Baseball

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

Alan drives a cab at night,
Has cab driver’s elbow
In his left arm,
Sells real estate by day.

Alan dreams of a big deal,
Of opening a classy poolhall.
Has a four million dollar deal
Which will probably fall through,

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

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

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.,

I

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.“

Curve behind the sun again

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

in memory of R.I.S. 1.

Would I know her anywhere, this child

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,

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,

I

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,

I

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,

Somebody dies every four minutes
in New York State —

To hell with you and your poetry —
You will rot and be blown
through the next solar system
with the rest of the gases —

What the hell do you know about it ?

AXIOMS

1

There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’.

Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series,

The sad marvels;

Of this was told