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Inamoratas, with an approbation, Bestowed his title. Blessed his inclination. He wakes, unwinds, elaborately: a cat Tawny, reluctant, royal. He is fat And fine this morning. Definite. Reimbursed. He waits a moment, he designs his reign, That no performance may be plain or vain. Then rises in a clear delirium. He sheds, with his pajamas, shabby days. And his desertedness, his intricate fear, the Postponed resentments and the prim precautions. Now, at his bath, would you deny him lavender Or take away the power of his pine? What smelly substitute, heady as wine, Would you provide? life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some. Would you have flowers in his life? suggest Asters? a Really Good geranium? A white carnation? would you prescribe a Show With the cold lilies, formal chrysanthemum Magnificence, poinsettias, and emphatic Red of prize roses? might his happiest Alternative (you muse) be, after all, A bit of gentle garden in the best Of taste and straight tradition? Maybe so. But you forget, or did you ever know, His heritage of cabbage and pigtails, Old intimacy with alleys, garbage pails, Down in the deep (but always beautiful) South Where roses blush their blithest (it is said) And sweet magnolias put Chanel to shame. No! He has not a flower to his name. Except a feather one, for his lapel. Apart from that, if he should think of flowers It is in terms of dandelions or death. Ah, there is little hope. You might as well— Unless you care to set the world a-boil And do a lot of equalizing things, Remove a little ermine, say, from kings, Shake hands with paupers and appoint them men, For instance—certainly you might as well Leave him his lotion, lavender and oil. Let us proceed. Let us inspect, together With his meticulous and serious love, The innards of this closet. Which is a vault Whose glory is not diamonds, not pearls, Not silver plate with just enough dull shine. But wonder-suits in yellow and in wine, Sarcastic green and zebra-striped cobalt. With shoulder padding that is wide And cocky and determined as his pride; Ballooning pants that taper off to ends Scheduled to choke precisely. Here are hats Like bright umbrellas; and hysterical ties Like narrow banners for some gathering war. People are so in need, in need of help. People want so much that they do not know. Below the tinkling trade of little coins The gold impulse not possible to show Or spend. Promise piled over and betrayed. These kneaded limbs receive the kiss of silk. Then they receive the brave and beautiful Embrace of some of that equivocal wool. He looks into his mirror, loves himself— The neat curve here; the angularity That is appropriate at just its place; The technique of a variegated grace. Here is all his sculpture and his art And all his architectural design. Perhaps you would prefer to this a fine Value of marble, complicated stone. Would have him think with horror of baroque, Rococo. You forget and you forget. He dances down the hotel steps that keep Remnants of last night’s high life and distress. As spat-out purchased kisses and spilled beer. He swallows sunshine with a secret yelp. Passes to coffee and a roll or two. Has breakfasted. Out. Sounds about him smear, Become a unit. He hears and does not hear The alarm clock meddling in somebody’s sleep; Children’s governed Sunday happiness; The dry tone of a plane; a woman’s oath; Consumption’s spiritless expectoration; An indignant robin’s resolute donation Pinching a track through apathy and din; Restaurant vendors weeping; and the L That comes on like a slightly horrible thought. Pictures, too, as usual, are blurred. He sees and does not see the broken windows Hiding their shame with newsprint; little girl With ribbons decking wornness, little boy Wearing the trousers with the decentest patch, To honor Sunday; women on their way From “service,” temperate holiness arranged Ably on asking faces; men estranged From music and from wonder and from joy But far familiar with the guiding awe Of foodlessness. He loiters. Restaurant vendors Weep, or out of them rolls a restless glee. The Lonesome Blues, the Long-lost Blues, I Want A Big Fat Mama. Down these sore avenues Comes no Saint-Saëns, no piquant elusive Grieg, And not Tschaikovsky’s wayward eloquence And not the shapely tender drift of Brahms. But could he love them? Since a man must bring To music what his mother spanked him for When he was two: bits of forgotten hate, Devotion: whether or not his mattress hurts: The little dream his father humored: the thing His sister did for money: what he ate For breakfast—and for dinner twenty years Ago last autumn: all his skipped desserts. The pasts of his ancestors lean against Him. Crowd him. Fog out his identity. Hundreds of hungers mingle with his own, Hundreds of voices advise so dexterously He quite considers his reactions his, Judges he walks most powerfully alone, That everything is—simply what it is. But movie-time approaches, time to boo The hero’s kiss, and boo the heroine Whose ivory and yellow it is sin For his eye to eat of. The Mickey Mouse, However, is for everyone in the house. Squires his lady to dinner at Joe’s Eats. His lady alters as to leg and eye, Thickness and height, such minor points as these, From Sunday to Sunday. But no matter what Her name or body positively she’s In Queen Lace stockings with ambitious heels That strain to kiss the calves, and vivid shoes Frontless and backless, Chinese fingernails, Earrings, three layers of lipstick, intense hat Dripping with the most voluble of veils. Her affable extremes are like sweet bombs About him, whom no middle grace or good Could gratify. He had no education In quiet arts of compromise. He would Not understand your counsels on control, nor Thank you for your late trouble. At Joe’s Eats You get your fish or chicken on meat platters. With coleslaw, macaroni, candied sweets, Coffee and apple pie. You go out full. (The end is—isn’t it?—all that really matters.) And even and intrepid come The tender boots of night to home. Her body is like new brown bread Under the Woolworth mignonette. Her body is a honey bowl Whose waiting honey is deep and hot, Her body is like summer earth, Receptive, soft, and absolute ...

A last rock-skip hurlstorm (crazing river-glass) the closest they ever were. • In right lockstitch snared and split some fire-supper cooked on sticks. • By dawn the older brother took to chucking what bottle-frags he could find and crud-oysters across. The (high-pitched) younger blacked our waters with a yowl. • Lord the sound such as rose from him carried so— Carved into us. Clings. • Hadn’t they clung tooth and claw to branch and bark. — Came a man (and truck) to take them off. • Dieseled those boys off away some say somewheres upcountry, inland. • Where it was they landed (why) nobody not them knows. • No body not them knows just how they humped and grubbled home what road they’d graved what woods criss-crossed which creeks which trains they’d hopped who helped. • Came safe home sure        but blank as houses. Came safe home       —as him  —and him. —as (evermore) not them.

This is the time lean woods shall spend A steeped-up twilight, and the pale evening drink, And the perilous roe, the leaper to the west brink, Trembling and bright to the caverned cloud descend. Now shall you see pent oak gone gusty and frantic, Stooped with dry weeping, ruinously unloosing The sparse disheveled leaf, or reared and tossing A dreary scarecrow bough in funeral antic. Then, tatter you and rend, Oak heart, to your profession mourning; not obscure The outcome, not crepuscular; on the deep floor Sable and gold match lustres and contend. And rags of shrouding will not muffle the slain. This is the immortal extinction, the priceless wound Not to be staunched. The live gold leaks beyond, And matter’s sanctified, dipped in a gold stain.

The chickens are back in their coop. The kids are out on the town. It's here in one fell swoop. It's sundown. You've heard them say it before. The rumour's been going around. You're heading straight for the door. It's sundown. You've forgotten what you said. All that matters is here and now No one's getting you to bed, even though it's sundown. The trucks roll by on the highway. You want to follow that sound. You want to have your say at sundown. The dusk turns into dark. You walk away with a frown. You're the only one in the park past sundown. Here's where the children played, but they're not here right now. You don't want to end your day, even though it's sundown.

You’re expected to see only the top, where sky scrambles bloom, and not the spindly leg, hairy, fending off tall, green darkness beneath. Like every flower, she has a little theory, and what she thinks is up.   I imagine the long climb out of the dark beyond morning glories, day lilies, four o’clocks up there to the dream she keeps lifting, where it’s noon all day.

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery. The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily. Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust— —I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past— and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb, leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives, all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown— and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form! A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul? Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive? You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower! And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not! So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter, and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen, —We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision. Berkeley, 1955

No pitying/“Ah” for this one —Alan Shapiro No, nor a fierce hurrah for what it does without choice, for following the light for the same reason the light follows it. Just a thing rough to the touch, a face like a thousand ticks turning their backs, suckling at something you can’t see, and a body like a tag off the earth so that my child hands couldn’t tear it out from the overgrown lot next door. My palms raw with the shock of quills and spines. Its hold like spite, and ugly except when seen from a distance— a whole field of them by the highway, an 80-mile-per-hour view like a camera’s flash. All of them like halos without saints to weigh them down.

Kathleen Eileen Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love. My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls, Are gone from the house. My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite And night is night. It is a real chill out, The genuine thing. I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer Because sun stays and birds continue to sing. It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone. The sweet flowers indrying and dying down, The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown. It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes. I am aware there is winter to heed. There is no warm house That is fitted with my need. I am cold in this cold house this house Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls. I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs. I am a woman who hurries through her prayers. Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my Desert and my dear relief Come: there shall be such islanding from grief, And small communion with the master shore. Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin, Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry In humming pallor or to leap and die. Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

Some people say the devil is beating his wife. Some people say the devil is pawing his wife. Some people say the devil is doubling down on an overall attitude of entitlement toward the body of his wife. Some people say the devil won’t need to be sorry, as the devil believes that nothing comes after this life. Some people say that in spite of the devil’s public, long-standing, and meticulously logged disdain for the health and wholeness of his wife, the devil spends all day, every day, insisting grandly and gleefully on his general pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly considers himself to be an unswayed crusader: effortlessly magnetic, scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of the devil’s several advanced degrees, a luminous autodidact. Some people say calm down; this is commonplace. Some people say calm down; this is very rare. Some people say the sun is washing her face. Some people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.

The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena By indulging native appetites played what has now been seen a Not entirely negligible part In consolidating at the very start The position of the Early Christian Church. Initiatory rites are always bloody And the lions, it appears From contemporary art, made a study Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy Liturgically sacrificial hue And if the Christians felt a little blue— Well people being eaten often do. Theirs was the death, and theirs the crown undying, A state of things which must be satisfying. My point which up to this has been obscured is that it was the lions who procured By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone The martyrdoms on which the Church has grown. I only write this poem because I thought it rather looked As if the part the lions played was being overlooked. By lions’ jaws great benefits and blessings were begotten And so our debt to Lionhood must never be forgotten.