Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 42

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roads and streetsigns rocks and hills and names on everybody’s house

looking for the lost address of a notable Frenchman of the Void

to pay our tender crime of homage to his helpless menhir

and lay my temporary American Howl on top of his silent Calligramme

for him to read between the lines with Xray eyes of Poet

as he by miracle had read his own death lyric in the Seine

I hope some wild kidmonk lays his pamphlet on my grave for God to read me on cold winter nights in heaven

already our hands have vanished from that place my hand writes now in a room in Paris Git-le-Coeur

Ah William what grit in the brain you had what’s death

I walked all over the cemetery and still couldn’t find your grave

what did you mean by that fantastic cranial bandage in your poems

O solemn stinking deathshead what’ve you got to say nothing and that’s barely an answer

You can’t drive autos into a sixfoot grave tho the universe is mausoleum big enough for anything

the universe is a graveyard and I walk around alone in here

knowing that Apollinaire was on the same street 50 years ago

his madness is only around the corner and Genet is with us stealing books

the West is at war again and whose lucid suicide will set it all right

Guillaume Guillaume how I envy your fame your accomplishment for American letters

your Zone with its long crazy line of bullshit about death

come out of the grave and talk thru the door of my mind

issue new series of images oceanic haikus blue taxicabs in Moscow negro statues of Buddha

pray for me on the phonograph record of your former existence

with a long sad voice and strophes of deep sweet music sad and scratchy as World War I

I’ve eaten the blue carrots you sent out of the grave and Van Gogh’s ear and maniac peyote of Artaud

and will walk down the streets of New York in the black cloak of French poetry

improvising our conversation in Paris at Pere Lachaise

and the future poem that takes its inspiration from the light bleeding into your grave

II

Here in Paris I am your guest O friendly shade

the absent hand of Max Jacob

Picasso in youth bearing me a tube of Mediterranean

myself attending Rousseau’s old red banquet I ate his violin

great party at the Bateau Lavoir not mentioned in the textbooks of Algeria

Tzara in the Bois de Boulogne explaining the alchemy of the machineguns of the cuckoos

he weeps translating me into Swedish

well dressed in a violet tie and black pants

a sweet purple beard which emerged from his face like the moss hanging from the walls of Anarchism

he spoke endlessly of his quarrels with Andre Breton

whom he had helped one day trim his golden mustache

old Blaise Cendrars received me into his study and spoke wearily of the enormous length of Siberia

Jacques Vache invited me to inspect his terrible collection of pistols

poor Cocteau saddened by the once marvelous Radiguet at his last thought I fainted

Rigaut with a letter of introduction to Death

and Gide praised the telephone and other remarkable inventions

we agreed in principle though he gossiped of lavender underwear

but for all that he drank deeply of the grass of Whitman and was intrigued by all lovers named Colorado

princes of America arriving with their armfuls of shrapnel and baseball

Oh Guillaume the world so easy to fight seemed so easy

did you know the great political classicists would invade Montparnasse

with not one sprig of prophetic laurel to green their foreheads

not one pulse of green in their pillows no leaf left from their wars—Maya-kovsky arrived and revolted

III

Came back sat on a tomb and stared at your rough menhir

a piece of thin granite like an unfinished phallus

a cross fading into the rock 2 poems on the stone one Coeur Renversee

other Habituez-vous comme moi A ces prodiges que j’annonce Guillaume Apollinaire de Kostrowitsky

someone placed a jam bottle filled with daisies and a 5&10? surrealist typist ceramic rose

happy little tomb with flowers and overturned heart

under a fine mossy tree beneath which I sat snaky trunk

summer boughs and leaves umbrella over the menhir and nobody there

Et quelle voix sinistre ulule Guillaume qu’es-tu devenu

his nextdoor neighbor is a tree

there underneath the crossed bones heaped and yellow cranium perhaps

and the printed poems Alcools in my pocket his voice in the museum

Now middleage footsteps walk the gravel

a man stares at the name and moves toward the crematory building

same sky rolls over thru clouds as Mediterranean days on the Riviera during war

drinking Apollo in love eating occasional opium he’d taken the light

One must have felt the shock in St. Germain when he went out Jacob & Picasso coughing in the dark

a bandage unrolled and the skull left still on a bed outstretched pudgy fingers the mystery and ego gone

a bell tolls in the steeple down the street birds warble in the chestnut trees

Famille Bremont sleeps nearby Christ hangs big chested and sexy in their tomb

my cigarette smokes in my lap and fills the page with smoke and flames

an ant runs over my corduroy sleeve the tree I lean on grows slowly

bushes and branches upstarting through the tombs one silky spiderweb gleaming on granite

I am buried here and sit by my grave beneath a tree

Paris, Winter-Spring 1958

Message

        Since we had changed

        rogered spun worked

        wept and pissed together

        I wake up in the morning

        with a dream in my eyes

        but you are gone in NY

        remembering me Good

        I love you I love you

        & your brothers are crazy

        I accept their drunk cases

It’s too long that I have been alone

it’s too long that I’ve sat up in bed

without anyone to touch on the knee, man

or woman I don’t care what anymore, I

want love I was born for I want you with me now

Ocean liners boiling over the Atlantic

Delicate steelwork of unfinished skyscrapers

Back end of the dirigible roaring over Lakehurst

Six women dancing together on a red stage naked

The leaves are green on all the trees in Paris now

I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes

Paris, May 1958

To Lindsay

Vachel, the stars are out

dusk has fallen on the Colorado road

a car crawls slowly across the plain

in the dim light the radio blares its jazz

the heartbroken salesman lights another cigarette

In another city 27 years ago

I see your shadow on the wall

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