Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 184

Ring yr brazen horns ye

     Fire engines of Soho!

Bark ye dogges in lofts, explode

     yr honking halos ye

     weightless Angels of

     Television!

It’s gonna be a delightful

     time, thank god nothing’s

     happening muchachos

Tonite but parties & car crashes,

     births & ambulance sirens,

Confetti falling over

     heartbroken partygoers

     doing the Lindy Hop at the

     back window of the loft

years ago when Abstract-Expressionist

     painters & poets had a party

     celebrating U.S. Eternity

     on New Year’s Eve before the War.

Brooklyn College Brain

For David Shapiro & John Ashbery

You used to wear dungarees & blue workshirt,

sneakers or cloth-top shoes, & ride alone

on subways, young & elegant unofficial

bastard of nature, sneaking sweetness into Brooklyn.

Now tweed jacket & yr father’s tie on yr breast,

salmon-pink cotton shirt & Swedish bookbag

you’re half bald, palsied lip & lower eyelid

continually tearing, gone back to college.

Goodbye Professor Ginsberg, get your identity

card next week from the front office so you can

get to class without being humiliated dumped on the

sidewalk by the black guard at the Student Union door.

Hello Professor Ginsberg have some coffee,

have some students, have some office hours

Tuesdays & Thursdays, have a couple subway tokens

in advance, have a box in the English Department,

have a look at Miss Sylvia Blitzer behind the typewriter

Have some poems er maybe they’re not so bad have a

good time workshopping Bodhicitta in the Bird Room.

March 27, 1979

Garden State

It used to be, farms,

stone houses on green lawns

a wooded hill to play Jungle Camp

asphalt roads thru Lincoln Park.

The communists picnicked

amid spring’s yellow forsythia

magnolia trees & apple blossoms, pale buds

breezy May, blue June.

Then came the mafia, alcohol

highways, garbage dumped in marshes, real

estate, World War II, money

flowed thru Nutley, bulldozers.

Einstein invented atom bombs

in Princeton, television antennae

sprung over West Orange—lobotomies

performed in Greystone State Hospital.

Old graveyards behind churches

on grassy knolls, Erie Railroad

bridges’ Checkerboard underpass

signs, paint fading, remain.

Reminds me of a time pond’s pure

water was green, drink or swim.

Traprock quarries embedded

with amethyst, quiet on Sunday.

I was afraid to talk to anyone

in Paterson, lest my sensitivity

to sex, music, the universe, be discovered &

I be laughed at, hit by colored boys.

“Mr. Professor” said the Dutchman

on Haledon Ave. “Stinky Jew” said

my friend black Joe, kinky haired.

Oldsmobiles past by in front of my eyeglasses.

Greenhouses stood by the Passaic in the sun,

little cottages in Belmar by the sea.

I heard Hitler’s voice on the radio.

I used to live on that hill up there.

They threw eggs at Norman Thomas the Socialist speaker

in Newark Military Park, the police

stood by & laughed. Used to murder

silk strikers on Mill St. in the twenties.

Now turn on your boob tube

They explain away the Harrisburg

hydrogen bubble, the Vietnam war,

They haven’t reported the end of Jersey’s gardens,

much less the end of the world.

Here in Boonton they made cannonballs

for Washington, had old iron mines,

spillways, coach houses—Trolleycars

ran thru Newark, gardeners dug front lawns.

Look for the News in your own backyard

over the whitewashed picket fence, fading signs

on upper stories of red brick factories.

The Data Terminal people stand on Route 40

now. Let’s get our stuff together. Let’s

go back Sundays & sing old springtime music

on Greystone State Mental Hospital lawn.

Spring 1979

Spring Fashions

Full moon over the shopping mall—

     in a display window’s silent light

the naked mannequin observes her fingernails

Boulder, 1979

Las Vegas: Verses Improvised for El Dorado H.S. Newspaper

Aztec sandstone waterholes known by Moapa’ve

dried out under the baccarat pits

of M.G.M.’s Grand Hotel.