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I mean, who isn’t heating up for the next life on the order of Antoine Doinel, or a pot of unsweetened chocolate. Beginning with a single window and the sense that what we know outgrows everything except a headache or the desk dreaming on its own. It doesn’t matter if being upright brings living beings closer to the lives they lead (one’s 26-year-old self smokes a cigar but isn’t a desperado) nor is beginning a poem with someone’s wrath a means of stepping outside the Self as though volume equalled flesh tones — any more than the Epic of the Roast Chicken with Lyonnaise Potatoes and Greens takes over the above-ground, colors and smells aside.

Between the train's long slide and the sun ricocheting off the sea, anyone would have fallen silent in those words, the language of age in her face, the birds cawing over the broken earth, gathering near its stones and chapel doors. In the marina, the sea and its bones have grown smaller. Though the tide is out, it is not the tide nor the feathers nor the cat that jumps into the street, the dust lifting with each wing and disappearing. The rust- colored sheets that wrap the sails of ships, I don't know their name nor the way to say lips of water in Italian and mean this:  an old woman stood by the tracks until his hand stopped waving.

Say I had no choice, this weightless finger touched my tongue and told me to, it taught me; when kinder and more subtle methods failed, it put a gun to my head, a zero seared coldly in one temple, electrode glued chill to the other, the sniffer dogs rooting and snuffling in my crotch, the small white doorless room, the laser flashlight in one eye. You can’t hear the voice when it utters let there be speech, yet I faithfully spoke what I thought I was supposed to, inspired idiot, or dummy on that lap of language, the words themselves more real than I, words here before we were and when we are not again. So I blurted it out, my initial soliloquies, what I could catch through the static, giving my head a good thump now and then like one of those black-and-white tv sets, and projecting, those were some vast stadiums, the first row of faces as far as near stars if there at all, never having the faintest idea what it meant, the microphone dead, I did my best, tell them. Inch-thick rope for ascot, eyes put out, chained to my oars, all the others long vanished: the first minute of death is so long, like the first minute of consciousness there in the infinite darkness of somebody weeping, you never arrive, never reach shore, never mind with what clarity you seem to hear with your lips distant roar of surf breaking. I pulled too for those who’d come later, I’m guessing, singing in their names as well, sort of lip-synching but singing twice as loud, strapped to the mast, earways cleared, though I heard nothing but nothing, blue. Making up what I couldn’t make out, and all that uproarious and pitiless derision I had to raise my voice above, I mere link—out on that unknown ocean beating at my ears, just as at the beginning, the mother’s heart booming softly; from nowhere it came, like me, months before I arrived to take up the sorry job of being me, whatever a month was, whatever I was then, blind little dolphin with a thumb in its mouth, whatever a mouth was; poor mother mourning her own mother’s dying, over the actual ocean she lay, a strong stone’s throw from the Ohio or that poisoned ghost of it. Mother of my mother dying away from this world just as I was about to die into it. I see them there, up to their knees, gathered as for a baptism, cross traced in hydrochloric acid on a tiny forehead, right there at the dead water’s edge a scythe of moon, a meteor in arc of falling axe of gold for the severing of hairy umbilical rope, hear me out! I saw they were standing watch over her, and my mother’s conspicuous absence, wincing at the constant cough; and I saw her whom I would never meet, nearing peace in the scarlet Magdalenean cerements, clenching lightly between thumb and skeletal forefinger the scarlet egg, and the wide river’s sundering undertow sucking to its breast her shrunken body, fetal in her narrow bed, nothing but a huckleberry craft by now just vanishing around the first bend, more and more lost from sight by my mother, twenty-two, unaided by lunatic male she’d been sentenced to, from Goethe-phase to Trakl-phase. And she breaks down in her hotel room, in bullet-pocked Vienna, helplessly swept down the blind unwept current still flowing, sadness’s chemistry, horror’s and guilt’s, to this day through my veins. Months before we met, I listening to her crying, it went on forever, how not hear it, how not be fed it, in a shoreless darkness of sorrowing I listened, still listen, now watch this and pay close attention: nothing else there, only a listening called me, no name even, till they grave it in stone. Until we finally met, I watched her face rise on the horizon. Then there was some loud mutual screaming in the even more terrible blindness called light. Long before I invented the first word it taught me, it told me the others, so many. So only what was never mine is mine; and when no one is listening I sing what it means to me, even now, hearing my voice through my own disappearing, farther away every day, my mother’s mother’s fate and mine now one as I board the ocean liner at three months of age and arrive in New York, filled with space and time.

i The children on the lawn joined hand to hand go round and round each arm going into the next arm, around full circle until it comes back into each of the single bodies again They are singing, but not to each other: their feet move almost in time to the singing We can see the concentration on their faces, their eyes fixed on the empty moving spaces just in front of them. We might mistake this tranced moving for joy but there is no joy in it We can see (arm in arm) as we watch them go round and round intent, almost studious (the grass underfoot ignored, the trees circling the lawn ignored, the lake ignored) that the whole point for them of going round and round is (faster slower) going round and round ii Being with you here, in this room is like groping through a mirror whose glass has melted to the consistency of gelatin You refuse to be (and I) an exact reflection, yet will not walk from the glass, be separate. Anyway, it is right that they have put so many mirrors here (chipped, hung crooked) in this room with its high transom and empty wardrobe; even the back of the door has one. There are people in the next room arguing, opening and closing drawers (the walls are thin) You look past me, listening to them, perhaps, or watching your own reflection somewhere behind my head, over my shoulder You shift, and the bed sags under us, losing its focus there is someone in the next room there is always (your face remote, listening) someone in the next room. iii However, in all their games there seems to be some reason however abstract they at first appear When we read them legends in the evening of monstrous battles, and secret betrayals in the forest and brutal deaths, they scarcely listened; one yawned and fidgeted; another chewed the wooden handle of a hammer; the youngest one examined a slight cut on his toe, and we wondered how they could remain completely without fear or even interest as the final sword slid through the dying hero. The next night walking along the beach we found the trenches they had been making: fortified with pointed sticks driven into the sides of their sand moats and a lake-enclosed island with no bridges: a last attempt (however eroded by the water in an hour) to make maybe, a refuge human and secure from the reach of whatever walks along (sword hearted) these night beaches. iv Returning to the room: I notice how all your word- plays, calculated ploys of the body, the witticisms of touch, are now attempts to keep me at a certain distance and (at length) avoid admitting I am here I watch you watching my face indifferently yet with the same taut curiosity with which you might regard a suddenly discovered part of your own body: a wart perhaps, and I remember that you said in childhood you were a tracer of maps (not making but) moving a pen or a forefinger over the courses of the rivers, the different colours that mark the rise of mountains; a memorizer of names (to hold these places in their proper places) So now you trace me like a country’s boundary or a strange new wrinkle in your own wellknown skin and I am fixed, stuck down on the outspread map of this room, of your mind’s continent (here and yet not here, like the wardrobe and the mirrors the voices through the wall your body ignored on the bed), transfixed by your eyes’ cold blue thumbtacks v The children like the block of grey stone that was once a fort but now is a museum: especially they like the guns and the armour brought from other times and countries and when they go home their drawings will be full for some days, of swords archaic sunburst maces broken spears and vivid red explosions. While they explore the cannons (they aren’t our children) we walk outside along the earthworks, noting how they are crumbling under the unceasing attacks of feet and flower roots; The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases; Why is it (I’m thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending? vi And you play the safe game the orphan game the ragged winter game that says, I am alone (hungry: I know you want me to play it also) the game of the waif who stands at every picture window, shivering, pinched nose pressed against the glass, the snow collecting on his neck, watching the happy families (a game of envy) Yet he despises them: they are so Victorian Christmas-card: the cheap paper shows under the pigments of their cheerful fire- places and satin- ribboned suburban laughter and they have their own forms of parlour games: father and mother playing father and mother He’s glad to be left out by himself in the cold (hugging himself). When I tell you this, you say (with a smile fake as a tinsel icicle): You do it too. Which in some ways is a lie, but also I suppose is right, as usual: although I tend to pose in other seasons outside other windows. vii Summer again; in the mirrors of this room the children wheel, singing the same song; This casual bed scruffy as dry turf, the counterpane rumpled with small burrows, is their grassy lawn and these scuffed walls contain their circling trees, that low clogged sink their lake (a wasp comes, drawn by the piece of sandwich left on the nearby beach (how carefully you do such details); one of the children flinches but won’t let go) You make them turn and turn, according to the closed rules of your games, but there is no joy in it and as we lie arm in arm, neither joined nor separate (your observations change me to a spineless woman in a cage of bones, obsolete fort pulled inside out), our lips moving almost in time to their singing, listening to the opening and closing of the drawers in the next room (of course there is always danger but where would you locate it) (the children spin a round cage of glass from the warm air with their thread-thin insect voices) and as we lie here, caught in the monotony of wandering from room to room, shifting the place of our defences, I want to break these bones, your prisoning rhythms (winter, summer) all the glass cases, erase all maps, crack the protecting eggshell of your turning singing children: I want the circle broken.

Whenever I have a day off, I write a new poem. Does this mean you shouldn’t work, or that you write best on your day off? For example, this is the poem I wrote today. * When he was 20, he understood some of the secrets of life, and undertook to write them down so simply that even an idiot could understand. “For,” he reasoned, “if I can’t do that, I don’t understand it myself.” He proved himself right. When he was 50, he didn’t understand it himself. * “Why is it,” he said, “that no matter what you say, a woman always takes it personally?” “I never do,” she said. * John said, “Then I met that short fat guy with the neat little beard, with a name like dawn.” “You mean George Abend?” “Yeah.” “Abend means evening.” *

Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions Eaten in my head-stone by the wind and rain i Almost as if an intangible Nemesis or hatred Were marking scores against me, But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory. I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches, Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored, Not on the right of the matter. O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone! For worse than the anger of the wronged, The curses of the poor, Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear, Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer, Hanged by my sentence, Was innocent in soul compared with me.

I I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last being but a broken man I must be satisfied with my heart, although Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. II What can I but enumerate old themes, First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride. And then a counter-truth filled out its play, `The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it, She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. I thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love. And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea; Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love And not those things that they were emblems of. III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

I remember when I wrote The Circus I was living in Paris, or rather we were living in Paris Janice, Frank was alive, the Whitney Museum Was still on 8th Street, or was it still something else? Fernand Léger lived in our building Well it wasn’t really our building it was the building we lived in Next to a Grand Guignol troupe who made a lot of noise So that one day I yelled through a hole in the wall Of our apartment I don’t know why there was a hole there Shut up! And the voice came back to me saying something I don’t know what. Once I saw Léger walk out of the building I think. Stanley Kunitz came to dinner. I wrote The Circus In two tries, the first getting most of the first stanza; That fall I also wrote an opera libretto called Louisa or Matilda. Jean-Claude came to dinner. He said (about “cocktail sauce”) It should be good on something but not on these (oysters). By that time I think I had already written The Circus When I came back, having been annoyed to have to go I forget what I went there about You were back in the apartment what a dump actually we liked it I think with your hair and your writing and the pans Moving strummingly about the kitchen and I wrote The Circus It was a summer night no it was an autumn one summer when I remember it but actually no autumn that black dusk toward the post office And I wrote many other poems then but The Circus was the best Maybe not by far the best Geography was also wonderful And the Airplane Betty poems (inspired by you) but The Circus was the best. Sometimes I feel I actually am the person Who did this, who wrote that, including that poem The Circus But sometimes on the other hand I don’t. There are so many factors engaging our attention! At every moment the happiness of others, the health of those we know and our own! And the millions upon millions of people we don’t know and their well-being to think about So it seems strange I found time to write The Circus And even spent two evenings on it, and that I have also the time To remember that I did it, and remember you and me then, and write this poem about it At the beginning of The Circus The Circus girls are rushing through the night In the circus wagons and tulips and other flowers will be picked A long time from now this poem wants to get off on its own Someplace like a painting not held to a depiction of composing The Circus. Noel Lee was in Paris then but usually out of it In Germany or Denmark giving a concert As part of an endless activity Which was either his career or his happiness or a combination of both Or neither I remember his dark eyes looking he was nervous With me perhaps because of our days at Harvard. It is understandable enough to be nervous with anybody! How softly and easily one feels when alone Love of one’s friends when one is commanding the time and space syndrome If that’s the right word which I doubt but together how come one is so nervous? One is not always but what was I then and what am I now attempting to create If create is the right word Out of this combination of experience and aloneness And who are you telling me it is or is not a poem (not you?) Go back with me though To those nights I was writing The Circus. Do you like that poem? have you read it? It is in my book Thank You Which Grove just reprinted. I wonder how long I am going to live And what the rest will be like I mean the rest of my life. John Cage said to me the other night How old are you? and I told him forty-six (Since then I’ve become forty-seven) he said Oh that’s a great age I remember. John Cage once told me he didn’t charge much for his mushroom identification course (at the New School) Because he didn’t want to make a profit from nature He was ahead of his time I was behind my time we were both in time Brilliant go to the head of the class and “time is a river” It doesn’t seem like a river to me it seems like an unformed plan Days go by and still nothing is decided about What to do until you know it never will be and then you say “time” But you really don’t care much about it any more Time means something when you have the major part of yours ahead of you As I did in Aix-en-Provence that was three years before I wrote The Circus That year I wrote Bricks and The Great Atlantic Rainway I felt time surround me like a blanket endless and soft I could go to sleep endlessly and wake up and still be in it But I treasured secretly the part of me that was individually changing Like Noel Lee I was interested in my career And still am but now it is like a town I don’t want to leave Not a tower I am climbing opposed by ferocious enemies I never mentioned my friends in my poems at the time I wrote The Circus Although they meant almost more than anything to me Of this now for some time I’ve felt an attenuation So I’m mentioning them maybe this will bring them back to me Not them perhaps but what I felt about them John Ashbery Jane Freilicher Larry Rivers Frank O’Hara Their names alone bring tears to my eyes As seeing Polly did last night It is beautiful at any time but the paradox is leaving it In order to feel it when you’ve come back the sun has declined And the people are merrier or else they’ve gone home altogether And you are left alone well you put up with that your sureness is like the sun While you have it but when you don’t its lack’s a black and icy night. I came home And wrote The Circus that night, Janice. I didn’t come and speak to you And put my arm around you and ask you if you’d like to take a walk Or go to the Cirque Medrano though that’s what I wrote poems about And am writing about that now, and now I’m alone And this is not as good a poem as The Circus And I wonder if any good will come of either of them all the same.

Their ruler is elected state by state, and no one cuts his heart out as he drowses. Their senior citizens still copulate. Their convicts are allowed to change their blouses. In this backyard there hangs a gutted deer, and in that driver's seat there sits a wife. They have their MMR and Retrovir. They have their quarter-century more life. Each commoner receives a welcome mat. The maids have maids, and plumbers go to Paris. They call their waiters "sir." The poor are fat. They eat. They do not easily embarrass.

Can we believe—by an effort comfort our hearts: it is not waste all this, not placed here in disgust, street after street, each patterned alike, no grace to lighten a single house of the hundred crowded into one garden-space. Crowded—can we believe, not in utter disgust, in ironical play— but the maker of cities grew faint with the beauty of temple and space before temple, arch upon perfect arch, of pillars and corridors that led out to strange court-yards and porches where sun-light stamped hyacinth-shadows black on the pavement. That the maker of cities grew faint with the splendour of palaces, paused while the incense-flowers from the incense-trees dropped on the marble-walk, thought anew, fashioned this— street after street alike. For alas, he had crowded the city so full that men could not grasp beauty, beauty was over them, through them, about them, no crevice unpacked with the honey, rare, measureless. So he built a new city, ah can we believe, not ironically but for new splendour constructed new people to lift through slow growth to a beauty unrivalled yet— and created new cells, hideous first, hideous now— spread larve across them, not honey but seething life. And in these dark cells, packed street after street, souls live, hideous yet— O disfigured, defaced, with no trace of the beauty men once held so light. Can we think a few old cells were left—we are left— grains of honey, old dust of stray pollen dull on our torn wings, we are left to recall the old streets? Is our task the less sweet that the larvae still sleep in their cells? Or crawl out to attack our frail strength: You are useless. We live. We await great events. We are spread through this earth. We protect our strong race. You are useless. Your cell takes the place of our young future strength. Though they sleep or wake to torment and wish to displace our old cells— thin rare gold— that their larve grow fat— is our task the less sweet? Though we wander about, find no honey of flowers in this waste, is our task the less sweet— who recall the old splendour, await the new beauty of cities? The city is peopled with spirits, not ghosts, O my love: Though they crowded between and usurped the kiss of my mouth their breath was your gift, their beauty, your life.