Читать книгу The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas - Lorenzo Thomas - Страница 11

Dracula

DRACULA

Crosses his blond eyes to think of you

Picks up his brown overnight bag and

Runs down the ash covered streets to the station

Scuffles with the ignorant ticket agent

Leaps on the bus as it belches forward

Passengers seeping into the dark

The city is obliged to be dark

And mysteriously desolate under

Ritualized demands of departure

The foolish moon of your care and

Coins filtering through his sheer pockets

A shroud with pockets cape

His personal state of permanent transit

Covered with decals where he ever mailed

His possessions This is serious business.

A brand new black greatcoat neatly folded

Over his naked arm the dance of human fluid

“Blood” in more polite times. The tattoo

Remarkable and genteel,

Pictures of mountains

And soft undistinguished

Rivers in his hand Across his dry palm

bus ticket dup-

lication designs

The awkward sneer impinging on his nez

This particular

Place

Dracula depicted in venetian half- light

dissolving boundaries of his presence:

Dracula your white faces

against the night

Hair falling back

over your faces

formula STORY

Personal history to that man was particular

Actual form and the descriptive logic of it

The word he thought it was

Was death, was the stiffened sense

O the garments only a sob story

That we could say here was a person

And the person a loss to himself

How strange how strange. The bed-

Room of the most facile delusions

And the clothing edging the plump door

A frighteningly ponderous human body

Suddenly the face of Charles Baudelaire

Crushing on the television screen

Waking the thick solitude of common-

Place individual people. Confused

Lost. A man whose heritage and biography was death

He said so

Past back

in the mornings

And demanding this song with your content

From me, the personal to be what person

History of a single man you are completely

Yes, but who are you

■

Start the thing over again:

DRACULA is not a myth but

Just another cheap novel

Written in the boring 18th

19th century made into the

Worst film of 1932 1958 and

Unless we get wise to our-

Selves next year over again

Then what is all this

Dracula is real Dracula is real!

ESSAY The demands of the loving human flesh

substance

A man and himself.

European habits

Colorless eyes filling the empty sleeves

Of the earth, another Slavic conception

After we keep on asking, What is that in the gypsy

language

What is that thing we no longer discover

Effective about our own faces in the glass

Underneath the B♭ chandelier

The final odors of our dinner in person

Shudder in the monotonous drawing room

Still you have nothing else to amuse you

It compels. It compels

The imprint of his RNA

On physical objects and

Space he insists on it,

Insists he has been dead

Over 300 years and we

Suggest we believe it

After the trance we put

On our hypothetical

Subconscious mind Dracula

Dracula is real! good lord!

How do we understand it

It is life you have founded

Death’s mythology on, when

Your substance demands Get

Out of that umbrella now

Right now.

And now you are brushing yr teeth

With the language, trying to get

The decay out of the classical music

That lurks behind each evident crime

Every clumsy seduction of falseness

And mechanical simpering pride that

Moves like a film across the eyes

Distorting the incredible color of

Summertime on crowded sands

An unashamed obvious bur-

Lesk moving like a sloppy

Sneak thief in the dreams

Floating like sunlight into an awful

America white and unhappy as drawn

by a dull artist who lusts and his

Creations for the darkness of blood

And insane crime. But it’s a crime

What he’s doing and beyond statute

THIS IS A WORK OF ART no matter how

Unnecessary it remain to our flesh

■

These last lines of it spoken by the midnight doctor

And left hanging in the flat air over the station

To be snatched by the violent train of his thoughts

Suspended sentences drawing sighs from the placid

Snake tooth mouth of our Dracula. Changes his form

Assumes an entire jury of peering witnesses walking

Deliberately like negroes on the street,

And then the strict transformation rabble

Screaming and waving pockets torn off

The most respectable fences in the town

A lynch mob. Simple. This is nothing

With symbols except the holy mystery of

Our people in this country today. God

Have charged them with the presence of the unwanted

The necessary black negro and this is the way

Our people bear their judgment

There is no release in the songs

Their music is dying They try to steal

Heat for the beautiful instruments again

The black ones learn to play these

Machines but they leave our people screaming

Silence Nothing happens. More nothing and

The loss of the land hangs in the air

A rotten rapist. Stomach full of bloody

Advertising. Sculpture or is it dance

The hanging orchards of America but our

People are so ashamed. The signs alter

Our cities serving the sacrament negro

Motion and feelinglanguage logic blood

The jig. Boss. Silent, it is without Dracula’s

Ease he sucked from the ersatz florentine walls

Something is yet lacking in our people’s religion

Said the doctor at midnight

Speaking their own language at that

■

Rejection and the knowledge it is a sense of loss

We lack, that only such emotion could complete us

When we are tired of our thoughtful survival and

Cry to be married to a cringing darkness and capture

It in our own souls. Petty lunacy of each stilled

Evening in some totally unremarkable place, under-

Stand that as the torture of our rapturous manners

The white glitter of our impressive table

Manners and thoughts that go nowhere after

All we are content to have surround us and

Lift up to the light of our language and

Sip thoughtlessly of the ravishing cup marked

With a brand name of the thing we have used

To identify ourselves on this surprised earth

Minion. The register of surprise at some awkwardly

Pretentious demand

breaking up all over again

the expectation of some

orderly form

The Cross crucifix

back

in the same Dracula

story

To have been saying, Dracula is a real person

A man

and any Art that depends for sub-

stance

there, the human

must end in pieces

appropriate

like the hill

white stones

and green hill Athens

The pettiness of a real man

Walks in the luncheonette

Grinning over the sandwich meat without blood

an American

Dracula hmmmm

■

A bouquet of ashes.