Collected Poems

The Hellgate 1969–1975

The Hellgate 1969–1975 187 Part I. Testament Being of sound body & sound mind           in my 35th year, with the sounds of sparrows, with the lights of summer falling south with the performing angel on the hill of paradise already seen from a garden’s ray, with the sense of children, with the dream of their breath still clear, with God clearing away the leaves in my heart, with God cleaning away the computers from my breast and penis, with color and darkness of color, with the sound of sparrows ready, with the blue jays cutting the trees with the cicada foreign and metallic in the trees, with moans, and hearts feeding sky, insulin and mercury renewed in bed, in arms reading the salt ocean or swallowed, with dragons’ eggs nestling in those arms, with fire transmuted into birth, with earthquakes of pulse, with deluge of new life dragging through the sea, on loneliness in the street’s tumult and night mist spread. On quivering genitals, on mud, between mystery and misery, between eyes quick like mercury to smile and heavy as mercury and sad, between husbands, and Psyche & Cupid and St. Anthony’s bread, 188 stale and filled with youth, between animals and St. Francis between fish and retribution In strength and weakness in watching                                   and drinking I leave the ocean and the sea, the womb and mother earth in all her crudeness of violent warmth, I leave mothers in their flesh, fathers in their skins leave sons with their birds daughters with their flowers, leave the fish and internal pressure, crabs with bright eyes, the whale looking sideways hiding a woman in those eyes. I leave the deep insects and flesh they’ve eaten and been eaten. Even shells and even microbes are left that were never looked at. But who cares?   O new ocean what remains behind you? I leave the organics of dreams and all their convolutions, music is left, and seas of rain, rhythm, movement, rain, leaving motion of rains through tornados, hurricanes I leave everything. I do not take Spring with its invisible wand nor its underground messages I do not take the seeds licking the dirt, roots fucking the dirt, nor Spring’s nostrils filled with elixirs of puberty. 189 No, I take no Spring with me and its yellow sun nor the Spring that if it would last too long, would fill us with antimatter and grace until a deadly swoon. And I do not take summer either, filled with sulphur, filled with graceful ether, in the mind’s dull furnaces of race, but that’s another thing I do not take. I leave behind me, tearing up the ground winding up with the self raped by the ocean and labor that welcomes a friend. I leave behind work, as I leave behind hydrogen. All substances rest in one dark, just as one woman rests in old men. All songs, even that of the lark, have to remain and I leave them all just at the vanishing of pain. Yes, I do not take summer; there’s other rain. In the world’s heart I leave the heart murmuring in the light of sleep. No more beating heart, but dreams remain and the world’s compensations. 190 Rivers in their dreamy dialogue to the edges of plain relations with the weather and chemicals alone, I leave helium to the rarefied, and then there’s the atmosphere’s one. Rivers of night and rivers flying through the viscous mind like rays the sun gives that are also left behind. Yes, I do not take summer, other rains fill the seas with deposits of earth mother with lava, basalt, sand, trees. The earth deposits itself in water; but I leave water, too, wherever it can be found in bodies like saving it out of the fire. Now that the word is out and the action is left, now that the word is falling                        back on itself and the action is out Now that the word is in and the action is falling on itself now that the falling is made out of the action of the word and falling has nothing to do,   O word, that releases the action itself. Now that a tender word formed is in action, and in order to revive the falling out of sounds, releases from the oxygen a vivisected flight. 191 Released from things, I leave behind the...