Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 10

Dead glimpses of apocalypse:

The child pissing off the rock,

Or woman withered in the lips,

Contemplate the unseen Cock

That crows all beasts to ecstasy;

And so the Saints beyond the clock

Cry to men their dead eyes see.

Come, incomparable crown,

Love my love is lost to claim,

O hollow fame that makes me groan;

We are a king without a name:

Regain thine angel’s lost renown,

As, in the mind’s forgotten meadow,

Where brightest shades sleep under stone,

Man runs after his own shadow.

New York, March 1949

After All, What Else Is There to Say?

When I sit before a paper

   writing my mind turns

in a kind of feminine

     madness of chatter;

but to think to see, outside,

in a tenement the walls

     of the universe itself

I wait: wait till the sky

     appears as it is,

wait for a moment when

     the poem itself

is my way of speaking out, not

     declaiming of celebrating, yet,

but telling the truth.

New York, Early 1949

Sometime Jailhouse Blues

Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath,

As I lay my body down

Between the ache of breath and breath,

Golden slumber in the bone.

Thought’s a stone, though sweet or sorry,

Run-down from an uphill climb:

Money, money, work and worry,

And all the aimless toil of Time.

Sometime I look up in light

And see the weary sun go West;

Sometime I see the moon at night

Go hidden in her cloudy rest.

Sometime tears of death will blind

All that was worldly, wise or fair,

And visioned by the death of mind

My ghost will wander in the air,

And gaze upon a ghostly face,

Not knowing what was fair or lost,

Remembering not what flesh lay waste,

Or made him kind as ghost to ghost.

Brooklyn, April 24, 1949

Please Open the Window and Let Me In

Who is the shroudy stranger of the night,

Whose brow is mouldering green, whose reddened eye

Hides near the window trellis in dim light,

And gapes at old men, and makes children cry?

Who is the laughing walker of the street,

The alley mummy, stinking of the bone,

To dance unfixed, though bound in shadow feet,

Behind the child that creeps on legs of stone?

Who is the hungry mocker of the maze,

And haggard gate-ghost, hanging by the door,

The double mummer in whose hooded gaze

World has beckoned unto world once more?

Paterson, May 1949

Tonite all is well… What a

terrible future. I am twenty-three,

year of the iron birthday,

gate of darkness. I am ill,

I have become physically and

spiritually impotent in my madness this month.

I suddenly realized that my head

is severed from my body;

I realized it a few nights ago

by myself,

lying sleepless on the couch.

Paterson, Summer 1949

Fyodor

The death’s head of realism

and superhuman iron mask

that gapes out of The Possessed,

sometimes: Dostoievski.

My original version of D.

before I read him, as the dark

haunted-house man, wild, aged,

spectral Russian. I call him

Dusty now but he is

Dostoyevsky What premonitions

I had as a child.

Paterson, June 1949

Epigram on a Painting of Golgotha

On a bare tree in a hollow place,

A blinded form’s unhaloed face;

Sight, where Heaven is destroyed,

The hanging visage of the void.

New York, Summer 1949

“The road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena.”

—Thos. Hardy

I attempted to concentrate

the total sun’s rays in

each poem as through a glass,

but such magnification

did not set the page afire.

New York, Summer 1949

Metaphysics

This is the one and only

firmament; therefore

it is the absolute world.

There is no other world.

The circle is complete.

I am living in Eternity.

The ways of this world

are the ways of Heaven.

New York, Mid-1949

In Death, Cannot Reach What Is Most Near

We know all about death that