Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 24

          shifting their fronds

in the direction of the balmy wind,

          monstrous animals

sprayed up out of the ground

          settling and unsettling

as in water …

          and later in the night

a moment of premonition

when the plenilunar cloudfilled sky

          is still and small.

So spent a night

          with drug and hammock

at Chichen Itza on the Castle:—

          I can see the moon

moving over the edge of the night forest

          and follow its destination

through the clear dimensions of the sky

          from end to end of the dark

circular horizon.

          High dim stone portals,

entablatures of illegible scripture,

bas-reliefs of unknown perceptions:

          and now the flicker of my lamp

and smell of kerosene on dust-

          strewn floor where ant wends

its nightly ritual way toward great faces

          worn down by rain.

In front of me a deathshead

          half a thousand years old

—and have seen cocks a thousand

old grown over with moss and batshit

          stuck out of the wall

in a dripping vaulted house of rock—

          but deathshead’s here

on portal still and thinks its way

          through centuries the thought

of the same night in which I sit

          in skully meditation

—sat in many times before by

          artisan other than me

until his image of ghostly change

          appeared unalterable—

but now his fine thought’s vaguer

          than my dream of him:

and only the crude skull figurement’s

          gaunt insensible glare is left

with broken plumes of sensation,

headdresses of indecipherable intellect

          scattered in the madness of oblivion

to holes and notes of elemental stone,

blind face of animal transcendency

          over the sacred ruin of the world

dissolving into the sunless wall of a blackened room

          on a time-rude pyramid rebuilt

          in the bleak flat night of Yucatan

where I come with my own mad mind to study

          alien hieroglyphs of Eternity.

A creak in the rooms scared me.

Some sort of bird, vampire or swallow,

          flees with little paper wingflap

around the summit in its own air unconcerned

          with the great stone tree I perch on.

          Continual metallic

whirr of chicharras,

          then lesser chirps

of cricket: 5 blasts

          of the leg whistle.

The creak of an opening

          door in the forest,

some sort of weird birdsong

          or reptile croak.

My hat woven of henequen

          on the stone floor

as a leaf on the waters,

          as perishable;

my candle wavers continuously

          and will go out.

Pale Uxmal,

          unhistoric, like a dream,

Tulum shimmering on the coast in ruins;

Chichen Itza naked

          constructed on a plain;

Palenque, broken chapels in the green

          basement of a mount;

lone Kabah by the highway;

          Piedras Negras buried again

by dark archaeologists;

          Yaxchilan

resurrected in the wild,

and all the limbo of Xbalba still unknown—

          floors under roofcomb of branch,

foundation to ornament

          tumbled to the flowers,

pyramids and stairways

          raced with vine,

limestone corbels

          down in the river of trees,

pillars and corridors

          sunken under the flood of years:

Time’s slow wall overtopping

          all that firmament of mind,

as if a shining waterfall of leaves and rain

were built down solid from the endless sky

          through which no thought can pass.

A great red fat rooster

mounted on a tree stump

in the green afternoon,

the ego of the very fields,

screams in the holy sunlight!

          —was looking back