The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (14 page)

When I woke up this morning

the lark was full of tears.

White, bright hail was frying

on the grass.

Now up against the wire

the falcon wrecks the hen

and carries her gray heart

over the redwoods while the new

sun burns on the former rain.

Crossed by her shadow, my hand

cupped beneath the spigot,

I am drinking last year's snow.

How bad it hurts

that the mountains ascend

to their ghost-deals white

with the wine of next summer.

I'm drinking tea, looking out over Santa Monica,

and listening to the old songs.

I've spent the day with Hollywooders,

and they really are beautiful people,

charming and a little afraid. “Don't you need love?”

the song asks now. Oh yes,

I suppose I do need love, and I suppose

I'm as scared and probably as charming, in some moments,

as any person I've met today.

Here I have to mention the white statue

of Santa Monica on the shore, resolutely turned

toward the city and all our frightened hearts,

away from the Pacific, showing her back to blueness,

to homeless distance, questions, formlessness,

and toward those very same things embodied—

even formlessness embodied—

in the eyes and hands of the hustlers deigning to work

their Murphies on the Martians from the Shangri-la.

For her, if not for me, these

are the degraded Christ. And too

the reincarnate, self-invented, pure

ones tanning in the timelessness, Omegas

singing

in the sand beside their heads.

It is as if Saint Monica's beautiful love

had conjured up quite negligently this ocean

of which she is ignorant,

as if what she loves in us

had been pressed from us like wine and flooded the world.

Now the distances are filled with it, and ships

sail on it and there are countries

all around it, and organizations weeping…

The hull of the knife and the surf

of our hurting

The outrigger of the bullet and the whitecaps

of our mistakes

The Commander of Suicide

and the archipelago

of the mirror

The jogging women

of Santa Monica

I like to get near them

as they go past

because they smell

like heated-up perfume

I try to get

inside their eyes

Santa Monica

mother of St. Augustine

mother of prayers

a guy is scraping

xmas snowflakes

from the window with

a putty knife

I would have raped you

seething like an ocean in your bed

Santa Monica

while you prayed

Thank you salesperson I see your heart

quivering redly in its gossamer

I with this fiery whirling atomic

symbol where I used to have a stomach

lighting my dead shoes

down the aisle

Briefly the gauzy but legible

future veils the place and is beheld

I can talk inside the mind

of my great-grandchild Oh unconceived

monster hurting your teeth on our dead Disneylands

we were here we touched this radioactive food

We didn't have claws then something in our hearts sufficed

We didn't have X-ray eyes we knew what

was inside of everything

Descendants

I have paid and I have left

walked out of the little store onto a white beach

the light declining and lavender

walked past two women

as they knelt covered with gooseflesh

beside the Tarot dealer

past a man pretending to be a machine in a circle

of laughter

alongside but not too close

to the people who no longer

live indoors or hide their thoughts

past the child

born in a towaway zone

the mother's eyes like

a creek

numbers

and curses going by in the water

I leave you this record

of an invisible monstrosity and this

report of sadness

a semi-truck against the bruised roses

of sunset

emeralds in the velvet wound

the lights

of Malibu the cold

small lights

At the barber—

he shaves you with that razor—

but starting with the acceptable rightness

thru the historic sensuality,

bestower

of an antique masculinity:

denting then pulling my throat's thin

covering with his left hand's fingers,

in his right

the razor—like

a wand he touches it

to the air; lowers it to my throat; and then—

If I were a murderer—

not in the way we all are, but the other way—

please let my barber never have killed anyone

when he kills me.

Christ by the dumpster peeling and tossing

your lottery tickets—oh Nazarene drinking dust, oh

Christ rising and falling, oh Jesus

Christ giving us the finger in “Christ au tambeau,”

bless please the people in art galleries

lonely as a distant train. Bless now

the cancer of the bone, the last light making

beautiful the poisons in the sky—

and the condemned man in his tuxedo dream,

his dream of limousines and innocence,

take off your clothes and come to him in dreams,

stand on the fire escape naked and bless

with jazz like a rivulet of codeine

the laughter spilling from our broken necklaces.

I was a child,

the president of a world of toys.

—awake in the dark, but not the dark

of childhood, because the grownups' talk

(and the murmur of my grandmother and the senile

voice of the porch swing's chain, irrelevantly

assenting to whatever they should say

about a life that seemed—while frames of light

wheeled along the walls as cars went by—

a wooly cartoon maelstrom that had put them

unharmed and tired and a little drunk

there on the porch, as I had been put to bed)

turned the childhood dark to grownup dark.

I myself am the Tacomas I have known,

streets collapsing into planes of black and silver,

I one outcome of Portland

and its jeunes filles

scarred by the pretty rain,

cars dealt out around the gas stations,

girls kneeling in prayer by the phones,

—but

loveless save as now when on my knees

and spangled by broken blossoms in the orchard

I breathe the terrible silence of the unfutured,

the pastless,

burned by the silences of tears,

the twenty-six silences of our fate,

the twelve kinds of silence in the apple-petal,

and burned by the Lover

and Utterer of those silences,

made a choir of flame and then blown away

like a blossom. I am these petals—nothing

more than what I see or where I am,

nothing—a trick of twilight, wind, and flowers.

Virgin stranded on the tennis court

at dawn: her little skirt as still, as white, as marble…

In such forlornness men sink themselves,

following its current out past their lives…

oceanic nauseating

depths drifting us

down alongside the islands where love

clasped us to itself and delivered our drowning—

mountains and a day and a cloud

in a barnyard: no larger than an egg, a puff of mist

drives like musket smoke out

of the peacock's blue throat

along with its effeminate scream.

Ah! oh! ow!—

waiting to be born

We pass the island of the war and the hour

we lay bleeding and one of those tropic flies

landed and its freaked-out golden eyes

looked at the light This man

remembers how he set out

to find others who were like him

but was broken like a claw at dinner

He comes to Santa Monica

where people with their faces

stuck on proudly climb

the moment to its mountain loneliness

the world

a window they might shoulder past

in expectation of some gift of the street

He cries I'm blind again

It's true

For shame is its own veil

For shame is its own veil and veils

the world as much as the face—

smells and songs make sadness

and everyone walking toward you

holding in each mouth a word

an answer

How does it taste

this secret the whole world is keeping from me

I just a poor mortal human having stumbled onto

the glen where the failed gods are drinking

stand here almost remembering my birth

and the trees too are beautiful and dead