Far from the sea far from the sea of Breton fishermen the white clouds scudding over Lowell and the white birches the bare white birches along the blear night roads
Sprinting across the freeway just ahead of them having set his left foot down directly onto the pavement from the ledge of the cement divide and edging his other leg forward deliberately—caught the way sports pages show an athlete with muscles condensed in the effort of crossing through a particular space—and then she sees the cars coming towards him giving off that early morning shine across their hoods almost colorless but precipitous in the four-lane parallel rush of metal and cannot tell if any driver straining into the distance further ahead has seen him or possibly has caught that glint off the long black flashlight he appears to carry with its up-beam turned on full and faintly visible due to the angle of early sun falling over the midwestern plains fanning out in every direction away from the sudden view of the airport hub’s acclaimed architectural design.
She sees the brief alignment of his body methodically finding its way across the freeway lanes blue baseball cap fit snugly over his head to just above the hairline where now dusky skin of his neck breaks into the picture. He’s made it halfway,
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
He smelled bad and was red-eyed with the miseries of being scared while sleepless when he said this: “I want a private woman, peace and quiet, and some green stuff in my pocket. Fuck the rest.” Pity the underwear and socks, long burnt, of an accomplished murderer, oh God, of germans and replacements, who refused three stripes to keep his B.A.R.,
Swing by starwhite bones and Lights tick in the middle. Blue and white steel Black and white People hurrying along the wall. ”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“
When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day watching the champs of the Dante Billiard Parlor and the French pinball addicts. I am leading a quiet life on lower East Broadway. I am an American.
For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash, but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake
Plurality is all. I walk among the restaurants, the theatres, the grocery stores; I ride the cars and hear of Mrs. Bedford’s teeth and Albuquerque, strikes unsettled, someone’s simply marvelous date, news of the German Jews, the baseball scores, storetalk and whoretalk, talk of wars. I turn the pages of a thousand books to read the names of Buddha, Malthus, Walker Evans, Stendhal, André Gide,
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
O what a physical effect it has on me To dive forever into the light blue sea Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends, Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still, It is beautiful, when October Is over, and February is over,
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 . . .
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a postwar Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers, People who look up to you and are willing To do things for you, but you think
I Two old men, father-and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying by the Grand Canal together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas, he who changes everything he touches to Wagner. The ocean's green cold pushes up through the palazzo floors. Wagner is marked, his famous Punchinello profile looks more tired than before, his face a white flag. The gondola is heavy-laden with their lives, two round trips and a one-way.
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