Read The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Page 5

into that light thrown always toward them

  off the interminable, blue

  backstretches

  they gaze upon hopefully.

  And from what separate, enraged oceans

  can they possibly expect

  to save themselves,

  and for what? At times I say, obviously

  this window opens

  upon the seas and the blindnesses, it is from

  this very window

  that the signal will at last be issued for

  the taking of our own lives.

  Other times I suspect

  that among the trembling inner organs

  of a captured bird, people

  are climbing into buses in the morning fog,

  and I observe

  a woman, how the movements of her parts

  conspire to propel her

  from grayness into grayness, vague

  injustices attending her

  steps until I wonder

  what

  can they possibly mean, down there,

  by their arms and legs?—

  until I wonder

  what the voices must mean when they are singing.

  THE INCOGNITO LOUNGE

  ONE

  The Incognito Lounge

  The manager lady of this

  apartment dwelling has a face

  like a baseball with glasses and pathetically

  repeats herself. The man next door

  has a dog with a face that talks

  of stupidity to the night, the swimming pool

  has an empty, empty face.

  My neighbor has his underwear on

  tonight, standing among the parking spaces

  advising his friend never to show

  his face around here again.

  I go everywhere with my eyes closed and two

  eyeballs painted on my face. There is a woman

  across the court with no face at all.

  They’re perfectly visible this evening,

  about as unobtrusive as a storm of meteors,

  these questions of happiness

  plaguing the world.

  My neighbor has sent his child to Utah

  to be raised by the relatives of friends.

  He’s out on the generous lawn

  again, looking like he’s made

  out of phosphorus.

  The manager lady has just returned

  from the nearby graveyard, the last

  ceremony for a crushed paramedic.

  All day, news helicopters cruised aloft

  going whatwhatwhatwhatwhat.

  She pours me some boiled

  coffee that tastes like noise,

  warning me, once and for all,

  to pack up my troubles in an old kit bag

  and weep until the stones float away.

  How will I ever be able to turn

  from the window and feel love for her?—

  to see her and stop seeing

  this neighborhood, the towns of earth,

  these tables at which the saints

  sit down to the meal of temptations?

  And so on—nap, soup, window,

  say a few words into the telephone,

  smaller and smaller words.

  Some TV or maybe, I don’t know, a brisk

  rubber with cards nobody knows

  how many there are of.

  Couple of miserable gerbils

  in a tiny white cage, hysterical

  friends rodomontading about goals

  as if having them liquefied death.

  Maybe invite the lady with no face

  over here to explain all these elections:

  life. Liberty. Pursuit.

  Maybe invite the lady with no face

  over here to read my palm,

  sit out on the porch here in Arizona

  while she touches me.

  Last night, some kind

  of alarm went off up the street

  that nobody responded to.

  Small darling, it rang for you.

  Everything suffers invisibly,

  nothing is possible, in your face.

  The center of the world is closed.

  The Beehive, the 8-Ball, the Yo-Yo,

  the Granite and the Lightning and the Melody.

  Only the Incognito Lounge is open.

  My neighbor arrives.

  They have the television on.

  It’s a show about

  my neighbor in a loneliness, a light,

  walking the hour when every bed is a mouth.

  Alleys of dark trash, exhaustion

  shaped into residences—and what are the dogs

  so sure of that they shout like citizens

  driven from their minds in a stadium?

  In his fist he holds a note

  in his own handwriting,

  the same message everyone carries

  from place to place in the secret night,

  the one that nobody asks you for

  when you finally arrive, and the faces

  turn to you playing the national anthem

  and go blank, that’s

  what the show is about, that message.

  I was raised up from tiny

  childhood in those purple hills,

  right slam on the brink of language,

  and I claim it’s just as if

  you can’t do anything to this moment,

  that’s how inextinguishable

  it all is. Sunset,

  Arizona, everybody waiting

  to get arrested, all very

  much an honor, I assure you.

  Maybe invite the lady with no face

  to plead my cause, to get

  me off the hook or name

  me one good reason.

  The air is full of megawatts

  and the megawatts are full of silence.

  She reaches to the radio like St. Theresa.

  Here at the center of the world

  each wonderful store cherishes

  in its mind undeflowerable

  mannequins in a pale, electric light.

  The parking lot is full,

  everyone having the same dream

  of shopping and shopping

  through an afternoon

  that changes like a face.

  But these shoppers of America—

  carrying their hearts toward the bluffs

  of the counters like thoughtless purchases,

  walking home under the sea,

  standing in a dark house at midnight

  before the open refrigerator, completely

  transformed in the light…

  Every bus ride is like this one,

  in the back the same two uniformed boy scouts

  de-pantsing a little girl, up front

  the woman whose mission is to tell the driver

  over and over to shut up.

  Maybe you permit yourself to find

  it beautiful on this bus as it wafts

  like a dirigible toward suburbia

  over a continent of saloons,

  over the robot desert that now turns

  purple and comes slowly through the dust.

  This is the moment you’ll seek

  the words for over the imitation

  and actual wood of successive

  tabletops indefatigably,

  when you watched a baby child

  catch a bee against the tinted glass

  and were married to a deep

  comprehension and terror.

  White, White Collars

  We work in this building and we are hideous

  in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes

  woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels

  and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us,

  turning and returning like the spray of light that goes

  around dance-halls among the dancing fools.

  My office smells like a theory,
but here one weeps

  to see the goodness of the world laid bare

  and rising with the government on its lips,

  the alphabet congealing in the air

  around our heads. But in my belly’s flames

  someone is dancing, calling me by many names

  that are secret and filled with light and rise

  and break, and I see my previous lives.

  Enough

  The terminal flopped out

  around us like a dirty hankie,

  surrounded by the future population

  of death row in their disguises—high

  school truant, bewildered Korean refugee—

  we complain that Bus 18 will never arrive,

  when it arrives complain what an injury

  is this bus again today, venerable

  and destined to stall. When it stalls

  at 16th and McDowell most of us get out

  to eat ourselves alive in a 24-hour diner

  that promises not to carry us beyond

  this angry dream of grease and the cries

  of spoons, that swears our homes

  are invisible and we never lived in them,

  that a bus hasn’t passed here in years.

  Sometimes the closest I get to loving

  the others is hating all of us

  for drinking coffee in this stationary sadness

  where nobody’s dull venereal joking breaks

  into words that say it for the last time,

  as if we held in the heavens of our arms

  not cherishable things, but only the strength

  it takes to leave home and then go back again.

  Night

  I am looking out over

  the bay at sundown and getting

  lushed with a fifty-nine-

  year-old heavily rouged cocktail

  lounge singer; this total stranger.

  We watch the pitiful little

  ferry boats that ply between this world

  and that other one touched

  to flame by the sunset,

  talking with unmanageable

  excitement about the weather.

  The sky and huge waters turn

  vermilion as the cheap-drink hour ends.

  We part with a grief as cutting

  as that line between water and air.

  I go downstairs and I go

  outside. It is like stepping into the wake

  of a tactless remark, the city’s stupid

  chatter hurrying to cover up

  the shocked lull. The moon’s

  mouth is moving, and I am just

  leaning forward to listen

  for the eventual terrible

  silence when he begins,

  in the tones of a saddened

  delinquent son returned

  unrecognizable, naming

  those things it now seems

  I might have done

  to have prevented his miserable

  life. I am desolate.

  What is happening to me.

  Heat

  Here in the electric dusk your naked lover

  tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.

  It’s beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,

  Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,

  streaming with hatred in the heat

  as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin

  to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,

  and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.

  August,

  you’re just an erotic hallucination,

  just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,

  are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,

  this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,

  the bogus moon of tenderness and magic

  you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

  The Boarding

  One of these days under the white

  clouds onto the white

  lines of the goddamn PED

  X-ING I shall be flattened,

  and I shall spill my bag of discount

  medicines upon the avenue,

  and an abruptly materializing bouquet

  of bums, retirees, and Mexican

  street-gangers will see all what

  kinds of diseases are enjoying me

  and what kind of underwear and my little

  old lady’s legs spidery with veins.

  So Mr. Young and Lovely Negro Bus

  Driver I care exactly this: zero,

  that you see these things

  now as I fling my shopping

  up by your seat, putting

  this left-hand foot way up

  on the step so this dress rides up,

  grabbing this metal pole like

  a beam of silver falling down

  from Heaven to my aid, thank-you,

  hollering, “Watch det my medicine

  one second for me will you dolling,

  I’m four feet and det’s a tall bus

  you got and it’s hot and I got

  every disease they are making

  these days, my God, Jesus Christ,

  I’m telling you out of my soul.”

  The Song

  The small, high wailing

  that envelops us here,

  distant, indistinct,

  yet, too, immediate,

  we take to be only

  the utterances of loose fan

  belts in the refrigerating

  system, or the shocked hum

  that issues from the darkness

  of telephone receivers;

  but it speaks to us

  so deeply we think it

  may well be the beseeching

  of the stars, the shameless

  weeping of coyotes

  out on the Mohave.

  Please.

  Please, stop listening

  to this sound, which

  is actually the terrible

  keening of the ones

  whose hearts have been broken

  by lives spent in search

  of its source,

  by our lives of failure,

  spent looking everywhere

  for someone to say these words.

  The White Fires of Venus

  We mourn this senseless planet of regret,

  droughts, rust, rain, cadavers

  that can’t tell us, but I promise

  you one day the white fires

  of Venus shall rage: the dead,

  feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each

  of us will have his resurrected one to tell him,

  “Greetings. You will recover

  or die. The simple cure

  for everything is to destroy

  all the stethoscopes that will transmit

  silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness

  is in learning to admit

  solitude as one admits

  the bayonet: gracefully,

  now that already

  it pierces the heart.

  Living one: you move among many

  dancers and don’t know which

  you are the shadow of;

  you want to kiss your own face in the mirror

  but do not approach,

  knowing you must not touch one

  like that. Living

  one, while Venus flares

  O set the cereal afire,

  O the refrigerator harboring things

  that live on into death unchanged.”

  They know all about us on Andromeda,

  they peek at us, they see us

  in this world illumined and pasteled

  phonily like a bus station,

  they are with us when the streets fall down fraught

  with laundromats and each of us

  closes himself in his small

  San Francisco without recourse.

/>   They see you with your face of fingerprints

  carrying your instructions in gloved hands

  trying to touch things, and know you

  for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains,

  trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape

  past the window of this then that dark

  closed business establishment.

  The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music

  converged on by ambulance sirens

  and they understand everything.

  They’re on your side. They forgive you.

  I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves,

  who are as diamonds to the Andromedans,

  who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds:

  namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains,

  their expressions lodged among the drugs

  and sunglasses, each gazing down too long

  into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony.

  O Andromedans they don’t know what to do

  with themselves and so they sit there

  until they go home where they lie down

  until they get up, and you beyond the light years know

  that if sleeping is dying, then waking

  is birth, and a life

  is many lives. I love them because they know how

  to manipulate change

  in the pockets musically, these whose faces the seasons

  never give a kiss, these

  who are always courteous to the faces

  of presumptions, the presuming streets,

  the hotels, the presumption of rain in the streets.

  I’m telling you it’s cold inside the body that is not the body,

  lonesome behind the face

  that is certainly not the face

  of the person one meant to become.

  TWO

  Nude

  My luck has been so all but

  perfect I can imagine

  nothing that might be added

  save perhaps one or two more

  such truly astonishing