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

  house and car and parents. I’m going to Greenland at dawn.

  XXVII

  I want a sign, a heraldic bird, or even an angel at midnight

  or a plane ticket to Alexandria, a room full of good dreams.

  This won’t do; farmlife with chickens clucking in the barnyard,

  lambs, cows, vicious horses kicking when I bite their necks.

  The woman carved of ice was commissioned by certain unknown

  parties and lasted into a March thaw, tits turning to water.

  Phone call. That strange cowboy who pinned a button to the boy’s

  fly near the jukebox – well last night he shot his mom.

  Arrested, taken in as it were for having a purple fundament,

  a brain full of grotesqueries, a mouth exploding with red lies.

  Hops a plane to NYC riding on the wing through a thunderstorm,

  a parade, a suite at the Plaza, a new silver-plated revolver.

  XXVIII

  In the hotel room (far above the city) I said I bet you

  can’t crawl around the room like a dog hoho. But she could!

  All our cities are lewd and slippery, most of all San Francisco

  where people fuck in the fog wearing coarse wool.

  And in Los Angeles the dry heat makes women burn so that

  lubricants are fired in large doses from machine guns.

  We’ll settle the city question by walking deeply into forests

  and in reasonably vestal groves eat animal meat and love.

  I’m afraid nothing can be helped and all letters must be

  returned unopened. Poetry must die so poems will live again.

  Mines: there were no cities of golden-haired women down there

  but rats, raccoon bones, snake skeletons and dark. Black dark.

  XXIX

  For my horse, Brotherinlaw, who had no character

  breaking into panic at first grizzly scent.

  Stuff this up your ass New York City you hissing

  clip joint and plaster-mouthed child killer.

  In Washington they eat bean soup and there’s

  bean soup on the streets and in the mouths of monuments.

  The bull in the grove of lodgepole pines, a champion

  broke his prick against a cow and is now worthless.

  For that woman whose mouth has paper burns

  a fresh trout, salt, honey, and healing music.

  XXX

  I am walked on a leash by my dog and am water

  only to be crossed by a bridge. Dog and bridge.

  An ear not owned by a face, an egg without a yolk

  and my mother without a rooster. Not to have been.

  London has no bees and it is bee time. No hounds

  in the orchard, no small craft warnings or sailing ships.

  In how many poems through how many innocent branches

  has the moon peeked without being round.

  This song is for New York City who peeled me like

  an apple, the fat off the lamb, raw and coreless.

  XXXI

  I couldn’t walk across that bridge in Hannibal

  at night. I was carried in a Nash Ambassador.

  On Gough Street the cars went overhead. I counted

  two thousand or more one night before I slept.

  She hit him in the face with her high-heeled shoe

  as he scrambled around the floor getting away.

  What am I going to do about the mist and the canning

  factory in San Jose where I loaded green beans all night?

  Billions of green beans in the Hanging Gardens off Green

  Street falling softly on our heads, the dread dope again.

  XXXII

  All those girls dead in the war from misplaced or aimed

  bombs, or victims of the conquerors, some eventually happy.

  My friends, he said after midnight, you all live badly.

  Dog’s teeth grew longer and wife in bed became a lizard.

  Goddamn the dark and its shrill violet hysteria.

  I want to be finally sane and bow to all sentient creatures.

  I’ll name all the things I know new and old any you may

  select from the list and remember the list but forget me.

  It was cold and windy and the moon blew white fish across

  the surface where phosphorescent tarpon swam below.

  Ice in the air and the man just around the corner has a gun

  and that nurse threw a tumor at you from the hospital window.

  XXXIII

  That her left foot is smaller if only slightly

  than her right and when bare cloven down to the arch.

  Lovers when they are up and down and think they are whirling

  look like a pink tractor tire from the ceiling.

  Drag the wooden girl to the fire but don’t throw

  her in as would the Great Diana of Asia.

  Oh the price, the price price. Oh the toll, the toll toll.

  Oh the cost, the cost cost. Of her he thought.

  To dogs and fire, Bengal tiger, gorilla, Miura bull

  throw those who hate thee, let my love be perfect.

  I will lift her up out of Montana where her hoof

  bruised my thigh. I planted apple trees all day.

  XXXIV

  When she walked on her hands and knees in the Arab

  chamber the fly rod, flies, the river became extinct.

  When I fall out of the sky upon you again I’ll

  feather at the last moment and come in feet first.

  There are rotted apples in the clover beneath the fog

  and mice invisibly beneath the apples eat them.

  There is not enough music. The modal chord I carried

  around for weeks is lost for want of an instrument.

  In the eye of the turtle and the goldfish and the dog

  I see myself upside down clawing the floor.

  XXXV

  When she dried herself on the dock a drop of water

  followed gravity to her secret place with its time lock.

  I’ve been sacrificed to, given up for, had flowers

  left on my pillow by unknown hands. The last is a lie.

  How could she cheat on me with that African? Let’s refer

  back to the lore of the locker room & shabby albino secrets.

  O the shame of another’s wife especially a friend’s.

  Even a peek is criminal. That greener grass is brown.

  Your love for me lasted no longer than my savings for Yurp.

  I couldn’t bear all those photos of McQueen on your dresser.

  Love strikes me any time. The druggist’s daughter, the 4-H

  girl riding her blue-ribbon horse at canter at the fair.

  XXXVI

  A scenario: I’m the Star, Lauren, Faye, Ali, little stars,

  we tour America in a ’59 Dodge, they read my smoldering poems.

  I climbed the chute and lowered myself onto the Brahma bull,

  we jump the fence trampling crowds, ford rivers, are happy.

  All fantasies of a life of love and laughter where I hold your

  hand and watch suffering take the very first boat out of port.

  The child lost his only quarter at the fair but under the grandstand

  he finds a tunnel where all cowshit goes when it dies.

  His epitaph: he could dive to the bottom or he paddled in black

  water or bruised by flotsam he drowned in his own watery sign.

  In the morning the sky was red as were his eyes and his brain

  and he rolled over in the grass soaked with dew and said no.

  XXXVII

  Who could knock at this door left open, repeat

  this after me and fold it over as an endless sheet.

  I love or I am a pig which perhaps I should be,

  a poisoned ham in the dining room of Congress.

  Not to kill but to infect with me
rcy. You are known

  finally by what magazines you read in whose toilet.

  I’ll never be a cocksman or even a butterfly. The one

  because I am the other, and the other, the other one.

  This is the one song sung loud though in code: I love.

  A lunepig shot with fatal poison, butterfly, no one.

  XXXVIII

  Once and for all to hear, I’m not going to shoot anybody

  for any revolution. I’m told it hurts terribly to be shot.

  Think that there are miniature pools of whiskey in your flesh

  and small deposits of drugs and nicotine encysted in fat.

  Beautiful enchanted women (or girls). Would you take your

  places by my side, or do you want to fuck up your lives elsewhere?

  The veteran said it was “wall-to-wall death” as the men had

  been eating lunch, the mortar had hit, the shack blown to pieces.

  We’ll pick the first violets and mushrooms together & loiter

  idyllically in the woods. I’ll grow goat feet & prance around.

  Master, master, he says, where can I find a house & living

  for my family, without blowing my whole life on nonsense?

  XXXIX

  If you laid out all the limbs from the Civil War hospital

  in Washington they would encircle the White House seven times.

  Alaska cost two cents per acre net and when Seward

  slept lightly he talked to his wife about ice.

  My heart is Grant’s for his bottle a day and his

  foul mouth, his wife that weighed over five hundred pounds.

  A hundred years later Walt Whitman often still

  walks the length of the Potomac and on the water.

  A child now sees it as a place for funerals and bags

  of components beneath the senators’ heads.

  XL

  If you were less of a vowel or had a full stop in your

  brain. A cat’s toy, a mouse stuffed with cotton.

  It seems we must reject the ovoid for the sphere,

  the sphere for the box, the box for the eye of the needle.

  And the world for the senate for the circus

  for the war for a fair for a carnival. The hobbyhorse.

  The attic for a drawer and the drawer for a shell.

  The shell for the final arena of water.

  That fish with teeth longer than its body is ours

  and the giant squid who scars the whale with sucker marks.

  XLI

  Song for Nat King Cole and the dog who ate the baby

  from the carriage as if the carriage were a bowl.

  A leafy peace & wormless earth we want, no wires,

  connections, struts or props, only guitars and flutes.

  The song of a man with a dirty-minded wife – there is

  smoke from her pit which is the pit of a peach.

  I wrenched my back horribly chopping down a tree – quiff,

  quim, queeritus, peter hoister, pray for torn backs.

  The crickets are chirping tonight and an ant crosses

  the sleeping body of a snake to get to the other side.

  I love the inventions of men, the pea sheller, the cherry

  picker, the hay baler, the gun and throne and grenade.

  XLII

  New music might, that sucks men down in howls

  at sea, please us if trapped in the inner ear.

  When rising I knew there was a cock in that dream

  where it shouldn’t have been I confess I confess.

  Say there this elbow tips glass upward, heat rolls

  down in burns, say hallow this life hid under liquid.

  Late in the morning Jesus ate his second breakfast,

  walked out at five years, drove his first nail into a tree.

  Say the monkey’s jaw torn open by howling, say after

  the drowned man’s discovered scowling under the harbor’s ice.

  XLIII

  Ghazal in fear there might not be another

  to talk into fine white ash after another blooms.

  He dies from it over and over; Duncan has

  his own earth to walk through. Let us borrow it.

  Mary is Spanish and from her heart comes forth

  a pietà of withered leather, all bawling bulls.

  Stand in the wine of it, the clear cool gold

  of this morning and let your lips open now.

  The fish on the beach that the blackbirds eat

  smell from here as dead men might after war.

  XLIV

  That’s a dark trough we’d hide in. Said his

  sleep without frisson in a meadow beyond Jupiter.

  It is no baronet of earth to stretch to – flags

  planted will be only flags where no wind is.

  Hang me rather there or the prez’s jowl on a stick

  when we piss on the moon as a wolf does NNW of Kobuk.

  I’ll be south on the Bitterroot while you’re up there

  and when you land I’ll fire a solitary shot at moonface.

  I wish you ill’s ills, a heavy thumb & slow hands

  and may you strike hard enough to see nothing at all.

  XLV

  What in coils works with riddle’s logic, Riemann’s

  time a cluster of grapes moved and moving, convolute?

  As nothing is separate from Empire the signs change

  and move, now drawn outward, not “about” but “in.”

  The stars were only stars. If I looked up then it was

  to see my nose flaring on another’s face.

  Ouspensky says, from one corner the mind looking for

  herself may go to another then another as I went.

  And in literal void, dazzling dark, who takes

  who where? We are happened upon and are found at home.

  XLVI

  O she buzzed in my ear “I love you” and I dug at

  the tickle with a forefinger with which I knew her.

  At the post office I was given the official FBI

  Eldridge Cleaver poster – “Guess he ain’t around here.”

  The escaping turkey vulture vomits his load of rotten

  fawn for quick flight. The lesson is obvious & literary.

  We are not going to rise again. Simple as that.

  We are not going to rise again. Simple as that.

  I say it from marrow depth I miss my tomcat gone now from

  us three months. He was a fellow creature and I loved him.

  XLVII

  The clouds swirling low past the house and

  beneath the treetops and upstairs windows, tin thunder.

  On the hill you can see far out at sea a black ship

  burying seven hundred yards of public grief.

  The fish that swam this morning in the river swims

  through the rain in the orchard over the tips of grass.

  Spec. Forces Sgt. Clyde Smith says those fucking

  VC won’t come out in the open and fight. O.K. Corral.

  This brain has an abscess which drinks whiskey

  turning the blood white and milky and thin.

  The white dog with three legs dug a deep

  hole near the pear tree and hid herself.

  XLVIII

  Dog, the lightning frightened us, dark house and both of us

  silvered by it. Now we’ll have three months of wind and cold.

  Safe. From miracles and clouds, cut off from you and your

  earthly city, parades of rats, froth, and skull tympanums.

  The breathing in the thicket behind the beech tree was a deer

  that hadn’t heard me, a doe. I had hoped for a pretty girl.

  Flickers gathering, swallows already gone. I’m going south

  to the Yucatán or Costa Rica and foment foment and fish.

  In the Sudan grass waving, roots white cords, utterly hidden

  and only the hou
nds could find me assuming someone would look.

  The sun shines coldly. I aim my shotgun at a ship at sea

  and say nothing. The dog barks at the ship and countless waves.

  XLIX

  After the “invitation” by the preacher she collapsed in the

  aisle and swallowed her tongue. It came back out when pried.

  No fire falls and the world is wet not to speak of gray and

  heat resistant. This winter the snow will stay forever.