Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured, Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell— We, who have sung the praises of the lord With every fiber in us, every cell.
We, who did not manage to devote Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway Above a cradle—in a flimsy boat, Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away.
I.
MIDNIGHT.
"He hath made me to dwell in darkness as those that have been long dead."
All dark!—no light, no ray!
Sun, moon, and stars, all gone!
Dimness of anguish!—utter void!—
Crushed, and alone!
One waste of weary pain,
One dull, unmeaning ache,
A heart too weary even to throb,
In a morning coat, hands locked behind your back, you walk gravely along the lines in your head. These others stand with you, squinting the city into place, yet cannot see what you see, what you would see —a vision of these paths,
Some say that Chattanooga is the Old name for Lookout Mountain To others it is an uncouth name Used only by the uncivilised Our a-historical period sees it As merely a town in Tennessee To old timers of the Volunteer State
Kind are her answers, But her performance keeps no day; Breaks time, as dancers From their own music when they stray: All her free favors And smooth words wing my hopes in vain. O did ever voice so sweet but only feign? Can true love yield such delay,
Not for their ice-pick eyes, their weeping willow hair, and their clenched fists beating at heaven. Not for their warnings, predictions of doom. But what they promised. I don’t care if their beards are mildewed, and the ladders are broken. Let them go on
1 Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain. Does it rain in Spain? Oh yes my dear on the contrary and there are no bull fights. The dancers dance in long white pants It isn’t right to yence your aunts Come Uncle, let’s go home. Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart an artless fart in the home. Democracy. Democracy. Bill says democracy must go. Go democracy.
He whom we anatomized ‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’ speaks to us, hatching marrow, broody all night over the bones of a deadman.
Driving westward near Niagara, that transfiguring of the waters, I was torn—as moon from orbit by a warping of gravitation— From coercion of the freeway to the cataract’s prodigality, Had to stand there, breathe its rapture, inebriety of the precipice . . .
Fingers clamped to iron railings in a tremor of earth’s vibration, I look upstream: foam and boulders wail with a biblical desolation, Tree roots, broken oar, a pier end, wrack of the continent dissolving . . .
Clean the spittoons, boy. Detroit, Chicago, Atlantic City, Palm Beach. Clean the spittoons. The steam in hotel kitchens, And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the loyalty oath.
I am a deviate. I fondle and contribute, backscuttle and brown, father of three.
I stand high in the community. My name is in Who’s Who. People argue about my modesty.
I drink my share and yours and never have enough. I free-load officially and unofficially.
A physical coward, I take on all intellectuals, established poets, popes, rabbis, chiefs of staff.
I am a mystic. I will take an oath that I have seen the Virgin. Under the dry pandanus, to the scratching of kangaroo rats, I achieve psychic onanism. My tree of nerves electrocutes itself.
I uphold the image of America and force my luck. I write my own ticket to oblivion.
It should have a woman's name, something to tell us how the green skirt of land has bound its hips. When the day lowers its vermilion tapestry over the west ridge, the water has the sound of leaves shaken in a sack, and the child's voice that you have heard below sings of the sea.
The eyelids glowing, some chill morning. O world half-known through opening, twilit lids Before the vague face clenches into light; O universal waters like a cloud, Like those first clouds of half-created matter; O all things rising, rising like the fumes From waters falling, O forever falling; Infinite, the skeletal shells that fall, relinquished,
Airport bus from JFK cruising through Queens passing huge endless cemetery by Long Island’s old expressway (once a dirt path for wheelless Indians) myriad small tombstones tilted up gesturing statues on parapets stone arms or wings upraised
When chapman billies leave the street, And drouthy neebors neebors meet, As market-days are wearing late, And folk begin to tak the gate; While we sit bousin, at the nappy, And gettin fou and unco happy, We think na on the lang Scots miles, The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles, That lie between us and our hame, Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame, Gathering her brows like gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
This truth fand honest Tam o' Shanter, As he frae Ayr ae night did canter:
Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
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