Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 16

or go? I wouldn’t

     give you a nickel,

you aren’t much of a doll

     anyway. And he

picks up his pride

and puts on his pants

     —glad enough

to have pants to wear—

     and goes.

Why is it that versions

     of this lack

of communication are

     universal?

New York, Late 1950

A Typical Affair

Living in an apartment with a gelded cat

I found a maiden—and left her there.

I seek a better bargain; and that aunt,

that aunt of hers was an awful nuisance.

Seriously, between us, I think I did right

in all things by her. And I’ll see her again,

and we’ll become friendly (not lovers) because

I have to work with her in the shoestore.

She knows, too. And it will be interesting

tomorrow to see how she acts. If she’s

friendly (or even loving) I will resist:

albeit so politely she’ll think she has

been complimented. And one night

drunk maybe we’ll have a ball.

Paterson, December 1950

A Poem on America

America is like Russia.

Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.

We have the proletariat too.

Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.

Versilov wore a hair shirt

and dreamed of classical pictures.

The alleys, the dye works,

Mill Street in the smoke,

melancholy of the bars,

the sadness of long highways,

negroes climbing around

the rusted iron by the river,

the bathing pool hidden

behind the silk factory

fed by its drainage pipes;

all the pictures we carry in our mind

images of the thirties,

depression and class consciousness

transfigured above politics

filled with fire

with the appearance of God.

Early 1951

After Dead Souls

Where O America are you

going in your glorious

automobile, careening

down the highway

toward what crash

in the deep canyon

of the Western Rockies,

or racing the sunset

over Golden Gate

toward what wild city

jumping with jazz

on the Pacific Ocean!

Spring 1951

Marijuana Notation

How sick I am!

     that thought

always comes to me

     with horror.

Is it this strange

     for everybody?

But such fugitive feelings

have always been

     my metier.

Baudelaire—yet he had

great joyful moments

     staring into space,

looking into the

     middle distance,

contemplating his image

     in Eternity.

They were his moments

     of identity.

It is solitude that

produces these thoughts.

It is December

almost, they are singing

     Christmas carols

in front of the department

stores down the block on

     Fourteenth Street.

New York, November 1951

Gregory Corso’s Story

The first time I went

     to the country to New Hampshire

when I was about eight

     there was a girl

I always used to paddle with a plywood stick.

We were in love,

     so the last night there

we undressed in the moonlight

     and showed each other our bodies,

then we ran singing back to the house.

December 10, 1951

I Have Increased Power

over knowledge of death.

(See also Hemingway’s

preoccupation.) My

dreamworld and realworld

become more and more

distinct and apart.

I see now that what

I sought in X seven years

ago was mastery or

victimage played out

naked in the bed.

Renewal of nostalgia

for lost flair of those days,

lost passions …

          Trouble with

me now, no active life

in realworld. And Time,

as realworld, appearing vile,

as Shakespeare says:

ruinous, vile, dirty Time.