The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Read Online Free PDF Page B

something
    at this hour when I am already made?
    Never a famous hero, a star, a priest—
    my mind decides a little faster than
    the world can talk, and what I dreamed was only
    the darker sketch of what I would become.
    It’s 1996. I’m forty-eight.
    I am a monk who never prays. I am
    a prayer. The pilgrim comes to hear me;
    the banker comes, the bald janitors arrive,
    the mothers lift their wicked children up—
    they wait for me as if I were a bus,
    with or without hope, what’s the difference?
    One guy manipulates a little calculator,
    speaking to it as to a friend. Sweat
    is delivered from its mascara,
    sad women read about houses…
    and now the deaf approach, trailing the dark smoke
    of their infirmity behind them as they leave it
    and move toward the prayer that everything
    is praying: the summer evening a held bubble,
    every gesture riveting the love,
    the swaying of waitresses, the eleven television
    sets in a storefront broadcasting a murderer’s face—
    these things speak the clear promise of Heaven.

Passengers
    The world will burst like an intestine in the sun,
    the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,
    but there will always be somebody riding the bus
    through these intersections strewn with broken glass
    among speechless women beating their little ones,
    always a slow alphabet of rain
    speaking of drifting and perishing to the air,
    always these definite jails of light in the sky
    at the wedding of this clarity and this storm
    and a woman’s turning—her languid flight of hair
    traveling through frame after frame of memory
    where the past turns, its face sparking like emery,
    to open its grace and incredible harm
    over my life, and I will never die.

ONE
The Rockefeller Collection of Primitive Art
    Solter my neighbor rocks his lover through the human night,
    softly and softly, so as not to tell the walls,
    the walls the friends of the spinster. But I’m only a spinster,
    I’m not a virgin. I have made love. I have known desire.
    I followed desire through the museums.
    We seemed to float along sculptures,
    along the clicking ascent
    of numerals in the guards’ hands. Brave works
    by great masters were all around us.
    And then we came out of a tunnel into one of those restaurants
    where the natural light was so unnatural
    as to make heavenly even our fingernails and each radish.
    I saw everyone’s skull beneath the skin,
    I saw sorrow painting its way out of the faces,
    someone was telling a lie and I could taste it,
    and I heard the criminal tear-fall,
    saw the dog
    who dances with his shirt rolled up to his nipples,
    the spider…
    Why are their mouths small tight circles,
    the figures of Africa, New Guinea, New Zealand,
    why are their mouths astonished kisses beneath drugged eyes,
    why is the eye of the cantaloupe expressionless
    but its skin rippling with terror,
    and out beyond Coney Island in the breathless waste
    of Atlantia, why
    does the water move when it is already there?
    My neighbor’s bedsprings struggle
    â€”soon she will begin to scream—
    I think of them always
    traveling through space,
    riding their bed so
    softly it staves the world through the air
    of my room—it is their right,
    because we freely admit how powerful the sight is,
    we say that eyes stab and glances rake,
    but it is not the sight
    that lets us taste the salt on someone’s shoulder in the night,
    the musk of fear in the morning,
    the savor of falling in the falling
    elevators in the buildings of rock,
    it is the dark that lets us it is the dark. If
    I can imagine them then
    why can’t I imagine this?

Talking Richard Wilson Blues, by Richard Clay Wilson
    You might as well take a razor
    to your pecker as let a woman in your heart.
    First they do the wash and then they kill you.
    They flash their lights and teach your wallet to puke.
    They bring it to you folded—if you see her
    stepping between the coin laundry and your building
    over the