Reality Sandwiches: 1953-1960 Read online

  -- uncanny feeling the white cat

  sleeping on the table

  will open its eyes in a moment

  and be looking at me --.

  One might sit in this Chiapas

  recording the apparitions in the field

  visible from a hammock

  looking out across the shadow of the pasture

  in all the semblance of Eternity

  . . . a dwarfed thatch roof

  down in the grass in a hollow slope

  under the tall crowd of vegetation

  waiting at the wild edge:

  the long shade of the mountain beyond

  in the near distance,

  its individual hairline of trees

  traced fine and dark along the ridge

  against the transparent sky light,

  rifts and holes in the blue air

  and amber brightenings of clouds

  disappearing down the other side

  into the South . . .

  palms with lethargic feelers

  rattling in presage of rain,

  shifting their fronds

  in the direction of the balmy wind,

  monstrous animals

  sprayed up out of the ground

  settling and unsettling

  as in water . . .

  and later in the night

  a moment of premonition

  when the plenilunar cloudfilled sky

  is still and small.

  So spent a night

  with drug and hammock

  at Chichen Itza on the Castle:--

  I can see the moon

  moving over the edge of the night forest

  and follow its destination

  through the clear dimensions of the sky

  from end to end of the dark

  circular horizon.

  High dim stone portals,

  entablatures of illegible scripture,

  bas-reliefs of unknown perceptions:

  and now the flicker of my lamp

  and smell of kerosene on dust-

  strewn floor where ant wends

  its nightly ritual way toward great faces

  worn down by rain.

  In front of me a deathshead

  half a thousand years old

  -- and have seen cocks a thousand

  old grown over with moss and batshit

  stuck out of the wall

  in a dripping vaulted house of rock --

  but deathshead's here

  on portal still and thinks its way

  through centuries the thought

  of the same night in which I sit

  in skully meditation

  -- sat in many times before by

  artisan other than me

  until his image of ghostly change

  appeared unalterable --

  but now his fine thought's vaguer

  than my dream of him:

  and only the crude skull figurement's

  gaunt insensible glare is left,

  with its broken plumes of sensation

  and indecipherable headdresses of intellect

  scattered in the madness of oblivion

  to holes and notes of elemental stone,

  blind face of animal transcendency

  over the holy ruin of the world

  dissolving into the sunless wall of a blackened room

  on a time-rude pyramid rebuilt

  in the bleak flat night of Yucatan

  where I come with my own mad mind to study

  alien hieroglyphs of Eternity.

  A creak in the rooms scared me.

  Some sort of bird, vampire or swallow,

  flees with little paper wingflap

  around the summit in its own air unconcerned

  with the great stone tree I perch on.

  Continual metallic

  whirr of chicharras,

  then lesser chirps

  of cricket: 5 blasts

  of the leg whistle.

  The creak of an opening

  door in the forest,

  some sort of weird birdsong

  or reptile croak.

  My hat woven of hennequin

  on the stone floor

  as a leaf on the waters,

  as perishable;

  my candle wavers continuously

  and will go out.

  Pale Uxmal,

  unhistoric, like a dream,

  Tuluum shimmering on the coast in ruins;

  Chichen Itza naked

  constructed on a plain;

  Palenque, broken chapels in the green

  basement of a mount;

  lone Kabah by the highway;

  Piedras Negras buried again

  by dark archaeologists;

  Yaxchilan

  resurrected in the wild,

  and all the limbo of Xbalba still unknown --

  floors under roofcomb of branch,

  foundation to ornament

  tumbled to the flowers,

  pyramids and stairways

  raced with vine,

  limestone corbels

  down in the river of trees,

  pillars and corridors

  sunken under the flood of years:

  Time's slow wall overtopping

  all that firmament of mind,

  as if a shining waterfall of leaves and rain

  were built down solid from the endless sky

  through which no thought can pass.

  A great red fat rooster

  mounted on a tree stump

  in the green afternoon,

  the ego of the very fields,

  screams in the holy sunlight!

  -- I can't think with that

  supersonic cock intensity

  crucifying my skull

  in its imaginery sleep.

  -- was looking back

  with eyes shut to

  where they crawled

  like ants on brown old temples

  building their minute ruins

  and disappearing into the wild

  leaving many mysteries

  of deathly volition

  to be divined.

  I alone know the great crystal door

  to the House of Night,

  a legend of centuries

  -- I and a few indians.

  And had I mules and money I could find

  the Cave of Amber

  and the Cave of Gold

  rumored of the cliffs of Tumbala.

  I found the face of one

  of the Nine Guardians of the Night

  hidden in a mahogany hut

  in the Area of Lost Souls

  -- first relic of kind for that place.

  And I found as well a green leaf

  shaped like a human heart;

  but to whom shall I send this

  anachronistic valentine?

  Yet these ruins so much

  woke me to nostalgia

  for the classic stations

  of the earth,

  the ancient continent

  I have not seen

  and the few years

  of memory left

  before the ultimate night

  of war.

  As if these ruins were not enough,

  as if man could go

  no further before heaven

  till he exhausted

  the physical round

  of his own mortality

  in the obscure cities

  hidden in the ageing world

  . . . the few actual

  ecstatic conscious souls

  certain to be found,

  familiars . . .

  returning after years

  to my own scene

  transfigured:

  to hurry change

  to hurry the years

  bring me to my fate.

  So I dream nightly of an embarcation,

  captains, captains,

  iron passageways, cabin lights,

  Bro
oklyn across the waters,

  the great dull boat, visitors, farewells,

  the blurred vast sea --

  one trip a lifetime's loss or gain:

  as Europe is my own imagination

  -- many shall see her,

  many shall not --

  though it's only the old familiar world

  and not some abstract mystical dream.

  And in a moment of previsioning sleep

  I see that continent in rain,

  black streets, old night, a

  fading monument . . .

  And a long journey unaccomplished

  yet, on antique was

  rolling in gray barren dunes under

  the world's waste of light

  toward ports of childish geography

  the rusty ship will

  harbor in . . .

  What nights might I not see

  penniless among the Arab

  mysteries of dirty towns around

  the casbahs of the docks?

  Clay paths, mud walls,

  the smell of green cigarettes,

  creosote and rank salt water --

  dark structures overhead,

  shapes of machinery and façade

  of hull: and a bar lamp

  burning in the wooden shack

  across from the dim

  mountain of sulphur on the pier.

  Toward what city

  will I travel? What wild houses

  do I go to occupy?

  What vagrant rooms and streets

  and lights in the long night

  urge my expectation? What genius

  of sensation in ancient

  halls? what jazz beyond jazz

  in future blue saloons?

  what love in the cafes of God?

  I thought, five years ago

  sitting in my apartment,

  my eyes were opened for an hour

  seeing in dreadful ecstasy

  the motionless buildings

  of New York rotting

  under the tides of Heaven.

  There is a god

  dying in America

  already created

  in the imagination of men

  made palpable

  for adoration:

  there is an inner

  anterior image

  of divinity

  beckoning me out

  to pilgrimage.

  O future, unimaginable God.

  Finca Tacalapan de San

  Leandro, Palenque,

  Chiapas, Mexico 1954 --

  San Francisco1955

  II.

  Jump in time

  to the immediate future,

  another poem:

  return to the old land

  penniless and with

  a disconnected manuscript,

  the recollection of a few

  sensations, beginning:

  logboat down Rio Michol

  under plantain

  and drifting trees

  to the railroad,

  darkness on the sea

  looking toward the stations

  of the classic world --

  another image descending

  in white mist

  down the lunar highway

  at dawn, above

  Lake Catemaco on the bus

  -- it woke me up --

  the far away likeness

  of a heavenly file

  of female saints

  stepping upward

  on miniature arches

  of a gold stairway

  into the starry sky,

  the thousands of little

  saintesses in blue hoods

  looking out at me

  and beckoning:

  SALVATION!

  It's true,

  simple as in the image.

  Then the mummies

  in their Pantheon

  at Guanajuato --

  a city of Cortesian

  mines in the first

  crevasse of the Sierras,

  where I rested --

  for I longed to see their

  faces before I left:

  these weren't mythical rock

  images, tho stone

  -- limestone effigies out

  of the grave, remains

  of the fatal character --

  newly resurrected,

  grasping their bodies

  with stiff arms, in soiled

  funeral clothes;

  twisted, knock-kneed,

  like burning

  screaming lawyers --

  what hallucinations

  of the nerves? --

  indecipherable-sexed;

  one death-man had

  raised up his arms

  to cover his eyes,

  significant timeless

  reflex in sepulchre:

  apparitions of immortality

  consumed inward,

  waiting openmouthed

  in the fireless darkness.

  Nearby, stacked symmetrically,

  a skullbone wall ending

  the whitewashed corridor

  under the graveyard

  -- foetid smell reminiscent

  of sperm and drunkenness --

  the skulls empty and fragile,

  numerous as shells,

  -- so much life passed through

  this town . . .

  The problem is isolation

  -- there in the grave

  or here in oblivion of light.

  Of eternity we have

  a numbered score of years

  and fewer tender moments

  -- one moment of tenderness

  and a year of intelligence

  and nerves: one moment of pure

  bodily tenderness --

  I could dismiss Allen with grim

  pleasure.

  Reminder: I knelt in my room

  on the patio at San Miguel

  at the keyhole: 2 A.M.

  The old woman lit a candle.

  Two young men and their girls

  waited before the portal,

  news from the street. She

  changed the linen, smiling.

  What joy! The nakedness!

  They dance! They talk

  and simper before the door,

  they lean on a leg,

  hand on a hip, and posture,

  nudity in their hearts,

  they clap a hand to head

  and whirl and enter,

  pushing each other,

  happily, happily,

  to a moment of love. . .

  What solitude I've

  finally inherited.

  Afterward fifteen hours

  on rubbled single lane,

  broken bus rocking along

  the maws and continental crags

  of mountain afternoon,

  the distant valleys fading,

  regnant peaks beyond

  to days on the Pacific

  where I bathed --

  then riding, fitful,

  gazing, sleeping

  through the desert

  beside a wetback

  sad-faced old-man-

  youth, exhausted

  to Mexicali

  to stand

  near one night's dark shack

  on the garbage cliffs

  of bordertown overhanging

  the tin house poor

  man's village below,

  a last night's

  timewracked brooding

  and farewell,

  the end of a trip.

  -- Returning

  armed with New Testament,

  critic of horse and mule,

  tanned and bearded

  satisfying Whitman, concerned

  with a few Traditions,

  metrical, mystical, manly

  . . . and certain characteristic flaws

  -- enough!

  The nation over the border

  grinds its arms and
dreams

  of war: I see

  the fiery blue clash

  of metal wheels

  clanking in the industries

  of night, and

  detonation of infernal bombs

  . . . and the silent downtown

  of the States

  in watery dusk submersion.

  Guanajuato -- Los Angeles, 1954

  [NOTE: Uxmal and other proper names mentioned in the first part of the poem are those of ruined cities. Xbalba, translatable as morning Star in Region Obscure, or Hope, and pronounced Chivalvá, is the area in Chiapas between the Tobasco border and the Usumascintla River at the edge of the Peten Rain Forest; the boundary of lower Mexico and Guatemala today is thereabouts. The locale was considered a Purgatory or Limbo, the legend is vague, in the (Old) Mayan Empire. To the large tree at the crest of what is now called Mount Don Juan, at the foot of which this poem was written, ancient craftsmen came to complete work left unfinished at their death.]

  ON BURROUGHS' WORK

  The method must be purest meat

  and no symbolic dressing,

  actual visions & actual prisons

  as seen then and now.

  Prisons and visions presented

  with rare descriptions

  corresponding exactly to those

  of Alcatraz and Rose.

  A naked lunch is natural to us,

  we eat reality sandwiches.

  But allegories are so much lettuce.

  Don't hide the madness.

  San Jose 1954

  LOVE POEM ON THEME BY WHITMAN

  I'll go into the bedroom silently and lie down between the bridegroom and the bride,

  those bodies fallen from heaven stretched out waiting naked and restless,

  arms resting over their eyes in the darkness,

  bury my face in their shoulders and breasts, breathing their skin,

  and stroke and kiss neck and mouth and make back be open and known,

  legs raised up crook'd to receive, cock in the darkness driven tormented and attacking

  roused up from hole to itching head,

  bodies locked shuddering naked, hot lips and buttocks screwed into each other

  and eyes, eyes glinting and charming, widening into looks and abandon,

  and moans of movement, voices, hands in air, hands between thighs,

  hands in moisture on softened lips, throbbing contraction of bellies

  till the white come flow in the swirling sheets,

  and the bride cry for forgiveness, and the groom be covered with tears of passion and compassion,

  and I rise up from the bed replenished with last intimate gestures and kisses of farewell --

  all before the mind wakes, behind shades and closed doors in a darkened house

  where the inhabitants roam unsatisfied in the night,

  nude ghosts seeking each other out in the silence.

  OVER KANSAS

  Starting with eyeball kicks

  on storefronts from bus window

  on way to Oakland airport:

  I am no ego

  these are themselves

  stained grey wood and gilded

  nigger glass and barberpole

  thass all.