A Selection from The Book of Nightmares
From Galway Kinnell's
The Book of Nightmares
The Dead Shall
Be Raised Incorruptible
1
A piece of flesh gives off
smoke in the field --
carrion,
caput mortuum,
orts,
pelf,
fenks,
sordes,
gurry dumped from hospital trashcans.
Lieutenant!
This corpse will not stop burning!
2
"That you Captain? Sure,
sure I remember -- I still hear you
lecturing at me on the intercom, Keep your guns up, Burnsie!
thd then screaming, Stop shooting, for crissake, Burnsie,
those are friendlies! But crissake, Captain,
I'd already started, burst
after burst, little black pajamas jumping
and falling . . . and remember that pilot
who'd bailed out over the North,
how I shredded him down to catgut on his strings?
one of his slant eyes, a piece
of his smile, sail past me
every night right after the sleeping pill. . .
"It was only
that I loved the sound
of them, I guess I just loved
the feel of them sparkin' off my hands . . ."
3
On the television screen:
Do you have a body that sweats?
Sweat that has odor?
False teeth clanging into your breakfast?
Case of the dread?
Headache so steady it may outlive you?
Armpits sprouting hair?
Piles so huge you don't need a chair to sit at a table?
We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed . . .
4
In the Twentieth Century of my trespass on earth,
having exterminated one billion heathens,
heretics, Jews, Moslems, witches, mystical seekers,
black men, Asians, and Christian brothers,
every one of them for his own good,
a whole continent of red men for living in community,
one billion species of animals for being sub-human,
and ready and eager to take on
the bloodthirsty creatures from the other planets,
I, Christian man, groan out this testament of my last will.
I gave my blood fifty parts polystyrene,
twenty-five parts benzene, twenty-five parts good old gasoline,
to the last bomber pilot aloft, that there shall be one acre
in the dull world where the kissing flower may bloom,
which kisses you so long your bones explode under its lips.
My tongue
goes to the Secretary of the Dead
to tell the corpses, "I'm sorry, fellows,
the killing was just one of those things
difficulut to pre-visualize -- like a cow,
say, getting hit by lightning."
My stomach, which has digested
four hundred treaties giving the Indians
eternal right to their land, I give to the Indians.
I throw in my lungs which have spent four hundred years
sucking in good faith on peace pipes.
My soul I leave to the bee
that he may sting it and die, my brain
to the fly, his back the hysterical green color of slime,
the he may suck on it and die, my flesh to the advertising man,
the anti-prostitute, who loathes human flesh for money.
I assign my crooked backbone
to the dice maker, to chop up into dice,
for casting lots as to who shall see his own blood
on his shirt front and who his brother's
for the race isn't to the swift but to the crooked.
To the last man surviving on earth
I give my eyelids worn out by fear, to wear
in the absolute night of radiation and silence,
so that his eyes can't close, for regret
is like tears seeping through closed eyelids.
I give the emptiness my hand: the little finger picks no more noses,
slag clings to the black stick of the ring finger,
a bit of flame jets from the tip of the fuck-you finger,
the first finger accuses the heart, which has vanished,
on the thumb stump wisps of smoke ask a ride into the emptiness.
In the Twentieth Century of my nightmare
on earth, I swear on my chromium testicles
to this testament
and last will
of my iron will,
my fear of love, my itch for money, and my madness.
5
In the ditch
snakes crawl cool paths
over the rotted thigh, the toe bones
twitch in the smell of burnt rubber,
the belly
opens like a poison nightflower,
the tongue has evaporated,
the nostril
hairs sprinkle themselves with yellowish-white dust,
the five flames at the end
of each hand have gone out, a mosquito
sips a last meal from this plate of serenity.
And the fly,
the last nightmare, hatches himself.
6
I ran
my neck broken I ran
holding my head up with both hands I ran
thinking the flames
the flames may burn the oboe
but listen buddy boy they can't touch the notes!
7
A few bones
lie about in the smoke of bones.
Membranes,
effigies pressed into grass,
mummy windings,
desquamations,
sags incinerated mattresses gave back to the world,
memories shocked into the mirrors on whorehouse ceilings,
angel's wings
flagged down into the snows of yesteryear,
kneel
on the scorched earth
in the shapes of men and animals:
do not let this last hour pass,
do not remove the last, poison cup from our lips.
And a wind holding
the cries of love-making from all our nights and days
moves among the stones, hunting
for two twined skeletons to blow its last cry across.
Lieutenant!
This corpse wll not stop burning!.
-- The Book of Nightmares
VII
Little Sleep's Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight
1
You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up to the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
2
I have heard you tell
the sun, don't go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower don't grow old,
don't die, Little Maud,
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,
until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across the hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,
and iron twists weapons towards the true north,
and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the dark, O corpse to be...
And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-tumbling of a house that falls.
3
In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lad: to all
to all the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried
your one word, caca! caca! caca!
and each spoonful
stopped, in a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam
Yes,
you cling because
I, like you, only sooner
than you, will go down
the paths of vanished alphabets,
the roadlessness
to the other side of the darkness,
your arms,
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old men,
which once could call up the lost nouns.
4
And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,
and the stones saying
over their one word, ci-git, ci-git, ci-git,
and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there
unable to let them in.
5
If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a cafe' at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,
and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking
one day all this will only be a memory,
learn,
as you stand
at the end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come--- to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This Laughter. These temple bones.
The still undanced cadence of vanishing.
6
In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:
and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.
7
Back you go, into your crib.
The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.
Little sleep's head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.
VIII
The Call Across the Valley of not Knowing
1
In the red house sinking down
into ground rot, a lamp
at one window, the smarled ashes letting
a single flame go free,
a shoe of dreaming iron nailed to the wall,
two mismatched halfnesses lying side by side in the darkness
I can feel with my hand
the foetus rouse himself
with a huge fishy thrash, and re-settle in the darkness.
Her hair glowing in the firelight,
her breasts full,
her belly swollen,
a sunset of firelight
wavering all down one side, my wife sleeps on,
happy,
far away, in some other,
newly opened room of the world.
2
Sweat breaking from his temples,
Aristophanes ran off
at the mouth--- made it all up, nightmared it all up
on the spur
of that moment which has stabbed us ever since:
that each of us
is a torn half
whose lost other we keep seeking across time
until we die, or give up---
or actually find her:
as I myself in an Ozark
Airlines DC-6 droning over
towns made of crossroads, headed down
into Waterloo, Iowa, actually found her,
held her face a few hours
in my hands; and for reasons--- cowardice,
loyalties, all which goes by the name “necessity”---
left her...
3
And yet I think
it must be the wound, the wound itself,
which lets us know and love,
which forces us to reach out to our misfit
and by a kind
of poetry of the soul, accomplish,
for a moment, the wholeness the drunk Greek
extrapolated from his high
or flagellated out of an empty heart,
that purest,
most tragic concumbence, strangers
clasped into one, a moment, of their moment on earth.
4
She who lies halved
beside me --- she and I once
watched the bees, dreamers not yet
dipped into the acids
of the craving for anything, not yet burned down into flies, sucking
the blossom-dust
from the pear-tree in spring,
we two
lay out together
under the tree, on earth, beside our empty clothes,
our bodies opened to the sky
floated down
and the bees glittered in the blossoms
and the bodies of our hearts
opened
under the knowledge
of tree, on the grass of the knowledge
of graves, and among the flowers of flowers.
And the brain kept blossoming
all through the body, until the bones themselves could think,
and the genitals sent out wave after wave of holy desire
until even the dead brain cells
surged and fell in god-like androgynous fantasies ---
and I understood
the unicorn's phallus could have risen, after all,
directly out of thought itself.
5
Of that time in a Southern jail,
when the sheriff, as he cursed me
and spat, took my hand in his hand, rocked
from the pulps the whorls
and tented archways into the tabooed realm, that underlife
where the canaries of the blood are singing, pressed
the flesh-flowers
into the dirty book of the
police-blotter, afterwards what I remembered most
was the care, the almost loving,
animal gentleness of his hand on my hand
Better than the rest of us, he knows
the harshness of the cubicle
in hell where they put you
with all your desires undiminished, and with no body to appease them.
And when he himself floats out
on a sea he almost begins to remember,
floats out into a darkness he has known already;
when, the moan of wind
and the gasp of lungs call to each other among the waves
and the wish to float
comes to matter not at all as he sinks under
is it so impossible to think
he will dream back to all the hands black and white
he took in his hands
as the creation
touches him a last time all over his body?
6
Suppose I had stayed
with that woman of Waterloo, suppose
we had met on a hill called Safa, in our own country,
that we had lain out on the grass
and looked into each other's blindness, under leaf-shadows
wavering across our bodies in the drifts of sun,
our faces
inclined toward each other, as hens
incline their faces
when the heat flows from the warmed egg
back into the whole being, and the silver moon
had stood still for us in the middle of heaven---
I think I might have closed my eyes, and moved
from then on like one of the born blind,
their faces
gone into heaven already.
7
We who live out our plain lives, who put
our hand into the hand of whatever we love
as it vanishes,
as we vanish,
and stumble toward what will be, simply by arriving,
a kind of fate,
some field, maybe, of flaked stone
scattered in the starlight
where the flesh
swaddles its skeleton a last time
before the bones go their way without us,
might we not hear, even then,
the bear call
from his hillside --- a call, like ours, needing
to be answered --- and the dam-bear
call back across the darkness
of the valley of not-knowing
the only word tongues can shape without intercession,
yes...yes...?
X
LASTNESS
1.
The skinny waterfalls, footpaths
footpaths wandering out from heaven, strike
the cliffs, leap, and shudder off.
Somewhere behind me
a small fire goes on flaring in the rain, in the desolate ahses.
No matter, now, whom it was built for,
it keeps its flames, it warms
everyone who might wander into its radiance,
a tree, a lost animal, the stones,
because in the dying world it was set burning.
2.
A black bear sits alone
in the twilight, nodding from side
to side, turning slowly around and around
on himself, scuffing the four-footed
circle into the earth. He sniffs the sweat
in the breeze, he understands
a creature, a death-creature
watches from the fringe of the trees,
finally he understands
I am no longer here, he himself
from the fringe of the trees watches
a black bear
get up, eat a few flowers, trudge away,
all his fur glistening
in the rain
And what glistening!
Sancho Fergus
my boychild, had such great shouldrs,
when he was born his head
came out, the rest of him stuck. And he opened
his eyes: his head out there all alone
in the room, he squinted with pained,
barely unglued eyes at the nine-month’s
blood splashing beneath him
on the floor. and almost
smiled, I thought, almost forgav e it all in advance.
When he came wholly forth
I took him up in my hands and bent
over and smelled
the black glistening fur
of his head, as empty space
must have bent
over the newborn planet
and smelled the grasslands and the ferns.
3
Walking toward the cliff overhanging
the river, I call out to the stone,
and the stone
calls back, its voice hunting among the rubble
for my ears.
Stop.
As you approach an echoing
cliffside, you sense the line
where the voice calling from the stone
no longer answers,
turns into stone, and nothing comes back.
Here, between answer
and nothing, I stand, in the old shoes
flowed over by the rainbows of hen-oil,
each shoe holding the bones
which ripple together in the communion
of the step,
and which open out
in front of the toes, the whole foot trying
to dissolve into the future.
A clatter of elk hooves.
Has the top sphere
emptied itself? Is it true
the earth is all there is, and the earth does not last?
On the river the world floats by holding one corpse.
Stop. Stop here.
Living brings you to death, there is no other road.
4
This is the tenth poem
and it is the last. It is right
at the last, that one
and zero
walk off together,
walk off the end of the pages together,
one creature
walking away side by side with the emptiness.
Lastness
is brightness. It is the brightness
gathered up of all that went before. It lasts.
And when it does end
there is nothing, nothing
left,
in the rust of old cars,
in the hole torn open in the body of the Archer.,
in the river-mist smelling of the warmest of stones,
the dead lie,
empty, filled, at the beginning,
and the first
voice comes craving again out of their mouths.
5
That Bach concert I went to so long ago---
the chandeleried room
of ladies and gentlemen who would never die...
the voices go out,
the room becomes hushed,
the violinist
puts the irreversible sorrow on his face
into the opened palm
of the wood, the music begins:
a shower of rosin,
the bow-hairs listening down all their length
to the wail,
the sexual wail
of the back-alleys and blood strings we have lived
still crying,
still singing, from the sliced inteestine
of cat.
6
This poem
if we shall call it that,
or concert of one
divided among himself,
this earthward gesture
of the sky-diver, the worms
on his back still spinning forth
and already gnawing away
the silks of his loves, who could have saved him,
this free floating of one
opening his arms into the attitude
of flight, as he obeys the necessity and falls...
7
Sancho Fergus! Don’t cry!
Or else, cry.
On the body,
on the blued flesh, when it is
laid out, see if you can find
the one flea which is laughing.