Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 184
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Ring yr brazen horns ye
Fire engines of Soho!
Bark ye dogges in lofts, explode
yr honking halos ye
weightless Angels of
Television!
It’s gonna be a delightful
time, thank god nothing’s
happening muchachos
Tonite but parties & car crashes,
births & ambulance sirens,
Confetti falling over
heartbroken partygoers
doing the Lindy Hop at the
back window of the loft
years ago when Abstract-Expressionist
painters & poets had a party
celebrating U.S. Eternity
on New Year’s Eve before the War.
Brooklyn College Brain
For David Shapiro & John Ashbery
You used to wear dungarees & blue workshirt,
sneakers or cloth-top shoes, & ride alone
on subways, young & elegant unofficial
bastard of nature, sneaking sweetness into Brooklyn.
Now tweed jacket & yr father’s tie on yr breast,
salmon-pink cotton shirt & Swedish bookbag
you’re half bald, palsied lip & lower eyelid
continually tearing, gone back to college.
Goodbye Professor Ginsberg, get your identity
card next week from the front office so you can
get to class without being humiliated dumped on the
sidewalk by the black guard at the Student Union door.
Hello Professor Ginsberg have some coffee,
have some students, have some office hours
Tuesdays & Thursdays, have a couple subway tokens
in advance, have a box in the English Department,
have a look at Miss Sylvia Blitzer behind the typewriter
Have some poems er maybe they’re not so bad have a
good time workshopping Bodhicitta in the Bird Room.
March 27, 1979
Garden State
It used to be, farms,
stone houses on green lawns
a wooded hill to play Jungle Camp
asphalt roads thru Lincoln Park.
The communists picnicked
amid spring’s yellow forsythia
magnolia trees & apple blossoms, pale buds
breezy May, blue June.
Then came the mafia, alcohol
highways, garbage dumped in marshes, real
estate, World War II, money
flowed thru Nutley, bulldozers.
Einstein invented atom bombs
in Princeton, television antennae
sprung over West Orange—lobotomies
performed in Greystone State Hospital.
Old graveyards behind churches
on grassy knolls, Erie Railroad
bridges’ Checkerboard underpass
signs, paint fading, remain.
Reminds me of a time pond’s pure
water was green, drink or swim.
Traprock quarries embedded
with amethyst, quiet on Sunday.
I was afraid to talk to anyone
in Paterson, lest my sensitivity
to sex, music, the universe, be discovered &
I be laughed at, hit by colored boys.
“Mr. Professor” said the Dutchman
on Haledon Ave. “Stinky Jew” said
my friend black Joe, kinky haired.
Oldsmobiles past by in front of my eyeglasses.
Greenhouses stood by the Passaic in the sun,
little cottages in Belmar by the sea.
I heard Hitler’s voice on the radio.
I used to live on that hill up there.
They threw eggs at Norman Thomas the Socialist speaker
in Newark Military Park, the police
stood by & laughed. Used to murder
silk strikers on Mill St. in the twenties.
Now turn on your boob tube
They explain away the Harrisburg
hydrogen bubble, the Vietnam war,
They haven’t reported the end of Jersey’s gardens,
much less the end of the world.
Here in Boonton they made cannonballs
for Washington, had old iron mines,
spillways, coach houses—Trolleycars
ran thru Newark, gardeners dug front lawns.
Look for the News in your own backyard
over the whitewashed picket fence, fading signs
on upper stories of red brick factories.
The Data Terminal people stand on Route 40
now. Let’s get our stuff together. Let’s
go back Sundays & sing old springtime music
on Greystone State Mental Hospital lawn.
Spring 1979
Spring Fashions
Full moon over the shopping mall—
in a display window’s silent light
the naked mannequin observes her fingernails
Boulder, 1979
Las Vegas: Verses Improvised for El Dorado H.S. Newspaper
Aztec sandstone waterholes known by Moapa’ve
dried out under the baccarat pits
of M.G.M.’s Grand Hotel.
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