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

  have both died from want of her, cut off well past our prime.

  12

  I was proud at four that my father called me Little Turd of Misery.

  A special name somehow connected to all the cows and horses in

  the perpetual mire of the barnyard. It has a resonance to it un-

  known to president senator poet septic-tank cleaner critic butcher

  hack or baker liberal or snot, rightist and faker and faggot and

  cunt hound. A child was brought forth and he was named Little Turd

  of Misery and like you was thrown into the lake to learn how to

  swim, owned dogs that died stupidly but without grief. Why does

  the dog chase his broken legs in a circle? He almost catches them

  like we almost catch our unruly poems. And our fathers and uncles

  had ordinary pursuits, hunted and fished, smelled of tobacco and

  liquor, grew crops, made sauerkraut and wine, wept in the dark,

  chased stray cows, mended fences, were hounded as they say by

  creditors. Barns burned. Cabbages rotted. Corn died of drought

  before its holy ears were formed, wheat flattened by hail and wind and

  the soup grew only one potato and a piece of salt pork from its

  center. Generations of slavery. All so we could fuck neurotically

  and begin the day rather than end it drinking and dreaming of dead

  dogs, swollen creeks with small bridges, ponds where cows are caught

  and drown, sucked in by the muck. But the wary boy catches fish

  there, steals a chicken for his dog’s monthly birthday, learns

  to smoke, sees his first dirty picture and sings his first dirty

  song, goes away, becomes deaf with song, becomes blinded by love,

  gets letters from home but never returns. And his nights become less black

  and holy, less moon-blown and sweet. His brain burns away like

  gray paraffin. He’s tired. His parents are dead or he is dead

  to his parents. He smells the smell of a horse. The room is

  cold. He dims the light and builds a noose. It works too well.

  13

  All of those little five-dollar-a-week rooms smelling thick of

  cigarette smoke and stale tea bags. The private bar of soap

  smearing the dresser top, on the chair a box of cookies and a letter

  from home. And what does he think he’s doing and do we all begin our

  voyage into Egypt this way. The endless bondage of words. That’s why

  you turned to those hooligan taverns and vodka, Crane to his

  sailors in Red Hook. Four walls breathe in and out. The clothes on

  the floor are a dirty shroud. The water is stale in its glass.

  Just one pull on the bottle starts the morning faster. If you

  don’t rouse your soul you will surely die while others are having

  lunch. Noon. You passed the point of retreat and took that dancer,

  a goad, perhaps a goddess. The food got better anyhow and the

  bottles. This is all called romantic by some without nostrils

  tinctured by cocaine. No romance here, but a willingness to age

  and die at the speed of sound. Outside there’s a successful revolution

  and you’ve been designated a parasite. Everywhere crushed women

  are bearing officious anti-Semites. Stalin begins his diet of

  iron shavings and blood. Murder swings with St. Basil’s bell, a

  thousand per gong free of charge. North on the Baltic Petrodvorets

  is empty and inland, Pushkin is empty. Nabokov has sensibly flown

  the shabby coop. But a hundred million serfs are free and own

  more that the common bread; a red-tinged glory, neither fire nor

  sun, a sheen without irony on the land. Who could care that you

  wanted to die, that your politics changed daily, that your songs

  turned to glass and were broken. No time to marry back in Ryazan,

  buy a goat, three dogs, and fish for perch. The age gave you a

  pistol and you gave it back, gave you two wives and you gave

  them both back, gave you a rope to swing from which you used wisely.

  You were good enough to write that last poem in blood.

  14

  Imagine being a dog and never knowing what you’re doing. You’re

  simply doing: eating garbage, fawning, mounting in public with

  terrible energy. But let’s not be romantic. Those curs, however

  sweet, don’t have souls. For all of the horrors at least some of

  us have better lives than dogs. Show me a dog that ever printed

  a book of poems read by no one in particular before he died at

  seventeen, old age for a dog. No dog ever equaled Rimbaud for

  grace or greatness, for rum running, gun running, slave trading

  and buggery. The current phrase, “anything that gets you off,”

  includes dogs but they lack our catholicity. Still, Sergei, we never

  wanted to be dogs. Maybe indians or princes, Caesars or Mongolian

  chieftains, women in expensive undergarments. But if women, lesbians

  to satisfy our ordinary tastes for women. In a fantasy if you

  become a woman you quickly are caressing your girlfriend. That

  pervert. I never thought she would. Be like that. When she’s away

  from me. Back to consciousness, the room smells like a locker room.

  Out the window it’s barely May in Moscow and the girls have shed

  their winter coats. One watches a group of fishermen. She has

  green eyes and is recent from the bath. If you were close enough

  which you’ll never be you could catch her scent of lemon and

  the clear softness of her nape where it meets her hair. She’ll

  probably die of flu next year or marry an engineer. The same

  things really as far as you’re concerned. And it’s the same in this

  country. A fine wife and farm, children, animals, three good reviews.

  Then a foggy day in late March with dozens of crows in the air

  and a girl on a horse passes you in the woods. Your dog barks.

  The girl stops, laughing. She has green eyes. Your heart is off

  and running. Your groin hopes. You pray not to see her again.

  15

  The soul of water. The most involved play. She wonders if she

  is permitted to name the stars. Tell her no. This month, May,

  is said to be “the month of tiny plant-sucking pests.” So even

  nature is said to war against us though those pests it seems are

  only having lunch. So the old woman had named the stars above

  her hut and wondered if god had perhaps given them other names that

  she didn’t know about. Her priest was always combing his hair

  and shining his shoes. We were driven from the church, weren’t we

  Sergei? In hearses. But is this time for joking? Yes. Always.

  We wonder if our fathers in heaven or hell watch when we are about

  our lying and shameful acts. As if they up or down there weren’t

  sick enough of life without watching for eternity some faulty

  version of it, no doubt on a kind of TV. Tune the next hour out

  dad, I’m going to be bad. Six lines of coke and a moronic twitch.

  Please don’t watch. I can’t help myself. I provide for my children.

  They’re delighted with the fish I catch. My wife smiles hourly.

  She has her horses, dogs, cat, barn, garden. But in New York twenty

  layers above the city some cloud or stratum of evil wants to enter

  me and I’m certainly willing. Even on ground level in Key West.

  Look she has no clothes on and I only wanted to be
a friend and

  maybe talk about art. Only a lamb. Of course this Little Boy Blue

  act is tiresome and believed by no one on earth, heaven or hell.

  So we’ve tried to name the stars and think we are forgiven in

  advance. Rimbaud turned to black or arab boys remembering when he

  was twelve and there was no evil. Only a helpless sensual wonder.

  Pleasure gives. And takes. It is dark and hot and the brain is

  howling with those senseless drugs. Mosquitoes land upon those

  fields of sweat, the pool between her breasts. You want to be home

  rocking your child in a sunny room. Now that it’s over. But wait.

  16

  Today we’ve moved back to the granary again and I’ve anointed

  the room with Petrouchka. Your story, I think. And music. That

  ends with you floating far above in St. Petersburg’s blue winter

  air, shaking your fist among the fish and green horses, the dim-

  inuitive yellow sun and chicken playing the bass drum. Your

  sawdust is spilled and you are forever borne by air. A simple story.

  Another madman, Nijinsky, danced your part and you danced his.

  None of us apparently is unique. Think of dying waving a fist full

  of ballpoint pens that change into small snakes and that your

  skull will be transposed into the cymbal it was always meant to be.

  But shall we come down to earth? For years I have been too ready

  to come down to earth. A good poet is only a sorcerer bored with

  magic who has turned his attention elsewhere. O let us see wonders

  that psilocybin never conceived of in her powdery head. Just now

  I stepped on a leaf that blew in the door. There was a buzzing

  and I thought it concealed a wasp, but the dead wasp turned out to be

  a tiny bird, smaller than a hummingbird or june bug. Probably one

  of a kind and I can tell no one because it would anger the swarm

  of naturalists so vocal these days. I’ll tuck the body in my hair

  where it will remain forever a secret or tape it to the back of

  your picture to give you more depth than any mirror on earth.

  And another oddity: the record needle stuck just at the point

  the trumpet blast announced the appearance of your ghost in the

  form of Petrouchka. I will let it repeat itself a thousand times

  through the afternoon until you stand beside the desk in your

  costume. But I’ve no right to bring you back to life. We must

  respect your affection for the rope. You knew the exact juncture

  in your life when the act of dangling could be made a dance.

  17

  Behind my back I have returned to life with much more surprise

  than conviction. All those months in the cold with neither

  tears nor appetite no matter that I was in Nairobi or Arusha, Rome,

  the fabled Paris flat and dry as a newsphoto. And lions looked

  like lions in books. Only the rumbling sound of an elephant shooting

  water into his stomach with a massive trunk made any sense. But I

  thought you would have been pleased with the Galla women in Ethiopia

  and walking the Colonnade near the Vendôme I knew you had walked

  there. Such a few signs of life. Life brings us down to earth he

  thinks. Father of two at thirty-five can’t seem to earn a living.

  But whatever muse there is on earth is not concerned with groceries.

  We like to believe that Getty couldn’t buy a good line for a billion

  dollars. When we first offered ourselves up to her when young and

  in our waking dreams she promised nothing. Not certainly that we

  could buy a bike for our daughter’s birthday or eat good cuts of

  beef instead of hamburger. She doesn’t seem to care that our wine

  is ordinary. She walks in and out the door without knocking. She takes

  off her clothes and ruins the marriage bed. She out-and-out killed

  you Sergei for no reason I can think of. And you might want to

  kill her but she changes so fast whether into a song, a deer, a pig,

  the girl sitting on the pier in a short dress. You want to fish

  but you turn and there larger than any movie are two thighs and louder

  than any howl they beckon you to the life they hold so gently. We

  said that her eyes were bees and ice glistened in her hair. And we

  know she can become a rope but then you’re never sure as all rope

  tends to resemble itself though it is common for it to rest in coils

  like snakes. Or rope. But I must earn our living and can’t think

  about rope though I am to be allowed an occasional girl drawing up

  her thighs on a pier. You might want her even in your ghostly form.

  18

  Thus the poet is a beached gypsy, the first porpoise to whom it

  occurred to commit suicide. True, my friend, even porpoises have

  learned your trick and for similar reasons: losing hundreds of

  thousands of wives, sons, daughters, husbands to the tuna nets.

  The seventh lover in a row disappears and it can’t be endured.

  There is some interesting evidence that Joplin was a porpoise and

  simply decided to stop breathing at an unknown depth. Perhaps the

  navy has her body and is exploring ways to turn it into a weapon.

  Off Boca Grande a baby porpoise approached my boat. It was a girl

  about the size of my two-year-old daughter who might for all I know

  be a porpoise. Anyway she danced around the boat for an hour

  while her mother kept a safer distance. I set the mother at ease by

  singing my infamous theme song: “Death dupe dear dingle devil flower

  bird dung girl” repeating seven times until the mother approached

  and I leaned over the gunnel and we kissed. I was tempted to swim

  off with them but remembered I had a date with someone who tripled

  as a girl, cocaine dealer and duck though she chose to be the last,

  alas, that evening. And as in all ancient stories I returned to the

  spot but never found her or her little girl again. Even now mariners

  passing the spot deep in the night can hear nothing. But enough

  of porpoise love. And how they are known to beach themselves. I’ve

  begun to doubt whether we ever would have been friends. Maybe. Not

  that it’s to the point – I know three one-eyed poets like myself

  but am close to none of them. These letters might have kept me

  alive – something to do you know as opposed to the nothing you chose.

  Loud yeses don’t convince. Nietzsche said you were a rope dancer

  before you were born. I say yes before breakfast but to the smell

  of bacon. Wise souls move through the dark only one step at a time.

  19

  Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth

  not so apparently devoid of angels. We become very tired with

  pretending we like to earn a living, with the ordinary objects and

  events of our lives. What a beautiful toothbrush. How wonderful

  to work overtime. What a nice cold we have to go with the cold

  crabbed spring. How fun to have no money at all. This thin soup

  tastes great. I’m learning something every morning from cheap wine

  hangovers. These rejection slips are making me a bigger person.

  The mailbox is always so empty let’s paint it pink. It’s good for

  my soul that she prefers to screw another. Our cat’s right eyeball

  became ulcerated and had to be pulled but she�
��s the same old cat.

  I can’t pay my taxes and will be sent to prison but it will probably

  be a good experience. That rattlesnake striking at dog and daughter

  was interesting. How it writhed beautifully with its head cut

  off and dog and daughter were tugging at it. How purging to lose

  our last twenty dollars in a crap game. Seven come eleven indeed.

  But what grand songs you made out of an awful life though you had

  no faith that less was more, that there was some golden splendor

  in humiliation. After all those poems you were declared a coward

  and a parasite. Mayakovsky hissed in public over your corpse and

  work only to take his own life a little while later. Meanwhile

  back in America Crane had his Guggenheim year and technically jumped

  ship. Had he been seven hundred feet tall he would have been OK.

  I suspect you would have been the kind of friends you both needed

  so badly. So many husbands have little time for their homosexual

  friends. But we should never imagine we love this daily plate of shit.

  The horses in the yard bite and chase each other. I’ll make a carol

  of my dream: carried in a litter by lovely women, a 20 lb. bag of cocaine,

  angels shedding tunics in my path, all dead friends come to life again.

  20

  The mushrooms helped again: walking hangdoggedly to the granary

  after the empty mailbox trip I saw across the barnyard at the base

  of an elm stump a hundred feet away a group of white morels. How

  many there were will be kept concealed for obvious reasons. While

  I plucked them I considered each a letter from the outside world

  to my little cul-de-sac, this valley: catching myself in this act

  doing what I most despise, throwing myself in the laps of others.

  Save my life. Help me. By return post. That sort of thing. So we

  throw ourselves in the laps of others until certain famous laps

  grow tired, vigorous laps whose movement is slowed by the freight

  of all those cries. Then if you become famous after getting off

  so many laps you can look at the beautiful women at your feet and