Blood

notat 615

Jeg gik bortover veien med
to venner—
så gik solen ned
Himmelen blev pludseli blod
—og jeg følte som et pust af vemod—
en sugende smerte under hjertet
{S}Jeg standset—lænet mig

the day he traveled to my daughter's house
it was june. he cursed me with his morning nod
of anger as he filtered his callous
walk. skip. hop. feet slipshod
from 125th street bars, face curled with odd
reflections. the skin of a father is accented
in the sentence of the unaccented.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Our city fled,
So I sought its paths in haste
And looked around—I saw only horizon,
And I perceived that those who flee tomorrow
And those who return tomorrow
Are a body I tear apart on my page.

I could see: the clouds were a throat,
The water formed walls of flame.

Monterosa, your body is dead on Avenue A. Angelo,
They found you eyes open staring at the beer
Soaked floorboards. Did you want that? Did
You mind them filling your back with buckshot?

Angelo, I am angry with them all, and you Monterosa
Killed and killers, killing and dealing dope. No good
You were, no good they are. Still, I wish their fate
To be bodies stacking under the same blue smoke.

…When that joy is gone for good
I move the arms beneath the blood.

When my blood is running wild
I sew the clothing of a child.

When that child is never born
I lean my breast against a thorn.

When the thorn brings no reprieve
I rise and live, I rise and live.

I lay down under language
it left me and I slept

—You, the Comforter, came into the room

my blood, my mouth
all buttoned away—

Makers of houses, books, clothes-
makers, goodbye—

During the day I play at drowning
looking for the smoke
of eyelashes and faded hair
the lilac shadows of blood
and the ruins of coffee
but a night
I dream of the last syllable
in my mother's heart

My father built a great worry around me like a dock
Once I left it before I was finished
And he remained with his great, empty worry.
And my mother—like a tree on the shore
Between her arms outstretched for me.

And in '31 my hands were merry and small
And in '41 they learned to use a rifle
And when I loved my first love

We forget where we came from. Our Jewish
names from the Exile give us away,
bring back the memory of flower and fruit, medieval cities,
metals, knights who turned to stone, roses,
spices whose scent drifted away, precious stones, lots of red,
handicrafts long gone from the world
(the hands are gone too).

Circumcision does it to us,

I cried to men, “I would be crucified!”

And they said, “Why should your blood be upon our heads?”

And I answered, “How else shall you be exalted except by crucifyingmadmen?”

And they heeded and I was crucified. And the crucifixion appeasedme.

And when I was hanged between earth and heaven they lifted up theirheads to see me. And they were exalted, for their heads had neverbefore been lifted.

But as they stood looking up at me one called out, “For what artthou seeking to atone?”

And another cried, “In what cause dost thou sacrifice thyself?”

And a third said, “Thinkest thou with this price to buy worldglory?”

Then said a fourth, “Behold, how he smiles! Can such pain beforgiven?”

And I answered them all, and said:

“Remember only that I smiled. I do not atone—nor sacrifice—norwish for glory; and I have nothing to forgive. I thirsted—and Ibesought you to give me my blood to drink. For what is there canquench a madman’s thirst but his own blood? I was dumb—and Iasked wounds of you for mouths. I was imprisoned in your days andnights—and I sought a door into larger days and nights.

And now I go—as others already crucified have gone. And think notwe are weary of crucifixion. For we must be crucified by largerand yet larger men, between greater earths and greater heavens.”

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazón, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

They said to me no, don’t take any, no, don’t touch, that is burning
hot. No, don’t try to touch, to hold, that weighs too much, that
hurts.

They said to me: Read, write. And I tried, I took up a word, but it
struggled, it clucked like a frightened hen, wounded, in a cage of
black straw, spotted with old traces of   blood.

Translated from the French

My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my little hood with many bells
jangling when I'd turn my head.

My mother would be a falconress,
and she sends me as far as her will goes.

(from Henry V, spoken by King Henry) Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:

Indicative of the passion of the people
on the 15th of April, 1865 Good Friday was the day
Of the prodigy and crime,
When they killed him in his pity,
When they killed him in his prime

“Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance...”
—Djuna Barnes Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch
The sly very old woman wile away from her pious
And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin.
She pours big drinks. We think of what

He looked down at his withering body and saw a hair
near his navel, swaying.

And now he saw his other hairs rise up.

He felt a hectic current in his veins.
Looking within, he saw the bubbling of his blood.

He cursed his fever, saying:
“It is the chemistry of prayer.
It increases in frequency,

The canyon walls close in again,
slant light a silver glare in brown water.
The water is only knee deep, but when the boy reaches the
boulders—
purple dark, silvered by the smash of brute water—
water will tear at his chest and arms.
The walls of the canyon are brilliant in late light.
They would have glared red and gold for his drowned camera:

You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”

And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes

The Tiger-Woman came to me
When dusk was close and men were dull.
She beckoned from the jungle-path;
I followed, dreaming, fanciful.

The Tiger-Woman’s face is pale,
But oh, her speaking eyes are dark.
No beast can move so lithe as she
Beside the matted river’s mark.

The jungle is a fearsome place
For men who hunt, and men who slay,
But I was not afraid to go
Where Tiger-Woman led the way.

I cut myself upon the thought of you
And yet I come back to it again and again,
A kind of fury makes me want to draw you out
From the dimness of the present
And set you sharply above me in a wheel of roses.
Then, going obviously to inhale their fragrance,
I touch the blade of you and cling upon it,
And only when the blood runs out across my fingers
Am I at all satisfied.

Turn, turn again,
Ape’s blood in each vein!
The people that pass
Seem castles of glass,
The old and the good
Giraffes of the blue wood,
The soldier, the nurse,
Wooden-face and a curse,
Are shadowed with plumage
Like birds, by the gloomage.
Blond hair like a clown’s
The music floats—drowns
The creaking of ropes,
The breaking of hopes,
The wheezing, the old,

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders

Vodu green clinching his waist,
obi purple ringing his neck,
Shango, God of the spirits,
whispering in his ear,
thunderlight stabbing the island
of blood rising from his skull.

Mojo bone in his fist
strikes the sun from his eye.

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.
Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War. A crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington. Stale soggy wood of Washington. Wedges rust in soggy wood. . . Split it! In two! Again! Shred it! . . the sun. Wedges are brilliant in the sun; ribbons of wet wood dry and blow away. Black reddish blood. Pouring for crude-boned soft-skinned life, who set you flowing? Blood suckers of the War would spin in a frenzy of dizziness if they drank your blood. Prohibition would put a stop to it. Who set you flowing? White and whitewash disappear in blood. Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets? Eddying on the corners? Swirling like a blood-red smoke up where the buzzards fly in heaven? God would not dare to suck black red blood. A Nigger God! He would duck his head in shame and call for the Judgement Day. Who set you flowing?

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,

My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me.

Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and the spring growth of wild onion.

I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats with the music of El and subway in my ears, walled in by steel and wood and brick far from the sky.

I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane. I want to walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground. Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone.

O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?

Go your seeking, soul.
Mine the proven path of time’s foretelling.
Yours accordance with some mysteried whole.
I am but your passion-haunted dwelling.

Bring what news you can,
Stranger, loved of body’s humbled heart.
Say one whispered word to mortal man
From that peace whereof he claims you part.

The fields are white;
The laborers are few;
Yet say the idle:
There’s nothing to do.

Jails are crowded;
In Sunday-schools few;
We still complain:
There’s nothing to do.

I never hear the word “Escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation –
A flying attitude!

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars
Only to fail again!

Beholde, o man! lyft up thyn eye and see
What mortall peyne I suffre for thi trespace.
With pietous voys I crye and sey to the:
Beholde my woundes, behold my blody face,
Beholde the rebukes that do me so manace,
Beholde my enemyes that do me so despice,
And how that I, to reforme the to grace,
Was like a lambe offred in sacryfice.

...

And geyn thi pryde behold my gret mekenesse;
Geyn thyn envie behold my charité;
Geyn thi leccherye behold my chast clennesse;
Geyn thi covetyse behold my poverté.

And then we cowards
who loved the whispering
evening, the houses,
the paths by the river,
the dirty red lights
of those places, the sweet
soundless sorrow—
we reached our hands out

He tells me in Bangkok he’s robbed
Because he’s white; in London because he’s black;
In Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab:
Everywhere and at all times, and he fights back.

He holds up seven thick little fingers
To show me he’s rated seventh in the world,
And there’s no passion in his voice, no anger
In the flat brown eyes flecked with blood.

Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
Here is the shadow moving down the page
Where you sit reading by the garden wall.
Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises,
Shudder and droop. You know their voices now,
Faintly the martyred peaches crying out
Your name, the name nobody knows but you.

The curtains part: it is a summer’s day. There a cow on a grassy slope watches as a bull charges an old aeroplane in a meadow. The bull is punching holes with its horns in the aeroplane’s fabric...
Suddenly the aeroplane’s engine ignites; the meadow is dark blue smoke...
The aeroplane shifts round and faces the charging bull.
As the bull comes in the propeller takes off the end of its muzzle. The bloody nostrils, a ring through them, are flung to the grass with a shattered blossom of teeth.
The bull, blood oozing from the stump of its face, backs off, and charges again. This time the propeller catches the bull behind its lower jaw and flings the head into a tree.
The headless bull backs off once more, and then charges down again. The propeller beating at the headless bull, cutting the body away in a great halo of blood, until only the back legs are standing. These run widely away through the meadow in figure eights and zigzags, until at last they find the aeroplane again. And as they come running down the propeller whacks them apart.
The legs, one with the tail still attached to it, the other somehow retaining both rectum and testicles, scamper off in opposite directions.
The aeroplane turns away; the engine stops.
The shadows are suddenly seen in lengthened form.
The watching cow begins to low ...

I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

[To be sung to the tune of The Blood of the Lamb with indicated instrument] [BASS DRUM BEATEN LOUDLY]
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—

Genial poets, pink-faced
earnest wits—
you have given the world
some choice morsels,
gobbets of language presented
as one presents T-bone steak
and Cherries Jubilee.
Goodbye, goodbye,

I tell you that I see her still
At the dark entrance of the hall.
One gas lamp burning near her shoulder
Shone also from her other side
Where hung the long inaccurate glass
Whose pictures were as troubled water.
An immense shadow had its hand
Between us on the floor, and seemed

Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see;
Let the dew-fall drench either side of me;
Clear apple-leaves are soft upon that moon
Seen sidelong like a blossom in the tree;
And God, ah God, that day should be so soon.

The grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie.
Kissed upon either cheek and either eye,
I turn to thee as some green afternoon
Turns toward sunset, and is loth to die;
Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.

Lie closer, lean your face upon my side,
Feel where the dew fell that has hardly dried,
Hear how the blood beats that went nigh to swoon;

Moses, from whose loins I sprung,
Lit by a lamp in his blood
Ten immutable rules, a moon
For mutable lampless men.

The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,
With the same heaving blood,
Keep tide to the moon of Moses.
Then why do they sneer at me?

Like the Idalian queen,
Her hair about her eyne,
With neck and breast’s ripe apples to be seen,
At first glance of the morn
In Cyprus’ gardens gathering those fair flowers
Which of her blood were born,
I saw, but fainting saw, my paramours.
The Graces naked danced about the place,

Once there came a man
Who said:
“Range me all men of the world in rows.”
And instantly
There was a terrific clamor among the people
Against being ranged in rows.
There was a loud quarrel, world-wide.
It endured for ages;
And blood was shed
By those who would not stand in rows,
And by those who pined to stand in rows.
Eventually, the man went to death, weeping.
And those who stayed in the bloody scuffle
Knew not the great simplicity.

non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,
solaque famosam culpa professa facit.

Amores, III, xiv I love my work and my children. God

Hardly a ghost left to talk with. The slavs moved on
or changed their names to something green. Greeks gave up
old dishes and slid into repose. Runs of salmon thin
and thin until a ripple in October might mean carp.
Huge mills bang and smoke. Day hangs thick with commerce
and my favorite home, always overgrown with roses,
collapsed like moral advice. Tugs still pound against
the outtide pour but real, running on some definite fuel.

Come, the wind may never again
Blow as now it blows for us;
And the stars may never again shine as now they shine;
Long before October returns,
Seas of blood will have parted us;
And you must crush the love in your heart, and I the love in mine!

White coat and purple coat
a sleeve from both he sews.
That white is always stained with blood,
that purple by the rose.

And phantom rose and blood most real
compose a hybrid style;
white coat and purple coat
few men can reconcile.

At the throat of Soweto
a devil language falls
slashing
claw syllables to shred and leave
raw
the tongue of the young
girl
learning to sing

When tunes jigged nimbler than the blood
And quick and high the bows would prance
And every fiddle string would burst
To catch what’s lost beyond the string,
While half afraid their children stood,
I saw the old come out to dance.
The heart is not so light at first,
But heavy like a bough in spring.

‘Talbingo River’—as one says of bones:
‘Captain’ or ‘Commodore’ that smelt gunpowder
In old engagements no one quite believes
Or understands. Talbingo had its blood
As they did, ran with waters huge and clear
Lopping down mountains,
Turning crags to banks.

Now it’s a sort of aching valley,

Here she lies, a pretty bud,
Lately made of flesh and blood,
Who as soon fell fast asleep
As her little eyes did peep.
Give her strewings, but not stir
The earth that lightly covers her.

To see both blended in one flood,
The mothers’ milk, the children’s blood,
Makes me doubt if heaven will gather
Roses hence, or lilies rather.

A woman wails, boo hoo, mourning her man
Shut up, shame on you, don't cry to the hills!
O little sister, I should have warned you
Don't eat the meat, if it makes you cough blood!

1
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose

The brain forgets but the blood will remember.
There, when the play of sense is over,
The last, low spark in the darkest chamber
Will hold all there is of love and lover.

The war of words, the life-long quarrel
Of self against self will resolve into nothing;
Less than the chain of berry-red coral
Crying against the dead black of her clothing.

Debridement
Black men are oaks cut down.

Congressional Medal of Honor Society
United States of America chartered by
Congress, August 14, 1958; this certifies
that STAC John Henry Louis is a member
of this society.

“Don’t ask me anything about the

(In memory of Joseph Mary Plunkett)

("Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.")
—William Butler Yeats.

Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant. Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.

There came gray stretches of volcanic plains,
Bare, lone and treeless, then a bleak lone hill
Like to the dolorous hill that Dobell saw.
Around were heaps of ruins piled between
The Burn o’ Sorrow and the Water o’ Care;
And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls
One pillar rose up dark against the moon.
There was a nameless Presence everywhere;

He came back and shot. He shot him. When he came
back, he shot, and he fell, stumbling, past the
shadow wood, down, shot, dying, dead, to full halt.

At the bottom, bleeding, shot dead. He died then, there
after the fall, the speeding bullet, tore his face
and blood sprayed fine over the killer and the grey light.

Pictures of the dead man, are everywhere. And his spirit
sucks up the light. But he died in darkness darker than

I was thinking of a son.
The womb is not a clock
nor a bell tolling,
but in the eleventh month of its life
I feel the November
of the body as well as of the calendar.
In two days it will be my birthday
and as always the earth is done with its harvest.

When did you start your tricks
Monsieur?

What do you stand on such high legs for?
Why this length of shredded shank
You exaltation?

Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards
And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,
Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?

Europe: 1944
as regarded from a great distance Impersonal the aim
Where giant movements tend;

There is a little lightning in his eyes.
Iron at the mouth.
His brows ride neither too far up nor down.

He is splendid. With a place to stand.

Some glowing in the common blood.
Some specialness within.

(fromMacbeth) Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Achilles Holt, Stanford, 1930 Here for a few short years
Strengthen affections; meet,

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the waterlines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.
Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full
Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!
Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,

George Borrow in his Lavengro
Tells us of a Welshman, who
By some excess of mother-wit
Framed a harp and played on it,
Built a ship and sailed to sea,
And steered it home to melody
Of his own making. I, indeed,
Might write for Everyman to read

Dear stranger, reading this small, true book
By a simple man who loved much and wasn't loved,
Merging your own life with the lines on this page,
Lines that remind you of some frightening shore,
Cold rains, shipwreck, and loud winds and waves,
Stirring your lonely mind with brutal images
That conjure loves forgotten, fears disclaimed,
Joining your pulse with mine, tasting my blood,