The Roominghouse Madrigals (5 page)

at the sea at the beach in the dark there was somebody

sitting in a car along the shore and playing this drum

as if in Africa and the cops rode by on the sidewalk

and I went down to the disappointing sea

and saw two blue lights in the water and a boat

and a man walked by in a white shirt and squatted by the

shore and got up and walked along the shore

and then another man came and followed him:

they both walked along the shore by the water

one 12 feet behind the other and I watched them until

they disappeared and then I got up and walked through

the sand to the cement and through a bar door I saw a

negro singing with a light on his face

he wailed a strange song and the sound of the song twisted

in the air and everything was empty and dry and easy

and I got into my car and drove back to the hot city

but I knew I would always remember the time

and the catch of it—the way the night hung undisturbed

with people walking on it like some quiet rug

and a small boat rocking bravely by bulldogging water

and the colored pier lights like a broken mind sick in the sea.

the legs are gone and the hopes—the lava of outpouring,

and I haven’t shaved in sixteen days

but the mailman still makes his rounds and

water still comes out of the faucet and I have a photo of

myself with glazed and milky eyes full of simple music

in golden trunks and 12 oz. gloves when I made the semi-finals

only to be taken out by a German brute who should have been

locked in a cage for the insane and allowed to drink blood.

Now I am insane and stare at the wallpaper as one would stare

at a Cézanne or an early Picasso (he has lost it), and I sent out

the girls for beer, the old girls who barely bother to wipe

their asses and say, well, I guess I won’t comb my hair today:

it might bring me luck! well, anyway, they wash the dishes and

chop the wood, and the landlady keeps saying let me in, I can’t

get in, you’ve got the lock on, and what’s all that singing and

cussing in there? but she only wants a piece of ass, she pretends

she wants the rent

meanwhile the skulls of the dead are full of beetles and

old football scores like S.C. 16, N.D. 14 on a John

Baker field goal.

I can see the fleet from my window, the sails and the guns,
always

the guns poking their eyes in the sky looking for trouble like
young

L.A. cops who haven’t yet shaved and the young sailors out

there sex-hungry, trying to act tough, trying to act like men

but really closer to their mother’s nipples than to a true evaluation
of existence. I say, god damn it, that

the legs are gone and the outpourings too. inside my brain

rats snip and snipe and

to burn and fire out early dreams.

darling, says one of the girls, you’ve got to snap out of it,

we’re running out of MONEY. how do you want

your toast?

a woman’s a woman, I say, and I put my binoculars between
her

kneecaps and I can see where

empires have fallen.

I wish I had a brush, some paint, some paint and a brush, I say.

why? asks one of the

whores

BECAUSE RATS DON’T LIKE OIL! I scream.

(I can’t do it. I don’t belong here. I listen to radio programs

and people’s voices and I marvel that they can get excited

and interested over nothing) and I flick out the lights, I

crash out the lights, and I pull the shades down, I

tear the shades down as I light my last cigar

then dream jump from the Empire State Building

into the thickheaded bullbrained mob with the hard-on attitude;

already forgotten the dead of Normandy, Lincoln’s stringy
beard,

all the bulls that have died to flashing red capes,

all the love that has died in women and men

while fools have been elevated to the trumpet’s succulent sneer

and I have fought (red-handed and drunk

in slop-pitted alleys)

the bartenders of this rotten land.

and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can’t laugh when the whole
thing

is so ridiculous

the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets…are interesting?

in the dark I hear hands reaching for the last of my money

like mice nibbling at paper, automatic, while I slumber,

a false drunken God asleep at the wheel…

a quarter rolls across the floor, and I remember all the faces and

the football heroes, and everything has meaning, and an editor writes me, you are good

the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,

study it and put it to sleep in the abstract.

is there anything less abstract

on the last day?

the door closes and the last of the great whores are gone

and they are all great, somehow no matter how they have

killed me, they are great, and I smoke quietly

thinking of Mexico, of the decaying horses and dead bulls,

of Havana and Spain and Normandy, of the jabbering insane,

of the Kamikaze

winning whether they lived or died,

of my dead friends, of no more friends

ever; and the voice of my Mexican buddy saying, you won’t die

you won’t die in this war, you’re too smart, you’ll take care

of yourself.

I keep thinking of the bulls. the rotting bulls, dying everyday.

the whores are gone. the shells have stopped for a minute.

fuck everybody.

 

All I know is this: the ravens kiss my mouth,

the veins are tangled here,

the sea is made of blood.

 

 

All I know is this: the hands reaching out,

my eyes are closed, my ears are closed,

the sky rejects my scream.

 

 

All I know is this: my nostrils drip with dreams

the hounds lap us up, the fools laugh out,

the clock ticks out the dead.

 

 

All I know is this: my feet are sorrow here,

my words are less than lilies, my words are clotted now:

the ravens kiss my mouth.

 

 

they talk down through

the centuries to us,

and this we need more and more,

the statues and paintings

in midnight age

as we go along

holding dead hands.

 

 

and we would say

rather than delude the unknowing:

a damn good show,

but hardly enough for a horse to eat,

and out on the sunshine street where

eyes are dabbled in metazoan faces

I decide again

that in these centuries

they have done very well

considering the nature of their

brothers:

it’s more than good

that some of them,

(closer really to field-mouse than

falcon)

have been bold enough to try.

 

and the hedges wet in the rain, flaking in a sheet of wind,

and for a moment everything working: rusty bells, April

birds, unblushing brides, anything you can name that has not

died, so exactly, and even the wind like a lover’s hand,

a somehow important wind, something too like sleep or slain
enemies,

and the feet move through paths not restricted by the
bull-goaded mind,

and see—all and everywhere—hedges in the rain

like great cathedrals now, new Caesars, cats walking,

new gods without plug or wire, love without wasps,

new Christians, bulls, Romes, new new leaves, new rain

now splashing through the fire; and I close the door, old room,

I fall upon the couch, I sweat

and I cough I cough small words

lions bearing down through coffee cups and puddles, I

sigh, Cleopatra. Not for either of us, but for the rest.

 

Making love in the sun, in the morning sun

in a hotel room

above the alley

where poor men poke for bottles;

making love in the sun

making love by a carpet redder than our blood,

making love while the boys sell headlines

and Cadillacs,

making love by a photograph of Paris

and an open pack of Chesterfields,

making love while other men—poor fools—

work.

 

 

That moment—to this…

may be years in the way they measure,

but it’s only one sentence back in my mind—

there are so many days

when living stops and pulls up and sits

and waits like a train on the rails.

I pass the hotel at 8

and at 5; there are cats in the alleys

and bottles and bums,

and I look up at the window and think,

I no longer know where you are
,

and I walk on and wonder where

the living goes

when it stops.

 

 

the dirty dogs of Egypt stride down my bones

the cat goes home in the morning

and I think of agony when there’s little else to

do, and there’s usually little else to do

except think the agony might kill us—

but, perhaps, what really saves us from it

is our being able to luxuriate in it—

like an old lady putting on a red hat.

 

 

yet my walls are stained where broken glass has

pissed its liquor.

 

 

I see agony in a box of kitchen soap

and the walls want their flatness to be my

flatness, o the dirty dogs of Egypt,

I see flatirons hanging from hooks

the eagle is a canary in the breakfastnook

eating dry seed and cramped by the dream.

 

 

I want so much that is not here and do not know

where to go.

 

 

this thing upon me is not death

but it’s as real

and as landlords full of maggots

pound for rent

I eat walnuts in the sheath

of my privacy

and listen for more important

drummers;

it’s as real, it’s as real

as the broken-boned sparrow

cat-mouthed, uttering

more than mere

miserable argument;

between my toes I stare

at clouds, at seas of gaunt

sepulcher…

and scratch my back

and form a vowel

as all my lovely women

(wives and lovers)

break like engines

into steam of sorrow

to be blown into eclipse;

bone is bone

but this thing upon me

as I tear the window shades

and walk caged rugs,

this thing upon me

like a flower and a feast,

believe me

is not death and is not

glory

and like Quixote’s windmills

makes a foe

turned by the heavens

against one man;

…this thing upon me,

great god,

this thing upon me

crawling like a snake,

terrifying my love of commonness,

some call Art

some call Poetry;

it’s not death

but dying will solve its power

and as my grey hands

drop a last desperate pen

in some cheap room

they will find me there

and never know

my name

my meaning

nor the treasure

of my escape.