Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 48

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          my once fabulous amours in the Bronx

               faraway—

paths crossing in these hidden streets,

     my history summed up, my absences

          and ecstasies in Harlem—

—sun shining down on all I own

     in one eyeblink to the horizon

          in my last eternity—

               matter is water.

Sad,

     I take the elevator and go

          down, pondering,

and walk on the pavements staring into all man’s

                    plateglass, faces,

          questioning after who loves,

     and stop, bemused

          in front of an automobile shopwindow

     standing lost in calm thought,

          traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me

               waiting for a moment when …

Time to go home & cook supper & listen to

          the romantic war news on the radio

               … all movement stops

& I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,

     tenderness flowing thru the buildings,

     my fingertips touching reality’s face,

my own face streaked with tears in the mirror

          of some window—at dusk—

                    where I have no desire—

for bonbons—or to own the dresses or Japanese

               lampshades of intellection—

Confused by the spectacle around me,

     Man struggling up the street

          with packages, newspapers,

                    ties, beautiful suits

          toward his desire

     Man, woman, streaming over the pavements

          red lights clocking hurried watches &

               movements at the curb—

And all these streets leading

     so crosswise, honking, lengthily,

               by avenues

     stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums

               thru such halting traffic

                    screaming cars and engines

so painfully to this

     countryside, this graveyard

          this stillness

                    on deathbed or mountain

     once seen

               never regained or desired

                    in the mind to come

where all Manhattan that I’ve seen must disappear.

New York, October 1958

Ignu

On top of that if you know me I pronounce you an ignu

Ignu knows nothing of the world

a great ignoramus in factories though he may own or inspire them or even be production manager

Ignu has knowledge of the angel indeed ignu is angel in comical form

W. C. Fields Harpo Marx ignus Whitman an ignu

Rimbaud a natural ignu in his boy pants

The ignu may be queer though like not kind ignu blows archangels for the strange thrill

a gnostic women love him Christ overflowed with trembling semen for many a dead aunt

He’s a great cocksman most beautiful girls are worshipped by ignu

Hollywood dolls or lone Marys of Idaho long-legged publicity women and secret housewives

have known ignu in another lifetime and remember their lover

Husbands also are secretly tender to ignu their buddy

oldtime friendship can do anything cuckold bugger drunk trembling and happy

Ignu lives only once and eternally and knows it

he sleeps in everybody’s bed everyone’s lonesome for ignu ignu knew solitude early

So ignu’s a primitive of cock and mind

equally the ignu has written liverish tomes personal metaphysics abstract

images that scratch the moon ‘lightningflash-flintspark’ naked lunch fried shoes adios king

The shadow of the angel is waving in the opposite direction

dawn of intelligence turns the telephones into strange animals

he attacks the rose garden with his mystical shears snip snip snip

Ignu has painted Park Avenue with his own long melancholy

and ignu giggles in a hard chair over tea in Paris bald in his decaying room a black hotel

Ignu with his wild mop walks by Colosseum weeping

he plucks a clover from Keats’ grave & Shelley’s a blade of grass

knew Coleridge they had slow hung-up talks at midnight over mahogany tables in London

sidestreet rooms in wintertime rain outside fog the cabman blows his hand

Charles Dickens is born ignu hears the wail of the babe

Ignu goofs nights under bridges and laughs at battleships

ignu is a battleship without guns in the North Sea lost O the flowerness of the moment

he knows geography he was there before he’ll get out and die already

reborn a bearded humming Jew of Arabian mournful jokes

man with a star on his forehead and halo over his cranium

listening to music musing happy at the fall of a leaf the moonlight of immortality in his hair

table-hopping most elegant comrade of all most delicate mannered in the Sufi court

he wasn’t even there at all

wearing zodiacal blue sleeves and the long peaked conehat of a magician

harkening to the silence of a well at midnight under a red star

in the lobby of Rockefeller Center attentive courteous bare-eyed enthusiastic with or without pants

he listens to jazz as if he were a negro afflicted with jewish melancholy and white divinity

Ignu’s a natural you can see it when he pays the cabfare abstracted

pulling off the money from an impossible saintly roll

or counting his disappearing pennies to give to the strange busdriver whom he admires

Ignu has sought you out he’s the seeker of God

and God breaks down the world for him every ten years

he sees lightning flash in empty daylight when the sky is blue

he hears Blake’s disembodied Voice recite the Sunflower in a room in Harlem

No woe on him surrounded by 700 thousand mad scholars moths fly out of his sleeve

He wants to die give up go mad break through into Eternity

live on and teach an aged saint or break down to an eyebrow clown

All ignus know each other in a moment’s talk and measure each other up at once

as lifetime friends romantic winks and giggles across continents

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