Classic Poem

I

They have come back from Russia
With a life in them to set against
What the Jews, American Indians, the Irish even
Have succumbed to: the withering of the flower
That each man carries in his heart.
It withered in the blood of the Royal ones who went
Listlessly through Rambouillet to exile, it has gone bitter
In Jews who have found a country richer than faith was to them;
In Indians who lie quiet under the cannon
No longer biding time for the passing of swifter races;
In the Irish in whose century of black starvation
The flower bloomed more fiercely than a tropic flower.

There is a humanity now
Set upon the proud high inhumanity of architects,
An undermining pity at the roots when America builds
Considering those laws demanding that light and air be zoned
To preserve the weaker ones
(How many men died for Athens
Did Chartres consider or Mont St. Michel
The lives broken or walled-in for beauty?)
They come back in a year that has no stirs, no showers,
No days of indecision for those who bloom out of season;
No loosening of the soil of an established winter strong as Minnesota blizzards,
Speaking of Russia as the first men speaking of America
Cut their fervent way through wildernesses.
Or saying: it is the last spadeful of soil flung down
Upon the grave of artists; saying Russia is following
The Roman road of pragmatism with the bodies of " crucified men
Stretching for five miles along each side of it, "
Protesting that even Lenin's corpse has compromised with time.

They return disturbed
In a year when the Jews, Indians, the Irish sit quiet
And the thunder of falls is no longer heard, or of strong rivers,
Or exploration known, these things having ebbed westward with the savage
To oblivion, incest and death, these things having died naturally in degeneration.

A study of the past is the experiences of other men
Set down without complete authority, having seen them in my own time
Returning with a maybe maybe for a new country.

II

O pretty papa so much have you done for me that my spirit falters
I am not waiting for tenderness to fill the kid's heart with plenty plenty of gratitude
under the powder the rouge the borrowed clothes I am not sitting with the kid on my knee
waiting a pretty papa the tender but peeled eye under the mascara estimating his value as a
provider to take us home and let us hang up our stockings at Christmas

but one man I see the skin of his lips and his eyes rocking
it is his filthy words on me and his sad words and his blame on me
I remember and his wireless not saying the country is beautiful I
have thought of somebody else every minute but saying I'm beginning to spill things
not that I've had too much to drink but too little

III

You carry fatherhood as it should be
a man too absorbed in his own language
to demand it of other people in the restaurant
an admiration for a little girl with white hair

you see her go come hesitate like a fly on icing
you looking sideways the way a man should
upon his wife and children always
talking to someone else absently observing
the ankles and breasts that go by on the sidewalk

Or you little boy with your eyes asking what
wouldn't I do to you if once I got you with no
words between us if once I skinned you clean of your
Paris markets at morning of your flair and scent for
the negroid

you think you're my idea of a night out when even my
hottest blood cannot get warm to you if we danced all
night even over the cabbages the celery and the carrots
what would be left to us in the morning but a hot day
and the nostalgia for somebody else's kisses

IV

There is nothing so beautiful as young men in fine clothes
Young men with faces shaved to rose-petals Toes pointed in patent leather
Asking so much of the back-seats of taxi-cabs
O you Frenchboys it is life to me the breath stinking of garlic
in dock bistrots, the clouds sober and the first stars rolled out like dice

Once I swam from Covington to the Ohio shore
through the white curls of the Island Queen as she churned up to Coney Island
carrying so much dirt on me that I smelled
like a bushy-tailed mammal for days after;
And once I wore suphur blossoms in my hair
to drive the lice away. One autumn rolled
like a dog in beds of rotting seaweed to get
the fleas off my body and the fever out of my veins

I have been out in the amorous night
oh lalito
and I have come home wearing the Tour Eiffel
like a spanish comb in my hair
the black river has overflowed its banks this spring
and has come into my eyes so that I am blinded with glamor
and entered my nostrils so that I snort like a young filly
crossing the Champs de Mars

V

Now that the lights run out
and the wheels and the timber of trains cry on the river
Now that there is a tide of spring rising against the prows
There is no one to come into the room and say the same honor
Marches in the wrists
the music
the same blood is there

Whatever sweet stalks there are they will be withering
In the sea salted and summer a wide road under the sun
Let it be that the cold leaves the tight fists of April
Pointed and swelled but could not flower
this year

Mornings come like torches to strange rooms
where I have gone to bed in darkness not knowing
if there were books
chairs photographs
How to write of it

I had no use for it
hating the conversation and the wallpaper
nothing to remember
but the turn of a head scratching
and a man in the street singing for rabbit-hides