I
Dull, disagreeable and dying,
the old men—
they were setups for my ridicule,
till time, the healer, made me theirs.
In the old New York, we said,
“If life could write,
it would have written like us.”
Now the lifefluid goes
from the throwaway lighter,
its crimson, cylindrical, translucent
glow grows pale—
O queen of cities, star of morning.
The age burns in me.
The path is cleared and cleared each year,
each year the brush closes;
nature cooperates with us,
then we cooperate no more.
II
The television's ocean-green square
loved and searched as no human face . . .
In my disconnected room
I improve talking to myself.
I convalesce. I do not enjoy
polemic with my old students,
and place a board across the arms of my chair
to type out letters
they burn for fear of my germs.
Disciples came like swallows from Brazil,
or airborne book reviews from London.
On sleepless nights, when my tragedy
delights the dawdling dawnbirds, I ask
where are their unannounced, familiar faces
I could not recognize.
The students whose enthusiasm
burned holes in the transitory
have graduated to not having been.
It would never do
to have them come back to life again,
they would have the fool's heartiness of ghosts . . .
without references or royalties, out of work.
Now that I am three parts iced-over,
I see the rose glow in my heater.
In moments of warmth, I see
the beauty who made summer
Long Island tropical.
From the nineties to Nixon,
the same girl, the same bust,
still consciously unwrinkled.
On my screen,
her unspeakable employer
offers her to me nightly,
as if she were his daughter.
Did their panic make me infallible?
Was my integrity my unique
understanding of everything I damned?
Did the musician, Gesualdo,
murder his wife to inherit
her voice of the nightingale?
My criticism survives its victims
buried in the Little Magazines
that featured us concurrently,
the barracuda and his prey.
My maiden reviews,
once the verbal equivalent of murder,
are now a brief,compact pile,
almost as old as I.
They fall apart sallowing,
their stiff pages
chip like dry leaves
flying the tree that fed them.
Under New York's cellular façades
clothed with vitreous indifference,
I dwindle . . . Dynamite no more.
I ask for a natural d**h,
no teeth on the ground,
no blood about the place . . .
It's not d**h I fear,
but unspecified, unlimited pain.