Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (8 page)

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam

And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.

Also, well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,

Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.

So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit

Have visited such a man? Many others

Were justly called, and trustworthy.

Who would have trusted me? For they saw

How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,

And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.

Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,

Able to recognise greatness wherever it is,

And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,

I know what was left for smaller men like me:

A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud.

A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

The world is

not with us enough.

O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,

meaning
The Lord,
meaning

if anything all that lives

to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language.

tangerine, weather, to

breathe them, bite,

savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our

deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,

living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking

the fruit.

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted
Peaches
.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes,

took them home, boiled them in their jackets

and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.

Then I walked through the dried fields

on the edge of town. In middle June the light

hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,

and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds

were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers

squawking back and forth, the finches still darting

into the dusty light. The woman who sold me

the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone

out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses

praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables

at the roadside stand and urging me to taste

even the pale, raw sweetcorn trucked all the way,

she swore, from New Jersey. ‘Eat, eat,’ she said,

‘Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.’

                                                               Some things

you know all your life. They are so simple and true

they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,

they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,

the glass of water, the absence of light gathering

in the shadows of picture frames, they must be

naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965

before I went away, before he began to kill himself,

and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste

what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch

of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,

it stays in the back of your throat like a truth

you never uttered because the time was always wrong,

it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,

made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,

in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

Why such harsh machinery?

Why, to write down the stuff

and people of every day,

must poems be dressed up in gold,

in old and fearful stone? 

I want verses of felt or feather

which scarcely weigh, mild verses

with the intimacy of beds

where people have loved and dreamed.

I want poems stained

by hands and everydayness. 

Verses of pastry which melt

into milk and sugar in the mouth,

air and water to drink,

the bites and kisses of love.

I long for eatable sonnets,

poems of honey and flour. 

Vanity keeps prodding us

to lift ourselves skyward

or to make deep and useless

tunnels underground. 

So we forget the joyous

love-needs of our bodies.

We forget about pastries.

We are not feeding the world. 

In Madras a long time since,

I saw a sugary pyramid,

a tower of confectionery –

one level after another,

and in the construction, rubies,

and other blushing delights,

medieval and yellow. 

Someone dirtied his hands

to cook up so much sweetness. 

Brother poets from here

and there, from earth and sky,

from Medellín, from Veracruz,

Abyssinia, Antofagasta,

do you know the recipe for honeycombs? 

Let’s forget all about that stone.

Let your poetry fill up

the equinoctial pastry shop

our mouths long to devour –

all the children’s mouths

and the poor adults’ also.

Don’t go on without seeing,

relishing, understanding

all these hearts of sugar. 

Don’t be afraid of sweetness.

With us or without us,

sweetness will go on living

and is infinitely alive,

forever being revived,

for it’s in a man’s mouth,

whether he’s eating or singing,

that sweetness has its place. 

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away. 

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                      It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Coming up Buchanan Street, quickly, on a sharp winter evening

a young man and two girls, under the Christmas lights –

The young man carries a new guitar in his arms,

the girl on the inside carries a very young baby,

and the girl on the outside carries a chihuahua.

And the three of them are laughing, their breath rises

in a cloud of happiness, and as they pass

the boy says, ‘Wait till he sees this but!’

The chihuahua has a tiny Royal Stewart tartan coat like a teapot-holder,

the baby in its white shawl is all bright eyes and mouth like favours in a fresh sweet cake,

the guitar swells out under its milky plastic cover, tied at the neck with silver tinsel tape and a brisk sprig of mistletoe.

Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm chihuahua!

The vale of tears is powerless before you.

Whether Christ is born, or is not born, you

put paid to fate, it abdicates

                                          under the Christmas lights.

Monsters of the year

go blank, are scattered back,

can’t bear this march of three.

– And the three have passed, vanished in the crowd

(yet not vanished, for in their arms they wind

the life of men and beasts, and music,

laughter ringing them round like a guard)

at the end of this winter’s day.

For the present there is just one moon,

though every level pond gives back another.

But the bright disc shining in the black lagoon,

perceived by astrophysicist and lover,

is milliseconds old. And even that light’s

seven minutes older than its source.

And the stars we think we see on moonless nights

are long extinguished. And, of course,

this very moment, as you read this line,

is literally gone before you know it.

Forget the here-and-now. We have no time

but this device of wantoness and wit.

Make me this present then: your hand in mine,

and we’ll live out our lives in it.

The washing never gets done.

The furnace never gets heated.

Books never get read.

Life is never completed.

Life is like a ball which one must continually

catch and hit so that it won't fall.

When the fence is repaired at one end,

it collapses at the other. The roof leaks,

the kitchen door won't close, there are cracks in the foundation,

the torn knees of children's pants…

One can't keep everything in mind. The wonder is

that beside all this one can notice

the spring which is so full of everything

continuing in all directions – into evening clouds,

into the redwing's song and into every

drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,

as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.

A man doesn’t have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn’t have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes

was wrong about that. 

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love. 

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest

what history

takes years and years to do. 

A man doesn’t have time.

When he loses he seeks, when he finds

he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves

he begins to forget. 

And his soul is seasoned, his soul

is very professional.

Only his body remains forever

an amateur. It tries and it misses,

gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,

drunk and blind in its pleasures

and its pains. 

He will die as figs die in autumn,

shrivelled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches pointing to the place

where there’s time for everything. 

If we could get the hang of it entirely

       It would take too long;

All we know is the splash of words in passing

       and falling twigs of song,

And when we try to eavesdrop on the great

       Presences it is rarely

That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate

       Even a phrase entirely. 

If we could find our happiness entirely

       In somebody else’s arms

We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s

       Yammering fire alarms

But, as it is, the spears each year go through

       Our flesh and almost hourly

Bell or siren banishes the blue

       Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely

       And all the charts were plain

Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,

       A prism of delight and pain,

We might be surer where we wished to go

       Or again we might be merely

Bored but in brute reality there is no

       Road that is right entirely.