If I had a Green Automobile
I’d go find my old companion
in his house on the Western ocean.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I’d honk my horn at his manly gate,
inside his wife and three
children sprawl naked
on the living room floor.
He’d come running out
to my car full of heroic beer
and jump screaming at the wheel
for he is the greater driver.
We’d pilgrimage to the highest mount
of our earlier Rocky Mountain visions
laughing in each other’s arms,
delight surpassing the highest Rockies,
and after old agony, drunk with new years,
bounding toward the snowy horizon
blasting the dashboard with original bop
hot rod on the mountain
we’d batter up the cloudy highway
where angels of anxiety
careen through the trees
and scream out of the engine.
We’d burn all night on the jackpine peak
seen from Denver in the summer dark,
forestlike unnatural radiance
illuminating the mountaintop:
childhood youthtime age & eternity
would open like sweet trees
in the nights of another spring
and dumbfound us with love,
for we can see together
the beauty of souls
hidden like diamonds
in the clock of the world,
like Chinese magicians can
confound the immortals
with our intellectuality
hidden in the mist,
in the Green Automobile
which I have invented
imagined and visioned
on the roads of the world
more real than the engine
on a track in the desert
purer than Greyhound and
swifter than physical jetplane.
Denver! Denver! we’ll return
roaring across the City & County Building lawn
which catches the pure emerald flame
streaming in the wake of our auto.
This time we’ll buy up the city!
I cashed a great check in my skull bank
to found a miraculous college of the body
up on the bus terminal roof.
But first we’ll drive the stations of downtown,
poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail
whorehouse down Folsom
to the darkest alleys of Larimer
paying respects to Denver’s father
lost on the railroad tracks,
stupor of wine and silence
hallowing the slum of his decades,
salute him and his saintly suitcase
of dark muscatel, drink
and smash the sweet bottles
on Diesels in allegiance.
Then we go driving drunk on boulevards
where armies march and still parade
staggering under the invisible
banner of Reality—
hurtling through the street
in the auto of our fate
we share an archangelic cigarette
and tell each other’s fortunes:
fames of supernatural illumination,
bleak rainy gaps of time,
great art learned in desolation
and we beat apart after six decades …
and on an asphalt crossroad,
deal with each other in princely
gentleness once more, recalling
famous dead talks of other cities.
The windshield’s full of tears,
rain wets our naked breasts,
we kneel together in the shade
amid the traffic of night in paradise
and now renew the solitary vow
we made each other take
in Texas, once:
I can’t inscribe here… .
• • • • • •
• • • • • •
How many Saturday nights will be
made drunken by this legend?
How will young Denver come to mourn
her forgotten sexual angel?
How many boys will strike the black piano
in imitation of the excess of a native saint?
Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high
schools of melancholy night?
While all the time in Eternity
in the wan light of this poem’s radio
we’ll sit behind forgotten shades
hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.
Neal, we’ll be real heroes now
in a war between our cocks and time:
let’s be the angels of the world’s desire
and take the world to bed with us before we die.
Sleeping alone, or with companion,
girl or fairy sheep or dream,
I’ll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:
all men fall, our fathers fell before,
but resurrecting that lost flesh
is but a moment’s work of mind:
an ageless monument to love
in the imagination:
memorial built out of our own bodies
consumed by the invisible poem—
We’ll shudder in Denver and endure
though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.
So this Green Automobile:
I give you in flight
a present, a present
from my imagination.
We will go riding
over the Rockies,
we’ll go on riding
all night long until dawn,
then back to your railroad, the SP
your house and your children
and broken leg destiny
you’ll ride down the plains
in the morning: and back
to my visions, my office
and eastern apartment
I’ll return to New York.
New York, May 22–25, 1953
O dear sweet rosy
unattainable desire
… how sad, no way
to change the mad
cultivated asphodel, the
visible reality …
and skin’s appalling
petals—how inspired
to be so lying in the living
room drunk naked
and dreaming, in the absence
of electricity …
over and over eating the low root
of the asphodel,
gray fate …
rolling in generation
on the flowery couch
as on a bank in Arden—
my only rose tonite’s the treat
of my own nudity.
Fall 1953
Now that I’ve wasted
five years in Manhattan
life decaying
talent a blank
talking disconnected
patient and mental
sliderule and number
machine on a desk
autographed triplicate
synopsis and taxes
obedient prompt
poorly paid
stayed on the market
youth of my twenties
fainted in offices
wept on typewriters
deceived multitudes
in vast conspiracies
deodorant battleships
serious business industry
every six weeks whoever
drank my blood bank
innocent evil now
part of my system
five years unhappy labor
22 to 27 working
not a dime in the bank
to show for it anyway
dawn breaks it’s only the sun
the East smokes O my bedroom
I am damned to Hell what
alarmclock is ringing
New York, 1953
Liang Kai, Southern Sung
He drags his bare feet
out of a cave
under a tree,
eyebrows
grown long with weeping
and hooknosed woe,
in ragged soft robes
wearing a fine beard,
unhappy hands
clasped to his naked breast—
humility is beatness
humility is beatness—
faltering
into the bushes by a stream,
all things inanimate
but his intelligence—
stands upright there
tho trembling:
Arhat
who sought Heaven
under a mountain of stone,
sat thinking
till he realized
the land of blessedness exists
in the imagination—
the flash come:
empty mirror—
how painful to be born again
wearing a fine beard,
reentering the world
a bitter wreck of a sage:
earth before him his only path.
We can see his soul,
he knows nothing
like a god:
shaken
meek wretch—
humility is beatness
before the absolute World.
New York Public Library, 1953
I
The night café—4 A.M.
Cuba Libre 20c:
white tiled squares,
triangular neon lights,
long wooden bar on one side,
a great delicatessen booth
on the other facing the street.
In the center
among the great city midnight drinkers,
by Aldama Palace
on Gómez corner,
white men and women
with standing drums,
mariachis, voices, guitars—
drumming on tables,
knives on bottles,
banging on the floor
and on each other,
with wooden clacks,
whistling, howling,
fat women in strapless silk.
Cop talking to the fat-nosed girl
in a flashy black dress.
In walks a weird Cézanne
vision of the nowhere hip Cuban:
tall, thin, check gray suit,
gray felt shoes,
blaring gambler’s hat,
Cab Calloway pimp’s mustachio
—it comes down to a point in the center—
rushing up generations late talking Cuban,
pointing a gold-ringed finger
up toward the yellowed ceiling,
other cigarette hand pointing
stiff-armed down at his side,
effeminate:—he sees the cop—
they rush together—they’re embracing
like long lost brothers—
fatnose forgotten.
Delicate chords
from the negro guitarino
—singers at El Rancho Grande,
drunken burlesque
screams of agony,
VIVA JALISCO!
I eat a catfish sandwich
with onions and red sauce
20¢.
II
A truly romantic spot,
more guitars, Columbus Square
across from Columbus Cathedral
—I’m in the Paris Restaurant
adjacent, best in town,
Cuba Libres 30¢—
weatherbeaten tropical antiquity,
as if rock decayed,
unlike the pure
Chinese drummers of black stone
whose polished harmony can still be heard
(Procession of Musicians) at the Freer,
this with its blunt cornucopias and horns
of conquest made of stone—
a great dumb rotting church.
Night, lights from windows,
high stone balconies
on the antique square,
green rooms
paled by fluorescent houselighting,
a modern convenience.
I feel rotten.
I would sit down with my servants and be dumb.
I spent too much money.
White electricity
in the gaslamp fixtures of the alley.
Bullet holes and nails in the stone wall.
The worried headwaiter
standing amid the potted palms in cans
in the fifteen-foot wooden door looking at me.
Mariachi harmonica artists inside
getting around to Banjo on My Knee yet.
They dress in wornout sharpie clothes.
Ancient streetlights down the narrow Calle I face,
the arch, the square,
palms, drunkenness, solitude;
voices across the street,
baby wail, girl’s squeak,
waiters nudging each other,
grumble and cackle of young boys’ laughter
in streetcorner waits,
perro barking off-stage,
baby strangling again,
banjo and harmonica,
auto rattle and a cool breeze—
Sudden paranoid notion the waiters are watching me:
Well they might,
four gathered in the doorway
and I alone at a table
on the patio in the dark
observing the square, drunk.
25¢ for them
and I asked for “Jalisco”—
at the end of the song
oxcart rolls by
obtruding its wheels
o’er the music o’ the night.
Christmas 1953
I went in the forest to look for a sign
Fortune to tell and thought to refine;
My green valentine, my green valentine,
What do I know of my green valentine?
I found a strange wild leaf on a vine
Shaped like a heart and as green as was mine,
My green valentine, my green valentine,
How did I use my green valentine?
Bodies I’ve known and visions I’ve seen,
Leaves that I gathered as I gather this green
Valentine, valentine, valentine, valentine;
Thus did I use my green valentine.
Madhouse and jailhouses where I shined
Empty apartment beds where I pined,
O desolate rooms! My green valentine,
Where is the heart in which you were outlined?
Souls and nights and dollars and wine,
Old love and remembrance—I resign
All cities, all jazz, all echoes of Time,
But what shall I do with my green valentine?
Much have I seen, and much am I blind,
But none other than I has a leaf of this kind.
Where shall I send you, to what knowing mind,
My green valentine, my green valentine?
Yesterday’s love, tomorrow’s more fine?
All tonight’s sadness in your design.
What does this mean, my green valentine?
Regret, O regret, my green valentine.
Chiapas, 1954
For Karena Shields
I
Late sun opening the book,
blank page like light,
invisible words unscrawled,
impossible syntax
of apocalypse—
Uxmal: Noble Ruins
No construction—
let the mind fall down.
—One could pass valuable months
and years perhaps a lifetime
doing nothing but lying in a hammock
reading prose with the white doves
copulating underneath
and monkeys barking in the interior
of the mountain
and I have succumbed to this
temptation—
‘They go mad in the Selva—’
the madman read
and laughed in his hammock
eyes watching me:
unease not of the jungle
the poor dear,
can tire one—
all that mud
and all those bugs …
ugh… .
Dreaming back I saw
an eternal kodachrome
souvenir of a gathering
of souls at a party,
crowded in an oval flash:
cigarettes, suggestions,
laughter in drunkenness,
broken sweet conversation,
acquaintance in the halls,
faces posed together,
stylized gestures,
odd familiar visages
and singular recognitions
that registered indifferent
greeting across time:
Anson reading Horace
with a rolling head,
white-handed Hohnsbean
camping gravely
with an absent glance,
bald Kingsland drinking
out of a huge glass,
Dusty in a party dress,
Durgin in white shoes
gesturing from a chair,
Keck in a corner waiting
for subterranean music,
Helen Parker lifting
her hands in surprise:
all posturing in one frame,
superficially gay
or tragic as may be,
illumined with the fatal
character and intelligent
actions of their lives.
And I in a concrete room
above the abandoned
labyrinth of Palenque
measuring my fate,
wandering solitary in the wild
—blinking singleminded
at a bleak idea—
until exhausted with
its action and contemplation
my soul might shatter
at one primal moment’s
sensation of the vast
movement of divinity.
As I leaned against a tree
inside the forest
expiring of self-begotten love,
I looked up at the stars absently,
as if looking for
something else in the blue night
through the boughs,
and for a moment saw myself
leaning against a tree …
… back there the noise of a great party
in the apartments of New York,
half-created paintings on the walls, fame,
cocksucking and tears,
money and arguments of great affairs,
the culture of my generation …
my own crude night imaginings,
my own crude soul notes taken down
in moments of isolation, dreams,
piercings, sequences of nocturnal thought
and primitive illuminations
—uncanny feeling the white cat
sleeping on the table
will open its eyes in a moment
and be looking at me—
One might sit in this Chiapas
recording the apparitions in the field
visible from a hammock
looking out across the shadow of the pasture
in all the semblance of Eternity
… a dwarfed thatch roof
down in the grass in a hollow slope
under the tall crowd of vegetation
waiting at the wild edge:
the long shade of the mountain beyond
in the near distance,
its individual hairline of trees
traced fine and dark along the ridge
against the transparent sky light,
rifts and holes in the blue air
and amber brightenings of clouds
disappearing down the other side
into the South …
palms with lethargic feelers
rattling in presage of rain,
shifting their fronds
in the direction of the balmy wind,
monstrous animals
sprayed up out of the ground
settling and unsettling
as in water …
and later in the night
a moment of premonition
when the plenilunar cloudfilled sky
is still and small.
So spent a night
with drug and hammock
at Chichén Itzá on the Castle:—
I can see the moon
moving over the edge of the night forest
and follow its destination
through the clear dimensions of the sky
from end to end of the dark
circular horizon.
High dim stone portals,
entablatures of illegible scripture,
bas-reliefs of unknown perceptions:
and now the flicker of my lamp
and smell of kerosene on dust-
strewn floor where ant wends
its nightly ritual way toward great faces
worn down by rain.
In front of me a deathshead
half a thousand years old
—and have seen cocks a thousand
old grown over with moss and batshit
stuck out of the wall
in a dripping vaulted house of rock—
but deathshead’s here
on portal still and thinks its way
through centuries the thought
of the same night in which I sit
in skully meditation
—sat in many times before by
artisan other than me
until his image of ghostly change
appeared unalterable—
but now his fine thought’s vaguer
than my dream of him:
and only the crude skull figurement’s
gaunt insensible glare is left
with broken plumes of sensation,
headdresses of indecipherable intellect
scattered in the madness of oblivion
to holes and notes of elemental stone,
blind face of animal transcendency
over the sacred ruin of the world
dissolving into the sunless wall of a blackened room
on a time-rude pyramid rebuilt
in the bleak flat night of Yucatán
where I come with my own mad mind to study
alien hieroglyphs of Eternity.
A creak in the rooms scared me.
Some sort of bird, vampire or swallow,
flees with little paper wingflap
around the summit in its own air unconcerned
with the great stone tree I perch on.
Continual metallic
whirr of chicharras,
then lesser chirps
of cricket: 5 blasts
of the leg whistle.
The creak of an opening
door in the forest,
some sort of weird birdsong
or reptile croak.
My hat woven of henequen
on the stone floor
as a leaf on the waters,
as perishable;
my candle wavers continuously
and will go out.
Pale Uxmal,
unhistoric, like a dream,
Tulum shimmering on the coast in ruins;
Chichén Itzá naked
constructed on a plain;
Palenque, broken chapels in the green
basement of a mount;
lone Kabah by the highway;
Piedras Negras buried again
by dark archaeologists;
Yaxchilan
resurrected in the wild,
and all the limbo of Xbalba still unknown—
floors under roofcomb of branch,
foundation to ornament
tumbled to the flowers,
pyramids and stairways
raced with vine,
limestone corbels
down in the river of trees,
pillars and corridors
sunken under the flood of years:
Time’s slow wall overtopping
all that firmament of mind,
as if a shining waterfall of leaves and rain
were built down solid from the endless sky
through which no thought can pass.
A great red fat rooster
mounted on a tree stump
in the green afternoon,
the ego of the very fields,
screams in the holy sunlight!
—was looking back
with eyes shut to
where they crawled
like ants on brown old temples
building their minute ruins
and disappearing into the wild
leaving many mysteries
of deathly volition
to be divined.
I alone know the great crystal door
to the House of Night,
a legend of centuries
—I and a few Indians.
And had I mules and money I could find
the Cave of Amber
and the Cave of Gold
rumored of the cliffs of Tumbala.
I found the face of one
of the Nine Guardians of the Night
hidden in a mahogany hut
in the Area of Lost Souls
—first relic of kind for that place.
And I found as well a green leaf
shaped like a human heart;
but to whom shall I send this
anachronistic valentine?
Yet these ruins so much
woke me to nostalgia
for the classic stations
of the earth,
the ancient continent
I have not seen
and the few years
of memory left
before the ultimate night
of war—
As if these ruins were not enough,
as if man could go
no further before heaven
till he exhausted
the physical round
of his own mortality
in the obscure cities
hidden in the aging world
… the few actual
ecstatic conscious souls
certain to be found,
familiars …
returning after years
to my own scene
transfigured:
to hurry change
to hurry the years
bring me to my fate.
So I dream nightly of an embarkation,
captains, captains,
iron passageways, cabin lights,
Brooklyn across the waters,
the great dull boat, visitors, farewells,
the blurred vast sea—
one trip a lifetime’s loss or gain:
as Europe is my own imagination
—many shall see her,
many shall not—
though it’s only the old familiar world
and not some abstract mystical dream.
And in a moment of previsioning sleep
I see that continent in rain,
black streets, old night, a
fading monument…
And a long journey unaccomplished
yet, on antique seas
rolling in gray barren dunes under
the world’s waste of light
toward ports of childish geography
the rusty ship will
harbor in …
What nights might I not see
penniless among the Arab
mysteries of dirty towns around
the casbahs of the docks?
Clay paths, mud walls,
the smell of green cigarettes,
creosote and rank salt water—
dark structures overhead,
shapes of machinery and facade
of hull: and a bar lamp
burning in the wooden shack
across from the dim
mountain of sulphur on the pier.
Toward what city
will I travel? What wild houses
do I go to occupy?
What vagrant rooms and streets
and lights in the long night
urge my expectation? What genius
of sensation in ancient
halls? what jazz beyond jazz
in future blue saloons?
what love in the cafés of God?
I thought, five years ago
sitting in my apartment,
my eyes were opened for an hour
seeing in dreadful ecstasy
the motionless buildings
of New York rotting
under the tides of Heaven.
There is a god
dying in America
already created
in the imagination of men
made palpable
for adoration:
there is an inner
anterior image
of divinity
beckoning me out
to pilgrimage.
O future, unimaginable God.
Finca Tacalapan de San
Leandro, Palenque,
Chiapas, Mexico 1954–San Francisco 1955
II
Jump in time
to the immediate future,
another poem:
return to the old land
penniless and with
a disconnected manuscript,
the recollection of a few
sensations, beginning:
logboat down Río Michol
under plantain
and drifting trees
to the railroad,
darkness on the sea
looking toward the stations
of the classic world—
another image descending
in white mist
down the lunar highway
at dawn, above
Lake Catemaco on the bus
—it woke me up—
the far away likeness
of a heavenly file
of female saints
stepping upward
on miniature arches
of a gold stairway
into the starry sky,
the thousands of little
saintesses in blue hoods
looking out at me
and beckoning:
SALVATION!
It’s true,
simple as in the image.
Then the mummies
in their Pantheon
at Guanajuato—
a city of Cortesian
mines in the first
crevasse of the Sierras,
where I rested—
for I longed to see their
faces before I left:
these weren’t mythical rock
images, tho stone
—limestone effigies out
of the grave, remains
of the fatal character—
newly resurrected,
grasping their bodies
with stiff arms, in soiled
funeral clothes;
twisted, knock-kneed,
like burning
screaming lawyers—
what hallucinations
of the nerves?—
indecipherable-sexed;
one death-man had
raised up his arms
to cover his eyes,
significant timeless
reflex in sepulchre:
apparitions of immortality
consumed inward,
waiting openmouthed
in the fireless darkness.
Nearby, stacked symmetrically,
a skullbone wall ending
the whitewashed corridor
under the graveyard
—foetid smell reminiscent
of sperm and drunkenness—
the skulls empty and fragile,
numerous as shells,
—so much life passed through
this town …
The problem is isolation
—there in the grave
or here in oblivion of light.
Of eternity we have
a numbered score of years
and fewer tender moments
—one moment of tenderness
and a year of intelligence
and nerves: one moment of pure
bodily tenderness—
I could dismiss Allen with grim
pleasure.
Reminder: I knelt in my room
on the patio at San Miguel
at the keyhole: 2 A.M.
The old woman lit a candle.
Two young men and their girls
waited before the portal,
news from the street. She
changed the linen, smiling.
What joy! The nakedness!
They dance! They talk
and simper before the door,
they lean on a leg,
hand on a hip, and posture,
nudity in their hearts,
they clap a hand to head
and whirl and enter,
pushing each other,
happily, happily,
to a moment of love… .
What solitude I’ve
finally inherited.
Afterward fifteen hours
on rubbled single lane,
broken bus rocking along
the maws and continental crags
of mountain afternoon,
the distant valleys fading,
regnant peaks beyond
to days on the Pacific
where I bathed—
then riding, fitful,
gazing, sleeping
through the desert
beside a wetback
sad-faced old-man-
youth, exhausted
to Mexicali
to stand
near one night’s dark shack
on the garbage cliffs
of bordertown overhanging
the tin house poor
man’s village below,
a last night’s
timewracked brooding
and farewell,
the end of a trip.
—Returning
armed with New Testament,
critic of horse and mule,
tanned and bearded
satisfying Whitman, concerned
with a few Traditions,
metrical, mystical, manly
… and certain characteristic flaws
—enough!
The nation over the border
grinds its arms and dreams
of war: I see
the fiery blue clash
of metal wheels
clanking in the industries
of night, and
detonation of infernal bombs
… and the silent downtown
of the States
in watery dusk submersion.
Guanajuato-Los Angeles, 1954
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human—
looks out of the heart
burning with purity—
for the burden of life
is love,
but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.
No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love—
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
—cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:
the weight is too heavy
—must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.
The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye—
yes, yes,
that’s what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.
San Jose, 1954
railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman’s shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
—the dread hay flower
I thought—It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus’ inchlong
crown, and a soiled
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that’s been lying under
the garage for a year.
Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World
San Jose, 1954
The method must be purest meat
and no symbolic dressing,
actual visions & actual prisons
as seen then and now.
Prisons and visions presented
with rare descriptions
corresponding exactly to those
of Alcatraz and Rose.
A naked lunch is natural to us,
we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don’t hide the madness.
San Jose, 1954
I’ll go into the bedroom silently and lie down between the bridegroom and the bride,
those bodies fallen from heaven stretched out waiting naked and restless,
arms resting over their eyes in the darkness,
bury my face in their shoulders and breasts, breathing their skin,
and stroke and kiss neck and mouth and make back be open and known,
legs raised up crook’d to receive, cock in the darkness driven tormented and attacking
roused up from hole to itching head,
bodies locked shuddering naked, hot hips and buttocks screwed into each other
and eyes, eyes glinting and charming, widening into looks and abandon,
and moans of movement, voices, hands in air, hands between thighs,
hands in moisture on softened hips, throbbing contraction of bellies
till the white come flow in the swirling sheets,
and the bride cry for forgiveness, and the groom be covered with tears of passion and compassion,
and I rise up from the bed replenished with last intimate gestures and kisses of farewell—
all before the mind wakes, behind shades and closed doors in a darkened house
where the inhabitants roam unsatisfied in the night,
nude ghosts seeking each other out in the silence.
San Jose, 1954
Drawing by Robert LaVigne, San Francisco, 1954
Starting with eyeball kicks
on storefronts from bus window
on way to Oakland airport:
I am no ego
these are themselves
stained gray wood and gilded
nigger glass and barberpole
thass all.
But then, Kiss Me Again
in the dim brick lounge,
muted modern music.
Where shall I fly
not to be sad, my dear?
The other businessmen
bend heavily over armchairs
introducing women to cocktails
in fluorescent shadow—
gaiety of tables,
gaiety of fat necks,
gaiety of departures,
gaiety of national business,
hands waving away jokes.
I’m getting maudlin
on the soft rug watching,
mixed rye before me
on the little black table
whereon lieth my briefcase
containing market research
notes and blank paper—
that airplane ride to come
—or a barefaced pilgrimage
acrost imaginary plains
I never made afoot
into Kansas hallucination
and supernatural deliverance.
Later: Hawthorne mystic
waiting on the bench
composing his sermon also
with white bony fingers
bitten, with hometown gold
ring, in a blue serge suit
and barely visible blond
mustache on mental face,
blank-eyed: pitiful thin body
—what body may he love?—
My god! the soft beauty in
comparison—that football boy
in sunny yellow lovesuit
puzzling out his Xmas trip
death insurance by machine.
A virginal feeling again,
I’d be willing to die aloft now.
Can’t see outside in the dark,
real dreary strangers about,
and I’m unhappy flying away.
All this facility of travel
too superficial for the heart
I have for solitude.
Nakedness
must come again—not sex,
but some naked isolation.
And down there’s Hollywood,
the starry world below
—expressing nakedness—
that craving, that glory
that applause—leisure, mind,
appetite for dreams, bodies,
travels: appetite for the real,
created by the mind
and kissed in coitus—
that craving, that melting!
Not even the human
imagination satisfies
the endless emptiness of the soul.
The West Coast behind me
for five days while I return
to ancient New York—
ah drunkenness!
I’ll see your eyes again.
Hopeless comedown!
Traveling thru the dark void
over Kansas yet moving nowhere
in the dark void of the soul.
Angel woke me to see
—past my own reflection,
bald businessman with hornrims
sleepy in round window view—
spectral skeleton of electricity
illuminated nervous system
floating on the void out
of central brainplant powerhouse
running into heaven’s starlight
overhead. ’Twas over Hutchinson.
Engine passed over lights,
view gone.
Gorgeous George on my plane.
And Chicago, the first time,
smoking winter city
—shivering in my tweed jacket
walking by the airport
around the block on Cicero
under the fogged flat
supersky of heaven—
another project for the heart,
six months for here someday
to make Chicago natural,
pick up a few strange images.
Far-off red signs
on the orphan highway
glimmer at the trucks of home.
Who rides that lone road now?
What heart? Who smokes and loves
in Kansas auto now?
Who’s talking magic
under the night? Who walks
downtown and drinks black beer
in his eternity? Whose eyes
collect the streets and mountain tops
for storage in his memory?
What sage in the darkness?
Someone who should collect
my insurance!
Better I make
a thornful pilgrimage on theory
feet to suffer the total
isolation of the bum,
than this hipster
business family journey
—crossing U.S. at night—
in a sudden glimpse
me being no one in the air
nothing but clouds in the moonlight
with humans fucking
underneath… .
San Francisco-New York, December 1954