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Five Poems
By David Shapiro
For the Evening Land
"What causes a death rattle?"--The New York Times
If there is a sound before death in America
What causes that sound
Asks the newspaper
For most there is no sound
Only a dream of two words: White black
Irreversible or the dream without words
There is no voice in America
Only the finite
Reading the voices
But let me die singing, like the forefathers
Lightning never hits the obtrusive pole,
But the animals shrivel in the field.
And the obscure observer takes a note.
And what is that sound before death--
They have banished the death rattle, the rhonchi, the rales.
We die elsewhere, of something else.
And what is that last sound my mother made
Softly made: archaic breathing. And do not call it a dream.
Nor is it a game: The child says infinity is a small word
We have done away with noise and have left only
The agonal respiration like war material.
You will paint the Americans but is it
The father in a grain of dust, heroic androgyne with honeysuckle
Man in a skirt, woman in a flower, faithless but free
The child thinks the god's birthday must be every day:
He is that old. Fool's gold folly. Crystals slouch out of matrix.
While the spider illuminates his influence with a film
Of joy, the fly develops his refuge in a shattered theme
The dead sunflower almost blocks the sun
Like an old poet, an empty eve coerces us
Like an old fate, the gods are dipped in water and predict
Man is red dust, let there be flesh.
There is no sound before death in America
You do not see the charred soldier, only pleasure.
We have done away with all noise, but the agony of respiration.
And autumn will be the flag of that new nation.
Desire Lines
I can see
I cannot see
Keats in surgery in the 19th century
I can see
I cannot see
Mars and Aphrodite
dancing in the net
while the gods played and laughed at
the castanet
I can see
I cannot see
Keats and Fanny
Allen Ginsberg in 1953
I can see
I cannot see
An adult
Is a raindrop
A raindrop
Is an adult
I can see
I cannot see
Lou Andreas Salome and
Friedrich Nietzsche
Mars and Botticelli
Keats and Fanny B
Allen and Peter Orlovsky
Elizabeth and "and"
I can see
I cannot see
An adult
Is just an instrument
A landscape pornography
That hill is a hole
I walk on desire lines
You walk on desire
I can see
I cannot see
Sarcophagus for the Silence of God
for John Hejduk and Picard
Sarcophagus for the still small voice
Sarcophagus for the marriage of truth and troth
Sarcophagus for the mother of the hypocritical poet
Sarcophagus for the lava of speech
the incline of music
Sarcophagus for the materials for the messiah without melancholy
Sarcophagus for the misidentified corpse of the architect
Sarcophagus for the flower beyond flowers
Sarcophagus for the suicidal architect for the hand on the edge
Sarcophagus for the powerless computer for the traditional book
Sarcophagus for the one fairy tale
Sarcophagus for the future tense and for the subjunctive in the
gloom
of the miracle for Thomas Hardy's ox-cart
man
Sarcophagus for the twins of frozen speech and for the luminous
sounds of the surface
Sarcophagus for the slave of writing crying help in all
languages for wild sound for the twins of
frozen speech
Sarcophagus for the mistranslators
Song for Hannah Arendt
Out of being torn apart
comes art.
Out of being split in two
comes me and you. HA HA!
Out of being torn in three
comes a logical poetry. (She laughed but not at poetry.)
Out of the essential mistranslation
emerges an illegitimate nation.
Better she said the enraged
than the impotent slave sunk in the Bay.
Out of being split into thirteen parts
comes the eccentric knowledge of "hearts."
(Out of being torn at all
comes the poor-rich rhyme of not knowing, after all.)
And out of this war, of having fought
comes thinking, comes thought.
Voiceless
They were right who inveighed against
the voice,
too sexual an organ
the rabbis whose laryngologists
those who stopped a doctor
by their side like a singer
who refused to listen
and put a wall where voice had been
they died the lover of branches
of fire of the tape recorder used for good or ill your burning hair
If we were blind
and if we were known to listen
we would find one another
by your voice alone
(what you loved or Lillith loved was you and yes and permission)
and we are blind
lingo 4
 Books in print by David Shapiro
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