and they have not heard,
can I say now
that I remember the knife
and I sit in a cool room
and rub my fingers to the whistle of the clock
and calmly think of
Ajax and sputum
and railroad hens across the golden rails,
and my real love is in Athens
600
A or B,
as outside my window
pigeons stumble as they fly
and through a door
that outwaits an empty room,
roses can’t get
in or out,
or love or moths or lightning—
I would neither break upon sighing
or smile; could nothings
like moths and men
exist like orange sunlight upon paper
divided by nine?
Athens is now many miles
and one death away,
and the tables are dirty as hell
and the sheets and the dishes,
but I’m laughing: that’s not real;
but it is, divided by nine
or one hundred:
clean laundry is love
that does not scratch itself
and sigh.
sleeping woman
I sit up in bed at night and listen to you
snore
I met you in a bus station
and now I wonder at your back
sick white and stained with
children’s freckles
as the lamp divests the unsolvable
sorrow of the world
upon your sleep.
I cannot see your feet
but I must guess that they are
most charming feet.
who do you belong to?
are you real?
I think of flowers, animals, birds
they all seem more than good
and so clearly
real.
yet you cannot help being a
woman. we are each selected to be
something. the spider, the cook.
the elephant. it is as if we were each
a painting and hung on some
gallery wall.
—and now the painting turns
upon its back, and over a curving elbow
I can see ½ a mouth, one eye and
almost a nose.
the rest of you is hidden
out of sight
but I know that you are a
contemporary, a modern living
work
perhaps not immortal
but we have
loved.
please continue to
snore.
a party here—machineguns, tanks, an army fighting against men on rooftops
if love could go on like tarpaper
or even as far as meaning goes
but it won’t work
can’t work
there are too many snot-heads
too many women who hide their legs
except for special bedrooms
there are too many flies on the
ceiling and it’s been a hot
Summer
and the riots in Los Angeles
have been over for a week
and they burned buildings and killed policemen and
whitemen and
I am a whiteman and I guess I did not get particularly
excited because I am a whiteman and I am poor
and I pay for being poor
because I do as few handstands for somebody else as
possible
and so I’m poor because I choose it and I guess it’s
not as uncomfortable that
way
and so I ignored the riots
because I figured both the black and the white
wanted many things that did not interest
me
plus having a woman here who gets very excited about
discrimination the Bomb segregation
you know you know
I let her go on until finally the talk
wearies me
for I don’t care too much for the
standard answer
or the lonely addled creatures who like to join a
CAUSE simply because a cause lifts them out of their
dribbling
imbecility into a stream of
action. me, I like time to think, think, think . . .
but it was a party here, really, machineguns, tanks,
the army fighting against men on rooftops . . .
the same thing we accused Russia of doing. well, it’s
a lousy game, and I don’t know what to do, except
if it’s like a friend of mine said I said one night when
I was drunk: “Don’t ever kill anybody, even if it seems
like the last or the only thing to do.”
laugh. all right. it might make you happy
that I even have a stream of remorse when I kill a
fly. an ant. a flea. yet I go on. I kill them and
go on.
god, love is more strange than numerals more strange
than
grass on fire more strange than the dead body of a child
drowned in the bottom of a tub, we know so
little, we know so much, we don’t know
enough.
anyhow, we go through our