“You have outgrown me,” she says slowly,
Washing my father’s feet, then falling silent
Like a woman without a mouth.)
When your skin cried out my bones caught fire.
You laid me down, I can never bear this image again,
I was the welcome but murderous guest.
And now, in manhood, I am a stranger to you.
You see me approaching and you think, “He is
The summer, he shapes my flesh and keeps
The dogs in me alert.”
While you die on your feet every day, not with me,
Apart, there is no me, no me but in your earth.
Turning inside of me, your life is lost, you won’t
Come back to me, I cannot recover from you.
A Father
Dancing or defeated,
Imprisoned in human warmth, we are already slowing
In the thickets of disinclination, in the contaminated fields,
Following on the heels of the mutilated, who whisper.
Their lips dry in the sun, the late sun.
We hear the dusk, we hear
The daily rattle from the scaffold,
We hear the flayed cub, we hear
The Jew burning in the bush and the crippled nun,
The judge’s sisters, god-fearing and voluptuous,
The heathens in the park, the raven shooters and the crusaders.
We hear them all.
A beak eats out of our mouths.
A tropic encircles our blood.
And under the linden, dewy in its shade,
The father lies for days, days on end, unswayable,
Watching his worn-down children.
A Virgin
Between clouds and royal ferns
The mares will ride tonight in the white field
Growing whiter.
Between thorns and rhododendrons the farmers beat
The children who came too soon.
And where the black iron maiden
Subdues me
The tower shudders, the holy signs tremble.
Listen:
“I am the fatal mother, desire me,
implore me, awaken in my sun — I
Will be with you till your breath fails.”
Listen: “You will not heal but live
On the edge of my life.
In sand, you will acknowledge me.”
In a harbour
That breathes like a woman,
Not restlessly but endlessly,
Her body flutters,
And where she swells all buttons snap,
All skins peel.
Where she swells I surrender, foundering in her bucking
Boats, her rising triumph,
Her sinking, slackening, sailing inland sea.
A Woman
1
Hair roaring with laughter,
Seagull eyes, a pouch on her belly,
A mother or another traitor,
Who knows this scorching woman?
Her nails come close to my wood,
Her tainted claws awaken my skin,
She blares in my hair like a hunting horn.
She approaches in pleats and bolts,
In heat, in resin, in splashing,
While I, in a state of desire,
Extended like a rifle and
Ready to engage and kill,
Enclose, plough and fell,
Bending, kneeling, the heady animal
Between her leather-soft knees.
She splits my skittle
In the familiar warmth.
5
The husky night and the cart
Of time that drives into the night,
Rattling.
Your hair, the seagull nest.
The meerschaum hills in which,
Toothed, the fruit that splits.
The lizards, the stone woodpeckers
Swaying in the leaves,
In the furious leaves.
Hear the hooves of the horse Desire
Fleeing down the road.
Hear in the fields the moorcock, the hare,
The chattering teeth of love.
12
Her mouth: the tiger, the leap, the spinning top
Round and round to seven months of summer.
Her body: liana waiting to ignite.
A shell of wheat.
Flat is my white,
As white as a fish of stone.
I have been razed to the skin.
My population purged.
She has become someone else. Strange to my eye,
The one who lived in the scruff of my neck.
The Catchword: House
3
One leap
And I dived
Blind
Into the arms of a wind so bitter
The land let go its hold and I
Was impregnated by winter
And winter was the fury
Of my coagulating skin.
Darkness
Visited me
The blood
Of women asked and swiftly climbed and leapt
Into my backbone. And I became flesh and claw
And branch. Brittle
With desire I grew, a
Rider of the night-time
Strangers
Who I,
The animal,
Could no longer escape. In this season
Strangers
Are my life. Turning, they collapse,
As hot as women in the snow.
8
The night blows and beats its mutilated wings.
Rising from the uncertain earth the broken branch
Pierces my body.
Winter ends again and
No-one is mine.
From the avaricious woods,
The avaricious rats come riding through the grass.
12
Loneliness is a home.
(A home closes — warm
Lives a season in lodgings and
Becomes a face — soft
Is loneliness and ripens thought-
Fully from child to man and corpse.)
Don’t be like a home.
Love is a cramp and
(A murder) reaching for the
Moment: a dying executioner, a splitting conch.
Mirrors ripen. Don’t be like a mirror.
from A Painted Rider [1961]
N.Y
1
Over the rippled asphalt, through the steam
billowing from the grates,
three Black warriors carry a pink summer evening gown
like a senator’s wife.
On the concrete peninsula, in the bronze palaces
— drip trays for the growling jets above—
everybody buys the thinking man’s cigarette,
everybody chews their ground beef with nickel-plated teeth,
everybody washes in film-star milk.
What protects me from
this cannon fever?
A design around my left nipple
eloquently executed by Tattoo Joe,
the electric Rembrandt.