Crossing the Atlantic

Where they will bury me
I don't know.
Many places might not be
sorry to store me.

The Midwest has right of origin.
Already it has welcomed my mother
to its flat sheets.

The English fens that bore me

For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894—1956 I
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

1.

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

I
He who has never tasted the grapes of Canaan can only view them from Pisgah.

I have my tides, O sea-foamed Venus, dearer than watercress, pipkins, thyme and clymene. You once held me by the cord of my navel, but I have not died to live in Mahomet’s paradise.

Would that I could gather up my love to me as one does one’s fate, or measure her nature as God does the sea.

We are a weary race that hates seedtime. Poor Persephone, who is Maying springtime, and the coming up of flowers! We remember only what we seed, and Persephone goes down into the earth after Spring and Summer vegetation only because Pluto gave her pomegranate seeds to remember him, but if the seed perish, Persephone will die, and memory shall pass from the earth.

A man of humble blood, with a soul of Kidron, needs a Rachel, but I labored for years in the weary fields for Leah.II
The world is a wound in my soul, and I have sought the living waters in meditation, and the angelical fountains in the desert of Beersheba for solitude, for what health there is in friendship comes when one is alone.

I shed tears on the Mount of Olives because people no longer care for each other, but my friends have lacked the character for the vigil. There is no Cana wine in human affections that are not always awake, for people who do not trouble about each other are foes.

It is humiliating being the lamb and bleating to each passerby, “Feed me!” What is the use of saying that men are stones when I know I am going to try to turn them into bread.

I am afraid to say that people are truthful. When a man tells me he is honest I press my hand close to my heart where I keep my miserable wallet. If he says he has any goodness in him, I avoid him, for I trust nobody who has so little fear of the evils that grow and ripen in us while we imagine we have one virtuous trait. These demons lie in ambush in the thick, heady coverts of the blood, where hypocrisy and egoism fatten, waiting to mock or betray us in any moment of self-esteem.

I have no faith in a meek man, and regard anyone that shows a humble mien as one who is preparing to make an attack upon me, for there is some brutish, nether fault in starved vanity.

Yet once a friend leaned as gently on my coat as that disciple had on the bosom of the Saviour, and I went away, not knowing by his affection whether I was the John Christ was said to have loved most. I whispered thanks to my soul because he leaned upon me, for I shall never know who I am if I am not loved.

V
Much flesh walks upon the earth void of heart and warm liver, for it is the spirit that dies soonest.

Some men have marshland natures with mist and sea-water in their intellects, and are as sterile as the Florida earth which De Soto found in those meager, rough Indian settlements, and their tongues are fierce, reedy arrows. They wound and bleed the spirit, and their oaks and chestnut trees and acorns are wild, and a terrible, barren wind from the Atlantic blows through their blood as pitiless as the primitive rivers De Soto’s soldiers could not ford.

Do not attempt to cross these mad, tumid rivers, boreal and brackish, for water is unstable, and you cannot link yourself to it.

There are also inland, domestic men who are timid pulse and vetch, and though they may appear as stupid as poultry rooting in the mire, they are housed people, and they have orchards and good, tamed wine that makes men loving rather than predatory; go to them, and take little thought of their ignorance which brings forth good fruits, for here you may eat and not be on guard for the preservation of your soul.

People who have domestic animals are patient, for atheism and the stony heart are the result of traveling: sorrow never goes anywhere. Were we as content as our forefathers were with labor in the fallow, or as a fuller with his cloth, or a drayman with his horses and mules, we would stay where we are, and that is praying.

There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone, and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment.

God forgive me for my pride; though I would relinquish my own birthright for that wretched pottage of lentils which is friendship, I mistrust every mortal.

Each day the alms I ask of heaven is not to have a new chagrin which is my daily bread.

December 1959

Fit the First
The Landing

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.

An Episode AND the first grey of morning fill'd the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.

Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27 We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy
and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became
Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the
steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants

The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away
The sand. The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.”
The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence
And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made:
There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but
Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be

HAil holy Light, ofspring of Heav'n first-born,
Or of th' Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
Or hear'st thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
Whose Fountain who shall tell? before the Sun,
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a Mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.
Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing,
Escap't the Stygian Pool, though long detain'd
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight

On a road through the mountains with a friend many years ago
I came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream
flowed down flashing across dark rocks through its own
echoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten
it was the turning of autumn and already
the mornings were cold with ragged clouds in the hollows
long after sunrise but the pasture sagging like a roof
the glassy water and flickering yellow leaves

Back in the early fifties el Chonito and I were on the
Way to the bote when we heard the following dialogue:

Police car radio:Pachuco rumble in progress in front of Lyceum
Theatre. Sanger gang crossing tracks heading for
Chinatown. Looks big this time. All available
Westside units . . .

Cop to partner driving car:
Take your time. Let ’em wipe each other out.

i

Gilgamesh spoke and said to the old man then:
"When I looked at you I thought that you were not

a man, one made like me; I had resolved
to challenge you as one might challenge a demon,

a stranger-adversary. But now I see
that you are Utnapishtim, made like me,

a man, the one I sought, the one from whom

A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet.

Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses.

A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise.

A peck a small piece not privately overseen, not at all not a slice, not at all crestfallen and open, not at all mounting and chaining and evenly surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea.

A separation is not tightly in worsted and sauce, it is so kept well and sectionally.

Put it in the stew, put it to shame. A little slight shadow and a solid fine furnace.

The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful.

The line which sets sprinkling to be a remedy is beside the best cold.

A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday.

Wet crossing and a likeness, any likeness, a likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth, it has the staggering blindly and a little green, any little green is ordinary.

One, two and one, two, nine, second and five and that.

A blaze, a search in between, a cow, only any wet place, only this tune.

Cut a gas jet uglier and then pierce pierce in between the next and negligence. Choose the rate to pay and pet pet very much. A collection of all around, a signal poison, a lack of languor and more hurts at ease.

A white bird, a colored mine, a mixed orange, a dog.

Cuddling comes in continuing a change.

A piece of separate outstanding rushing is so blind with open delicacy.

A canoe is orderly. A period is solemn. A cow is accepted.

A nice old chain is widening, it is absent, it is laid by.

To airmen crossing and communicant
With orders of this field, no landing here
But by the grace of God; no postulant
Piloting earthward should abuse his fear:
Trust in the instruments which fall their round,
Tonight the only ceiling is the ground;
Zero, from nothing into nothing made,
Signifies all of altitude that stayed.

I know I’ll lose her.
One of us will decide. Linda will say she can’t
do this anymore or I’ll say I can’t. Confused
only about how long to stay, we’ll meet and close it up.
She won’t let me hold her. I won’t care that my
eyes still work, that I can lift myself past staring.
Nothing from her will reach me after that.
I’ll drive back to them, their low white T-shaped house

At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, criss-crossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump

For a month now, wandering over the Sierras,
A poem had been gathering in my mind,
Details of significance and rhythm,
The way poems do, but still lacking a focus.
Last night I remembered the date and it all
Began to grow together and take on purpose.
We sat up late while Deneb moved over the zenith
And I told Marie all about Boston, how it looked

Somebody’s baby was buried to-day—
The empty white hearse from the grave rumbled back,
And the morning somehow seemed less smiling and gay
As I paused on the walk while it crossed on its way,
And a shadow seemed drawn o’er the sun’s golden track.

Somebody’s baby was laid out to rest,
White as a snowdrop, and fair to behold,
And the soft little hands were crossed over the breast,
And those hands and the lips and the eyelids were pressed
With kisses as hot as the eyelids were cold.

Somebody saw it go out of her sight,
Under the coffin lid—out through the door;
Somebody finds only darkness and blight

Once you saw a drove of young pigs
crossing the highway. One of them
pulling his body by the front feet,
the hind legs dragging flat.
Without thinking,
you called the Humane Society.
They came with a net and went for him.
They were matter of fact, uniformed;

Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important