Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 49

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sad moment paying the cab goodbye and speeding away uptown

One or two grim ignus in the pack

one laughing monk in dungarees

one delighted by cracking his eggs in an egg cup

one chews gum to music all night long rock and roll

one anthropologist cuckoo in the Peten rainforest

one sits in jail all year and bets karmaic racetrack

one chases girls down East Broadway into the horror movie

one pulls out withered grapes and rotten onions from his pants

one has a nannygoat under his bed to amuse visitors plasters the wall with his crap

collects scorpions whiskies skies etc. would steal the moon if he could find it

That would set fire to America but none of these make ignu

it’s the soul that makes the style the tender firecracker of his thought

the amity of letters from strange cities to old friends

and the new radiance of morning on a foreign bed

A comedy of personal being his grubby divinity

Eliot probably an ignu one of the few who’s funny when he eats

Williams of Paterson a dying American ignu

Burroughs a purest ignu his haircut is a cream his left finger

pinkie chopped off for early ignu reasons metaphysical spells love spells with psychoanalysts

his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars

Celine himself an old ignu over prose

I saw him in Paris dirty old gentleman of ratty talk

with longhaired cough three wormy sweaters round his neck

brown mould under historic fingernails

pure genius his giving morphine all night to 1400 passengers on a sinking ship

‘because they were all getting emotional’

Who’s amazing you is ignu communicate with me

by mail post telegraph phone street accusation or scratching at my window

and send me a true sign I’ll reply special delivery

DEATH IS A LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT

Knowledge born of stamps words coins pricks jails seasons sweet ambition laughing gas

history with a gold halo photographs of the sea painting a celestial din in the

bright window

one eye in a black cloud

and the lone vulture on a sand plain seen from the window of a Turkish bus

It must be a trick. Two diamonds in the hand one Poetry one Charity

proves we have dreamed and the long sword of intelligence

over which I constantly stumble like my pants at the age six—embarrassed.

New York, November 1958

Battleship Newsreel

I was high on tea in my fo’c’sle near the forepeak hatch listening to the stars envisioning the kamikazes flapping and turning in the soiled clouds ackack burst into fire a vast hole ripped out of the bow like a burning lily we dumped our oilcans of nitroglycerine among the waving octopi dull thud and boom of thunder undersea the cough of the tubercular machinegunner

flames in the hold among the cans of ether the roar of battleships far away

rolling in the sea like whales surrounded by dying ants the screams the captain mad

Suddenly a golden light came over the ocean and grew large the radiance entered the sky

a deathly chill and heaviness entered my body I could scarce lift my eye

and the ship grew sheathed in light like an overexposed photograph fading in the brain.

New York, 1959

V

KADDISH AND

RELATED POEMS

(1959–1960)

Kaddish

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.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer—

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn—

Dreaming back thru life, Your time—and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,

the final moment—the flower burning in the Day—and what comes after,

looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city

a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed—

like a poem in the dark—escaped back to Oblivion—

No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream, trapped in its disappearance,

sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other,

worshipping the God included in it all—longing or inevitability?—while it lasts, a Vision—anything more?

It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,

Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shouldering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant—and the sky above—an old blue place.

or down the Avenue to the south, to—as I walk toward the Lower East Side —where you walked 50 years ago, little girl—from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock—

then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?—toward Newark—

toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards—

Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this life?

Toward the Key in the window—and the great Key lays its head of light on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the sidewalk—in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater—and the place of poverty

you knew, and I know, but without caring now—Strange to have moved thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,

with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstoops doors and dark boys on the street, fire escapes old as you

—Tho you’re not old now, that’s left here with me—

Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe—and I guess that dies with us—enough to cancel all that comes—What came is gone forever every time—

That’s good! That leaves it open for no regret—no fear radiators, lacklove, torture even toothache in the end—

Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul—and the lamb, the soul, in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change’s fierce hunger—hair and teeth—and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin, braintricked Implacability.

Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you’re out, Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your century, done with God, done with the path thru it—Done with yourself at last—Pure —Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all—before the world—

There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good.

No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more fear of Louis,

and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts, loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands—

No more of sister Elanor,—she gone before you—we kept it secret—you

killed her—or she killed herself to bear with you—an arthritic heart

—But Death’s killed you both—No matter—

Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and

weeks—forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth,

or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin’s at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar —by standing room with Elanor & Max—watching also the Capitalists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,

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