Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 172

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With the Beauty he abandoned; in new bodies they return:

To inspire future children ’spite his Ravens “Nevermore”

I have writ this antient riddle in Poe’s house in Baltimore.

January 16, 1977

Contest of Bards

For Jonathan Robbins

I

THE ARGUMENT: Old bard lived in solitary stone house at ocean edge three decades retired from the world, Young poet arrives naked interrupting his studies & announces his own prophetic dreams to replace the old Bard’s boring verities. Young poet had dreamed old poet’s scene & its hidden secret, an Eternal Rune cut in stone at the hearth-front hidden under porphyry bard-throne. Young bard tries to seduce old Boner with his energy & insight, & makes him crawl down on the floor to read the secret riddle Rhyme.

And the youth free stripling bounding along the Hills of Color

And the old man bearded, wrinkled, browed in his black cave

Meet in the broken house of stone, walls graven by Prophet Hands,

& contend for the Mysteries, vanity against vanity, deciphering

Eternal runes of Love, & Silence, & the Monster of Self

Covered with Blood & Lilies, covered with bones and hair and skin:

They glory in Night & Starvation the Fat Bright Cherub of Resurrection,

Bliss & God: Terrible Mental Cherub of Chemistry Imagination & Vanity

Bard after Bard orating and perishing, casting his image behind on men’s brains

thru sounds symboled on the mind’s stone walls reverberating Syllables Visionary

Perfect formed to ’dure Millennia, but Phantom is such Rock,

Phantom as the Cellular Believer in’s own tangible re-creation.

“I hear the Bard’s stone words Build my Immortal Architecture:

This body stone hands and genitals this Heart stone Tenderness

and Delight This head Stone language to Rafter the Stone Bed of Love.

Come lay down on this rock pillow, kid, lay down your tender breast,

Pale face, red hair, soft belly hairy tender foot and Loins

Under the hard immortal blanket, mattress of Rock sheeted with Vocables!

In twenty years I’ll vanish from this shore & Solitary Eternal Cave—

Here I studied & Deciphered the Granite Alphabet surrendered

from Graves from Sands that swirled at the door, from star-fish

spotted boulders in seas’ low tide when full-moon-gleam

Pulls bones of Leviathan & tiny bass-fins tide-pool’d

many in ancient nights.” So one spoke, ocean serpents curl’d around

his whitened beard, eyes wide in horror he be left by the Dark Shore,

to burn his memories in the rocky hearth & keep his cold loins warm

in winter-rain days or in snowy night’s vastness filled

with stars and planets, spring summer & autumn mortality.

Sly, craven, conquering he spoke, his words like rainbows,

or firelight, or shadows, moving humorous thru his beard,

falling in the air, clothing his body in hypocritic webs of truth,

to hide his shame, his empty nakedness. He meditated

remembering deeper Buddhic prophecies, abhoring his own runes solid

immovable but by time and storm inexorable, half visible on his walls.

The youth the color of the hills laughed delighted at his Vanity

and cried, “Under the hearth stone’s a rune, old Bard of Familiarity,

your eyes forgot, or tempest-addled brain, so busy boiling meat

and tending to your threadbare cares and household hermitage

& fishing day by day for thirty years for thoughts! Behold!”

He naked bent and moved the porphyry-smooth red fire-seat aside:

“Read what’s writ on earth here before you Ignorant Prophet,

Learn in your age what True Magicians spelled for all Futurity,

Cut in the vanity of rock before your feeble hand grasped iron Pen

Or feather fancy tickled your gross ear: There have been sages here

before you, and I am after to outlive your gloomy miserous

hospitality. I loved you Ungrateful Unimaginative Bard

And Came over hills thru small cities to companion your steadfast study.

I dreamed of your eyes and beard and rocks and oceans, I dreamed

this room these pitted moss green walls & runes you scraped

deciphered and memorized, pillars worn by tide and smoke

of your lamp You Grow near blind reading mind on your own house walls,

I dreamt you sitting on your fire-seat reading the vaporous language of flame tongues

nescient to the airy rune cut in the Bedrock under yr very Shamanic Throne

You stare at the ceiling half asleep, or sit on your pillow with heavy eyelid

murmuring old bards Truths to your brain, repetitive

imagining me, or some other red-buttocked stripling savior come

to yr stone bed naked to renew your old body’s intelligence

and help you read again when blind now what you already memorized

and forgot, peering like a boor illiterate in Shadows 30 years—

Yes I have come but not for your feeble purpose, come of my own dreamed will

To show you what you forgot dreamt, Immortal Text neglected

under your groaning seat as you sat self-inspired by your mortal fire.

O Self Absorbed vulgar hungry Demon, leave your body & mine

Take eyes off your own veined hands and worm thoughts, lower

Your watery selfish infatuate eyes from my breast to my feet

& read me aloud in Bardic Voice, that Voice of Rock you boast so well so many decades,

Yea Face inland to the fields and railroads skyscrapers & Viaducts.

Youths maddened by Afric jukeboxes & maidens simpering at Picture shows

Read thru smoky air to a hopeless hundred million fools!

Read what young mind’s Pearl Majesty made round oracular Beauteous

More unworldly than your own self-haunted snaily skull & stony household shell.”

Pointing downward, his arm stiff in disdain dismissing lesser Beauty,

Like radiant lively Adolescence rejecting joy or sorrow, shrewd

with bright glance Innocent, albescent limbs ruddy and smooth in Sea-Wrack Firelight

Proud with centuries of learning in New-woke brain and boyish limbs, so stood the young messenger.

Startled, the wool-wrapped bard looked up at eyes mocking shining into his own:

Looked down at the boy’s neck unwrinkled white unlike his own: the breast

thin muscled unawakened silken flesh: the belly with a corse of tawny hair

rosed round the pricked virgin-budding genitals, shining in hearth light,

thighs ready and careless like a strong Child’s, playful walking & dancing tho awkward,

Thick calves with new hair light to the foot long as a man’s.

Humbled, bewilderment Touching his tongue, heart beating his ribs rewakened

The bard mused on this mortal beauty, remembering dead bodies he’d embraced in rough and silken beds

Years, years, and years of loves ago—his breast grew light, eyes lost

in dream—Then in his forehead Time gapped all youthful-imaged bodies there

Devouring their Shadows, as the sea surged out the rocky door.

The stars inclined thru cold air, moved so slow blue shining past

he saw them barely touch the ocean wave and rise and blink and glimmer silently engulfed—

Then to the Prophesied Task his inner eyes returned to their dim outward orbs:

Saw the gloom in his own stony shell: stone letters wavering on chill walls,

Iron Pots carbon black on shelves, old seaweed clothes in a stone closet, folded green

for Holiday Solitude at Vernal Equinox and full Moon face—brass fire tongs

from old Paumanok City bought with gold gleaming strong at the hearth’s light—

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