Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 36

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Seattle!—department stores full of fur coats and camping equipment, mad noontime businessmen in gabardine coats talking on streetcorners to keep up the structure, I float past, birds cry,

Salvation Army offers soup on rotting block, six thousand beggars groan at a meal of hopeful beans.

February 2, 1956

Tears

I’m crying all the time now.

I cried all over the street when I left the Seattle Wobbly Hall.

I cried listening to Bach.

I cried looking at the happy flowers in my backyard, I cried at the sadness of the middle-aged trees.

Happiness exists I feel it.

I cried for my soul, I cried for the world’s soul.

The world has a beautiful soul.

God appearing to be seen and cried over. Overflowing heart of Paterson.

Seattle, February 2, 1956

Scribble

Rexroth’s face reflecting human

     tired bliss

White haired, wing browed

     gas mustache,

          flowers jet out of

               his sad head,

listening to Edith Piaf street song

     as she walks the universe

               with all life gone

               and cities disappeared

                    only the God of Love

                         left smiling.

Berkeley, March 1956

In the Baggage Room at Greyhound

I

In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal

sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart

worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in the night-time red downtown heaven,

staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty of our lives, irritable baggage clerks,

nor the millions of weeping relatives surrounding the buses waving goodbye,

nor other millions of the poor rushing around from city to city to see their loved ones,

nor an indian dead with fright talking to a huge cop by the Coke machine,

nor this trembling old lady with a cane taking the last trip of her life,

nor the red-capped cynical porter collecting his quarters and smiling over the smashed baggage,

nor me looking around at the horrible dream,

nor mustached negro Operating Clerk named Spade, dealing out with his marvelous long hand the fate of thousands of express packages,

nor fairy Sam in the basement limping from leaden trunk to trunk,

nor Joe at the counter with his nervous breakdown smiling cowardly at the customers,

nor the grayish-green whale’s stomach interior loft where we keep the baggage in hideous racks,

hundreds of suitcases full of tragedy rocking back and forth waiting to be opened,

nor the baggage that’s lost, nor damaged handles, nameplates vanished, busted wires & broken ropes, whole trunks exploding on the concrete floor,

nor seabags emptied into the night in the final warehouse.

II

Yet Spade reminded me of Angel, unloading a bus,

dressed in blue overalls black face official Angel’s workman cap,

pushing with his belly a huge tin horse piled high with black baggage,

looking up as he passed the yellow light bulb of the loft

and holding high on his arm an iron shepherd’s crook.

III

It was the racks, I realized, sitting myself on top of them now as is my wont at lunchtime to rest my tired foot,

it was the racks, great wooden shelves and stanchions posts and beams assembled floor to roof jumbled with baggage,

—the Japanese white metal postwar trunk gaudily flowered & headed for Fort Bragg,

one Mexican green paper package in purple rope adorned with names for Nogales,

hundreds of radiators all at once for Eureka,

crates of Hawaiian underwear,

rolls of posters scattered over the Peninsula, nuts to Sacramento,

one human eye for Napa,

an aluminum box of human blood for Stockton

and a little red package of teeth for Calistoga—

it was the racks and these on the racks I saw naked in electric light the night before I quit,

the racks were created to hang our possessions, to keep us together, a temporary shift in space,

God’s only way of building the rickety structure of Time, to hold the bags to send on the roads, to carry our luggage from place to place looking for a bus to ride us back home to Eternity where the heart was left and farewell tears began.

IV

A swarm of baggage sitting by the counter as the transcontinental bus pulls in.

The clock registering 12:15 A.M., May 9, 1956, the second hand moving forward, red.

Getting ready to load my last bus.—Farewell, Walnut Creek Richmond Vallejo Portland Pacific Highway

Fleet-footed Quicksilver, god of transience.

One last package sits lone at midnight sticking up out of the Coast rack high as the dusty fluorescent light.

The wage they pay us is too low to live on. Tragedy reduced to numbers.

This for the poor shepherds. I am a communist.

Farewell ye Greyhound where I suffered so much, hurt my knee and scraped my hand and built my pectoral muscles big as vagina.

May 9, 1956

Psalm III

To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road.

Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a higher place, the plaza of eternity.

Illuminate the welders in shipyards with the brilliance of their torches.

Let the crane operator lift up his arm for joy.

Let elevators creak and speak, ascending and descending in awe.

Let the mercy of the flower’s direction beckon in the eye.

Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness—to seek the light.

Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness—to seek the light.

Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.

Let Puget Sound be a blast of light.

I feed on your Name like a cockroach on a crumb—this cockroach is holy.

Seattle, June, 1956

Many Loves

“Resolved to sing no songs henceforth but those of manly attachment”

—Walt Whitman

Neal Cassady was my animal: he brought me to my knees

and taught me the love of his cock and the secrets of his mind

And we met and conversed, went walking in the evening by the park

Up to Harlem, recollecting Denver, and Dan Budd, a hero

And we made shift to sack out in Harlem, after a long evening,

Jack and host in a large double bed, I volunteered for the cot, and Neal

Volunteered for the cot with me, we stripped and lay down.

I wore my underwear, my shorts, and he his briefs—

lights out on the narrow bed I turned to my side, with my back to his Irish boy’s torso,

and huddled and balanced on the edge, and kept distance—

and hung my head over and kept my arm over the side, withdrawn

And he seeing my fear stretched out his arm, and put it around my breast

Saying “Draw near me” and gathered me in upon him:

I lay there trembling, and felt his great arm like a king’s

And his breasts, his heart slow thudding against my back,

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