Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 193

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How mad my youth, my sacramental passage!

Yet I dream these September journeys true:

When five days flowed like sickness in this knowledge,

I vomited out my mockery, all I knew.

III

Five nights upon the deep I suffered presage,

Five dawns familiar seabirds cried me pale:

I care not now, for I have seen an image

In the sea that was no Nightingale.

—My love, and doth still that rare figurine

In thy sad garden sing, now I am gone?

Sweet carols that I made, and caroller serene,

They broke my heart, and sang for thee alone.

Secret to thee the Nightingale was Death;

So all the figures are that I create.

For thee awhile I breathed another breath,

To make my Death thy Beauty imitate.—

More terrible than these are the vast visions

Of the sea, nor comprehensible.

Last night I stared upon the Cuban mountains,

Tragic in the mist, as on my soul,

Star studded in the dark, sea shaded round

And still, a funeral of Emperors,

Wind wound in ruined shrouds and crescent crowned

And tombed in desolation on dead shores.

The place was dread with age: the evening tide,

Eternal wife of death that washed these bones,

Turns back to sea by night, eternal bride:

She clasped my ship and rocked to hear its groans.

I did imagine I had known this sea,

Had been an audience to this before;

The place was prescient, like a great stage in me,

As out of a dream that late I dream no more.

I did imagine I had known this sea;

It raged like a great beast in my passage,

Till I, enraged creature, anciently

Engendered here, cried out upon mine image:

“How long in absence O thou journeyest,

Ages my soul and ages! Here ever home

In this sea’s endangerments thou sufferest;

And do, and do, and now my will hath done!”

Ah, love, I tell thee true, nor false affix

The solitude I watched by th’iron prow:

While I interpreted I stared me sick

At transformations in the tides below;

For the grim bride rose up, and all surrounding,

Carried me through the star-pierced air,

Till I cried Stay! and Stay! surrendering

My moved soul in flight to faster fear.

As I dived then I cried, delving all depthed in foam,

“Now close in weeds thy wave-lipped womb, mistress!”

But she ope’d her watering wounds and drew me down

And drove me dancing through the white-wreathed darkness.

Though I stood still to memorize the deep,

And woke my eyes wild-wide upon the height,

My soul it feareth its descent to keep,

My soul it turneth in its famous flight.

IV

Ha! now I die or no, I fear this tide

Carrieth me still, perishing, past where I stood,

So mild, to gaze whereat I long had died,

Or shall, as well, in future solitude.

What other shores are there I still remember?

I was in a pale land, I looked through a pure vision

In a pallid dawn, with a half-vacant glare.

Alas! what harbour hath the imagination?

O the transparent past hath a white port,

Tinted in the eye; it doth appear

Sometime on dark days, much by night, to sport

Bright shades like dimes of silver shining there,

On red dull sands on green volcanic shores.

I thought these stanzas out this cloudy noon,

Past Cuba now, past Haiti’s stony jaws,

In the last passage to Dakar. The moon

Alone was full as it had been all year,

Orange and strange at dawn. It was my eyes,

Not Africa, did this: they shined so pure

Each island floated by a sweet surprise.

Coins, then, on Cape Verde’s peaked cones

Sparkle out with pallors various.

It makes me God to pass these mortal towns:

Real people sicken here upon slopes sulphurous.

So in my years I saw my serious cities

Colored with Love and chiming with Nightingales,

Architectural with fantasies,

With fools in schools and geniuses in jails.

When in sweet vivid dreams such rainbows rise,

and spectral children dance among the music,

I watch them still: hot emeralds are their eyes!

My eyes are ice, alas! How white I wake!

V

Twenty days have drifted in the wake

Of this slow aged ship that carries coal

From Texas to Dakar. I, for the sake

Of little but my causelessness of soul,

Am carried out of my chill hemisphere

To unfamiliar summer on the earth.

I spend my days to meditate a fear;

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