Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 141

                                        & died to prove it.

Full Moon over Ozone Park

                    Airport Bus rushing thru dusk to

                                             Manhattan,

Jack the Wizard in his

                                             grave at Lowell

for the first nite—

That Jack thru whose eyes I

                              saw

                         smog glory light

                              gold over Mannahatta’s spires

                    will never see these

                              chimneys smoking

anymore over statues of Mary

                              in the graveyard

Black misted canyons

                    rising over the bleak

                                   river

Bright doll-like ads

                    for Esso Bread—

Replicas multiplying beards

                    Farewell to the Cross—

Eternal fixity, the big headed

               wax painted Buddha doll

                    pale resting incoffined—

Empty-skulled New

                    York streets

Starveling phantoms

                    filling city—

Wax dolls walking park

                                             Ave,

Light gleam in eye glass

Voice echoing thru Microphones

Grand Central Sailor’s

                         arrival 2 decades later

                                   feeling melancholy—

Nostalgia for Innocent World

                    War II—

A million corpses running

                    across 42d street

Glass buildings rising higher

                         transparent

                                   aluminum—

artificial trees, robot sofas,

                         Ignorant cars—

One Way Street to Heaven.

•

Gray Subway Roar

A wrinkled brown faced fellow

                              with swollen hands

leans to the blinking plate glass

                         mirroring white poles, the heavy car

                         sways on tracks uptown to Columbia—

Jack no more’ll step off at Penn Station

                         anonymous erranded, eat sandwich

                         & drink beer near New Yorker Hotel or walk

under the shadow of Empire State.

Didn’t we stare at each other length of the car

                         & read headlines in faces thru Newspaper Holes?

Sexual cocked & horny bodied young, look

                         at beauteous Rimbaud & Sweet Jenny

                                   riding to class from Columbus Circle.

“Here the kindly dopefiend lived.”

and the rednecked sheriff beat the longhaired

                              boy on the ass.

—103d street Broadway, me & Hal abused for sidewalk

                              begging twenty-five years ago.

Can I go back in time & lay my head on a teenage

                         belly upstairs on 110th Street?

or step off the iron car with Jack

                         at the blue-tiled Columbia sign?

at last the old brown station where I had

a holy vision’s been rebuilt, clean ceramic

over the scum & spit & come of quarter century.

•

Flying to Maine in a trail of black smoke

Kerouac’s obituary conserves Time’s

                                        Front Paragraphs—

Empire State in Heaven Sun Set Red,

                              White mist in old October

over the billion trees of Bronx—

                                   There’s too much to see—

Jack saw sun set red over Hudson horizon

                         Two three decades back

thirtynine fortynine fiftynine

                                             sixtynine

John Holmes pursed his lips,

                                             wept tears.

Smoke plumed up from oceanside chimneys

                              plane roars toward Montauk

                                        stretched in red sunset—

Northport, in the trees, Jack drank

                              rot gut & made haiku of birds

                                        tweetling on his porch rail at dawn—

Fell down and saw Death’s golden lite

                                        in Florida garden a decade ago.

Now taken utterly, soul upward,

                                   & body down in wood coffin

                                             & concrete slab-box.

I threw a kissed handful of damp earth

                                   down on the stone lid

                                             & sighed