Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 23

invisible words unscrawled,

          impossible syntax

of apocalypse—

          Uxmal: Noble Ruins

No construction—

          let the mind fall down.

—One could pass valuable months

and years perhaps a lifetime

doing nothing but lying in a hammock

reading prose with the white doves

          copulating underneath

and monkeys barking in the interior

          of the mountain

and I have succumbed to this

          temptation—

‘They go mad in the Selva—’

          the madman read

and laughed in his hammock

          eyes watching me:

unease not of the jungle

          the poor dear,

can tire one—

          all that mud

and all those bugs …

          ugh… .

Dreaming back I saw

an eternal kodachrome

souvenir of a gathering

of souls at a party,

crowded in an oval flash:

cigarettes, suggestions,

laughter in drunkenness,

broken sweet conversation,

acquaintance in the halls,

faces posed together,

stylized gestures,

odd familiar visages

and singular recognitions

that registered indifferent

greeting across time:

Anson reading Horace

with a rolling head,

white-handed Hohnsbean

camping gravely

with an absent glance,

bald Kingsland drinking

out of a huge glass,

Dusty in a party dress,

Durgin in white shoes

gesturing from a chair,

Keck in a corner waiting

for subterranean music,

Helen Parker lifting

her hands in surprise:

all posturing in one frame,

superficially gay

or tragic as may be,

illumined with the fatal

character and intelligent

actions of their lives.

And I in a concrete room

          above the abandoned

labyrinth of Palenque

          measuring my fate,

wandering solitary in the wild

          —blinking singleminded

at a bleak idea—

          until exhausted with

its action and contemplation

          my soul might shatter

at one primal moment’s

          sensation of the vast

movement of divinity.

As I leaned against a tree

          inside the forest

expiring of self-begotten love,

I looked up at the stars absently,

          as if looking for

something else in the blue night

          through the boughs,

and for a moment saw myself

          leaning against a tree …

… back there the noise of a great party

          in the apartments of New York,

half-created paintings on the walls, fame,

          cocksucking and tears,

money and arguments of great affairs,

          the culture of my generation …

          my own crude night imaginings,

my own crude soul notes taken down

          in moments of isolation, dreams,

piercings, sequences of nocturnal thought

          and primitive illuminations

—uncanny feeling the white cat

          sleeping on the table

will open its eyes in a moment

          and be looking at me—

One might sit in this Chiapas

recording the apparitions in the field

          visible from a hammock

looking out across the shadow of the pasture

in all the semblance of Eternity

          … a dwarfed thatch roof

down in the grass in a hollow slope

under the tall crowd of vegetation

          waiting at the wild edge:

the long shade of the mountain beyond

          in the near distance,

its individual hairline of trees

traced fine and dark along the ridge

          against the transparent sky light,

rifts and holes in the blue air

          and amber brightenings of clouds

disappearing down the other side

          into the South …

          palms with lethargic feelers

rattling in presage of rain,