Читать книгу Pleasure Dome - Yusef Komunyakaa - Страница 12
ОглавлениеLost in the Bonewheel Factory
Looking a Mad Dog Dead in the Eyes
Perception can force you to crawl
on God’s great damn stone floor
& scrape your knees to the bone,
in love with the smooth round ass
of death. You’ve come to admire
that never-miss sniper on the rooftops.
The man who dances in circles
has fistbeaten a dog to the ground.
All the newsreel faces turn away
from the woman hanging naked
by her hair in a picture window,
as a scarecrow drags across a yellow field.
The young man with a nail in his foot
is your son, who believes
he’s Christ, telling his father
what he wants to hear,
using a thorn for a toothpick.
Floor Plans
Secret walls swing open when a dream loses focus & lights click on inside the head. The road here isn’t a flatbed of light, isn’t a soft ride, this bridge over our backs, & we won’t remember how we came here even if we stand naked in the Garden of Eden like fools with bright axes. Our intent philosophic as a black hand that steers the brain behind a liquid motor, pulled by every voice we’ve heard like a rumor of faded coins in our pockets. In the wild purple night we leave prints of extinct animals in white sand where footsteps echo a hoodoo drum. All the cruel rooms are identical behind different-colored doors: a black cellophane window to the outside, a woman sprawled nude on a red velvet loveseat, a copy of Premonitions of the Bread Line on a white shag rug, as the shadow of a dagger slides along the walls. Cicadas hum fire in a valley. This is where a god gets his heart cut out, someone underneath the blueprint wrestles with roots. Where a woman crawls on cobblestones & a man chops off three fingers to beg bread. In a country without moon, sun, or solitary star, lies rot in the mouth. Kit Carson caresses Magda Goebbels. Death sits in a skull pale as a dove, & Nero’s fiddle whines like a sick animal in the night. A rook dips its beak in gold powder & flies backwards toward the sea’s roar, into what the blind man translates in each voice he looks at.
Tour Guide
It eats into the brain
between daylight & coma
like some small animal.
You’re propelled onward,
cackling like the old woman
at the end of the night hall,
her face smeared with rouge.
She’s every pretty face you’ve known.
This is where you begin
in yourself, in the room
alone with terror.
This is really when
the mannequin moves
its head in a camera flash.
In the chest a trembling starts
the soul rocking off-balance—
the last grin whittled
from the pain in you
where the shattered millstone
takes shape again.
Sitting in a Rocking Chair, Going Blind
the exact
second
the lights come on
like the aurora borealis
i’m sitting at a window of summer
for two weeks waiting for
a pomegranate tree
to fall & scatter
fruit on the ground
on the corner
a black buick
special
runs down a child
like 40 brass cymbals
& 40 tambourines
the air coagulates
in the background
a bright bird
falls from the sky
its scream is black
a dog drops dead
pissing on a fire hydrant
a woman’s dance burns off
with a green flame
anemones
spray the air white
in a world of dark
i can only remember to put my hands all over you
Pushing in All the Buttons
With armloads of lignum vitae, hands frightened over mouths, kinfolk gape at the paradox. Rods knock in the braincase as syndactyl hands plead like a Gypsy guitar. Not a daughter, but an angel whose legs Zeus tied together.
How many times, in how many head-hung rooms I’ve taken my life with a look you can read things into? Leg irons wouldn’t let me go into woods spilt with light. Like a seaward dream, the day grayed with gulls. When was the last time I wanted to drag death home, foxy in all her masquerade?
When the last beaten woman awakes no longer with the sun in her eyes, when no more poets are hanged effigies in the Library of Congress, when all the bagmen have fallen dead & fingers leap into pockets of love, a song will bloom under glass weather.
Confessing My Ignorance
Perhaps the cello meant
to be broken the moment
you wanted music.
Perhaps hog-back hills
meant to obscure
some incredible vision.
I can’t say what tree
drives us mad in the distance
when we strain to see the heart at work.
Something moves, worms
of ghost meat under the moon—
can we learn from what we
see? Did those crows
teach Van Gogh anything?
I don’t know
just what this is
that begs
to heal the earth
under each footstep
or what pulls me back
to innocence like the tongue cut out.
Mistress of Commonsense,
perhaps it’s meant for me
to swing open night’s door
& catch you naked
at the mirror
trying to shake hands
with yourself.
1938
The granite-colored gulls unlocked
their wings & the door to a wall
swung open. Ghosts ducked through,
disappeared, so much spinal cord
looped & curved into spider darkness
hacked out of a calcium tomb,
where water screams back into you.
Each night became a red machine.
You were cornered in Paris, in the granary
where the raw brain snorted
like a blue horse & a moneysack
of hunger growled. Where shadows
of trees pulled your face down to kiss
stones. Each day murdered the black clock
of your voice, each day, each depravity
a pretty woman might throw her arms around,
knifed your shadow, Vallejo.
Death wore out your boot heels.
S & M
“Tie my hands, hang me up
by my gorgeous feet,
braid a rope-ladder
with my hair—a corsage,”
you say. For a moment I am
a many-headed beast
embracing a pretty woman
in her sleek black get-up.
Spike-heeled habanera.
Take me away from myself
& don’t make me look.
The blue mouth
begs for what it needs.
Lover woman of the cat-o’-nine tails
there’s a man wounded
in your bedroom
no medicine can cure.
You whimper, you
come like a buttercup
opening darkness.
Stepfather: A Girl’s Song
Again heavy rain drives him home
from the cornfield, washing away
footsteps & covering tracks.
For years his eyes undressed me.
There’s a river in his stance
sweeping me away.
He comes into my bedroom
around corners of moonlight;
unexpected, he catches me
in his big arms. An ancient music
at the edge of my mouth.
He looks at me slantwise, warns:
“These hands whipped a mule crazy
& killed a man in ’63.”
My hands are like sparrows, stars
caught in tangled dance of branches.
He raises my clothes.
An undertow drags me down.
His mouth on mine, kissing my mother.
Stepmother: A Boy’s Song
Twenty years step between
you two, only five between us.
Unbroken woman who walks nude
out of shambled wheat, my heart
a pocketful of thin mirrors
throwing your names about.
You cross the threshold
& beg me to flex my biceps.
Remember, you can’t wash down suburbia
with black coffee & tantalizers,
neighbors goose-stepping jackals
on leashes. See, look at me
tear out handfuls of hair.
Papa’s always quoting that brutal
book, trying to get hills to march
home. Your tongue lights
the air. Tonight, I can’t help
but hold your breasts till
my mouth fills with honey.
You’re dragging the dark
waters in me with hooks,
& I talk from under your clothes.
No Love in This House
Tonight I touch your breasts.
September’s fruit.
Nipples, eyes of fire.
I kiss you deep
as a knife could go.
I pull you out of your jeans.
Black panties, red rose,
my fingers find
the center of you
where the blues begin.
I’m in a room of you
where a white horse
shockwaves. It’s hard to break
away: flesh, wine, language.
We curve into dance.
When I drive myself into you
you’re singing the name
of a man in Rifle Gap
with his cowboy boots propped
on another woman’s kitchen table.
High on Sadness
I think about you
till you’re naked
at a window waving goodbye.
Till the bones come out,
bright airplane
on an assembly line.
Violin bows, ribs.
I think about you
till a great beetle
beams on six legs
of unreason. I take you
baroque ballerina
into my arms for the last time,
& your metallic feelers
search the air.
It’s always out
in the next city
of rooms filled with California
Spiritual Sunshine incense
I go, a sleepwalker
on a cliff.
Sunbather
She lies under July, a blue towel
across her buttocks, her bare back
new metal arched in a dark room.
A sycamore guards her. Three crows
in symmetrical branches
watch their feathers fall,
black leaves. Today is
an 8″ ×10″ platinum photograph
in an old man’s dresser drawer.
The sky’s a slow fire,
car lights over night ice.
I close my eyes, concentrate,
& try to remove the blue towel
till the sun goes out.
Apprenticeship
His fingernails are black
& torn from blows,
as if the hammer
declares its own angle of reference.
The young carpenter curses:
“Awww, fuck! Sonovabitch! Dumb shit!”
His girlfriend lowers her white dress,
then moves away.
She reappears nude,
props one foot upon a red chair,
looks him square in the eyes.
Her skin glistens like a woman
who’s made love all afternoon.
Twenty-two stories up, he steps out
over the beams like a man with wings.
Light on the Subject
Hello, Mister Jack,
make yourself at home.
Here in Deadwood City
our eyes flash back to
knives on silver whetstones.
Can I get you anything,
perhaps a shot of Four Roses?
In this gray station of wood
our hearts are wet rags
& we turn to ourselves,
holding our own hands
as the scaffolds sway.
I can tell you this much
Brother Justice, our faith’s
unshakable, even if we rock stones
asleep in broken arms.
Because we have a thing
about law & order,
we’ve all seen moonlight on lakes
& crows whittled from a block
of air. In this animal-night, no
siree, we won’t disappoint you
when we rise out of hawkweed.
Punchdrunk
So what if he walks into red
North Carolina traffic at night
like Jarrell, dreaming hollyhock,
blowing some horn of bone?
Hellbent for green dark
because a man’s mind runs
away from him like a wild horse.
The second thought of a wood thrush,
wings waxed to August sky. Deep relic
truths & strange tales. Once he
went ringing doorbells, singing
Sticks & stones may break my bones, but. …
If he knows nothing else, he knows
how to take a solid, left, black jab,
how to force a big man to kiss the canvas,
a life stronger than fossil & boxwood.
Vigilante
Each hired hand places
a dusty boot in a stirrup,
swings himself into a sweat-burnt
saddle, hoping to handle
a noose. The boss’s moneysack
& Willie D. Jones gone.
Far as the eye can see
a sparrow, conifers jut toward
enamel sky. Snagged cloth
leads a trail into hackberry.
Near the northridge
he crossed the river into
another country of nights.
A human form scuffles knee-deep
in this year’s first snow,
bobbing on the sights of five guns.
Nothing to Do with Janice Drake
Mister Humbug
returns. She runs
to him, wailing his name
as if her clothes were on fire.
Then she sweeps
this killer’s tracks
clean, removing fingerprints
from the murder weapon.
He looks at her
& says, “Let that dress fall, Sweetie.
Don’t tell me
dogwoods grow crooked
because of Jesus.”
He grins
like a new case-knife.
Then stands at the bedroom
window, & says:
“Don’t you know
one of these days
you gonna make me
blow your brains out?”
Reconstructing a Crime
The back door opened
quiet as a coffin lid.
From the yard a Douglas fir
stared over his shoulder
like some god.
He was shoeless,
a man tiptoeing upon a dream.
From the right angle, the way
the moon now falls through damask curtains,
if anything, you’d only seen
the gun.
Outside their bedroom door
he could hear blossoms
of flesh. He slammed it open
& then huge white spaces
fell.
Come over here & lie down
within these chalked contours.
Okay. From this position,
the point of entry
was a gate …
the two lovers,
the way their legs were tangled,
he was still inside her.
Two
The dumb aura
deserts its guts
inside the queen
bee. The drone’s genitals
tear out like a blind eye
extricated in each honeyegg.
Sexual cadenza
of the praying mantis—
after her acrimonious mate
has been forced to eat
the song of his presence
his head is gnawed off
like a half-green
rosebud in the dirt.
Beg Song
. . where geometry borders on dream, and where the duende wears a muse’s mask for the eternal punishment of the great king.
—Federico Garcia Lorca
Foolhearted mindreader,
help us see how
the heart begs,
how fangs of opprobrium
possess our eyes. Truth
serum: how the index finger works
up into love, how the greased hand
slides up the wombholler of madness
& rebirth, whispering:
Look, back of the eyes. Each
gazes into its fish heart, final mirror
of beauty & monkeyshine.
Run your tongue along
fear in the frontal lobe.
Introduce us to that crazy man
with his face buried
in your hands.
In the slack bed, meat
falls through the door
of itself. Soul of a lamp.
Slipshod genius, show us
the cutworm’s silly heart,
how the telescopic love-eye
probes back to its genesis.
Death Threat Note
Dear Poetry Editor,
why did it have to
come to this?
Walk out any door
& you will never know.
Turn any doorknob
& open a butcher shop.
The chair rocks by itself.
A cat paces the windowsill;
the moon’s followed you home.
Another set of footprints
surfaces in new snow.
At any moment
a steel door slams
& locks a man in an icehouse.
I see Weldon Kees’ car
parked on the Golden Gate Bridge.
I’ve fallen in love
with a woman’s hands
on deathrow. Listen, a knife
can heal your mouth.
It’s no good to fall
pointing to the North Star,
moaning foxfire.
The meat wagon
runs off the road.
I don’t give warnings.
Child Stealer
You grin like a grape
peels open. One more step
& you will find yourself
lost in a room—
ten colors from floor
to ceiling in the old house
near the boxwood grove.
Let me kiss a tattoo
on your forehead.
You will come to love
this place where sunsets
hang red lanterns
in the windows.
For them to take you now,
will take nothing
short of death.
They say something’s wrong
with me upstairs,
& their eyes stare me down.
Torches in trees creep forward.
A Poet Whose Photo Never Grows Old
Snow is a white horse
around the bends of oaks
again. Someone you loved
now rocks herself
asleep in the ground.
The young coed curled
against you like a rainbow,
blood of a new season
connected to a distant land.
Your eyes were once lethal
in a way you’ve seen nightbirds
erase shadows & burn
a slow flame of songs,
the way you’ve seen a goddess
stooped over an old machine
whining like a violin—
what you call “these small miracles,”
the way you’ve seen roses released
from manure in a field.
Poetics
Beauty, I’ve seen you
pressed hard against the windowpane.
But the ugliness was unsolved
in the heart & mouth.
I’ve seen the quick-draw artist
crouch among the chrysanthemums.
Do I need to say more?
Everything isn’t ha-ha
in this valley. The striptease
on stage at the Blue Movie
is your sweet little Sara Lee.
An argument of eyes
cut through the metaphor,
& I hear someone crying
among crystal trees & confetti.
The sack of bones in the magnolia,
what’s more true than that?
Before you can see
her long pretty legs,
look into her unlit eyes.
A song of B-flat breath
staggers on death row. Real
men, voices that limp
behind the one-way glass wall.
I’ve seen the legless beggar
chopped down to his four wheels.
Imagination
There’s a deer no gun
can bring down like a big
woman in the grass sinks
to her knees to pray
in a white slouch.
He stands at the sunlit edge
of a snowy woods. Can you make him out?
An owl from its hiding place
spies on the buck.
Quails settle like a quiet
disturbance. The deer
stands more perfect
than man, like a slab
of half-gray granite
strong as midnight.
Precious as lust.
Eyes sharp & wild.
A wolf’s scent makes him stagger
As a hawk sails, powered by a hint
of day. One morning this deer will fall
when nothing or no one can nudge this man
awake. Where eyes cannot meet,
silence is a song, old bones
stashed in a decayed nest
in the ground.
Ghost Chant, et alii
Daydream the old Indian medicine man
who boards the Greyhound
at midnight outside Jackson Hole
& sits next to you,
the fat belly of life,
a lilacbush in May,
the smoke that curls
back up to eat itself.
Daydream a mongrel dog
who yelps at the footsteps of your sister.
The coyote-goddess’ lonely hill
to climb with the moon,
a stone vase
with a copperhead inside.
Daydream a mountain lion
riding air—to dismiss
the half song
of this machine’s forgetfulness.
A white ceramic Ferris wheel
surrendering sacks of grain,
the eccentric black book
that gnaws off your hands.
Daydream the viper & Easter lily.
A fifth of Ronrico
on the poet’s night table,
morning’s empty bottle,
a grunt-song that spins
itself from flesh
at the top of a spiral staircase,
the talking drum
the center of water.
Daydream a mermaid
peering into the four windows
of a lighthouse, the fandango
like a rooster struggles out of golden grass
with its head cut off.
Faust’s old greed & sick hair,
a gas leak
with twenty padlocks on your one door.
Daydream lies rot in the mouth,
a black Mercedes-Benz
& brass knuckles,
an old man who has seen too much
in a dark alley, the killer’s face
in seven mirrors on each wall,
hemlock in a silver chalice,
the shadow of a grave
beneath your slow feet.
Passions
Coitus
Ah, pink tip of sixth sense,
oyster fat of lovepearl,
dew-seed & singing leaf-tongue,
lizard’s head of pure thought.
Body Painting
To step into the golden lute
& paint one’s soul
on the body. Bird
goddess & slow snake
in the flowered tree. Circle,
lineage, womb, mouth, leaf-footed
godanimal on a man’s chest
who leaps into the moon
on a woman’s belly.
Blue-green Iridescent Flies
Meat, excrement, a source
of life attracts this
message & definition
of the ultimate us.
They fly off
with the weight of the world.
Peepshow
A new moon rises
on an elevator over the mountain.
String Bass
The moon’s at the window,
as she rocks in the arms
of this lonely player
like a tall Yoruba woman.
Pinball Machines
Encased in glass, a woman
opens her eyes. The room floods
with a century of bells.
Magnetic balls & sound of metal
seem enough to build a locomotive
moving through the room’s wooden bones.
Butterflies
Incandescent anthologies
semi-zoological alphabets of fire,
these short lives transmigrate, topaz
memories cling to air, release wordflesh
from the cocoon of silk fear.
Psilocybe
One hundred purple rooms
in a mirror of black water.
I must enter each,
interrogated by a different demon.
In the distance I can hear
the sea coming. A woman at Laguna Beach.
Her eyes now seashells.
Her arms two far-off sails.
Like a tree drags the ground on a windy day
with yellow & red fruit too soft to eat,
she comes toward me. Stars cluster
her laughter like a nest of moth eyes—
her focus on the world.
The closer she comes, the deeper
I work myself away into music
that I hope can save us both.
A man steps from a junkyard of chrome
fenders & hubcaps,
pulling off masks.
At least a hundred scattered about.
The last one: I’m him.
The Dog Act
I’m the warm-up act.
I punch myself in the face
across the makeshift stage.
Fall through imaginary trapdoors.
Like the devil, I turn cartwheels
& set my hair afire.
Contradiction, the old barker
drunk again on these lights
& camaraderie. The white poodles,
Leo, Camellia, St. John, & Anna,
leap through fiery hoops
to shake my hand.
I make a face
that wants to die
inside me.
“Step right up ladies & gentlemen,
see the Greatest Show on Earth,
two-headed lions, seraphim,
unicorns, satyrs, a woman
who saws herself in half.”
I can buckdance till I am
in love with the trapeze artist.
Can I have your attention now?
I’m crawling across the stagefloor
like a dog with four broken legs.
You’re supposed to jump up
& down now, laugh & applaud.
For You, Sweetheart, I’ll Sell Plutonium Reactors
For you, sweetheart, I’ll ride back down
into black smoke early Sunday morning
cutting fog, grab the moneysack
of gold teeth. Diamond mines
soil creep groan ancient cities, archaeological
diggings, & yellow bulldozers turn around all night
in blood-lit villages. Inhabitants here once gathered seashells
that glimmered like pearls. When the smoke clears, you’ll see
an erected throne like a mountain to scale,
institutions built with bones, guns hidden in walls
that swing open like big-mouthed B-52s.
Your face in the mirror is my face. You tapdance
on tabletops for me, while corporate bosses
arm wrestle in back rooms for your essential downfall.
I entice homosexuals into my basement butcher shop.
I put my hands around another sharecropper’s throat
for that mink coat you want from Saks Fifth,
short-change another beggarwoman,
steal another hit song from Sleepy
John Estes, salt another gold mine in Cripple Creek,
drive another motorcycle up a circular ice wall,
face another public gunslinger like a bad chest wound,
just to slide hands under black silk.
Like the Ancient Mariner steering a skeleton ship
against the moon, I’m their hired gunman
if the price is right, take a contract on myself.
They’ll name mountains & rivers in my honor.
I’m a drawbridge over manholes for you, sweetheart.
I’m paid two hundred grand
to pick up a red telephone anytime & call up God.
I’m making tobacco pouches out of the breasts of Indian
maidens so we can stand in a valley & watch grass grow.
Feet Nailed to the Floor
The Gypsy gazes into her crystal ball
to see a rooster drop in the dust.
One note of samba still burns
in the skull. The white-haired orator
has fallen asleep in his fireside chair,
& it’s now out of my hands.
Even your dear mama has taken the gold
crucifix from around her neck
& dropped it into a beggar’s tincup.
The seal is affixed. What can I say?
That informer, I bet his hands
are now on your sister’s legs.
I want to wash mine. Seven times
today the guards have chased children
who shout your name. You are a saint
to them, but blood isn’t yet dripping
in the courtyard from mango leaves.
The hole has been dug & a blindfold
cut from a lover’s nightgown.
The Nazi Doll
It sits lopsided
in a cage. Membrane.
Vertebra. This precious, white
ceramic doll’s brain
twisted out of a knob of tungsten.
It bleeds a crooked smile
& arsenic sizzles in the air.
Its eyes an old lie.
Its bogus tongue, Le Diable.
Its lampshade of memory.
Guilt yahoos, benedictions
in its Cro-Magnon skull
blossom, a flurry of fireflies,
vowels of rattlesnake beads.
Its heart hums the song of dust
like a sweet beehive.
Breaking Camp
Crops fall apart
in our hands, the whole year
stripped down to a penny’s
seed grain, huddled under
last night’s dogstar.
Places like Portales & Amarillo,
the only road out of town coughs
blood & dust. Tied to the ground
with songs, we sit along roadsides
like grass waiting for blades.
We clutch beads & pray our children grow
blind, stitching closed black pockets
while the stone-gatherers close in.
Property lines & night-blooming cereus
rush up to us, corrugated roofs
remembering the sky in rearview mirrors.
We leave voices buried under a sycamore,
ashes in a vase feeding its roots.
Following crops & shooting stars,
birds whirl south before a rainstorm
scrubs the stone floor
of the Panhandle. Each day is now
a yellow tractor rusting under a tin shed
where we feel our clothes grow thinner.
Corrigenda
I take it back.
The crow doesn’t have red wings.
They’re pages of dust.
The woman in the dark room
takes the barrel of a .357 magnum
out of her mouth, reclines
on your bed, a Helena Rubinstein smile.
I’m sorry, you won’t know your father
by his darksome old clothes.
He won’t be standing by that tree.
I haven’t salted the tail
of the sparrow.
Erase its song from this page.
I haven’t seen the moon
fall open at the golden edge of our sleep.
I haven’t been there
like the tumor in each of us.
There’s no death that can
hold us together like twin brothers
coming home to bury their mother.
I never said there’s a book inside
every tree. I never said I know how
the legless beggar feels when
the memory of his toes itch.
If I did, drunkenness
was then my god & naked dancer.
I take it back.
I’m not a suicidal mooncalf;
you don’t have to take my shoelaces.
If you must quote me, remember
I said that love heals from inside.
