Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 11

we will ever know because

we have all experienced

the state before birth.

Life seems a passage between

two doors to the darkness.

Both are the same and truly

eternal, and perhaps it may

be said that we meet in

darkness. The nature of time

is illuminated by this

meeting of eternal ends.

It is amazing to think that

thought and personality

of man is perpetuated in

time after his passage

to eternity. And one time

is all Time if you look

at it out of the grave.

New York, Mid-1949

This Is About Death

Art recalls the memory

of his true existence

to whoever has forgotten

that Being is the one thing

all the universe shouts.

Only return of thought to

its source will complete thought.

Only return of activity

to its source will complete

activity. Listen to that.

Mid-1949

Hymn

No hyacinthine imagination can express this clock of meat bleakly pining for its sweet immaterial paradise which I have celebrated in one gone dithyramb after another and have elevated to that highest place in the mind’s angelical empyrean which shall in the course of hot centuries to come come to be known as the clock of light:

the very summa and dove of the unshrouding of finality’s joy whence cometh purely pearly streams of reves and honey-thoughts and all like dreamy essences our hearts therefrom so filled with such incomparable and crownly creaminess one never knew whence it came,

whether from those foul regions of the soul the ancients named Malebolge or the Dank or the icicle-like crystal roads of cloudless sky called Icecube or Avenue where the angels late fourteen there convened hang on and raptly gaze on us singing down

in mewing voices liturgies of milk and sweet cream sighing no longer for the strawberries of the world whence in pain and wit’s despair they had ascended stoops of light up the celestial fire escape no more to sit suffering as we do one and all on the thorn

nor more we shall when the final gate is opened and the Diamond Seraph armed with 3 forks of lightning 7 claps of thunder 11 bursts of laughter and a thousand tears rolling down his silken cheeks bares his radiant breast and asks us in the Name of the Lord to share that Love in Heaven which on Earth was so disinherited.

September 1949

Sunset

The whole blear world

of smoke and twisted steel

around my head in a railroad

car, and my mind wandering

past the rust into futurity:

I saw the sun go down

in a carnal and primeval

world, leaving darkness

to cover my railroad train

because the other side of the

world was waiting for dawn.

New York-Paterson, November 1949

Ode to the Setting Sun

The Jersey Marshes in rain, November evening, seen from Susquehanna Railroad

The wrathful East of smoke and iron

Crowded in a broken crown;

The Archer of the Jersey mire

Naked in a rusty gown;

Railroad creeping toward the fire

Where the carnal sun goes down.

Apollo’s shining chariot’s shadow

Shudders in the mortal bourn;

Amber shores upon the meadow

Where Phaethon falls forlorn

Fade in somber chiaroscuro,

Phantoms of the burning morn.

Westward to the world’s blind gaze,

In funeral of raining cloud,

The motionless cold Heavens blaze,

Born out of a dying crowd;

Daybreak in the end of days,

Bloody light beneath the shroud.

In vault dominion of the night

The hosts of prophecy convene,

Till, empire of the lark alight,

Their bodies waken as we dream,

And put our raiment on, and bright

Crown, still haloed though unseen.

Under the earth there is an eye

Open in a sightless cave,

And the skull in Eternity

Bares indifference to the grave:

Earth turns, and the day must die,

And the sea accepts the wave.

My bones are carried on the train

Westward where the sun has gone;

Night has darkened in the rain,

And the rainbow day is done;

Cities age upon the plain

And smoke rolls upward out of stone.

New York-Paterson, November 1949–1950

Paterson

What do I want in these rooms papered with visions of money?

How much can I make by cutting my hair? If I put new heels on my shoes, bathe my body reeking of masturbation and sweat, layer upon layer of excrement

dried in employment bureaus, magazine hallways, statistical cubicles, factory stairways,

cloakrooms of the smiling gods of psychiatry;

if in antechambers I face the presumption of department store supervisory employees,

old clerks in their asylums of fat, the slobs and dumbbells of the ego with money and power

to hire and fire and make and break and fart and justify their reality of wrath and rumor of wrath to wrath-weary man,

what war I enter and for what a prize! the dead prick of commonplace obsession,

harridan vision of electricity at night and daylight misery of thumb-sucking rage.

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins,

eyes and ears full of marijuana,