Kenneth Koch - To Marina lyrics

So many convolutions and not enough simplicity! When I had you to write to it Was different. The quiet, dry Z Leaped up to the front of the alphabet. You sit, stilling your spoons With one hand; you move them with the other. Radio says, “God is a postmaster.” You said, Zis is lawflee. And in the heat Of writing to you I wrote simply. I thought These are the best things I shall ever write And have ever written. I thought of nothing but touching you Thought of seeing you and, in a separate thought, of looking at you. You were concentrated feeling and thought. You were like the ocean In which my poems were the swimming. I brought you Ear rings. You said, these are lawflee. We went To some beach, where the sand was dirty. Just going in To the bathing house with you drove me “out of my mind.” It is wise to be witty. The shirt collar's far away. Men tramp up and down the city on this windy day. I am feeling a-political as a shell Brought off some fish. Twenty-one years Ago I saw you and loved you still. Still! It wasn't plenty Of time. Read Anatole France. Bored, a little. Read Tolstoy, replaced and overcome. You read Stendhal. I told you to. Where was replacement Then? I don't know. He shushed us back in to ourselves. I used to understand The highest excitement. Someone died And you were distant. I went away And made you distant. Where are you now? I see the chair And hang onto it for sustenance. Good God how you kissed me And I held you. You screamed And I wasn't bothered by anything. Was nearest you. And you were so realistic Preferring the Soviet Bookstore To my literary dreams. “You don't like war,” you said After reading a poem In which I'd simply said I hated war In a whole list of things. To you It seemed a position, to me It was all a flux, especially then. I was in an Unexpected situation. Let's take a walk I wrote. And I love you as a sheriff Searches for a walnut. And And so unless I'm going to see your face Bien soon, and you said You must take me away, and Oh Kenneth You like everything To be pleasant. I was burning Like an arch Made out of trees. I'm not sure we ever actually took a walk We were so damned nervous. I was heading somewhere. And you had to be At an appointment, or else be found out! Illicit love! It's not a thing to think of. Nor is it when it's licit! It is too much! And it wasn't enough. The achievement I thought I saw possible when I loved you Was that really achievement? Were you my Last chance to feel that I had lost my chance? I grew faint at your voice on the telephone. Electricty and all colors were mine, and the tops of hills And everything that breathes. That was a feeling. Certain Artistic careers had not even started. And I Could have surpa**ed them. I could have I think put the Whole world under our feet. You were in the restaurant. It Was Chinese. We have walked three blocks. Or four blocks. It is New York In nineteen fifty-three. Nothing has as yet happened That will ever happen and will mean as much to me. You smile, and turn your head. What rocketing there was in my face and in my head And bombing everywhere in my body I loved you I knew suddenly That nothing had meant anything like you I must have hoped (crazily) that something would As if thinking you were the person I had become. My sleep is beginning to be begun. And the sheets were on the bed. A clock rang a bird's song rattled into my typewriter. I had been thinking about songs which were very abstract. It was really a table. Now, the telephone. Hello, what? What is my life like now? Engaged, studying and looking around The library, teaching—I took it rather easy A little too easy—we went to the ballet Then dark becomes the light (blinding) of the next eighty days Orchestra cup become As beautiful as an orchestra or a cup, and Locked climbs becomes If we were locked, well not quite, rather Oh penniless could I really die, and I understood everything Which before was running this way and that in my head I saw titles, volumes, and suns I felt the hot Pressure of your hands in that restaurant To which, along with gla**es, plates, lamps, lusters, Tablecloths, napkins, and all the other junk You added my life for it was entirely in your hands then— My life Yours, My Sister Life of Pasternak's beautiful title My life without a life, my life in a life, my life impure And my life pure, life seen as an entity One d**h and a variety of days And only on life. I wasn't ready For you. I understood nothing Seemingly except my feelings You were whirling In your life I was keeping Everything in my head An artist friend's apartment Five flights up the Lower East Side nineteen Fifty-something I don't know What we made love the first time I Almost died I had never felt That way it was like being stamped on in Hell It was roses of Heaven My friends seemed turned to me to empty shell On the railroad train's red velvet back You put your hand in mine and said “I told him” Or was it the time after that? I said Why did you Do that you said I thought It was over. Why Because you were so Nervous of my being there it was something I thought I read Tolstoy. You said I don't like the way it turns out (Anna Karenina) I had just liked the strength Of the feeling you thought About the end. I wanted To I don't know what never leave you Five flights up the June Street empties of fans, cups, kites, cops, eats, nights, no The night was there And something like air I love you Marina Eighty-five days Four thousand three hundred and sixty- Two minutes all poetry was changed For me what did I do in exchange I am selfish, afraid you are Overwhelmingly parade, back, sunshine, dreams Later thousands of dreams You said You make me feel nawble (noble). I said Yes. I said To nothingness, This is all poems. Another one said (later) That is so American. You were Russian You thought of your feelings, one said, not of her, Not of the real situation. But my feelings were a part, They were the force of the real situation. Truer to say I thought Not of the whole situation For your husband was also a part And your feelings about your child were a part And all my other feelings were a part. We Turned this way and that, up- Stairs then down Into the streets. Did I die because I didn't stay with you? Or what did I lose of my life? I lose You. I put you In everything I wrote. I used that precious material I put it in forms Also I wanted to break down the forms Poetry was a real occupation To hell with the norms, with what is already written Twenty-nine in love finds pure expression Twenty-nine years you my whole life's digression Not taken and Oh Kenneth Everything afterwards seemed nowhere near What I could do then in several minutes— I wrote, “I want to look at you all day long Because you are mine.” I am twenty-nine, pocket flap folded And I am smiling I am looking out at a world that I significantly re-created from inside Out of contradictory actions and emotions. I look like a silly child that Photograph that year—big gla**es, unthought-of clothes, A suit, slight mess in general, cropped hair. And someone liked me, Loved me a lot, I think. And someone else had, you had too. I was Undrenched by the tears I'd shed later about this whole thing when I'd telephone you I'd be all nerves, though in fact All life was a factor and all my nerves were in my head. I feel Peculiar. Or I feel nothing. I am thinking about this poem. I am thinking about your raincoat, I am worried about the tactfulness, About the truth of what I say. I am thinking about my standards for my actions About what they were You raised my standards for harmony and for happiness so much And, too, the sense of a center Which did amazing things for my taste But my taste for action? For honesty, for directness in behavior? I believe I simply never felt that anything could go wrong This was abject stupidity I also was careless in how I drove then and in what I ate And drank it was easier to feel that nothing could go wrong I had those feelings. I Did not those things. I was involved in such and such A situation, artistically and socially. We never spent a night Together it is the New York of Aquamarine sunshine and the Loew's Theater's blazing swing of light In the middle of the day Let's take a walk Into the world Where if our shoes get white With snow, is it snow, Marina, Is it snow or light? Let's take a walk Every detail is everything in its place (Aristotle). Literature is a cup And we are the malted. The time is a gla**. A June bug comes And a carpenter spits on a plane, the flowers ruffle ear rings. I am so dumb-looking. And you are so beautiful. Sitting in the Hudson Tube Walking up the fusky street Always waiting to see you You the original creation of all my You, you the you In every poem the hidden one whom I am talking to Worked at Bamberger's once I went with you to Cerutti's Bar—on Madison Avenue? I held your hand and you said Kenneth you are playing with fire. I said Something witty in reply. It was the time of the McCarthy trial Hot sunlight on lunches. You squirted Red wine into my mouth. My feelings were like a fire my words became very clear My psyche or whatever it is that puts together motions and emotions Was unprepared. There was a good part And an alarmingly bad part which didn't correspond— No letters! No seeming connection! Your slim pale hand It actually was, your blondness and your turning-around-to-me look Good-bye Kenneth. No, Marina, don't go And what had been before would come after Not to be mysterious we'd be together make love again It was the wildest thing I've done I can hardly remember it It has gotten by now So mixed up with losing you The two almost seemed in some way the same. You Wore something soft—angora? Cashmere? I remember that it was black, You turned around And on such a spring day which went on and on and on I actually think I felt that I could keep The strongest of all feelings contained inside me Producing endless emotional designs. With the incomparable feeling of rising and of being like a banner Twenty seconds worth twenty-five years With feeling noble extremely mobile and very free With Taking a Walk With You, West Wind, In Love With You, and Yellow Roses With pleasure I felt my leg muscles and my brain couldn't hold With the Empire State Building the restaurant your wrist bones with Greenwich Avenue In nineteen fifty-one with heat humidity a dog pissing with neon With the feeling that at last My body had something to do and so did my mind You sit At the window. You call Me, across Paris, Amsterdam, New York. Kenneth! My Soviet Girlhood. My Spring, summer And fall. Do you Know you have Missed some of them? Almost all. I am Waiting and I Am fading I Am fainting I'm In a degrading state Of inactivity. A ball Rolls in the gutter. I have Two hands to Stop it. I am A flower I pick The vendor his Clothes getting up Too early and What is it makes this rose Into what is more fragrant than what is not? I am stunned I am feeling tortured By “A man of words and not a man of deeds” I was waiting in a taxicab It was white letters in white paints it was you Spring comes, summer, then fall And winter. We really have missed All of that, whatever else there was In those years so sanded by our absence. I never saw you for as long as half a day You were crying outside the bus station And I was crying— I knew that this really was my life— I kept thinking of how we were crying Later, when I was speaking, driving, walking, Looking at doorways and colors, mysterious entrances Sometimes I'd be pierced as by a needle Sometimes be feverish as from a word Books closed and I'd think I can't read this book, I threw away my life These held on to their lives. I was Excited by praise from anyone, startled by criticism, always hating it Traveling around Europe and being excited It was all in reference to you And feeling I was not gradually forgetting What your temples and cheekbones looked like And always with this secret Later I thought that what I had done was reasonable It may have been reasonable I also thought that I saw what had appealed to me So much about you, the way you responded To everything your excitement about Me, I had never seen that. And the fact That you were Russian, very mysterious, all that I didn't know About you—and you didn't know Me, for I was as strange to you as you were to me. You were like my first trip to France you had Made no a**umptions. I could be Clearly and Pa**ionately and Nobly (as you'd said) who I was—at the outer limits of my life Of my life as my life could be Ideally. But what about the dark part all this lifted Me out of? Would my bad moods, my uncertainties, my Distrust of people I was close to, the Twisty parts of my ambition, my Envy, all have gone away? And if They hadn't gone, what? For didn't I need All the strength you made me feel I had, to deal With the difficulties of really having you? Where could we have been? But I saw so many new possibilities That it made me rather hate reality Or I think perhaps I already did I didn't care about the consequences Because they weren't “poetic” weren't “ideal” And oh well you said we walk along Your white dress your blue dress your green Blouse with sleeves then one without Sleeves and we are speaking Of things but not of very much because underneath it I am raving I am boiling I am afraid You ask me Kenneth what are you thinking If I could say It all then I thought if I could say Exactly everything and have it still be as beautiful Billowing over, riding over both our doubts Some kind of perfection and what did I actually Say? Marina it's late. Marina It's early. I love you. Or else, What's this street? You were the perfection of my life And I couldn't have you. That is, I didn't. I couldn't think. I wrote, instead. I would have had To think hard, to figure everything out About how I could be with you, Really, which I couldn't do In those moments of permanence we had As we walked along. We walk through the park in the sun. It is the end. You phone me. I send you a telegram. It Is the end. I keep Thinking about you, grieving about you. It is the end. I write Poems about you, to you. They Are no longer simple. No longer Are you there to see every day or Every other or every third or fourth warm day And now it has been twenty-five years But those feelings kept orchestrating I mean rehearsing Rehearsing in my and tuning up While I was doing a thousand other things, the band Is ready, I am over fifty years old and there's no you— And no me, either, not as I was then, When it was the Renaissance Filtered through my nerves and weakness Of nineteen fifty-four or fifty-three, When I had you to write to, when I could see you And it could change.