John Wieners

Why is it eternity lasts a moment a moment eternity? Are you quiet enough to hear horned owls at dawn? I hear voices rustle in the leaves after they are gone. New mice burst into life.   Small raccoons bear tiny chains around their wrists.

O poetry, visit this house often, imbue my life with success, leave me not alone, give me a wife and home. Take this curse off of early death and drugs, make me a friend among peers, lend me love, and timeliness. Return me to the men who teach and above all, cure the hurts of wanting the impossible through this suspended vacuum. 1969

Yes I put her away. But now life flares up As safe as China in a cup You hear the droppings of her heart. Leaves rustle on the windowpane. Three o’clock turns round again. The man in the moon grows full Of her death while earth awaits beneath To receive her ashes on the wind. Yes, earth owns the wind As I her life Whom I have never seen Nor been with Still within our hearts there lies this communion of all that dies we held in common because without it we become more common than the dust. 2. Clay cannot create her features nor mirror reveal her mouth Photograph not show her form full with self, so put away her picture from the shelf And turn instead to living woman on the couch, decked with flowers as if it were she laid out, and not Sylvia, in the woods. 3. Address to the Woman Tell her that may not rise again she sings still in our breath. Tell her that may not breathe again she moves yet beneath the moon. Tell her that may not weave again her hands are dawns within our eyes. Tell her that may not speak again Her words are warnings in the wood.

I sit in Lees. At 11:40 PM with Jimmy the pusher. He teaches me Ju Ju. Hot on the table before us shrimp foo yong, rice and mushroom chow yuke. Up the street under the wheels of a strange car is his stash—The ritual. We make it. And have made it. For months now together after midnight. Soon I know the fuzz will interrupt, will arrest Jimmy and I shall be placed on probation. The poem does not lie to us. We lie under its law, alive in the glamour of this hour able to enter into the sacred places of his dark people, who carry secrets glassed in their eyes and hide words under the coats of their tongue. 6.16.58

God love you Dana my lover lost in the horde on this Friday night, 500 men are moving up & down from the bath room to the bar. Remove this desire from the man I love. Who has opened the savagery of the sea to me. See to it that his wants are filled on California street Bestow on him lar- gesse that allows him peace in his loins. Leave him not to the moths. Make him out a lion so that all who see him hero worship his thick chest as I did moving my mouth over his back bringing our hearts to heights I never hike over anymore. Let blond hair burn on the back of his neck, let no ache screw his face up in pain, his soul is so hooked. Not heroin. Rather fix these hundred men as his lovers & lift him with the enormous bale of their desire. 6.20.58

The scene changes Five hours later and I come into a room where a clock ticks. I find a pillow to muffle the sounds I make. I am engaged in taking away from God his sound. The pigeons somewhere above me, the cough a man makes down the hall, the flap of wings below me, the squeak of sparrows in the alley. The scratches I itch on my scalp, the landing of birds under the bay window out my window. All dull details I can only describe to you, but which are here and I hear and shall never give up again, shall carry with me over the streets of this seacoast city, forever; oh clack your metal wings, god, you are mine now in the morning. I have you by the ears in the exhaust pipes of a thousand cars gunning their motors turning over all over town. 6.15.58

Our age bereft of nobility How can our faces show it? I look for love. My lips stand out dry and cracked with want of it. Oh it is well. My poem shall show the need for it. Again we go driven by forces we have no control over. Only in the poem comes an image that we rule the line by the pen in the painter’s hand one foot away from me. Drawing the face and its torture. That is why no one dares tackle it. Held as they are in the hands of forces they cannot understand. That despair is on my face and shall show in the fine lines of any man. I had love once in the palm of my hand. See the lines there. How we played its game, are playing now in the bounds of white and heartless fields. Fall down on my head, love, drench my flesh in the streams of fine sprays. Like French perfume so that I light up as mountain glorys and I am showered by the scent of the finished line. No circles but that two parallels do cross And carry our souls and bodies together as the planets, Showing light on the surface of our skin, knowing that so much of it flows through the veins underneath. Our cheeks puffed with it. The pockets full. 2. Pushed on by the incompletion of what goes before me I hesitate before this paper scratching for the right words. Paul Klee scratched for seven years on smoked glass, to develop his line, LaVigne says, look at his face! he who has spent all night drawing mine. The sun also rises on the rooftops, beginning w/ violet. I begin in blue knowing why we are cool. 3. My middle name is Joseph and I walk beside an ass on the way to what Bethlehem, where a new babe is born. Not the second hand of Yeats but first prints on a cloudy windowpane. America, you boil over 4. The cauldron scalds. Flesh is scarred. Eyes shot. The street aswarm with vipers and heavy armed bandits. There are bandages on the wounds but blood flows unabated. The bath- rooms are full. Oh stop up the drains. We are run over. 5. Let me ramble here. yet stay within my own yardlines. I go out of bounds without defense, oh attack. 6. At last the game is over and the line lengthens. Let us stay with what we know. That love is my strength, that I am overpowered by it: desire that too is on the face: gone stale. When green was the bed my love and I laid down upon. Such it is, heart’s complaint, You hear upon a day in June. And I see no end in view when summer goes, as it will, upon the roads, like singing companions across the land. Go with it man, if you must, but leave us markers on your way. South of Mission, Seattle, over the Sierra Mountains, the Middle West and Michigan, moving east again, easy coming into Chicago and the cattle country, calling to each other over canyons, careful not to be caught at night, they are still out, the destroyers, and down into the South, familiar land, lush places, blue mountains of Carolina, into Black Mountain and you can sleep out, or straight across into States I cannot think of their names. This nation is so large, like our hands, our love it lives with no lover, looking only for the beloved, back home into the heart, New York, New England, Vermont green mountains, and Massachusetts my city, Boston and the sea. Again to smell what this calm ocean cannot tell us. The seasons. Only the heart remembers and records in words of works we lay down for those men who can come to them. 7. At last. I come to the last defense. My poems contain no wilde beestes, no lady of the lake music of the spheres, or organ chants, yet by these lines I betray what little given me. One needs no defense. Only the score of a man’s struggle to stay  with what is his own, what lies within him to do. Without which is nothing, for him or those who hear him And I come to this, knowing the waste, leaving the rest up to love and its twisted faces my hands claw out at only to draw back from the blood already running there. Oh come back, whatever heart you have left. It is my life you save. The poem is done. 6.18.58

For I have seen love and his face is choice Heart of Hearts, a flesh of pure fire, fusing from the center where all Motion is one. And I have known despair that the Face has ceased to stare at me with the Rose of the world but lies furled in an artificial paradise it is Hell to get into. If I knew you were there I would fall upon my knees and plead to God to deliver you in my arms once again. But it is senseless to try. One can only take means to reduce misery, confuse the sensations so that this Face, what aches in the heart and makes each new start less close to the source of desire, fade from the flesh that fires the night, with dreams and infinite longing.

to Somes from incarceration, Taunton State Hospital, 1972 gaunt, ugly deformed broken from the womb, and horribly shriven at the labor of their forefathers, if you check back scout around grey before actual time their sordid brains don’t work right, pinched men emaciated, piling up railroad ties and highway ditches blanched women, swollen and crudely numb ered before the dark of dawn scuttling by candlelight, one not to touch, that is, a signal panic thick peasants after the attitude at that time of their century, bleak and centrifugal they carry about them, tough disciplines of copper Indianheads. there are worse, whom you may never see, non-crucial around the spoke, these you do, seldom locked in Taunton State Hospital and other peon work farms drudge from morning until night, abandoned within destitute crevices odd clothes intent on performing some particular task long has been far removed there is no hope, they locked-in key’s; housed of course and there fed, poorly off sooted, plastic dishes, soiled grimy silver knives and forks, stamped Department of Mental Health spoons but the unshrinkable duties of any society produces its ill-kempt, ignorant and sore idiosyncrasies. There has never been a man yet, whom no matter how wise can explain how a god, so beautiful he can create the graces of formal gardens, the exquisite twilight sunsets in splendor of elegant toolsmiths, still can yield the horror of dwarfs, who cannot stand up straight with crushed skulls, diseases on their legs and feet unshaven faces of men and women, worn humped backs, deformed necks, hare lips, obese arms distended rumps, there is not a flame shoots out could ex- tinguish the torch of any liberty’s state infection. 1907, My Mother was born, I am witness t- o the exasperation of gallant human beings at g- od, priestly fathers and Her Highness, Holy Mother the Church persons who felt they were never given a chance, had n- o luck and were flayed at suffering. They produced children with phobias, manias and depression, they cared little for their own metier, and kept watch upon others, some chance to get ahead Yes life was hard for them, much more hard than for any blo ated millionaire, who still lives on their hard-earned monies. I feel I shall have to be punished for writing this, that the omniscient god is the rich one, cared little for looks, less for Art, still kept weekly films close for the free dishes and scandal hot. Some how though got cheated in health and upon hearth. I am one of them. I am witness not to Whitman’s vision, but instead the poorhouses, the mad city asylums and re- life worklines. Yes, I am witness not to God’s goodness, but his better or less scorn. The First of May, The Commonwealth of State of Massachusetts, 1972

And with great fear I inhabit the middle of the night What wrecks of the mind await me, what drugs to dull the senses, what little I have left, what more can be taken away? The fear of travelling, of the future without hope or buoy. I must get away from this place and see that there is no fear without me: that it is within unless it be some sudden act or calamity to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If I could just get out of the country. Some place where one can eat the lotus in peace. For in this country it is terror, poverty awaits; or am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson or experience to those young who would trod the same path, without God unless he be one of justice, to wreak vengeance on the acts committed while young under un- due influence or circumstance. Oh I have always seen my life as drama, patterned after those who met with disaster or doom. Is my mind being taken away me. I have been over the abyss before. What is that ringing in my ears that tells me all is nigh, is naught but the roaring of the winter wind. Woe to those homeless who are out on this night. Woe to those crimes committed from which we can walk away unharmed. So I turn on the light And smoke rings rise in the air. Do not think of the future; there is none. But the formula all great art is made of. Pain and suffering. Give me the strength to bear it, to enter those places where the great animals are caged. And we can live at peace by their side. A bride to the burden that no god imposes but knows we have the means to sustain its force unto the end of our days. For that is what we are made for; for that we are created. Until the dark hours are done. And we rise again in the dawn. Infinite particles of the divine sun, now worshipped in the pitches of the night.