A Poem for Painters

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