It has all
come back today.
That memory for me is nothing
there ever was,
That man
so long,
when stretched out
and so bold
on his ground
and so much
lonely anywhere.
*
But never to forget
that moment
when we came out of the tavern
and wandered through the carnival.
They were playing
the washington post march
but i mistook it for manhattan beach
for all around were the colored lights
of delirium
to the left the boats
of Italians
and ahead of us, past the shoulders
of St. Peter, the magician of those fishermen
the bay
stood, and immediately is it the silent
inclined pole where tomorrow the young men
of this colony
so dangerous on the street
will fall harmlessly
into the water.
They are not the solid
but are the solidly built
citizens, and they are about us
as we walk across
the square
with their black provocative
women
slender, like whips of
sex in the sousa filled night.
Where edged
by that plastic man in the music
of a transplanted time and
enough of drunkenness
to make you senseless of all
but virtue
(there is never
no, there is never a small complaint)
(that all things shit poverty,
and Life, one wars on with
many embraces) oh it was a time that was perfect
but for my own hesitating
to know all I had not known.
Pure existence, even in the crowds
I love
will never be possible for me
even with the men I love
This is
the guilt
that kills me
My adulterated presence
but please believe with all men
I love to be
*
That memory
of how he lay out
on the floor in his great length
and when morning came,
late,
he lingered
in the vastest of all cities
in this hemisphere
and all other movement
stopped, nowhere
else was there a stirring known to us
yet that morning I stood
by the window up 3 levels
and watched a game
of stick ball, thinking of going away,
and wondering what would befall that man
when he returned to his territory.
The street as you could guess
was thick with their running
and cars,
themselves, paid that activity
such respect I thought a ritual
in the truest sense,
where all time and all motion
part around the space of men
in that act
as does a river flow past
the large rock.
*
And he slept.
In the next room, waiting
in an outward slumber
for the time
we climbed into the car, accepting all things
from love, the currency of which is
parting, and glancing.
Then went
out of that city to jersey
where instantly we could not find our way
and the maze of the outlands west
starts that quick
where you may touch
your finger to liberty
and look so short a space
to the columnar bust
of New York
and know those people exist
as a speck in your own lonely heart
who will shortly depart,
taking a conveyance for the
radial stretches
past girls on corners
past drugstores, tired hesitant
creatures who I also love
in all their alienation were it not so
past all equipment of country side
to temporary homes
where the wash of sea and other
populations come
once more to whisper only one thing
for all people: a late and far-away
night yearning for
and when he gets there
I want him to stay away
from the taverns of familiarity
I want him to walk by the seashore alone
in all height
which is nothing more than
a mountain. Or the hailing of a mast
with big bright eyes.
So rushing,
all the senses
come to him
as a swarm of golden bees
and their sting is the power
he uses as parts of
the oldest brain. He hears
the delicate thrush
of the water attacking
He hears the cries, falling gulls
and watched silently the gesture of grey
bygone people. He hears their cries
and messages, he never
ignores any sound.
As they come to him he places them
puts clothes upon them
and gives them their place
in their new explanation, there is never
a lost time, nor any inhabitant
of that time to go split by prisms or unplaced
and unattended,
that you may believe
is the breath he gives
the great already occurred and nightly beginning world.
So with the populace of his mind
you think his nights? are not
lonely. My God. Of his
loves, you know nothing and of his
false beginning
you can know nothing,
but this thing to be marked
again
only
he who worships the gods with his strictness
can be of their company
the cat and the animals, the bird he took
from the radiator
of my car saying it had died
a natural death, rarely seen in a bird.
To play, as areal particulars can out of the span
of Man, and of all, this man
does not
he, does, he
walks
by the sea
in my memory
and sees all things and to him
are presented at night
the whispers of the most flung shores
from Gloucester out
