First Thing

Then a hermit, who visited the city once
a year, came forth and said, Speak to us of
Pleasure.
And he answered, saying:
Pleasure is a freedom-song,
But it is not freedom.
It is the blossoming of your desires,
But it is not their fruit.

The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge
Outside the window is Jack Kennedy—
Standing on one leg and looking jerkily around
And staring straight into the room at me.

Ask not what your country can do for you—
Ask what you can do for your country.
Here’s how.
That wouldn’t be the way I’d do it.

I
Hung up on body parts in the particulate daylight, you step out of a Beckett play to find yourself in a memory resisting itself, as meat hits the fan so to speak against the white blanket of the grainy void. You never know where it’s going, the body, the boy swathed in bullets with those black eyes pissing a letter-opener in the desert mud near a disabled Mercedes. When things enter the room you think bazooka and check your hat. A puddle of warm ice-cream in anticipation. Here’s where Coney Island drops like a discarded napkin and you can’t go home again. Mucous brimming the banks, a cake of dust in the shape of a rocking chair ticking away. But soon it will snow as exquisite dogs languish from inside a sandwich tied to a parachute. No time for ballads, the table is set.
II
Light solidifies in cells, the keeper of lost keys. They don’t belong to anyone, the keys. Playing the game backwards reveals nothing a blind child could not guess by the hairs on his arm. The lips on old men are lockboxes in the terminal of no-knowing without gratitude for the despair of angels. You have to suffer, you have to fill up in order to implode, to be recognized for the necessities of commerce. They unhinge, finally, the doors you walk through into phantom stairwells in telephonic hum smelling of wet coal and doll’s hair. Precipitous adjectives gush from a cracked faucet in the chancellery restroom. Someone is stifling laughter from underneath a card table where an electric utility had fallen from his sleeve. They say that trussed birds derive no pleasure from the music of mangled wagons and that gas seeps like a well-kept secret imperiling dust mites in the spleens of hooded maidens locked away from the light. Everything is descending, even the scholarship of the ancient adverbs. Mouths twist into almonds and you wonder how the noise can drown itself out with nothing but nouns and dinner plates and gallows, with history a hiccup waiting to happen.
III

for Ros Krauss Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air

I should like to live in a sunny town like this
Where every afternoon is half-day closing
And I would wait at the terminal for the one train
Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving.

At the far end of the platform is a tunnel, and the train
Slows out of it like a tear from a single eye.
You couldn’t get further than this, the doors all opened
And the porter with rolled sleeves wielding a mop.

Snow hurries
the strawberries
from the bush.
Star-wet water rides
you into summer,
into my autumn.
Your cactus hands
are at my heart again.

TO A FRIEND No! those days are gone away
And their hours are old and gray,
And their minutes buried all
Under the down-trodden pall

1.Baseball, I warrant, is not the whole
occupation of the aging boy.
Far from it: There are cats and roses;
there is her water body. She fills
the skin of her legs up, like water;
under her blouse, water assembles,
swelling lukewarm; her mouth is water,
her cheekbones cool water; water flows

Why can pansies be their aid or paths.
He said paths she had said paths
All like to do their best with half of the time
A sweeter sweetener came and came in time
Tell him what happened then only to go
He nervous as you add only not only as they angry were
Be kind to half the time that they shall say
It is undoubtedly of them for them for every one any one