Sounds of trains in the surf in subways of the sea And an even greater undersound of a vast confusion in the universe a rumbling and a roaring as of some enormous creature turning under sea and earth a billion sotto voices murmuring a vast muttering a swelling stuttering in ocean's speakers world's voice-box heard with ear to sand a shocked echoing a shocking shouting of all life's voices lost in night And the tape of it someow running backwards now through the Moog Synthesizer of time Chaos unscrambled back to the first harmonies And the first light
An Elegy on the Death of Kenneth Patchen
A poet is born A poet dies And all that lies between is us and the world
And the world lies about it making as if it had got his message even though it is poetry but most of the world wishing it could just forget about him and his awful strange prophecies
Along with all the other strange things he said about the world which were all too true and which made them fear him more than they loved him though he spoke much of love
Along with all the alarms he sounded which turned out to be false if only for the moment all of which made them fear his tongue more than they loved him Though he spoke much of love and never lived by ‘silence exile & cunning’ and was a loud conscientious objector to the deaths we daily give each other though we speak much of love
And when such a one dies even the agents of Death should take note and shake the shit from their wings in Air Force One But they do not And the shit still flies And the poet now is disconnected and won’t call back though he spoke much of love
And still we hear him say ‘Do I not deal with angels when her lips I touch’ And still we hear him say ‘0 my darling troubles heaven with her loveliness’ And still we hear him say ‘As we are so wonderfully done with each other We can walk into our separate ‘sleep On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies’
And still we hear him saying ‘Therefore the constant powers do not lessen Nor is the property of the spirit scattered on the cold hills of these events’ And still we hear him asking ‘Do the dead know what time it is?’
He is gone under He is scattered undersea and knows what time but won’t be back to tell it He would be too proud to call back anyway And too full of strange laughter to speak to us anymore anyway
And the weight of human experience lies upon the world like the chains of the ‘sea in which he sings And he swings in the tides of the sea And his ashes are washed in the ides of the sea And ‘an astonished eye looks out of the air’ to see the poet singing there
And dusk falls down a coast somewhere
where a white horse without a rider turns its head to the sea
Away Above A Harborful
Away above a harborful of caulkless houses among the charley noble chimneypots of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines a woman pastes up sails upon the wind hanging out her morning sheets with wooden pins O lovely mamma! her nearly naked teats throw thrust shadows when she stretches up to hang the last of her so white washed sins but it is wetly amorous and winds itself about her clinging to her skin so caught with arms upraised she tosses back her head in voiceless laughter and in choiceless gesture then shakes out gold hair while in the reachless seascape spaces between the blown white shrouds stand out the bright steamers to kingdom come
Baseball Canto
Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn, reading Ezra Pound, and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto and demolish the barbarian invaders. When the San Francisco Giants take the field and everybody stands up for the National Anthem, with some Irish tenor's voice piped over the loudspeakers, with all the players struck dead in their places and the white umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little black caps pressed over their hearts, Standing straight and still like at some funeral of a blarney bartender, and all facing east, as if expecting some Great White Hope or the Founding Fathers to appear on the horizon like 1066 or 1776. But Willie Mays appears instead, in the bottom of the first, and a roar goes up as he clouts the first one into the sun and takes off, like a footrunner from Thebes. The ball is lost in the sun and maidens wail after him as he keeps running through the Anglo-Saxon epic. And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bullfighter in his tight pants and small pointy shoes. And the right field bleechers go made with Chicanos and blacks and Brooklyn beer-drinkers, "Tito! Sock it to him, sweet Tito!" And sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket and smacks one that don't come back at all, and flees around the bases like he's escaping from the United Fruit Company. As the gringo dollar beats out the pound. And sweet Tito beats it out like he's beating out usury, not to mention fascism and anti-semitism. And Juan Marichal comes up, and the Chicano bleechers go loco again, as Juan belts the first ball out of sight, and rounds first and keeps going and rounds second and rounds third, and keeps going and hits paydirt to the roars of the grungy populace. As some nut presses the backstage panic button for the tape-recorded National Anthem again, to save the situation.
But it don't stop nobody this time, in their revolution round the loaded white bases, in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics, in the territorio libre of Baseball.
