Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 234

all you could ask

as if pure space

gave you a place

in Eternity—

To see the City

Stand all day

Shine all night

Bright starlight

streaming the height

Watery lawn

misty at dawn

warmed by the sun

Bathed in the moon

green grasses of June

80 times only

Don’t be lonely

Roses are live

Cockroaches thrive

in plastic garbage

maggots salvage

your dead meat

Horses eat

golden Hay

in golden day

Young kids jump

in the City dump

Take the lump

in your throat

and sing out

yr holy note

of heart’s delight

in living light

Day & Night

Sincerity

is the key

to Bliss in this

Eternity

April 5, 1985

Cadillac Squawk

Sitting on the twelfth floor Gomden I heard a wild siren in the garment district

Heard dog scream at dog on park avenue

my head rumbled the Bronx 242’d street Lexington Avenue Express

lonesome sparrows chirped weathered coppergreen cornice 1860

Footstep crash, pocket change jangled the shrine room’s polished floor

traffic waves rushed the shore 1985

Adolf Hitler’s voice in the taxi horn

squeak soprano steely cheep Chevrolet brakeshafts

subway breath rising to Empire State Observation Roof

iron doors slam refrigerators shut

bones creak in my knees’ antechambers

Heard the long Cadillac horn squawk up sidestreet brick buildingsides

elevators ascended and descended a thousand skyscrapers

wheels within wheels rubber and steel revolve on asphalt corridors

Exhaust puffs out monoxide Broadway Manhattan

Heard the sky shut up

Heard conversation in the trees in leafy Bronx

Heard Africa sigh

Asia turned over in its sleepy bunk

blood ran down rocks in South America

Heard Central America squeeze its ribs through iron gates

the Middle East rumbled plates & spoons in wartime bomb rubble

Polynesians danced with bacteria

Heard Japonesia eat with chopsticks chewing rice & peapods

Heard Australia rattle song sticks singing in Simpson Desert at the end of the world

New York Dharmadatu, June 16, 1985, 3:33 P.M.

Things I Don’t Know

Dawn, a mastiff howls on the porch across the street behind the For Sale signed tree

Chatter Chirp Chirp Chatter Chirp Chir Chir Chic Chir chance birdie twitters in a maple tree branch, Twirp!

I wake, what bird’s that, what kind of dog moans so?

Is that a maple or an oak, on Mapleton Street? What flowers weeds & ferns, those in the backyard? What car goes by awhoosh? A Pontiac, swash up the street,

A Chevy, Ford, a Pinto, a Grammarian, a 4 wheel drive GM?

What star I saw last night when clouds lifted & Orion’s belt

Glittered gold on blue? or was that amber on azure? As my eye

followed his arrow past the North Star thru the void, was that a tiny galaxy shimmering?

Where’s Sagittarius, which way is the black hole at center of the Spiral Nebula?

Where’s Sahel where a million children starve? Where’s Libya where Wilson of the CIA trained terrorists?

How many times this century’d the Marines land on Nicaragua’s dirty flag?

Who killed Roque Dalton? What’s the size of U.S. national Debt?

& how much interest we pay each year till the Eighties end?

Now the bird’s quiet & the dog bark’s down, what’s differential calculus? How do you fix electric socket wires?

I used to know the names of all the minerals. I do remember Pectolite gave you like asbestos splinters.

How do people overcome panic driving cars? Are bird bones hollow? didn’t I once know the look of grackle & scarlet tanager?

Cirrus or cumulus, what cloud produces thunder, lightning, rain?

What makes electricity in a battery? How does my wind charger friction become electric?

When water pours into hydraulic ram, what makes it squirt uphill when the valve closes in the Pressure Chamber? Is that it? Something like that?

What’re the 12 pix in Conditioned Co-existent Emergence’s Chain?

Blind man, potter, monkey tree, boat world, house with seven windows, what comes next before the man with arrow in his eye?

What about banks? What’s common stock & preferred? What’s a futures?

How do you hang a door, frame a window? Hold a light chainsaw?

How fix a broken leg? Ease a heart attack, deliver a baby? Breathe in the mouth of a man dying at oceanside?

What kind of government ever worked? Who wrote English Choriambics?

This isn’t Trivia (how play that?) this is my life, I can’t remember

the name of the lawyer my fellow student, friends with me in college 40 years ago—

How make a living, if I couldn’t write poetry?

Would I know how to plant peas, tie up tomato stalks?

July 21, 1985

*Buddhist Samatha-Vipassana Sitting Practice of Meditation

Notes

The following notes to the poems in White Shroud originally appeared in Selected Poems 1947–1995. (HarperCollins Publishers, 1996). More exten sive notes to this section can be found online at www.allenginsberg.org.

Homage Vajracarya

850 Ven. Chogyam Trungpa, Vajracarya’s Shambhala Arts included mind training with Archery (Kyudo), Calligraphy, Tea Ceremony, etc.

Why I Meditate

851 MIRROR STREET: Dadaist original Cabaret Voltaire was on Zurich’s Spiegelgasse Strasse.

851 RUTHERFORD: William Carlos Williams. Manhattan: Charles Reznikoff.

851 CHICAGO’S TEARGAS SKIES: 1968 Democratic convention police riot.

851 UNBORN: Buddhist metaphor, universe & consciousness are “unborn,” i.e. not traceable back to any ultimate birthplace, source, cause.

851 ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Aesopean Stalinist word for Jew.

Do the Meditation Rock

863 Buddhist Samatha-Vipassana Sitting Practice of Meditation instructions according to the Ven. Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. See his Meditation in Action (Boston: Shambhala Press, 1991).

863 UNCLE DON: 1930s U.S. radio father-figure tale-teller.

Arguments

885 PARAQUAT: Agricultural poison dust sprayed by U.S. on Sonora, Mexico, cannabis fields.