77 Dream Songs Read Online Free PDF Page B

fuck,
    was: Do, ut des.

47
    April Fool’s Day, or, St Mary of Egypt
    —Thass a funny title, Mr Bones.
    —When down she saw her feet, sweet fish, on the threshold,
    she considered her fair shoulders
    and all them hundreds who have held them, all
    the more who to her mime thickened & maled
    from the supple stage,
    and seeing her feet, in a visit, side by side
    paused on the sill of The Tomb, she shrank: ‘No.
    They are notworthy,
    fondled by many’ and rushed from The Crucified
    back through her followers out of the city ho
    across the suburbs, plucky
    to dare my desert in her late daylight
    of animals and sands. She fall prone.
    Only wind whistled.
    And forty-seven years went by like Einstein.
    We celebrate her feast with our caps on,
    whom God has not visited.

48
    He yelled at me in Greek,
    my God!—It’s not his language
    and I’m no good at—his is Aramaic,
    was—I am a monoglot of English
    (American version) and, say pieces from
    a baker’s dozen others: where’s the bread?
    but rising in the Second Gospel, pal:
    The seed goes down, god dies,
    a rising happens,
    some crust, and then occurs     an eating. He said so,
    a Greek idea,
    troublesome to imaginaryJews,
    like bitter Henry, full of the death of love,
    Cawdor-uneasy, disambitious, mourning
    the whole implausible necessary thing.
    He dropped his voice & sybilled of
    the death of the death of love.
    I óught to get going.

49
    Blind
    Old Pussy-cat if he won’t eat, he don’t
    feel good into his tum’, old Pussy-cat.
    He wants to have eaten.
    Tremor, heaves, he sweaterings. He can’t.
    A dizzy swims of where is Henry at;
    … somewhere streng verboten.
    How come he sleeps & sleeps and sleeps, waking like death:
    locate the restorations of which we hear
    as of profound sleep.
    From daylight he got maintrackt, from friends’breath,
    wishes, his hopings. Dreams make crawl with fear
    Henry but not get up.
    The course his mind his body steer, poor Pussy-cat,
    in weakness & disorder, will see him down
    whiskers & tail.
    ‘Wastethrift’: Oh one of cunning wives know that
    he hoardy-squander, where is nor downtown
    neither suburba. Braille.

50
    In a motion of night they massed nearer my post.
    I hummed a short blues. When the stars went out
    I studied my weapons system.
    Grenades, the portable rack, the yellow spout
    of the anthrax-ray: in order. Yes, and most
    of my pencils were sharp.
    This edge of the galaxy has often seen
    a defence so stiff, but it could only go
    one way.
    —Mr Bones, your troubles give me vertigo,
    & backache.Somehow, when I make your scene,
    I cave to feel as if
    de roses of dawns & pearls of dusks, made up
    by some ol’ writer-man, got right forgot
    & the greennesses of ours.
    Springwater grow so thick it gonna clot
    and the pleasing ladies cease. I figure, yup,
    you is bad powers.

51
    Our wounds to time, from all the other times,
    sea-times slow, the times of galaxies
    fleeing, the dwarfs’ dead times,
    lessen so little that if here in his crude rimes
    Henry them mentions, do not hold it, please,
    for a putting of man down.
    Ol’ Marster, being bound you do your best
    versus we coons, spare now a cagey John
    a whilom bits that whip:
    who’ll tell your fortune, when you haveconfessed
    whose & whose woundings—against the innocent stars
    & remorseless seas—
    —Are you radioactive, pal? —Pal, radioactive.
    —Has you the night sweats & the day sweats, pal?
    —Pal, I do.
    —Did your gal leave you? —What do you think, pal?
    —Is that thing on the front of your head what it seems to be, pal?
    —Yes, pal.

III

52
    Silent Song
    Bright-eyed & bushy-tailed woke not Henry up.
    Bright though upon his workshop shone a vise
    central, moved in
    while he was doing time down hospital
    and growing wise.
    He gave it the worst look he had left.
    Alone. They all abandoned     Henry—wonder! all,
    when most he—under the sun.
    That was all right.
    He can’t work well with it here, or think.
    A bilocation, yellow