The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems Read online

  The dead cherry trees diseased with leaf rot were piled and

  soaked with fuel oil, flames shooting upward into the rain.

  Rouse your soul to frenzy said Pasternak. Icons built

  of flesh with enough heat to save a life from water.

  A new sign won’t be given and the old ones you forgot won’t

  return again until the moment before you die, unneeded then.

  Fuse is wet, match won’t light it and nothing will. Heat comes

  out of the center, radiates faintly and no paper will burn.

  L

  A boot called Botte Sauvage renders rattlers harmless but they

  cost too much; the poet bitten to death for want of boots.

  I’m told that black corduroy offers protection from moonburn

  and that if you rub yourself with a skunk, women will stay away.

  There is a hiding place among the relics of the fifties, poets

  hiding in the trunks of Hudson Hornets off the Merritt Parkway.

  They said she was in Rome with her husband, a sculptor, but

  I’m not fooled. At the Excelsior I’ll expose her as a whore.

  Down in the canyon the survivors were wailing in the overturned

  car but it was dark, the cliffs steep, so we drove on to the bar.

  She wants affection but is dressed in aluminum siding and her

  edges are jagged; when cold, the skin peels off the tongue at touch.

  LI

  Who could put anything together that would stay in one place

  as remorseless as that cabin hidden in the maple grove.

  In Nevada the whores are less clean and fresh than in

  Montana, and do not grow more beautiful with use.

  The car went only seventeen miles before the motor burned up

  and I sat in the grass thinking I had been taken and was sad.

  This toothache means my body is wearing out, new monkey glands

  for ears in the future, dog teeth, a pink transplanted body.

  She is growing old. Of course with the peach, apple, plum,

  you can eat around the bruised parts but still the core is black.

  Windemere and Derwent Water are exhausted with their own

  charm and want everyone to go back to their snot-nosed slums.

  LII

  I was lucky enough to have invented a liquid heart

  by drinking a full gallon of DNA stolen from a lab.

  To discover eleven more dollars than you thought you

  had and the wild freedom in the tavern that follows.

  He’s writing mood music for the dead again and ought to have

  his ass kicked though it is bruised too much already by his sport.

  Both serpent becoming dragon and the twelve moons lost

  at sea, worshiped items, rifts no longer needed by us.

  Hot Mickey Mouse jazz and the mice jigging up the path

  to the beehive castle, all with the bleached faces of congressmen.

  LIII

  These corners that stick out and catch on things

  and I don’t fill my body’s clothes.

  Euclid, walking in switchbacks, kite’s tip, always

  either up or down or both, triangular tongue & cunt.

  Backing up to the rose tree to perceive which of its

  points touch where. I’ll soon be rid of you.

  There are no small people who hitch rides on snakes

  or ancient people with signs. I am here now.

  That I will be suicided by myself or that lids close over

  and over simply because they once were open.

  We’ll ask you to leave this room and brick up the door

  and all the doors in the hallway until you go outside.

  LIV

  Aieeee was said in a blip the size of an ostrich egg,

  blood pressures to a faint, humming heart flutters.

  I can’t die in this theater – the movie, Point Blank,

  god’s cheap abuse of irony. But the picture is fading.

  This dry and yellow heat where each chicken’s

  scratch uproots a cloud and hay bursts into flame.

  The horse is enraged with flies and rolls over

  in the red dirt until he is a giant liver.

  From the mailman’s undulant car and through the lilacs

  the baseball game. The kitchen window is white with noon.

  LV

  The child crawls in widening circles, backs to the wall

  as a dog would. The lights grow dim, his mother talks.

  Swag: a hot night and the clouds running low were brains and I

  above them with the moon saw down through a glass skull.

  And O god I think I want to sleep within some tree

  or on a warmer planet beneath a march of asteroids.

  He saw the lady in the Empire dress raise it to sit bare

  along the black tree branch where she sang a ditty of nature.

  They are packing up in the lamplight, moving out again

  for the West this time sure only of inevitable miracles.

  No mail delights me as much as this – written with plum juice

  on red paper and announcing the rebirth of three dead species.

  LVI

  God I am cold and want to go to sleep for a long time

  and only wake up when the sun shines and dogs laugh.

  I passed away in my sleep from general grief and a seven-

  year hangover. Fat angels wrapped me in traditional mauve.

  A local indian maiden of sixteen told the judge to go

  fuck himself, got thirty days, died of appendicitis in jail.

  I molded all the hashish to look like deer & rabbit turds

  and spread them in the woods for rest stops when I walk.

  Please consider the case closed. Otis Redding died in a

  firestorm and we want to put him together again somehow.

  LVII

  I thought it was night but found out the windows were painted

  black and a bluebird bigger than a child’s head was singing.

  When we get out of Nam the pilot said we’ll go down to S.A.

  and kick the shit outta those commie greasers. Of course.

  In sleepwalking all year long I grew cataracts, white-haired,

  flesh fattened, texture of mushrooms, whistled notes at moon.

  After seven hours of television and a quart of vodka he wept

  over the National Anthem. O America Carcinoma the eagle dead.

  Celebrate her with psalms and new songs – she’ll be fifteen

  tomorrow, a classic beauty who won’t trouble her mind with poems.

  I wanted to drag a few words out of silence then sleep and none

  were what I truly wanted. So much silence and so many words.

  LVIII

  These losses are final – you walked out of the grape arbor

  and are never to be seen again and you aren’t aware of it.

  I set off after the grail seven years ago but like a spiral

  from above these circles narrow, tighten into a single point.

  Let’s forgive her for her Chinese-checker brain and the pills

  that charge it electrically. She’s pulled the switch too often.

  After the country dance in the yellow Buick Dynaflow with

  leather seats we thought Ferlin Husky was singing to us.

  A bottle of Corbys won you. A decade later on hearing

  I was a poet you laughed. You are permanently coarsened.

  Catherine near the lake is a tale I’m telling – a whiff

  of lilac and a girl bleeds through her eyes like a pigeon.

  LIX

  On the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost I rose early

  and went fishing where I saw an osprey eat a bass in a tree.

  We are not all guilty for anything. Let all stupefied

  Calvinists take pleasure in sweet dirty pictures and
gin.

  As an active farmer I’m concerned. Apollinaire fertilizer

  won’t feed the pigs or chickens. Year of my seventh failure.

  When we awoke the music was faint and a golden light came

  through the window, one fly buzzed, she whispered another’s name.

  Let me announce I’m not against homosexuality. Now that the air

  is clear on this issue you can talk freely Donny Darkeyes.

  A home with a heated garage where dad can tinker with his

  poetry on a workbench and mom glazes the steamed froth for lunch.

  LX

  She called from Sundance, Wyoming, and said the posse had

  forced her into obscene acts in the motel. Bob was dead.

  The horse kicked the man off his feet and the man rolled

  screaming in the dirt. The red-haired girl watched it all.

  I’ve proclaimed June Carter queen-of-song as she makes me

  tremble, tears form, chills come. I go to the tavern and drink.

  The father ran away and was found near a highway underpass

  near Fallon, Nevada, where he looked for shelter from the rain.

  My friend the poet is out there in the West being terrified,

  he wants to come home and eat well in New York City.

  Daddy is dead and late one night won’t appear on the porch

  in his hunting clothes as I’ve long wanted him to. He’s dead.

  LXI

  Wondering what this new light is, before he died he walked

  across the kitchen and said, “My stomach is very cold.”

  And this haze, yellowish, covers all this morning, meadow,

  orchard, woods. Something bad is happening somewhere to her.

  I was ashamed of her Appalachian vulgarity and vaguely askew

  teeth, her bad grammar, her wanting to screw more often than I.

  It was May wine and the night liquid with dark and fog when

  we stopped the car and loved to the sound of frogs in the swamp.

  I’m bringing to a stop all my befouled nostalgia about childhood.

  My eye was gored out, there was a war and my nickname was pig.

  There was an old house that smelled of kerosene and apples

  and we hugged in a dark attic, not knowing how to continue.

  LXII

  He climbed the ladder looking over the wall at the party

  given for poets by the Prince of China. Fun was had by all.

  A certain gracelessness entered his walk and gestures. A tumor

  the size of a chickpea grew into a pink balloon in his brain.

  I won’t die in Paris or Jerusalem as planned but by electrocution

  when I climb up the windmill to unscrew the shorted yard lights.

  Samadhi. When I slept in the woods I awoke before dawn

  and drank brandy and listened to the birds until the moon disappeared.

  When she married she turned from a beautiful girl into a

  useless sow with mud on her breasts and choruses of oinks.

  O the bard is sure he loves the moon. And the inanimate moon

  loves him back with silences, and moonbeams made of chalk.

  LXIII

  O well, it was the night of the terrible jackhammer

  and she put my exhausted pelt in the closet for a souvenir.

  Baalim. Why can only one in seven be saved from them

  and live again? They never come in fire but in perfect cold.

  Sepulchral pussy. Annabel Lee of the snows – the night’s

  too long this time of year to sleep through. Dark edges.

  All these songs may be sung to the kazoo and I am not

  ashamed, add mongrel’s bark, and the music of duck and pig.

  Mab has returned as a giantess. She’s out there: bombs in

  fist and false laurel, dressed antigreen in black metal.

  From this vantage point I can only think of you in the

  barnyard, one-tenth ounce panties and it’s a good vision.

  LXIV

  That the housefly is guided in flight by a fly brain diminishes

  me – there was a time when I didn’t own such thoughts.

  You admit then you wouldn’t love me if I were a dog or rabbit,

  was legless with truly bad skin. I have no defense. Same to you.

  Poetry (that afternoon, of course) came flying through the

  treetops, a shuddering pink bird, beshitting itself in flight.

  When we were in love in 1956 I thought I would give up Keats

  and be in the UAW and you would spend Friday’s check wisely.

  Hard rock, acid rock, goofballs, hash, haven’t altered my love

  for woodcock and grouse. It is the other way around, Mom.

  I resigned. Walked down the steps. Got on the Greyhound bus

  and went home only to find it wasn’t what I remembered at all.

  LXV

  There was a peculiar faint light from low in the east

  and a leaf skein that scattered it on the ground where I lay.

  I fell into the hidden mine shaft in Keewanaw, emerging

  in a year with teeth and eyes of burnished copper, black skin.

  What will become of her, what will become of her now that

  she’s sold into slavery to an Air Force lieutenant?

  I spent the night prophesying to the huge black rock

  in the river around which the current boiled and slid.

  We’ll have to put a stop to this dying everywhere of young

  men. It’s not working out and they won’t come back.

  Those poems you wrote won’t raise the dead or stir the

  living or open the young girl’s lips to jubilance.

  LETTERS TO YESENIN

  for J.D.

  1973

  1

  to D.G.

  This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin

  bought at a Leningrad newsstand – permanently

  tilted on my desk: he doesn’t stare at me

  he stares at nothing; the difference between

  a plane crash and a noose adds up to nothing.

  And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed

  on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat

  magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both

  of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing

  and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved

  in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge

  near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet

  of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted

  body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity

  this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing

  between shoes and the floor a light-year away.

  So this is a song of Yesenin’s noose that came

  to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home

  where there’s nothing but snow. But I stood under

  your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg!

  a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart

  it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva

  embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was

  finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat

  as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart

  other than the poems you hurled into nothing those

  years before the articulate noose.

  2

  to Rose

  I don’t have any medals. I feel their lack

  of weight on my chest. Years ago I was ambitious.

  But now it is clear that nothing will happen.

  All those poems that made me soar along a foot

  from the ground are not so much forgotten as never

  read in the first place. They rolled like moons

  of light into a puddle and were drowned. Not even

  the puddle can be located now.
Yet I am encouraged

  by the way you hung yourself, telling me that such

  things don’t matter. You, the fabulous poet of

  Mother Russia. But still, even now, school girls

  hold your dead heart, your poems, in their laps

  on hot August afternoons by the river while they wait

  for their boyfriends to get out of work or their

  lovers to return from the army, their dead pets to

  return to life again. To be called to supper. You

  have a new life on their laps and can scent their

  lavender scent, the cloud of hair that falls

  over you, feel their feet trailing in the river,

  or hidden in a purse walk the Neva again. Best of all

  you are used badly like a bouquet of flowers to make