77 Dream Songs Read online

  and then you got tired.

  I’m afraid that’s it. I figure you with love,

  lifey, deathy, but I have a little sense

  the rest of us are fired

  or fired: be with us: we will blow our best,

  our sad wild riffs come easy in that case,

  thinking you over,

  knowing you resting, who was reborn to rest,

  your gorgeous sentence done. Nothing’s the same,

  sir,—taking cover.

  40

  I’m scared a lonely. Never see my son,

  easy be not to see anyone,

  combers out to sea

  know they’re goin somewhere but not me.

  Got a little poison, got a little gun,

  I’m scared a lonely.

  I’m scared a only one thing, which is me,

  from othering I don’t take nothin, see,

  for any hound dog’s sake.

  But this is where I livin, where I rake

  my leaves and cop my promise, this’ where we

  cry oursel’s awake.

  Wishin was dyin but I gotta make

  it all this way to that bed on these feet

  where peoples said to meet.

  Maybe but even if I see my son

  forever never, get back on the take,

  free, black & forty-one.

  41

  If we sang in the wood (and Death is a German expert)

  while snows flies, chill, after so frequent knew

  so many all of nothing,

  for lead & fire, it’s not we would assert

  particulars, but animal; cats mew,

  horses scream, man sing.

  Or: men psalm. Man palms his ears and moans.

  Death is a German expert. Scrambling, sitting,

  spattering, we hurry.

  I try to. Odd & trivial, atones

  somehow for my escape a bullet splitting

  my trod-on instep, fiery.

  The cantor bubbled, rattled. The Temple burned.

  Lurch with me! phantoms of Varshava. Slop!

  When I used to be,

  who haunted, stumbling, sewers, my sacked shop,

  roofs, a dis-world ai! Death was a German

  home-country.

  42

  O journeyer, deaf in the mould, insane

  with violent travel & death: consider me

  in my cast, your first son.

  Would you were I by now another one,

  witted, legged? I see you before me plain

  (I am skilled: I hear, I see)—

  your honour was troubled: when you wondered—‘No’.

  I hear. I think I hear. Now full craze down

  across our continent

  all storms since you gave in, on my pup-tent.

  I have of blast & counter to remercy you

  for hurling me downtown.

  We dream of honour, and we get along.

  Fate winged me, in the person of a cab

  and your stance on the sand.

  Think it across, in freezing wind: withstand

  my blistered wish: flop, there, to his blind song

  who pick up the tab.

  43

  ‘Oyez, oyez!’ The Man Who Did Not Deliver

  is before you for his deliverance, my lords.

  He stands, as charged

  for This by banks, That cops, by lawyers, by

  publishingers for Them. I doubt he’ll make

  old bones.

  Be.

  I warned him, of a summer night: consist,

  consist. Ex-wives roar.

  Further, the Crown holds that they spilt himself,

  splitting his manward chances, to his shame,

  my lords, & our horror.

  Behind, oh worst lean backward them who bring

  un-charges: hundreds & one, children,

  the pillars & the sot.

  Henry thought. It is so. I must sting.

  Listen! the grave ground-rhythm of a gone

  … makar? So what.

  44

  Tell it to the forest fire, tell it to the moon,

  mention it in general to the moon

  on the way down,

  he’s about to have his lady, permanent;

  and this is the worst of all came ever sent

  writhing Henry’s way.

  Ha ha, fifth column, quisling, genocide,

  he held his hands & laught from side to side

  a loverly time.

  The berries & the rods left him alone less.

  Thro’ a race of water once I went: happiness.

  I’ll walk into the sky.

  There the great flare & stench, O flying creatures,

  surely will dim-dim? Bars will be closed.

  No girl will again

  conceive above your throes. A fine thunder peals

  will with its friends and soon, from agony

  put the fire out.

  45

  He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back.

  He thought they was old friends. He felt on the stair

  where her papa found them bare

  they became familiar. When the papers were lost

  rich with pals’ secrets, he thought he had the knack

  of ruin. Their paths crossed

  and once they crossed in jail; they crossed in bed;

  and over an unsigned letter their eyes met,

  and in an Asian city

  directionless & lurchy at two & three,

  or trembling to a telephone’s fresh threat,

  and when some wired his head

  to reach a wrong opinion, ‘Epileptic’.

  But he noted now that: they were not old friends.

  He did not know this one.

  This one was a stranger, come to make amends

  for all the imposters, and to make it stick.

  Henry nodded, un-.

  46

  I am, outside. Incredible panic rules.

  People are blowing and beating each other without mercy.

  Drinks are boiling. Iced

  drinks are boiling. The worse anyone feels, the worse

  treated he is. Fools elect fools.

  A harmless man at an intersection said, under his breath: “Christ!”

  That word, so spoken, affected the vision

  of, when they trod to work next day, shopkeepers

  who went & were fitted for glasses.

  Enjoyed they then an appearance of love & law.

  Millenia whift & waft—one, one—er, er …

  Their glasses were taken from them, & they saw.

  Man has undertaken the top job of all,

  son fin. Good luck.

  I myself walked at the funeral of tenderness.

  Followed other deaths. Among the last,

  like the memory of a lovely fuck,

  was: Do, ut des.

  47

  April Fool’s Day, or, St Mary of Egypt

  —Thass a funny title, Mr Bones.

  —When down she saw her feet, sweet fish, on the threshold,

  she considered her fair shoulders

  and all them hundreds who have held them, all

  the more who to her mime thickened & maled

  from the supple stage,

  and seeing her feet, in a visit, side by side

  paused on the sill of The Tomb, she shrank: ‘No.

  They are not worthy,

  fondled by many’ and rushed from The Crucified

  back through her followers out of the city ho

  across the suburbs, plucky

  to dare my desert in her late daylight

  of animals and sands. She fall prone.

  Only wind whistled.

  And forty-seven years went by like Einstein.

  We celebrate her feast with our caps on,

  whom God has not visited.

  48

  He yelled at me in Greek,

  my God!—It’s not his
language

  and I’m no good at—his is Aramaic,

  was—I am a monoglot of English

  (American version) and, say pieces from

  a baker’s dozen others: where’s the bread?

  but rising in the Second Gospel, pal:

  The seed goes down, god dies,

  a rising happens,

  some crust, and then occurs an eating. He said so,

  a Greek idea,

  troublesome to imaginary Jews,

  like bitter Henry, full of the death of love,

  Cawdor-uneasy, disambitious, mourning

  the whole implausible necessary thing.

  He dropped his voice & sybilled of

  the death of the death of love.

  I óught to get going.

  49

  Blind

  Old Pussy-cat if he won’t eat, he don’t

  feel good into his tum’, old Pussy-cat.

  He wants to have eaten.

  Tremor, heaves, he sweaterings. He can’t.

  A dizzy swims of where is Henry at;

  … somewhere streng verboten.

  How come he sleeps & sleeps and sleeps, waking like death:

  locate the restorations of which we hear

  as of profound sleep.

  From daylight he got maintrackt, from friends’ breath,

  wishes, his hopings. Dreams make crawl with fear

  Henry but not get up.

  The course his mind his body steer, poor Pussy-cat,

  in weakness & disorder, will see him down

  whiskers & tail.

  ‘Wastethrift’: Oh one of cunning wives know that

  he hoardy-squander, where is nor downtown

  neither suburba. Braille.

  50

  In a motion of night they massed nearer my post.

  I hummed a short blues. When the stars went out

  I studied my weapons system.

  Grenades, the portable rack, the yellow spout

  of the anthrax-ray: in order. Yes, and most

  of my pencils were sharp.

  This edge of the galaxy has often seen

  a defence so stiff, but it could only go

  one way.

  —Mr Bones, your troubles give me vertigo,

  & backache. Somehow, when I make your scene,

  I cave to feel as if

  de roses of dawns & pearls of dusks, made up

  by some ol’ writer-man, got right forgot

  & the greennesses of ours.

  Springwater grow so thick it gonna clot

  and the pleasing ladies cease. I figure, yup,

  you is bad powers.

  51

  Our wounds to time, from all the other times,

  sea-times slow, the times of galaxies

  fleeing, the dwarfs’ dead times,

  lessen so little that if here in his crude rimes

  Henry them mentions, do not hold it, please,

  for a putting of man down.

  Ol’ Marster, being bound you do your best

  versus we coons, spare now a cagey John

  a whilom bits that whip:

  who’ll tell your fortune, when you have confessed

  whose & whose woundings—against the innocent stars

  & remorseless seas—

  —Are you radioactive, pal? —Pal, radioactive.

  —Has you the night sweats & the day sweats, pal?

  —Pal, I do.

  —Did your gal leave you? —What do you think, pal?

  —Is that thing on the front of your head what it seems to be, pal?

  —Yes, pal.

  III

  52

  Silent Song

  Bright-eyed & bushy-tailed woke not Henry up.

  Bright though upon his workshop shone a vise

  central, moved in

  while he was doing time down hospital

  and growing wise.

  He gave it the worst look he had left.

  Alone. They all abandoned Henry—wonder! all,

  when most he—under the sun.

  That was all right.

  He can’t work well with it here, or think.

  A bilocation, yellow like catastrophe.

  The name of this was freedom.

  Will Henry again ever be on the lookout for women & milk,

  honour & love again,

  have a buck or three?

  He felt like shrieking but he shuddered as

  (spring mist, warm, rain) an handful with quietness

  vanisht & the thing took hold.

  53

  He lay in the middle of the world, and twitcht.

  More Sparine for Pelides,

  human (half) & down here as he is,

  with probably insulting mail to open

  and certainly unworthy words to hear

  and his unforgivable memory.

  —I seldom go to films. They are too exciting,

  said the Honourable Possum.

  —It takes me so long to read the ’paper,

  said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker,

  because I have to identify myself with everyone in it,

  including the corpses, pal.’

  Kierkegaard wanted a society, to refuse to read ’papers,

  and that was not, friends, his worst idea.

  Tiny Hardy, toward the end, refused to say anything,

  a programme adopted early on by long Housman,

  and Gottfried Benn

  said:—We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.

  54

  ‘NO VISITORS’ I thumb the roller to

  and leans against the door.

  Comfortable in my horseblanket

  I prop on the costly bed & dream of my wife,

  my first wife,

  and my second wife & my son.

  Insulting, they put guardrails up,

  as if it were a crib!

  I growl at the head nurse; we compose on one.

  I have been operating from nothing,

  like a dog after its tail

  more slowly, losing altitude.

  Nitid. They are shooting me full of sings.

  I give no rules. Write as short as you can,

  in order, of what matters.

  I think of my beloved poet

  Issa & his father who

  sat down on the grass and took leave of each other.

  55

  Peter’s not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.

  The architecture is far from reassuring.

  I feel uneasy.

  A pity,—the interview began so well:

  I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away

  and sloshed out a martini

  strangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters—

  God’s health, the vague hell of the Congo,

  John’s energy,

  anti-matter matter. I felt fine.

  Then a change came backward. A chill fell.

  Talk slackened,

  died, and he began to give me sideways looks.

  ‘Christ,’ I thought ‘what now?’ and would have askt for another

  but didn’t dare.

  I feel my application failing. It’s growing dark,

  some other sound is overcoming. His last words are:

  ‘We betrayed me.’

  56

  Hell is empty. O that has come to pass

  which the cut Alexandrian foresaw,

  and Hell lies empty.

  Lightning fell silent where the Devil knelt

  and over the whole grave space hath settled awe

  in a full death of guilt.

  The tinchel closes. Terror, & plunging, swipes.

  I lay my ears back. I am about to die.

  My cleft feet drum.

  Fierce, the two-footers club. My green world pipes

  a finish—for us all, my love, not some.

  Crumpling, I—why,—

  So in his crystal b
all them two he weighs,

  solidly, dreaming of his sleepy son,

  ah him, and his new wife.

  What roar solved once the dilemma of the Ancient of Days,

  what sigh borrowed His mercy?—Who may, if

  we are all the same, make one.

  57

  In a state of chortle sin—once he reflected,

  swilling tomato juice—live I, and did

  more than my thirstier years.

  To Hell then will it maul me? for good talk,

  and gripe of retail loss? I dare say not.

  I don’t thínk there’s that place

  save sullen here, wherefrom she flies tonight

  retrieving her whole body, which I need.

  I recall a ’coon treed,

  flashlights, & barks, and I was in that tree,

  and something can (has) been said for sobriety

  but very little.

  The guns. Ah, darling, it was late for me,

  midnight, at seven. How in famished youth

  could I foresee Henry’s sweet seed

  unspent across so flying barren ground,

  where would my loves dislimn whose dogs abound?

  I fell out of the tree.

  58

  Industrious, affable, having brain on fire,

  Henry perplexed himself; others gave up;

  good girls gave in;

  geography was hard on friendship, Sire;

  marriages lashed & languished, anguished; dearth of group

  and what else had been;

  the splendour & the lose grew all the same,

  Sire. His heart stiffened, and he failed to smile,

  catching (enfint) on.

  The law: we must, owing to chiefly shame

  lacing our pride, down what we did. A mile,

  a mile to Avalon.

  Stuffy & lazy, shaky, making roar

  overseas presses, he quit wondering:

  the mystery is full.

  Sire, damp me down. Me feudal O, me yore

  (male Muse) serf, if anyfing;

  which rank I pull.

  59

  Henry’s Meditation in the Kremlin

  Down on the cathedrals, as from the Giralda

  in a land no crueller, and over the walls

  to domes & river look

  from Great John’s belfry, Ivan-Veliky,

  whose thirty-one are still