shadow of the coming modesty. His death belongs to the future. I am well read. I am well served. I am satisfied and I give in. Long live the marriage of men and women. Long live the one heart.

RECENT SONGS

CAME SO FAR FOR BEAUTY

I came so far for beauty

I left so much behind:

my patience and my family,

my masterpiece unsigned

I thought I’d be rewarded

for such a very lonely choice,

and surely she would answer

to such a hopeless voice

I practised on my sainthood

I gave to one and all

but the rumours of my virtue

they moved her not at all

I changed my style to silver

I changed my clothes to black

and where I did surrender,

now I would attack

I stormed the old casino

for the money and the flesh,

and I myself decided

what was rotten, what was fresh

And men to do my bidding

and broken bones to teach

the value of my pardon

the shadow of my reach

But no I could not touch her

with such a heavy hand;

her star beyond my order,

her nakedness unmanned

I came so far for beauty

I left so much behind:

my patience and my family,

my masterpiece unsigned

THE WINDOW

Why do you stand by the window

abandoned to beauty and pride?

the thorn of the night in your