Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 182

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Just folks, we bought a motor car

No gas I guess we crossed the bar

I swear we started for Podunk

Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

I got his banjo on my knee

I played it like an old Sweetie

I sang plunk-a-plunk-a-plunk plunk plunk plunk

Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

One hand I gave myself the clap

Unborn, but still I took the rap

Big deal, I fell out of my bunk

Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

Hey hey! I ride down the blue sky

Sit down with worms until I die

Fare well! Hum Hum Hum Hum Hum Hum!

Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

Red barn rise wet in morning dew

Cockadoo dle do oink oink moo moo

Buzz buzz—flyswatter in the kitchen, thwunk!

Th’old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!

August 22, 1978

Blame the Thought, Cling to the Bummer

I am Fake Saint

magazine Saint Ram Das

Who’s not a Fake Saint consciousness, Nobody!

The 12th Trungpa, Karmapa 16, Dudjom lineage of Padmasambhava, Pope Jean-Paul, Queen of England crowned with dignity’s brilliant empty Diamonds Sapphires Emeralds, Amber, Rubies—

The sky is Fake Saint, emptyhearted blue

The Sacramento Valley floor fields no saints either, tractors in green corn higher than the T-shirted jogger.

This Volkswagen Fake Saint, license-plate-light wires smoking shorted in the rear-engine door.

Filter cigarette butt still smoking in the ashtray

No saints longhaired boys at the busdriver’s wheel

Hard workers no Fake Saints laborers everywhere behind desks in Plutonium offices

swatting flies under plastic flower-power signs

Driving Ponderosa & Spruce roads to the poet’s shrine at Kitkitdizze

Bedrock Mortar hermitage—Shobo-An temple’s copper roof on a black-oak groved hillside—

Discontinuous, the thought—empty—no harm—

To blame the thought would cling to the Bummer—

Unborn Evil, the Self & its systems

Transitory intermittent gapped in Grass Valley stopping for gas

Plutonium blameless, apocalyptic gift of Furies

Insentient space filled with green bushes—clouds over Ranger Station signs

Uncertain as incense.

Nevada City, September 7, 1978

“Don’t Grow Old”

     I

Twenty-eight years before on the living room couch he’d stared at me, I said

“I want to see a psychiatrist—I have sexual difficulties—homosexuality”

I’d come home from troubled years as a student. This was the weekend I would talk with him.

A look startled his face, “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?”

Equally startled, “No, no,” I lied, “that isn’t what it means.”

Now he lay naked in the bath, hot water draining beneath his shanks.

Strong shouldered Peter, once ambulance attendant, raised him up

in the tiled room. We toweled him dry, arms under his, bathrobe over his shoulder—

he tottered thru the door to his carpeted bedroom

sat on the soft mattress edge, exhausted, and coughed up watery phlegm.

We lifted his swollen feet talcum’d white, put them thru pajama legs,

tied the cord round his waist, and held the nightshirt sleeve open for his hand, slow.

Mouth drawn in, his false teeth in a dish, he turned his head round

looking up at Peter to smile ruefully, “Don’t ever grow old.”

     II

At my urging, my eldest nephew came

to keep his grandfather company, maybe sleep overnight in the apartment.

He had no job, and was homeless anyway.

All afternoon he read the papers and looked at old movies.

Later dusk, television silent, we sat on a soft-pillowed couch,

Louis sat in his easy-chair that swiveled and could lean back—

“So what kind of job are you looking for?”

“Dishwashing, but someone told me it makes your hands’ skin scaly red.”

“And what about officeboy?” His grandson finished highschool with marks too poor for college.

“It’s unhealthy inside airconditioned buildings under fluorescent light.”

The dying man looked at him, nodding at the specimen.

He began his advice. “You might be a taxidriver, but what if a car crashed into you? They say you can get mugged too.

Or you could get a job as a sailor, but the ship could sink, you could get drowned.

Maybe you should try a career in the grocery business, but a box of bananas could slip from the shelf,

you could hurt your head. Or if you were a waiter, you could slip and fall down with a loaded tray, & have to pay for the broken glasses.

Maybe you should be a carpenter, but your thumb might get hit by a hammer.

Or a lifeguard—but the undertow at Belmar beach is dangerous, and you could catch a cold.

Or a doctor, but sometimes you could cut your hand with a scalpel that had germs, you could get sick & die.”

Later, in bed after twilight, glasses off, he said to his wife

“Why doesn’t he comb his hair? It falls all over his eyes, how can he see?

Tell him to go home soon, I’m too tired.”

Amherst, October 5, 1978

     III

     Resigned

A year before visiting a handsome poet and my Tibetan guru, Guests after supper on the mountainside

we admired the lights of Boulder spread glittering below through a giant glass window—

After coffee, my father bantered wearily

“Is life worth living? Depends on the liver—”

The Lama smiled to his secretary—

It was an old pun I’d heard in childhood.

Then he fell silent, looking at the floor

     and sighed, head bent heavy

          talking to no one—

               “What can you do …?”

Buffalo, October 6, 1978

Love Returned

Love returned with smiles

three thousand miles

to keep a year’s promise

Anonymous, honest

studious, beauteous

learned and childlike

earnest and mild like

a student of truth,

a serious youth.

Whatever our ends

young and old we were friends

on the coast a few weeks

In New York now he seeks

scholarly manuscripts

old writs, haunted notes

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