The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (11 page)

The man wants to make love to the crippled man's sister

because he loves the crippled man.

The man cries

beside the bed of the man who cannot breathe.

He stands in the parking lot, turning in the sun.

He says to the restaurant, I'm closed,

and to the sunlight, Why don't you arrest me?

But the spring changes so thickly among the buildings, the sun

brightens so sharply on the walls,

and the air tastes so sweetly of the rightness of things—

suddenly thinking of his crippled friend: Oh, God,

you wanted water,

didn't you? And you with only tears for a voice.

What can I do now?

What can I do for you but drink this glass of water?

Close by the jerkwater rancheros tonight, the round

gloom longs, a window in the gloom, an attitude in the window, a pleading

in the attitude, an unwitnessed

ravishment in the pleading. A man stands there in the window

thinking about how naked the water looks,

thinking the water looks like emptiness, it looks

like nothing. His heart

aches to think how many gamblers have broke down

on this highway? How many princesses of ice?

I know I'm suburban, I've got a shitty whiskey in my hand,

I work a job like eating a knife…

Everyone's sperm all over my life,

the sad waiting. Here's to the simple and endless

desperate person lifting this glass.

If you imagine you're at the base of a cross coming out of your chest,

that its vertical beam is a café

and its crossbeam a bar of inebriates running along the rear of the café,

that you're in a soft booth in the vertical beam of the cross

facing a blonde over whose shoulder you happen to glance

at the instant the TV above the bar

broadcasts the unmistakable image of fate,

the Vietnamese man getting a bullet shot into his ear,

then you understand that I had to stop

eating my squid stew. I started to cry.

Susan tried to make

some gesture, baby

playing in front of the cobra's den,

and it was enough: I was lodged in the moment, we were the treasure.

Sweet heat each breath of air,

sugar of fire, and yet

Dark said she was my date.

She told me Don't be late.

I guess it is our fate

here in the mental hospital

of passion and forgetting

to scream inside the dream,

put back the suicide,

stand upon the corner

starkly lit by the beam

of memory from the face

of a friend amid the glass

of a toast, and wait that wait.

But I always come back to the corner of feelings and the sponge of vinegar.

What is made with the hands rises up to seize us

and press every word to its service

so that I can never look at anything that hasn't

been talked about a thousand times already,

but I saw him screw his face up like a child in suspense

of some mischief, and they blew his brains out.

Your homework is more important than Cub Scouts.

His head jerks.

There's a blue-and-white menu by Susan's left hand.

He collapses as if full of sand.

You'd better settle down and eat.

At the next table before his mother

the boy in the Cub Scout uniform settles down and eats.

The crocuses are all closed up; the spring is cold;

I read about prayer and think about prayer; however,

yesterday when I put my head down I found myself

inhabiting so completely a past

that never happened, that when I looked up out of it

I couldn't believe it, I couldn't believe it, it

might have been a symbol for my life, this moment

I'd entirely let slip—a steep hill, a road among pines,

no mist, but blurred hints of it in each breath,

no sun, but light everywhere, no shadows, because this is the shadow.

I want to go home from this place

to the beach that is only itself, not sand—

“My mother held me up so my father could beat me,

I was three years old, naked—by the ankles—I prayed,

I fashioned some idea of a Great Power in that instant,

and in that instant my personality was fashioned.

I was under a lot of pressure when I set the fire.

In the State Hospital I prayed that one of the patients

would attack a doctor so that I could illustrate

my intentions by a good deed. My prayer

was brought true on the forty-seventh day of my suffering.

Since then I've been moved here. My case

is beginning to look better and better

as I enter the twenty-seventh month of my ordeal.”

The Discalced Carmelites of Sedona, Arizona, warn

that we must not hope to return alive from prayer.

On the streets our heads come along like black and white dice

and our faces are fives.

I bow my head to pray, and they are what I see.

At another table, some South Americans are singing,

Detectives are moving across my sight
.

I am without humility tonight
.

What is my fate, what is my fate, what is my fate?

We're not in this disreputable hotel:

The disreputable hotels are in us
,

And we inhabit a hole in the light
.

What is my fate, what is my fate, what is my fate?

Their countries are being torn apart,

and yet some of them may be here for the chess tournament.

Oh yes, the world is sick of itself, sitting in its car,

but after the awful rejection I suffered by you

it was night.

A chilly wind was taking

small sticks and the like down the block

and worrying the signs. The street I walked was lifeless

but for three or four silent

figures moving in their white judo suits

toward The Center for Martial Arts…

Think of the flayed visage of our era,

the assassinated fathers, the naked hooks of

glances and the slithering

insinuations of our music,

and all our friends who have traveled so far to meet

their anagammaglobulinaemic, jail,

monsoon, AK-47 fates

in ways and places that sound

French—
laceration
,

heroin, Khe Sanh…

Later I was nearly killed

by a firetruck coming around a corner

filled with men completely decked out for fighting blazes.

There wasn't any siren. There was a radio playing

In the jungle

The mighty jungle

The lion sleeps tonight

and they were all singing along, a dozen

ghosts

on a ghostly ship, steering

God knows where, what kind of fire—

I'm trying to explain how these islands of meaningless joy

or the loss of someone close to me, like you,

can make the tragedy of a whole age insignificant.

The local priest has swept the cross from his wall

and hung a large print of Edward Hopper's

Nighthawks
, wherein the figures stall

as if somebody has told a joke

the three of them have just finished laughing at

or made one of those comments that says it all

for the moment. But the guy with his back

turned to you isn't laughing. He's got some

losing proposition, got it as palpably as the tall

redhead has her matchbook, or the soda jerk

his generous monopoly on the warm

coffee and the light,

so that you have to come back to yourself in the dark

street where that proposition lives, where nothing shows

but a vague cash register in one of the windows,

and all the way home

flowers look out of their vases at you

while aspirins dissolve amid the flowers.

And beyond them, beyond the faces of their houses all

got up for a masque,

they're sleeping two by two,

igniting the rooms

with their breaths and sighs,

holding one another closer,

tears on their pillows that this life

can be shared but not this survival.

The cedar mapped with water and hung with rain

has whatever a cedar might want,

a sky higher and a soil

deeper than a cedar's reaching,

but wants nothing.

My neighbor walks crippled, with half a head left,

toward the flag and boxes and machines

of the Post Office, having tried

once to shoot himself, and, having lived,

mails a letter.

Stove

at my back, warm me.

Rain on the harbor, tell me.

Dark on the day, know me.

Dark on the day, see me.

Dark on the day, help me.

When I was waiting for a haircut at Joe's

the man in the chair said, “Hey, do you know

Tony? Lives right up the hill from me?” and Joe

said, “Sure. Sure I know Tony. How long Tony

live up the hill from you?” The man said, “He been living

there about fifteen years I guess it must be.” “Been living

there about fifteen years, huh?” Joe said. “Yeah,

right up the hill from me. And you know what? Funniest thing,

the guy's dif! Dif!” “Dif?” said Joe. “Yah! Dif! And I been

saying hello to the guy every day just about fifteen years.”

“That so,” Joe said. The man in the chair said, “Yeah!

Funniest thing! He must have good eyesight though,

because when I says hello, he says, ‘Hi!'”

“What do you know,” Joe said. Outside above the harbor,

clouds were moving freely over the sun's face,

and the shifting illumination in the place

made it seem we were traveling. “Dif,

huh?” Joe said, and the man

said, “Yah! Dif!” “Well well,” Joe said.

The man remarked, “He must have pretty good eyesight:

because he talks to you when he can't even hear you.”

“How about that,” Joe said.

“He can't hear a word you're saying,” the man said.

“How about that,” Joe said. The man

in the chair said, “He can't hear a word of nothing.”

Text for Sam Messer's Paintings,

Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 2/20/82

Endeavor is that of seeking to be understood.

I'm not a child moving through light and shadow

We hope never to experience—escalators of darkness, escalators of heroin

From the screen door as my wife speaks.

Earth begin to tremble. Jungle drums do pound.

A man brushed you, saying Excuse me,

Or Mother why do you open your legs to these strangers,

Or detained you, asking if you knew the hour

Of the love and the sea that stinks like a sewer,

The geography and pornography of your face

To have my own address, my own reasons, my own shame.

And here, in the sweet red hotel room, where I witness

As dials on a crashed instrument,

You were coming out of the nightmare, any nightmare.

What am I sad about when I go to make love to you,

That you're not my mother?

You're so pretty, and the slender twigs nearly

Make numbers on your skin with their shadows.

I'm mystified and frightened.

It's religious.

If we were two strangers, two sojourners in a movie theater near a train station,

Wouldn't we have every right to cling to one another

While legibility tried to break

Out of all the things around us?

For once it's impossible to mistake anything

For itself: word that looks like another world,

World that looks like another word,

Earth like a heart, night like a thing.

All night the silhouettes of houses absolutely

Hopeless in the red darkness are singing fuck you:

And I have come into your life again wearing a fake beard

to sing this beautiful anthem of how sorry I am.

The moon delivering its dry ice and spiritless hygiene

Over the world…I wish I had a way

Of telling you my heart is broken without calling on

Exactly those words, but when I marshal the terms

of my situation I see only two neon skulls

And one broken heart. When will I be returning to this place

In triumph? Why doesn't L——ditch her man

And go for me forever and dance forever in the contests

With me all across this land? God, do you love me?

God do you love me God do you love me baby?

And tonight my ultimatums are dark

Where it occurs to me our absolutely hopeless

Of the latter, and the brightness that rakes the barbed wire.

The fire that precedes me is the fire of the wish,

The geography and pornography of your face.

Help me carry what can't be understood through the streets,

Wheel turning round and round,

Where it occurs to me our absolutely hopeless

Suggests the interstellar distances.

I'm not a child moving through light and shadow,

Long journeys into an engulfing wheat—

But I didn't bring you here to clock you

And is its own address.

There are things we don't ever expect to have to do, gradations in the consciousness of the self

Feelings in which all the plant life has been killed,

Darkness in which the suffering is turning red,

Money on which the faces are so lonely…

I suppose another way would be

To talk about it as if it were a fact

With which we're all familiar,

I suppose it
is
a fact with which we're all familiar,

A network of feelings, darkness, and money, a web

Of plant life and suffering and faces

Where everything is killed and red and lonely.

This is the chief integrating thing about it:

We appear to be at the mercy,

But then again it may be we have not yet come

To the mercy, that we will never arrive at the mercy.

So after I broke the cat's neck with a shovel because it was incurable

the parking lot looked like it was memorizing me.

I thought I heard the afternoon saying just another son of a bitch,

Just another thrillseeker another

Hard-on another nightmare. The infinite

Accent falling on the self seemed

To hold out forgiveness in its placement of some cars

To my left and to my right a shopping cart or something I forget

what it was.

The point is, the point is I might have singled out

Anything in that landscape and said those trees are after me; but

It is the nature of the Atlantic white cedar to invade swamps:

It is not the nature of this cedar to judge me. On

The other side of the damages I saw a man

Standing where the scenes of my childhood had been torn down.

And he was carrying the next day in his hands, and he was awake.

The orthodoxy in complete innocence drifts

Into being by a perfectly legitimate insistence,

And the lonely passion and triumph of spinsters,

The quiet radios in the red teenage heart

That serenade the fields around the car,

The Hojos' desperate percolation of java

Are part of that legitimate insistence on quality.

But when the wounded man is able to stand up

There's a second when we don't know whether the spear

Comes from him or violates him. Somebody

Get me a witness now cause I got the power

To crumble the orthodoxy with my happiness,

And I speak of things that only the brink of sleep

Has dared to imagine and only belief has seen.

Stake me to the cutthroat breakwater, turnkey woman honey is that

The doorbell? Or is it just a doorbell on TV?

I look in your eyes I get that

Jailing feeling in the misery of your making tofu

Instead of—but yet, the tofu has that feeling

Of failing to curdle due to overboiling

While we kissed and kissed amid the fumes and utensils.

I swear to God there are words in the air

But I can't read them, despite

Their shadows' being visible on our love.

I talk of stuff 20 streets away because the lights

And liver suffer in a shell. I love you and

I can't break through, I can't, I can't break through

Down there where they're trying to destroy the building.

Endeavor is that of seeking to be understood.

At sunset whiten the justice.

I am a stranger and a sojourner

And imprisoned, the former in their white…

I have visited the sick

Hospitals announcing we cannot live, while the wild glances.

More than anything, I feel I'm neither guilty nor innocent,

The one about Father why are you talking wrong.

I'm sorry about the story of your life,

I am employed or unemployed, I am a turner

Where every word of the voice of the radio

Give me a possession of a burying place.

This is the one where I change my fate

That I shall not have to suffer any change.