Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 20

Denver! Denver! we’ll return

          roaring across the City & County Building lawn

          which catches the pure emerald flame

                    streaming in the wake of our auto.

This time we’ll buy up the city!

          I cashed a great check in my skull bank

          to found a miraculous college of the body

                    up on the bus terminal roof.

But first we’ll drive the stations of downtown,

          poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail

          whorehouse down Folsom

                    to the darkest alleys of Larimer

paying respects to Denver’s father

          lost on the railroad tracks,

          stupor of wine and silence

                    hallowing the slum of his decades,

salute him and his saintly suitcase

          of dark muscatel, drink

          and smash the sweet bottles

                    on Diesels in allegiance.

Then we go driving drunk on boulevards

          where armies march and still parade

          staggering under the invisible

                    banner of Reality—

hurtling through the street

          in the auto of our fate

          we share an archangelic cigarette

                    and tell each other’s fortunes:

fames of supernatural illumination,

          bleak rainy gaps of time,

          great art learned in desolation

                    and we beat apart after six decades …

and on an asphalt crossroad,

          deal with each other in princely

          gentleness once more, recalling

                    famous dead talks of other cities.

The windshield’s full of tears,

          rain wets our naked breasts,

          we kneel together in the shade

                    amid the traffic of night in paradise

and now renew the solitary vow

          we made each other take

          in Texas, once:

                    I can’t inscribe here… .

• • • • • •

• • • • • •

How many Saturday nights will be

          made drunken by this legend?

          How will young Denver come to mourn

                    her forgotten sexual angel?

How many boys will strike the black piano

          in imitation of the excess of a native saint?

          Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high

                    schools of melancholy night?

While all the time in Eternity

          in the wan light of this poem’s radio

          we’ll sit behind forgotten shades

                    hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.

Neal, we’ll be real heroes now

          in a war between our cocks and time:

          let’s be the angels of the world’s desire

                    and take the world to bed with us before we die.

Sleeping alone, or with companion,

          girl or fairy sheep or dream,

          I’ll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:

                    all men fall, our fathers fell before,

but resurrecting that lost flesh

          is but a moment’s work of mind:

          an ageless monument to love

                    in the imagination:

memorial built out of our own bodies

          consumed by the invisible poem—

          We’ll shudder in Denver and endure

                    though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.

So this Green Automobile:

          I give you in flight

          a present, a present

                    from my imagination.

We will go riding

          over the Rockies,

          we’ll go on riding

                    all night long until dawn,

then back to your railroad, the SP

          your house and your children

          and broken leg destiny

                    you’ll ride down the plains

in the morning: and back

          to my visions, my office

          and eastern apartment

                    I’ll return to New York.

New York, May 22–25, 1953

An Asphodel

O dear sweet rosy

          unattainable desire

… how sad, no way

          to change the mad

cultivated asphodel, the

          visible reality …

and skin’s appalling

          petals—how inspired

to be so lying in the living

          room drunk naked