The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (13 page)

Meadows that wreck with a solitude,

tractors that have run down and died like toys,

even here among you

they are embarrassed and can't hide

from their obscurity,

the trembling

ugly young girls, their lips

making that speechless consonant they always make

in the clouded mirrors before they carry

their roses into the flames of evening.

And when they arrive among mainstreets down

on which the cheap outdated names

are sobbed by the marquees,

driving and stopping and getting out

under the avalanches of sunset and walking into stores

as cool and still as pantries—they know how it is.

History…Sadness…A bubble

of some old error swimming up through the years,

and gossip that grows stale and then is venerated…

They know who we are,

our every pain

outnumbered by the studious array

of little crucifixions in the vineyards,

they know how we begin to disbelieve

the moon and stars,

and the wild

deer who blows over the road,

and how we are visited by craft from distant worlds,

people who come near but never land.

Oh they know

the tortures of sweetness,

these young girls

waiting under the beautiful eyes of billboards.

I dreamed I had been dreaming,

And sadness did descend.

And when from the first dreaming

I woke, I walked behind

The window crossed with smoke and rain

In Washington, DC,

The neighbors strangling newspapers

Or watching the TV

Down on the rug in undershirts

Like bankrupt criminals.

The street where Revelation

Made James Hampton miserable

Lay wet beyond the glass,

And on it moved streetcorner men

In a steam of crossed-out clues

And pompadours and voodoo and

Sweet Jesus made of ivory;

But when I woke, the headlights

Shone out on Elloree.

Two endless roads, four endless fields,

And where I woke, the veils

Of rain fell down around a sign:

FRI & SAT JAM W/ THE MEAN

MONSTER MAN & II.

Nobody in the Elloree,

South Carolina, Stop-n-Go,

Nobody in the Sunoco,

Or in all of Elloree, his birthplace, knows

His name. But right outside

Runs Hampton Street, called, probably,

For the owners of his family.

God, are you there, for I have been

Long on these highways and I've seen

Miami, Treasure Coast, Space Coast,

I have seen where the astronauts burned,

I have looked where the Fathers placed the pale

Orange churches in the sun,

Have passed through Georgia in its green

Eternity of leaves unturned,

But nothing like Elloree.

Sam and I drove up from Key West, Florida,

Visited James Hampton's birthplace in South Carolina,

And saw The Throne

At The National Museum of American Art in Washington.

It was in a big room. I couldn't take it all in,

And I was a little frightened.

I left and came back home to Massachusetts.

I'm glad The Throne exists:

My days are better for it, and I feel

Something that makes me know my life is real

To think he died unknown and without a friend,

But this feeling isn't sorrow. I was his friend

As I looked at and was looked at by the rushing-together parts

Of this vision of someone who was probably insane

Growing brighter and brighter like a forest after a rain—

And if you look at the leaves of a forest,

At its dirt and its heights, the stuttering mystic

Replication, the blithering symmetry,

You'll go crazy, too. If you look at the city

And its spilled wine

And broken glass, its spilled and broken people and hearts,

You'll go crazy. If you stand

In the world you'll go out of your mind.

But it's all right,

What happened to him. I can, now

That he doesn't have to,

Accept it.

I don't believe that Christ, when he claimed

The last will be first, the lost life saved—

When he implied that the deeply abysmal is deeply blessed—

I just can't believe that Christ, when faced

With poor, poor people aspiring to become at best

The wives and husbands of a lonely fear,

Would have spoken redundantly.

Surely he couldn't have referred to some other time

Or place, when in fact such a place and time

Are unnecessary. We have a time and a place here,

Now, abundantly.

He waits forever in front of diagrams

On a blackboard in one of his photographs,

Labels that make no sense attached

To the radiant, alien things he sketched,

Which aren't objects, but plans.

Of his last dated

Vision he stated:

“This design is proof of the Virgin Mary descending

Into Heaven…”

The streetcorner men, the shaken earthlings—

It's easy to imagine his hands

When looking at their hands

Of leather, loving on the necks

Of jugs, sweetly touching the dice and bad checks,

And to see in everything a making

Just like his, an unhinged

Deity in an empty garage

Dying alone in some small consolation.

Photograph me photograph me photo

Graph me in my suit of loneliness,

My tie which I have been

Saving for this occasion,

My shoes of dust, my skin of pollen,

Addressing the empty chair; behind me

The Throne of the Third Heaven

Of the Nations Millennium General Assembly.

i AM ALPHA AND OMEGA THE BEGiNNiNG

AND THE END,

The trash of government buildings,

Faded red cloth,

Jelly glasses and lightbulbs,

Metal (cut from coffee cans),

Upholstery tacks, small nails

And simple sewing pins,

Lightbulbs, cardboard,

Kraft paper, desk blotters,

Gold and aluminum foils,

Neighborhood bums the foil

On their wine bottles,

The Revelation
.

And I command you not to fear.

There's a sadness about looking back when you get to the end:

a sadness that waits at the end of the street,

a cigaret that glows with the glow of sadness

and a cop in a yellow raincoat who says It's late,

it's late, it's sadness.

And it's a sadness what they've done to the women I loved:

they turned Julie into her own mother, and Ruthe—

and Ruthe I understand has been turned

into a sadness…

And when it comes time

for all of humanity to witness what it's done

and every television is trained on the first people to see God and

they say

Houston,

we have ignition,

they won't have ignition.

They'll have a music of wet streets

and lonely bars where piano notes

follow themselves into a forest of pity and are lost.

They'll have sadness.

They'll have

sadness, sadness, sadness.

Obedient to the laws of meat we walk

our feet wounded by joy

toward our humiliating rendezvous with mirrors

and toward the mysterious treasures tossed at our feet

as when I crossed the yard at Florence Prison

and heard someone calling

Poet

Poet

My name is James man

Life sentence!

The stifled musk of wood beneath linoleum

in the tall listening stairwells of certain

buildings stays, and the timbre the walls gave to your weeping

and to our snide talk and marijuana coughing,

that also stays, and some of the anger, and some of the stopped

feeling, the stranded, geologic

grieving of seedlings on a wind—and such we were—

they remain. But where do they remain?—the place

has gone, the receptacle

of these essences is mysterious.

I've returned to that same town, and nothing—

no raking, no ghostly notes, only

shopping malls standing where I beat you up

and spring's uncertain touch and stuck breath

and women who smell like flowers or fruit or candy

moved by delicate desires along the aisles.

As we did, the same trains drag through town,

summoned up out of the prairie and disappearing

toward places waiting for their conjuring,

mountains and glens and the snow coming down like dreams

in a silence and in a tiny souvenir.

Crow shines on a dead branch that may have

lived then and

under which we may have passed.

Our preacher was a demon and the joker

sprinkled down over our wedding a glitter

of rain, perhaps this same cold tiny rain

in the gusts of which the evergreens cast down

amid memory a cherishing.

Oh yes, nobody came to that sad show but the day

and the night, and your train was a train of years.

Since that time I have

by my own count three lives led,

one in magic, one in power, one in peace,

and still

the little wound goes like a well

down into the rotten dark and who

should breathe near there sees dreams

and pales and sickens in a music.

And the crow is not God, and the wind

is not God and nothing is God

that would not break us

for transgressions we made in ignorance.

Drove south two days ago

into the mongrel jaywalker onrush

of Los Angeles.

On the way,

stacks of irrigation pipe,

the laughter of

disc jockeys.

Farmhands in a pickup passed,

their glances spilling behind them as

one looked at me

—as if Route 5

had expressed you from the blondeness

of its fields,

its vast incomprehensible agriculture

finding itself in the numb openness

of your face:

tonight, beneath the moths—tears roll down the radio.

And you get drunk, and your scars are dancing…

Today, Carl and I took

another look at the orderly dead.

On Wednesdays before the alcoholic

rap group at the County Jail

across Low Gap Road, we often cruise

these old graveyard rows, reading

the brief, inexplicable stories twisted off

by cholera and tossed down here at our feet.

The shortest lives have the shortest graves,

the little brothers and sisters,

three and five and six, dead

in the month of May, beside the World War

comrades who all went away at once,

and the three superannuated wives

of a doctor who must have known

something, at least, because he outlived them all.

Oh, my lovely friend,

moss is coming

to fill our names…

Carl

is getting kind of old, and sometimes

he mumbles and forgets. Carl, don't.

Don't die.

Let's turn our backs on the dead

and cross the road to where the living,

incarcerated in their orange

jumpsuits, mark off their days.

The inmates look like children

in their brilliant clothes,

peeking up out of their living graves.

But tonight, pushing

the heavy words like ballast out of his mouth,

Ron told us:

“I've got seven foot

of scar. I been dead three times.”

The men had some kind of, I don't know, raped

feeling to them. I got mad.

I refused them my pity. I'll save it

for the people you hurt to get here, I said.

When I got home to Anchor Bay

I wandered idiotically

past the house where I'm not supposed to live,

staggered through the meadow, ignorant

of the lovely walnut tree, ignorant of the moon,

and went in

to the horses and held the new colt in the pissed-on stalls.

This creature will live. He's nursing now. A frost

of colostrum trembles on his lips,

dribbling from the teats

of Infinity, his mother, and staining the dust.

Right now I could go to the friend

who, a long time ago, when Michelle

and I were two crippled babies,

fucked her

because he was thirsty,

and say

I just want you to smell the rain

on this straw.