Crisscrossing America several times, I wrote poems. Fragments. It was not anything I saw. It was what I made out of what I might have seen, could have seen, remembered, knew, didn’t know, dreamed here and there, because on journeys the inventions are always more powerful than the landscapes, and if you want to record THAT, you write poems, you look at them, you turn them upside down, you arrange them like postcards, and the pleasure you derive is far greater than the view through windows, or on mountains, or next to rivers, unless you’re selling real estate.
~~~
O little tune,
Little tune,
out of Chicago and Des Moines and the East St. Louis train station at 4 in the morning and Joplin where it was spring in winter and the hills above LA and the dead little cheap nightclubs in the afternoon in Santa Monica on Broadway and in 1961 Paul an old boulevardier cranky con man from New York I played cards with suddenly appeared walking out of a tunnel on the edge of San Francisco one afternoon as I was getting off a bus completely impossible…
We dropped great looping clouds on the gangster sentinels of Chicago and heard their machine guns roar in the empty deserted streets
wildcats of Texas dripping sweat into their high hats pulling black blood out of the ground and sending it through tubes of night to porcupine refineries on the shores of Corpus Christi
New horizontal towns were multiplying on Long Island, stage flats of perfect symmetry coddled in the breasts of hopeful mothers asking for redemption from pill-addled afternoons and hallucinatory music cooking in shining ovens
budgets laid out neatly on Formica counters below the knives
distant farm fields dead in the snow
blank-eyed children walking in the snow
We stood in the blinding sunlight reflected from low slung whitewashed buildings of Pasadena and El Segundo and Long Beach and felt the roar of departing space rockets cutting tunnels through the future and pulling back the future with giant magnets of illuminated dust
We walked through measureless windows of wheat and corn growing in the middle flatlands under the warm rain of supernatural mansions
Draped curtains of night in the upper Mulholland hills of Los Angeles where the mountain lion and the coyote and the mythical Greek beast roamed like penniless vagabonds, free of the Wheel, free from selling themselves…
Under poles of yellow lights, gasping midnight locomotives clamped on to lines of freight cars in the backyards of Chicago/ Plastic lilies grew in the pastures of St. Louis haberdashers and department stores
In Los Angeles, concrete sunset of three stacked freeways, a carpet of park in Beverly Hills, old poolroom on Broadway downtown, bus to San Francisco, a bum holding out his hand and saying On Venus Jesus will show you machines of love
Standing up on a hill past Albuquerque on 66, I caught a ride into into a no-name Arizona town, walked in the foggy morning along an empty road to a snow-filled cliff and stared out at a spring valley a thousand feet below
—this was before television—
In blinding rain I stood on the Indiana Turnpike outside Chicago pointed east and wound up in the Pennsylvania countryside driving the car of a half-crippled man with a Bible I met in a Howard Johnson
our headlights went dead on a curve and a cop pulled in behind us and stopped us
he led us to a fat judge’s house in the middle of the night where we paid thirty bucks
then parked on a quiet lane and slept until dawn
early spring in March
flowering magnolia trees
he dropped two Thorazine and told me to drive
and his babbling about Heaven slowed down and he slept
and when we pulled into Manhattan he had me park in midtown
he looked at me with glazed doe’s eyes and said
I’m crooked, son, I’ve reached the end of the line, this is it, I’ll kill myself within a month
Wall Street towers in astral cloisters of Fat Zero
rabid missionaries shooting their cuffs
loopholes
Fly through steel walls into the psychotic fandango of the international money Surge
We walked through fields of cactus east of Tijuana, into caverns of mass graves, sacrificed Aztec skeletons still stank in creek of toothless hobo Ziggurat
faded blue Florida lagoons
lizards crawled in the sunlight between leaves on rumbling death-grip paragon trees spreading out their brass knuckles
In Arlington, graves of the missing
who had been torn in the bellows of the blood wind and later their children scattered and beached on winter islands
haggard lighthouse
foothill driftwood
shuttered herds of sheep turned away from the water
in the prehistoric hills of Western Massachusetts
a woman tiger struggles to her feet and stands
LILITH! The exiled one! LILITH! The charmed of the lonely! LILITH! The warm heart and the cold mind! She stands and breathes torrents of fragrant heat
she remembers
she remembers she was born without prior cause, without permission
she remembers
that
she redeposited the extracted sluice of language back into the river
and the petrified river ran again
she saw vividly what lay between things
she sprang the active force
she pushed over the tower
she stood the baby up on two legs
she performed acts reserved by the Sky Lunatic for himself
she said anyone could do these things
she sat in gutters with the lowest of men and broke bread
she said “whose blood is in my blood runs the risk of igniting the sun”
she stood on the white field
turned the dials of the sun, brought down the curtain of night, unhinged the canopy of stars, blew the scent of wild apples into the wasteland, held the moon in a cup of sand, tore away the trance
LILITH!
I see populations surge through golden avenues wrapped around the upper stories of Orphic ships waiting for solar winds
I open books in a shining arboretum, ten-thousand-foot wells pour from the sky down into stratified layers of rock…
In Elmsford, I watched a sleek black car pull up to a house down the block where an old man who grew apple trees was screaming and three men got out of the car and grabbed his arms and put him on a stretcher and took him away to the Foundation, a place where they kept the insane
he had spent every Sunday morning polishing his red car
he had once been a judge
he retired and built department stores
he kept a dog in his garage and fed it there
his son wore gray suits and drove a foreign car
owned a brewery
on the stretcher, the old man looked at his wristwatch and held up one finger
and there was an explosion in the distance
a new war had begun
In a long, long Los Angeles bar on a slow Tuesday afternoon I counted six Hindu gods sitting on stools drinking rotgut and transmitting sign language to their Boston banker lolling outside the men’s room
Malibu…in the oceanographic mythic giants all the capillaries have gone dry
the moon is setting on page one
tides of political sing-song are swaying in the intestinal tract of a beached octopus suctioned to a sidewalk
be of good cheer, son, never fear the end, there is no end THERE IS NO END
abide by the central directive–
when you’re lying on a slab in the mortuary
STAND UP
tell them they’ve made a minor miscalculation
recite a few lines from scripture
and stride quickly to the exit
confess to the guards
you’re just a pathetic figure
a minor functionary
in a bureau of functionaries
all the way up
tip your hat, grin, drop a few coins in the basket, move on
(Hermes) the great thief said
I have given you
Everything you need
And so it was
Another message
A column of fire
Rising out of the sea
midtown Manhattan…my father walks from the haberdasher to the barber shop with a new hat in a box
he sits in the chair and the barber winds it back and shaves him with a straight razor that was lolling in a tall glass of alcohol
the barber wipes off the alcohol with a white linen towel and moves the razor back and forth on his strop
and then he shaves my father
then he cuts his hair
purple shadows on 7th Avenue, dark pool room, old men playing three-cushion slowly, with long tapered fingers, Daumier Hals faces, and then those faces are ripped away as the floor sweeper lifts the shades and the sun comes streaming through the dust
San Diego…I am making the same proposal to you, my darling,
I pray to prayer
I deliver myself to you
I say the night and I say down the stairs we go again
never the garden
ever the garden
we are always in between everything we thought
always
my darling,
I’ll go with you
into the garden
into the bedroom
into the living room
into the kitchen
on to the rust-colored couch after the storm
when the evening is quiet
the stove is ticking
the cats are roaming the lawns
it doesn’t matter if you…
walking in a park in a city…
in the summer
in the middle of the afternoon are thinking of
what you want
as long as what you want
could be in the park
and then you only have to walk with the chance
of it happening in the next few minutes
and if it happens
you’ll be ready and this is the egg cracking
you’re therefore in a foreign city
A FOREIGN CITY
where you always wanted to be
of all the sliding cities
New York
there you are
Lilith
you refused to sign a pact with the sky manager and be born as half of the Adamic prince
You took the flood and made it into a tree
you walk through buildings on cold nights and turn toward the window and pour logic from a pitcher
I wander out of the bedroom half-asleep and sit down and wait for your call
You’re in Chicago talking to a group of salesmen about time
and a secret television station beyond reproach
South of Los Angeles…dancers arrive early in a giant room above the ocean.
In forest halls, dryads run like crystal.
CON FRER Tito Puente strides into the endless Balboa ballroom.
Timbales, rolling cymbals, chingachcook congas. Brass section put in harness from the ceiling. Tito is sitting in a blue mist. The slow vibraphone turns over and over.
Silver runners flash around corners.
White Plains…
road among trees
magnolia, oak, maple…
squirrels with great healthy bushy tails run up trunks
jump on to roofs
sniff smoke coming out of chimneys
grab mahogany from horse chestnut trees
we walked to the shore
we walked into the ocean
we walked on the ocean floor
we discovered the oceanic mind
we swam on the towering waves
we came back to ourselves
we smelled towers of the city
we floated into the city
we rolled out on to the highways of America
we walked out of the house of melting shadows
we saw the invisible bright April open road that runs across morbid rusting highways…
***
Why not poems reprinted here with permission of the author.
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