Читать книгу The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas - Lorenzo Thomas - Страница 10
ОглавлениеEarly Crimes
I
The way Egyptians used to sit
she sits
listening to the radio
Glass room trembles,
the people panting to be
average people
nothing to do with her
Sit erect in an ordinary
chair
The way she sat, her hands
pressed together
Monarch
Sunlight come into the dark
garden of the radio’s
insatiability Chew up
our peaceful moments
Flowers,
before the “news”
The 2nd stage etc etc etc
The age we live in doesn’t matter
She is not at home
She is somewhere pressed into
stone
Thinking foreign thoughts
to our music
Some mixup, huh
II
She is a new cut out
Her white outline exposes the news
broadcasts
Her dissent is like that
of the music
She is an oracle
her existence,
And I am so graceless their prophet
who does not know her
The people the people
She just walk down the street
and expose them
Listens to the radio
It is not 7:30 it is night now
here in New York
City
And now the news
III
Sit erect in an ordinary chair
Her hands touching
the water
The “beauty of strength”
and movement,
Most of the people aren’t average
They ordinary
The hands put together
Behind the bookcase glass
is a copy of The Imprisoned
Splendour
Some others with brown paper covers
Look like they’re bound in gold
THE UNNATURAL LIFE
What I am is a man aloneimprisoned in white
—Aimé Césaire
You know, I keep coming back to the Crown
Delicatessen It reminds me of you
I see your happy face in every blond table, my
Red embarrassed smirk in the edges of beer
Bottles The irresponsible public hero above
The stainless steel “take out” counter,
My picture is in that cheap frame
And you are that first dollar pasted on the mirror
I have been so busy of late, translating
“Two or Three Chants” by Leopold Senghor and
Thinking about the coming revolution You know,
Something got on my mind, I had to come back
It is my lucky day I am in the Crown Delicatessen
And you are not here
The peach tree spreads on the white house
Behind your house It is a simplified heart sketched
Like a delicate jacket, its nude design
Reflecting the pack of cigarettes in the pocket
The delay of the plunger in the flooded backwater
Kitchen, the hot curses over the idea of “some ale”
And the idea of revolution is also depicted:
The cashier returns and pays for his life
Because everything is going to be everything.
My copy of Muhammed Speaks covers the table and the wind, and
The door hanging open, frightened because I am here
That I might forget these young delusions of love, afraid
As I emerge from my fashionable jacket my brain turns
Black and hateful Like a beast, your color rising in my nose
And you are raped and murdered in the usual manner.
The same peach tree in the backyard spreads on the white house
Behind your house It is a simplified heart,
See the blind aorta sketched over the vacant bedroom windows.
I should never have moved into your neighborhood!
ONE NEVER KNOWS, DO ONE
For you, I wanted to be so fancy …
I wanted to be into everything, but you understand
That. Everyday you kept telling me
“Stay loose” Did you know it was a cliché,
Maybe you were carried away, baby
By the deep, lovely fog in my face. I was
So far out But suddenly, it moves
In on the area about me (what brakes fens etc)
Then today I see young Walters on the
Avenue and he is gone Left Bank, the whole bit—
Camera slung over his shoulder, dungaree
Shirt I was never that far out, only collegiate.
You understand that, and the dark crevices
Burned into my flesh by the clouds.
You will be glad to know that now I am
So much more interested in private life, other
People’s too And there’s something else.
You and my mother both, you will be so
Pleased to hear what I have to tell you. I agree with
You now. I really like “Cabin in the Sky” You’ll
Be so glad to know that now I also agree with
Your vision and judgment of my own handsomeness,
That I did not get that process I wanted.
NEGRITUDE
They swim they play the surf for pridefulness
Their slim boards vanity you see them spread over the pages of
Life hostaged
By photographers who talk like hipsters jewish to their very noses
Infatuate beholden to that scrim of glass and light
The manufactured cataracts of defeated capitalism japanese and german
Eastman Kodak a fine and studied blindness
What will our vacation cost I mean in terms of pride
Mornings when I rise riding the long subway all the way uptown
Half asleep crossing the Columbia campus me glowing in Ferris
Booth’s high glass
I love a slim black boy. I love you
And come to work in my own inferno 300°F. covered with surfboards
Rushing everyday to make the historic effort
But after three days sweat’s no catalyst I fear my cop out’s from
Exhaustion energy’s decomposition by fahrenheitic half-lives not
arrogance
My father years ago waiting tables in the Tivoli
Won’t towel dance the customers to tips runs out screaming Crème
de menthe on rye
Carstairs alamode!
Maybe there never is another job well I’d rather be in alleys & shake
bone dice.
His wife is pregnant in the hospital San Ignaz
Yeah some of that arrogance is me: the bleak edge of the book, notes
On Function
In placid waves of plate glass or my Nikon’s eye, mornings when I rise
The spontaneous book notes what a particular girl says I love you. And
I love you
It is a thing apart from everything the people have.
DOMESTIC HORROR
The house is like the venerated tibia, a chink heirloom
Final statement of some long-nailed uncle.
Kitchen bears a constant smell of butter, huge pots of rice cover
the walls
Everywhere things frying in brittle cast-iron skillets.
She stands against the window her profile dark against parhelion
Yellow walls. Yellow walls to drift out of the city like ordinary
clouds made to
Destroy the confines of the room. 14 × 11, designed by a russian cubist.
The walls float high above New York harbor, this house I keep telling you
It’s just too damn near the airport. Pan Am hanger in the living room,
a browntoned
Photograph taxis past all day, coldeyed 1920ish khanyapa,
Great floppy beige hat and rimless spectacles: that same young woman
of the
Kitchen dressed in a pale, wiser former body. All day they talk, the
lady on the wall
Giving directions: “More flour in that gravy, O my daughter.”
Look! Out on the wild streets of the afternoon a palsied mother and
father in slow
Motion. Galloping home, their well-formed daughter all blond curls
clinging
To the father’s drunken, twisted back. But they’re too ugly for a
poem of this quality.
Wait, who is this dead child bounding through our home, devouring
the furniture?
TOIL
I has taken all that I can stand
And now it is heroism
Someone to tell you my story
The NEWS photographers crowd
Across the lonely Hudson pier
Shouting interviews,
Ta ta. I’m going to swim to Greece
Who am I trying to impress
You burst into tears late!
My lips gargle “Goodbye”
The rosy sunrise envelops me,
My arm hooks into the night
EMBARKATION FOR CYTHERA
And out of the solitude
Voice and soul with selves unite
—C. Okigbo
This color, its pure absence
in other words a space
some African mothers, children
cupped in their slim arms
They are bending into the sand
and it is their lesson written there.
A new motif of
Destruction—
The idea of a written language
when before,
the words in our
mouths were enough.
Not that it takes anything away
from the people we are,
“Education”
You don’t write “corn” if you
mean okra.
Along Merrick Blvd, standing in front
the dance hall
it’s the same thing, the
cop in a luminous blue
His badge spreads all over his face,
threatening me. There should be
someway to get in without paying.
Rain that falls into the dusty
life of the people on
the street, it turns into a new language
All the fine mommas walking inside,
getting out of Grand Prixs
Can hardly read
this paper without stumbling over “embarkation”
What someone has done to us, that
my words become unintelligible.
It says, do not despise your own
I wonder if they see that,
All those foxes. All of a sudden
I’m so glad I have on my wide
Pants, my 10 dollar banlon shirt
The girls wish I was
inside, too. At least, I think so
This much is understood
I go down to Benson’s Burgers
and sit in the parking lot.
Food smell, but I don’t have any money
All I have is the blues
and a ticket for someplace called Cythera
a bus outing on Sunday.
Got this magazine telling about the great
new thing going on in Nigeria
and I have my beautiful high
a green alcove of the evening
called “music”
My voice when it is understood,
piped into dancehalls and restaurants by
this very intricate and lovely machine.
THE BLOND SINNER
Should I be handsome vested and wearing the black
Trench coat of another person’s sleepiness,
Collar turned up over my chin and impression
Of terrible guilt; that I’m here with you
Beautiful as you are anxious, beside you
Wearing your own impeccable decision to be night
In all its mystery and cigarette smoke radio—
Sitting around listening to the clock and the birds
Who are singing their morning which is my dark
Night except for them The single machine comp-
Letes my stranger’s hours and I awaken “used”
ECONOMICS
The idle boys are waiting in the park
Girls fear but girls fear anything
When they have been told these boys
Aren’t thugs, they’re charming
Cut outs and smiling locker doors
Open up the minds of the young people
And reveal them as forms of romance
The naked gymnasium stands among simple
Working class houses whose pretense
Is sitting pretty our solidarity our
Sty of stupid rapport, the miniature cheap
Mentalities MADE IN JAPAN caress her
But she longs to wear black serapes
From bleached balconies to give her sign
To the villagers that he is returning
And the weather reports are indecisive
For one half of the body returns as vapor
To the mind the other half as nerves
The words are the business of the dream
And its wisdom is moving so far away
That easy The street returns us home
Who are thinking of going to Europe
To sit in the classical sunny gardens
Reading newspapers blackened by race
Demonstrations, new chemical states
Rising in the bewildering absence of Europe
I rise now from my vacant chair
Thought depending on application
The room is in favor of longing
A bride illustrating scholarly ideas
Once more apprehends the afternoon
Taking shape in the air over the garden
We hopefully flee to, escaping dark
And unsavory developments in the way
The mind works today forming cabinets
We dumbly put our trust in and sit back
Pleased with this life we living smiling
At how we have apprehended the time itself
How we have put it to work at a profit
How those who can’t understand ECONOMICS
Can steal watches to sell in the park
It quiets the mind to think of transactions
Like this Even the vandals are part
Of the affluence our bodies exercise
And what spirit keeps thanking the heart
For its numerous changes
The book beside you called ECONOMICS
Which will be sold as PASSION FRUIT
In drugstores, bringing back thoughts
Of small consequence Sitting here
Say in a garden overlooking a river
Watching another toll across the bridge
Constructed (it says here) not to link
The country and the city but instruct
Pilots in handling their other emotions,
To thrill the people who look on it
With the steel web of their thoughts
That suddenly traps the air around them
And in it the insects of destiny they
Soon recognize as themselves A genus
Of winged creatures expanding as time does
Seeking the profit of secrets of light
HOW CAN I PROVE I AM NOT MODIGLIANI
We are not capable of lasting fault
Our errors change nothing
Our personal conception like
The vain sandals you wear
Cramp you and smell bad in the rain
But no one says nothing about it
And expect no explanation from
The sky, one moon and one star
We go on and make these mistakes
■
Because I have these things to say;
The moon shines down over it and
Miscellaneous references cloudy
The gold star you pin to my shirt
Another dumb mistake without any
Meaning beyond the pink shadow it
Husbands in my saddening thought
That the moon again is some reflection
Of the thing that misleads us,
Which is another stupid mistake
■
Hate to go out on the street you’re such
A smarty always coy and disgraceful and
Pointing out events our horoscope misplaces
The girl sitting there with red shoes on
Wearing a flower dress, thumbs past the
Greatest 20th Cent. painters like a snob
She very well could be Some men like these
Effects in a woman like drinking bad wine
Has a mystique or keeping your overcoat on
In usually placid houses tempting Satan
Listening to music annoyance odors
There is something persistent about you
You are always blaming me for it
How can I prove I am not Modigliani
But simply and trustingly another
Person who falls ill to the breeze
Coming over the marsh to the city
How can I prove that I have no intention
Of asking you to go on a diet or wear
The autumn’s foolish clothes, trust
Me there is nothing that far away as
The museum where we chat and pretend
We see each other and our beauty
Exits like summer grass into danger
We may run into people as charming as we are
And start a flame in their heart
Consume their error as judgment
Treat them as lovers yet be unaware
Of seeing in them, not beauty but
That plainness in them makes them lovely
In our eyes they are more beautiful
Than what is truly beautiful and travels
With nothing insignificant as beauty.
GREAT LOVE DUETS
The sensation created by the human voice
Surrounds the bare lightbulb and makes
It a radio bringing down the cultivated
Air of this room and the slum section
Of the city the soul seeks its order
Amid the disorder of tenement streets
So strange that in these poor neighborhoods
So many women named Mimi are singing to him
The voice in the hand of our imprecision
New York language which forms its cold
Beauty around a steel heart like flowers
Crystals. Is it in spite of the Earth’s
Heart uh some miracle speaks to the people
Wrapped in the sounds of their hesitation
These are the children of immigrant legends
The art students sit drinking 98¢ chianti
The words? Even a child’s grammar cd explain it
To him, although most children wouldn’t believe
And seek other justifications in the time literature
Their parents “make believe” and the art students
Who gather at their soda shoppes
And discuss in front the radio
Sonatas they are now so fond of
They play one dull station all
The time it is playing the same pretty
Sonata about a beautiful young girl
Living in sin with a mad violinist
Somewhere in the awful slums of NYC
And of all the people she thought
She would not mind being in love
Only one was not there, who she loved
Thinking won’t it be charming when
We decide to draw the purple covers
All the art students were thinking
“She framed me” and they all desire
One who goes up the stairs and stops
By the window in the light of another
Sonata the deep background the backyard
Presents, people sit on their stoops
Drinking from beercans and pleading
“Cut it out” to the voice that insists
On the news
Across from this island of stone
Smoke rising up in the still air
The voice which will recline on the flat air
The heavy barges on the river headed
For Belgium taking the concentration
Of the lazy youngsters sprawled
Derelicts of the sunlight on the
Grassy hillsides. On the graying divan
Lessons in English grammar are inter-
With the languor of a deliberate kind
Of romance with its blue 35mm pictures
Ringing down the curtain on the sonata:
The words? There are no words
Still the singing is heard
Why are we so foolishly engaged our environs
Why are we allowing crime to insist
On describing our form everything even
Our gray gloves become suspect, even!
Said the students illustrating their English
THE CLAUSE
Let its dreams carry like echoes
Across the distances another song
To seize her in her lovely trance
Another night in New York City it’s snowing
And still they insist on studying yoga
Oh wretched one, why have you driven my time
Away into this forest of stone the wind
Laughs at Oh wretched one you have made
Me the fool of the unfaithful seasons and
This discipline you reveal in my dis- sd the students.
Where in this street an art student
Is seen with his clumsy portfolio
Lights a du Maurier and meets his
Girl wondering what will the thrill
Be like this time? Another student
Cries “That face, I must paint it”
Somewhere in New York in the snow
The news again challenges our speech
The speech or the voices of our young people
The radio newscast reporting now the mad student
Leaps on the poor girl with his brush and pot
Of paint and paints her face some innocent hue
Dripping on her white somnolent dress
Causing her boyfriend to despise her
Singing that he loved only her guilt
The schizoid art students of Minnesota
Have come to New York City and ruined
Our city what with their crimes of bad
Grammer “farm life” German extraction
The schizoid art students of Minnesota
ENGAGEMENT
Keep your trust with him and do not go near
The dunce of charity who seeks to hold you
By your own want and tells his to physicians
Leaving his gifts a noontide charm of dew
Your hopeful orchard fields darken with fear
Buttoning the shirt we have depraved with flowers
Against the sudden cold rain
We do not see the force that makes us fall
Prey to the whining genius of the dark
Hours stealing our casual garden the march
Of our imagination to the lake and the arc
The light builds there, and we must fall
Victims to the petty erosions of the dark
The picture of the beautiful lake:
The secretive launch pressing our suspect horizon
Someone loves you the green wave you float on
You are our sensuous lady but exceedingly dull
So what will you have now, your dominion
You burn like the moon in the night for what
Trembling leaf in a pond and for whose sake
He would see currency in your lies and mark
The coursing of your blood a plot
Don’t you hear what the chariot says
As it crushes the air we are excited
To breathe Don’t you hear teenage songs
From 1956 flowing around your knees like
The surf we remember last summer afternoons
When you press your lips softly on the
Letter you send me or telephone and argue
With me about inconsequential events of
The air, why are you hearing only our voices
Only the signature of the electric space
We confine to chaperone us
The pedestrian bridge over the highway and
The moonlight; auto lights like an electric river
Sound of the wheels like a stagnant pond
Under the evening under the summer moon
Did you hear the Chinese verses the tires
Were saying, telling you the direction
These words are taking which way over
The strange map of our feelings. Our feelings.
Our feelings. Our feelings Are we trapped
In the speed of the mind’s careless radar
Zone where I am the driver If I were the driver
The airy car would run through villages
Through dark and accident and rain
Securing the award of my attentions
To you, which is a prize I wd greedily covet
And drive angrily to win year after year
Don’t you hear the proud heart’s cylinders
Facetiously singing
The moon is rouge on the horizon’s foggy face
To ask her for one dance, the dense
Fog of the 2-step recorded music
Coming to circle the womanly heart
Of the night; goes through his head.
How can it be that he is not the lover
She has sought in her French books
His regard is for her the etiquette of statues
Another time he speaks to her in French
Which is a voice so distant calm and grave
And its inflections darling gauzy Sundays
He invites her into the Bijou’s white frame
Where the minutes admire the beautiful fan
And her escort sleeping in the light
THE CONVENTION
The din of your heart on a desolate evening
Across the bleak court your white tears flash
In a soft room. The sharp hands
Replace the garish furniture and
Still I sit here the last image of
Your striking care. The autumn snow
Collects the summer sky’s debris and
Still the green stems twine around
Their stake of civilization
The one word it would hurt me to chip
From the glitter in my mouth
Instead of the phone call this poem
And can’t say it. The murkish flood
Idle logic now distilled in your flesh
The silvered tears
Images of our separation
When I remain untrue to
Anything The desolation
Shimmers in my pleasures
And takes back my thoughts from you
Instead of my raw breath, I give you
Fear drives me back to the convention
My feelings, to have for an afternoon.
Then we understand each other,
All is returned to me And
Still it resembles the thoughts
Of me you keep in a beautiful
Carton in your room, somewhere
Across the city that now seems
So strange, accepting the convention
We live for but never mention:
You are not free to acknowledge
These terms such is our agreement
Then we understand each other
You got it. Then slowly walk out
The room and out in the gathering
Street. The gold flood of the gut-
Ters sunlight and motor oil
Thinking that what our beauty
Finds in the street’s disorder
Can return in the quiet hotel
The conventional neon light making it Spain
Anything else we wd want to believe
Shoddy sense of improvement and
An immaculate joy. Standards
Concerning the function of beauty
And all the love-light shining
In the eyes of a deceased photo
The gone Election Day signs;
Simply to anticipate feelings you had
Already included in your sighs
She offers me the terrain
Of her heart in bondage
I enter and provide its wage
When I sat down at this table
A prophet and now to finish
This ravishing book and have it
Bound in expensive white paper
Filled with the conventional words
Bringing a little strain
Her breath and mine play tag
In lush, bitter arbors
Our wasted hammocks sag
Gladiolas filled with tears
Wrung from the scattered burden
Of trees burnished with rage, our rage
Autumn embroidery in a raw cage
Containing joy, leaking disdain
Holes full of sky in the trees
Her lover crosses his red knees.
Embarrassing. That’s right
She offers me you offer me a jeweled
Motorcade to trust my heart to
But I am not interested. The one
To whom this heart belongs is she
Who hears it singing everywhere
Conventional as honesty in love is.
Discarding daylight’s forgery of
Manners, midnights’s emerald stair
Then we understand each other
Except the Africa of her mouth
SONG
You asked me to sing
Then you seemed not
To hear; to have gone out
From the edge of my voice
And I was singing
There I was singing
In a heathen voice
You could not hear
Though you requested
The song—it was for them.
Although they refuse you
And the song I made for you
Tangled in their tongue
They wd mire themselves in the spring
Rains, as I sit here folding and
Unfolding my nose in your gardens
I wouldn’t mind it so bad
Each word is cheapened
In the air, sounding like
Language that riots and
Screams in the dark city
Thoughts they requested
Concepts that rule them
Since I can’t have you
I will steal what you have
