Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings
Author: Norman Mailer
Date: 2003-10-27T23:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Poetry; Illustrated
Description: Modest Gifts An unexpected collection from Norman Mailer--a book of his selected poems and more than one hundred of his drawings, most of them never before published. Modest Gifts is full of what the author calls "casual pleasures"--witty, naughty, and surprisingly tender verse and art. Lust, seduction, betrayal, jealousy, and even the banality of cocktail party chatter are depicted with humor, affection, and, above all, honesty. Here is an aspect of Norman Mailer unknown to many: lighthearted, prankish, whimsical, and often gentle, playfully sketching the intimate urban world that surrounds u
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

A Random House Trade Paperback Original

Preface, drawings, and compilation copyright © 2003 by Norman Mailer

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The poems in this work were originally published in Cannibals and Christians (New York: The Dial Press, 1966), copyright © 1965 by Norman Mailer, and in Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters) (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), copyright © 1962 by Norman Mailer.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Time magazine for permission to reprint excerpts from “Review of ‘Deaths for the Ladies’ ” from Time magazine, March 30, 1962, copyright © 1962 by Time, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Mailer, Norman.

Modest gifts : poems and drawings / by Norman Mailer.

p.   cm.

ISBN 0-8129-7237-6

I. Title.

PS3525.A4152A6 2003

811’.54—dc22     2003058552

Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

ISBN 978-0-8129-7237-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8971-7
v4.1
a

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

“I don’t know where to start”

Preface

I. COCKTAIL PARTY

A. Voices

“Don’t speak to me…”

“I never dreamed…”

“My mother tells me…”

“options.com…”

“Sometimes I feel…”

“Sometimes…”

Poem: “I was hysterical…”

“I feel as if…”

“My new date is fantastic.…”

“Don’t try to tell me, Randy…”

“I don’t really believe…”

Poem: “How can you say…”

“I must say…”

“I’ve made money…”

Poem: “The cigarette smoker said…”

Poem: “I think I’ll switch…”

“I’m getting very little out of this.”

“I’m getting nothing”

“Can’t you see?…”

B. Lingerers, Laggards & Blackguards

“Why can’t Garry Trudeau…”

“This much I know.…”

“Just let me kiss her once…”

“It’s not only…”

“Yes, I am the leprechaun…”

“I have reason…”

“BEWARE I’m loaded!”

Poem: “I don’t mind a party…”

II. MALADIES OF CENTRALISTS

Poem: “She believed in the efficacy…”

Poem: United Citizens Protest

Poem: The Suburban Arts

Poem: Therapy

Poem: “Repetition kills the soul…”

Poem: “A plague is coming…”

Poem: “As it grows, the flower…”

“I’m not afraid…”

Poem: Togetherness

“I want to serve my country.”

Poem: Commuter Pool

III. LEVELS OF PROCUREMENT

Poem: Sex in the High Schools

Poem: Night Club

Poem: “Do your duty…”

Poem: “Lie down with dogs…”

“I’m tired of feeling like a parking meter…”

“What did you expect?…”

[Burdened Prostitute]

[Bewildered Whore]

[Spaced-out Hooker]

[Prosperous Trollop]

“Yes, I’m Mary, Mary Magdalene…”

IV. THE MEDIOCRE

Poem: “We live in a world…”

Poem: Static

Poem: “Superhighways cut through…”

Poem: Seminars

“Who stole my false teeth?”

V. A ONE NIGHT STAND

Poem: In the Hallway

Poem: “You have one…”

[nude]

Poem: Eating in the Kitchen

Poem: A Logic of Love

Poem: “You’re not large enough…”

Poem: In the Mirror Is the Reckoning

“I think a bad cold is spiritual…”

VI. UNHAPPY MARRIAGE

“Worry-Wart…”

Poem: “What’s he got?…”

Poem: “I want to be a fine woman…”

Poem: Hallelujah!

“You are late with the alimony”

“No more bad news…”

VII. A DRUNKEN MARRIAGE

Poem: “Look, she said…”

Poem: The Good Lors

Poem: Rainy Afternoon with the Wife

Poem: Bellevue

Poem: “You let everything stand…”

Poem: A Wandering in Prose: for Hemingway, November 1960

VIII. DRINKING TO ETERNITY

Poem: “Men who work at Time…”

Poem: “I’m rich said Irish…”

Poem: “There’s one thing about you, baby…”

Poem: “When I was your age…”

Poem: Bar Twists

Poem: Epitaph of a Rail

“I am washed by the sorrows of love”

“I gave my soul to him.”

IX. INTERMISSION
(During the Intermission There Will Be a Variety Show)

Poem: Ian Fleming Revisited

[flying birds]

“A bird just pooped on me!”

“On me, too!”

“Petals on a wet black bough.”

More petals

“My head is in a whirl.…”

“I was supposed to be a baker’s dozen.”

Poem: Sports Channel

Poem: “Let’s stamp out bad dialogue.…”

NFL Quarterback

High School Quarterback

“I’ve coached football for thirty years…”

“Yes sir, this is my third year…”

Poem: Illumination

Poem: “the worst to be said about mothers…”

Bar Mitzvah in the Suburbs

X.

A. Interplanetary Is Trans-temporal

“So, I said to Aeschylus…”

“He’s gone the moment…”

“Picasso said that the act…”

“Picasso said the exact same thing to me!”

“Where can I find a man…”

That Salome!

Portrait of Picasso as Salvador Dali

Poem: “Of course, Mr. President…”

Poem: “release the anger contained…”

B. In Which We Visit the Abductionally Challenged

“The aliens did abduct me…”

“I can’t say the same”

“It was unspeakable”

Seinfeld

“It wasn’t that bad.…”

“Believe it or not…”

“I can’t complain.…”

“earth people assume…”

[devil]

XI. THE UPPER CLASSES

A. Transatlantic

Poem: “The Prime Minister said…”

Poem: “Money is a river…”

“The secret of money…”

“They call me Robber Baron…”

Poem: Registers

Poem: The Socialite’s Song

Poem: Definition of a Lady/Definition of a Hero

Poem: “Evil fingers…”

Poem: Ode to a Lady

Poem: Marriage à la Mode

Poem: Devils

B. Witches and Warlocks

Poem: “The most eligible bachelor…”

Poem: “I’m fast becoming a goose…”

Poem: “You bruise my catatonia…”

Poem: “Deep in my dungeon…”

Poem: The Ride of the Sad Saint

C. Camembert and Caviar

Poem: “It’s a fine wine…”

Poem: “The second bottle…”

Poem: “Nonetheless, we agreed…”

Poem: “Vodka is fine…”

Poem: “The caviar is marvelous…”

Poem: “If poetry is the food of the soul…”

Poem: “Since Camembert is the King of cheeses…”

Poem: “One cannot give…”

Poem: Hymns

“It’s not easy to be a priest…”

Poem: The Inaugural Ball

XII. THE LOWER CLASSES

The Hard Hat

The Hard Hat’s best friend

“I’m the best friend’s father.…”

“Yes I’m in the militia.…”

“I know things the Sopranos don’t.”

Poem: “There was a meet for the boys…”

“You don’t know who I am…”

“Ditto!”

“ ‘Who says I’m shit-face?’…”

“I’m Ass-face…”

“Keep your nose clean…”

“They ask me…”

Poem: East Village

Poem: “Now these children…”

Poem: To the Ghost of Senator Joe

Poem: “You can’t and you won’t print that…”

Poem: To the Lower Classes

Poem: “Panhandling the Bowery…”

Poem: Square Dance

XIII. HUNTING FOR POEMS

Poem: “Men who go out for game…”

“As a poetess…”

“Even the seeds of sensation…”

“Spleen?…”

“Some of my ideas are impossible…”

Poem: Burnt Umber Yellow Ochre

[Man’s Face]

Poem: “ ‘Our concern was speech…’ ”

Poem: “I have a simple mind…”

Poem: “A writer who has power…”

Poem: “you break up your line…”

“Falling in love has left my work…”

“I have no desire to change.…”

“I’m very critical…”

Poem: “Some poems are mild and pleasant…”

Poem: “Poems written by masochists…”

Poem: Justice

Poem: Danger

Poem: “those who are alive…”

“I’ve learned to live…”

Poem: The Corners of a Square

Poem: “Let at least a drink…”

XIV. POLITICIANS

“We’re looking to mine the bottom line.…”

“I see no reason to put…”

“It was easy.…”

Old Battered Billy-Boy Clinton

Madeleine Albright

“People keep asking me if I’m Ariel Sharon”

“People keep telling me…”

Poem: Exodus

XV. HEMINGWAY REVISITED

Poem: “Jake pissed…”

Poem: “Hey—you sleep deep…”

Poem: “Catherine never blushed…”

Poem: “We really ought, Catherine said…”

Poem: “You may not love me Jake said…”

Poem: “Mangled, morgued…”

“Will you play ‘The Lady Is a Tramp?’ ”

Poem: “I feel like I’ve been…”

Poem: “A little taste of heaven…”

XVI. THE HARBORS OF THE MOON

Poem: “I used to think my life…”

Poem: “One nerve screams…”

Poem: Death of a Lover Who Loved Death

Poem: In the Jardin Exotique of Eze

Poem: The Executioner’s Song

“All the men I’ve killed…”

Poem: “Is mood a temple…”

Poem: A Wandering in Prose: for Hemingway, Summer 1956

Poem: The Harbors of the Moon

[Birds]

Appendix: Introduction to Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters)

The End

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Also by Norman Mailer

About the Author

Well, in fact I do know. It is to warn the buyer. For the title is accurate—the gifts you will purchase are modest. William Merrill once wrote that a poem which was too easy to read was without value. “Difficult surfaces [can work] through to the poem’s emotional core.”

These pieces, for the most part, will be comprehensible on first approach. Some barely qualify as poems. They are snippets of prose called short hairs, there to shift your mood a hair’s width. Perhaps one element of a good poem is its power to succeed in altering a reader’s mood, but I will make no such claim for most of these inclusions, and something of the same can be said of the drawings. Is one to call them caricatures, cartoons, squibbles, or doodles? At best, they are line drawings—shading is beyond my means. If I now combine these line drawings with the short hairs, it is to offer the reader an easy pleasure. My serious work, such as it is, does not always accomplish this. Nor does it always want to. I belong to that dwindling group of novelists who wish to make a demand on their audience. I want the reader to owe a little more to the work than some passing gratitude for the mild enlivening of his or her leisure time. My mind was shaped at an early age, after all, by the great Russian novelists with their implicit expectation that you, the reader, are there to suffer with the writer. Why? For a huge reason—to partake of the ongoing quest to deepen our comprehension of life and eternity, as if—for fact!—life and eternity cannot survive without such a quest.

I still believe this. But by the age of eighty, tolerance insists on seeping into dedication. Casual pleasures become more meaningful even as lively pleasures sleep, and a few pains turn chronic. So, amusement becomes more of a virtue in itself. I now like to think that a limited ability to draw when coupled with a merry pretension to write poetry can turn sometimes into more than the sum of its parts, even as a minus times a minus will produce a plus. In mathematics, that always operates. In art, it can happen now and again. Obviously, I hope this is such an occasion.

I am not, however, being altogether candid. There are a few good poems and a few good drawings here. Which ones they may be, I keep to myself. My real pleasure will come if twenty different candidates are nominated by a score of men and women.

Here, I must offer a further confession. I knew this unashamedly self-serving attitude would have to disclose itself—modesty (at least for me) is too harsh a stricture to maintain all the way through two pages of a preface.

One more note:

A few poems were revised for this edition, but most were written in the early Sixties and published in a book called Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters). The rest appeared by 1965 in Cannibals and Christians. Most of the drawings were done, however, in recent years. Nonetheless, the sketches are not all that removed from the tone of the short hairs, even if my ongoing mood in those years when the poems were written was considerably more intense. So I think it’s appropriate to include an appendix in this book. It is the introduction I wrote for a mass-market paperback edition of Deaths for the Ladies, which came out almost ten years after the first publication in 1962, and it will offer a subtext to those readers who find themselves somewhat intrigued by what follows.

I

Cocktail Party

A. Voices

I
was
hysterical
stated
the girl

I
dropped
my

god
damned con
tact lens

down

the drain

Then
this
creep
called at four

A.M.

Hel

lo Kook

he said

Guess what:

I just

found

your

contact

lens.

How can you

say
you’re

only

three-quarters

a man,
why you’re

completely

a man

said the

lady

in a

three-quarter voice.

I still
love
him
deeply
she said
deeply
out of her
double
chin.

The
cigarette
smoker
said

I’d
rather
waste it
than give
it
away

America should have

two churches

one for people

who smoke

and one for those

who don’t

I think

I’ll switch
from ginger ale

now
to a
nice

glass

of

soda.

Drinker
with a
problem said:

I’ll drink
to that.

Cocktail Party

B. Lingerers, Laggards & Blackguards

I don’t mind

a party that

gets

a little rough

but did you

have to throw

up

in my foyer?

Despair never

said the

drunk,

I’ll pick

it up

I’ll really

pick it up

because I don’t

believe

in leaving

my leavings

at a lady’s

door

when she’s a lady

like you

you crappy

old

unhappy

bag of an armpit

anyone ever

say

you’re beautiful

said the drunk as he fell on his nose

trying to kiss lady and her fortune.

II

Maladies of Centralists

She believed

in the

efficacy

of patterns

So she worked

on the

Avenue

of the

Madison

and

sold

glop

The steel
and
glass
of some womb
that
lacked
the love
to
give her eyes

This ill

whose
first
symptom

is

a

monotony
of nights

UNITED CITIZENS PROTEST

Gather
me
a
monotony
of
names

THE SUBURBAN ARTS

Putting up

with

something

you don’t

like

and calling

it charming

spells

age-in-the-face,

dear,

said

the

skin

graft

as it

said

hello

and moved into its new home

on the neck

THERAPY

People

who

despise

themselves

wear

dingy

under-

garments

said

the

psychiatrist

flinging
the sorrows

of his

seed

out, off, and away

into a

white

linen

hand-

kerchief

with a

hand-

rolled

edge.

Repetition

kills the

soul
for its offers

dull the

hole

of memory
where life

was once

a tree

nestling the root

with gyres

of sky

and

midnight’s

murmuring

summer.

A plague is

coming

named

Virus Y S X

still unsolved

promises to be

proof

against

antibiotics

psychotherapy

Internet ventures

mega-vitamins

ATMs

celebrity diets

pundits

cell phones

foundations

cruise ships

rehab

spas

Viagra

anthrax

Botox

Prozac

breast enhancement

liposuction

insider trading

political correctness

and

even a good piece

of rare

When that unhappy day

comes to America

let Islam

take over.

The best defense is

infection.

As it grows,

the flower

breaks

through the stone.

It has yet

to prove

itself

against

the clay.

Gray without grace

day.

TOGETHERNESS

My flesh must smell like an old tire
my sex is bitter and gone
my days are leafless and all sleep

said the housewife

going to the specialist
one knows what kind
but in the waiting room
she was racked by a plague
from the pots of the American

miasma—our magazines,

and so lady murmured

too quietly
even for her mind to hear:

Reader’s Digest, please save your soul
and leave mine free to contemplate
eternity which must be more

than I glimpse for myself now

an endless promenade
across a field of baked old beans

a cataract of dishwater

regurgitated by the memory
of champagne I never drank

and kings I never kissed

COMMUTER POOL

Each time I think of some little thing

I can do to get ahead,

I feel as if
a foul fierce art from the nightmares
of constipation, the flaming waste of
stagnation

(Chime! Chime! the Vowels!)

has forced its way

up up into my brain
and played the lyre from Hades’ heart.

So I say to myself (I am growing deaf,
my dear) I say to myself: Boy,
you are getting ready to trade
the possibilities of the future,
otherwise known as soul,

for the ego,
the beans and the booze

Remember: that Guy died for us.

But oh those dreams and how they burn.

oh those dreams and how they burn.

Heaven cannot have a bitch
so royal as the root of my sweet itch.

III

Levels of Procurement

SEX IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS

Johnny

what

can I do

said the

girl

I gotta pee

She was in a

strange pad

three hours long

Why just
come here,
princess,

said

Johnny
and I’ll lead you
to the throne
who serves as sink.

Oh, Johnny

said the girl

you’re funny.

NIGHT CLUB

The call girl

walked along

the bar

escorted by

a plump

virile

pomaded

hip businessman,

minor league Mafia,

and behind them

trailed a smell

of stale

sulphur.

O sex

you are dying

I know

but in

whose name?

and for what

cause?

Do your duty

said I

to the beauty

as she turned

from love

(the act)

and sauntered

down the

hall

to

commune

with porcelain,

fluorescent light
and hound’s sigh

of lavatory water

languishing

after the

souls

my beauty

chose

to taste

and flush

away.

Lie down with dogs

you rise with

figs

said the lady

who was the loveliest

of all my pigs.

Call this poem

the Market Place

cried

the red hair

Negress

who ball my ace.

Whores,

I prate,

make no ditties

of my sores,

for a pimp

who shows no limp

in the gait

of his will

has escaped

all ill.

IV

The Mediocre

We live in a world filled with all the wonderful things

which did not happen

all the passion never born

when the sperm sailed into the sheet

and left a quiver of empty arrows

(did your little womb go pitty pat pat

when midnight passed and I wasn’t there?)

We walk in cities filled with second choice
you and me planned by calculation of the budget

those neon signs cold compromise

to cheat the savage dream of fire

you do not control the flame

until you put it under glass

(all those lovely modern shacks

fifty stories of steel and mass

second choice in a new idea)

Is it better that prisons look like public schools
and airports shake their hips in plastic luxury?

What a world of second choice besets the eye

no wonder I am going blind says the Lord

and oh that static in my ear

(must everyone speak in an accent

borrowed from another and all

food die a second death?—freeze my juices

seal my flesh.)

Devil torture me no longer, I will join
the vibration in the computer chip

second choice of the wind when

the spirits of the dead failed, you

hear, to make us feel their hurt.

STATIC

Dah dit dit da dit dit dah
dah dah dit dit dah dah
dah dit dit dah dit dit dah
dah dah dit dit dah dah

Mentally cool and bright

Arms fly is the war song

Father of strong in your nave

Dum ditty, dum ditty, dum

dah dah dit dah dit dit

Bold old gold is the grave

which does not slay

but reduces

the best and worst

to mediocre

dit dit dah

dah dah dit

the mediocre

Superhighways

cut through

profit and

passion

and so

inhabit

the moon

before we’ve

learned

its mountain

road

which

winds

in

slow

curves

of the

root

toward

the ore

and her nugget

SEMINARS

1.

A short hair is the chromosome of a short
story
said the sadist, an assistant protestant
professor
of creative composition. His words danced
like genes in the gism of a hate-filled lair.

It was the air before his face
down from the burning glass
of his spectacle lens
to the razor of his mouth

Kill talent by teaching it procedure
said the sphincter of his nostril.

Doctor Category, said the hair
within his nose, you stifle me now

But I will grow in your grave like ivy
entwining myself in the orbital
locket of your skull

For I, royal hair of the rebellion
am the last of a lover’s nerve
the poet lover who created you
old gray-haired sadistic dad

I am father of your categories

on the short hair.

Said the assistant protestant professor:

kill me, artist, curl your hair
into the bone of my grave
but I love your work

2.

Forgive my passion for category

I must believe that God is a tidy man
besides I will go before you
there are machines to replace me

Univac and One-Hole-Trac

They will bring death to your nerve
deeper than I ever dreamed.

Upon one another we fell sobbing
before the bitch of ice.

on came her machine. Yes, it said,
your short hair used to be the
chromosome of the short story

Now it is the fiber in fiberglass,

I gave one cry back clear back to

Coleridge on his lonely alp
for the horror of the albatross

was its malignant wings

Death we have betrayed your sting
and licked the long dry tongue of
intellection

much too long

We will die from anemia of the soul
in some plentitude of electronics

and her suburb

V

A One Night Stand

IN THE HALLWAY

My God,

she said

I came

in my

hat

This time

take your

shoes off

he said

My God,
he said
this time

I came
in my
hat
well,
take it
off

she said,

I want

to see
the baby
and how

his hair

will be.

You

have
one
of
the

greatest asses
in town
he said,

Is

it
extraordinary

she

asked?

No. It’s excellent. Please do

stop

EATING IN THE KITCHEN

Do you have

a comb?

Use your

fingers.

A LOGIC OF LOVE

Your eyes

are beautiful
said my love.

Yes said I

eyes of

mine have

seen your

breast

and so are

beautiful

(but one’s heart

was immersed

in that

calculus

of the soul

that measures

the profit

and cost

of conversions

from beauty

to power)

Your eyes

are beautiful

said my love

and have

left

me.

You’re not large enough

for a whale
and much too fat

to be a shark

Porpoise
was her reply

Sleek pig

thought the mind

of my eye

Sleek pigs

are porpoises

said she
and began to cry.

IN THE MIRROR IS THE RECKONING

Midnight

said

the

lipstick
your mascara

is mud.

I know

said the

eyes
but he was

so

attractive
and he
ended
in the vast

middle.

VI

Unhappy Marriage

What’s

he got?

(made

a little

money

Lost

a little

love)

Miami.

She says
these things

I drop
like dead
meat-balls.

I want to
be a
fine
woman
and a
great
mother
to my
children
and
oh yes
you
she said

He makes love

like a little
pig’s tail

thought she

all tight

kinky

curly cue
and full of squeal

why can’t he
go
dark and deep?

Cheap!

beep beep a beep!

went the tail

of the pig
roar! went the
boar

and with a crash
and a snore
he went dark

and deep

into himself

and sleep.

HALLELUJAH!

Children

who issue

from

a matrimony

of the usual misery

go forth

into lives
which are best spent

in sin

said the Lord

VII

A Drunken Marriage

Look, she said,

he carried

her across

the street and

over the slush
why don’t you

carry me?

Because you

got the curse

I got worse

we been married

ten years

and when you’re

drunk you say

anything.

Whatever
dear Romeo

said

Juliet

carrying

me

across the street.

THE GOOD LORS

The Good Lors

gave me

my

pretty

face

The Good Lors

is full

of air
like a polar bear

with

lollypop

breeze,

daddy.

why
why daddy
why is the sky blue?

child

one would have

to embrace
your formal

Why

with coronations

of intelligence

purer than

the purest

reason
of my
heart

Gin is not water

but she is white

She makes

you very

drunk

like mommy-daddy-dolly

used to be

when she-he

fall

boom-boom

off the wagon
daddy

RAINY AFTERNOON WITH THE WIFE

Wanted
without
wings
is stone

dew

Gray
without
grace

is

day

without

prey

you’re

a king

with

feet

of clay

No,
lass

I’m
a
mandarin

and reached
for a
beer
first
of the
blow

Gray
without
grace,
day.

You can’t
have
a beer

Momma
says
no

By God
if I had a
momma
like
you

I’d
never
a
reached
the age
of six

Wanted
without
wings
is
stone
do

Gray
without
grace,
day.

Gray
without
grace.

BELLEVUE
yogurt

mart

church

for

art

blood
and
wood
is
bread

mother
menstrual
spike
and
mass

fetus
feathers
food

earning
butter
bone
and
break

fairies
father
flutes

homicide is hairy

morons murder mutes

Royal

is

the

rat who runs the race

You let everything stand

until it’s knocked over

and then

you go over

and write

your own

ruins

A WANDERING IN PROSE: FOR HEMINGWAY, NOVEMBER 1960

That first unmanageable cell to
stifle his existence arrived
on a morning when by
an extreme act of the will
he chose not to strike his
mother. Since this was
thirty-six hours after he
had stabbed his wife, and
his mother had come at a time
when he wished to see no one
in order to savor the woes
and pawed prides of his soul

(what a need for leisure
has the criminal heart), his
renunciation of violence
was civilized, too civilized
for his cells which proceeded
to revolt. But then it is
the thesis of this summary
that civilization spawns
its inner disease in every corner of
every church whose smell
is stale with the fatigues
of such devotion as lost its
memory on the long road
from ecstasy to
habit.

VIII

Drinking to Eternity

1.

Men

who work

at Time

have a

life expectancy

which is

not long

said the

young man

from

Newsweek

2.

Those

who

bat out

the poop

for
the other sheet

don’t use up

a thing

in

my scheme

of space
said the
young blood

from Yale

3.

But
in the
evenings

they met

and had

beers

together

in Irish bars

which looked

the proper hair

of fashion

askew

the type

4.

And as they drank

into

warm

spring

evenings

the remembered musk

of wood-smoke at dusk

brought

tenderness

to

liberty

and irony

to fate

and they

would

chant

a song

which went:

we
are
saving
our

pennies

to buy
a bond

to aid
the drive

of the United

Corporations of Community
who wish
to construct
a new
and improved
rest home
for the
pushers
on the
team

Boola-

boola,

boola-
boole.

1.

I’m rich

said

Irish

derby

slopping

a drink

to the

floor

So I’ve always

missed

the pleasures

of the poor.

Taste his spit!

said the sawdust

it’s a scandal

and a shame

Naught but outer limbo

said the roach

on his way

on his fraught-filled

way to the door

and toward the

stair

of his own.

2.

When he reached

the cracked enamel

in the kitchen

of his pad

he made a

tour

of quarters

leaving

molecules

like pennies

on the oil cloth

of the

poor—

five molecules

of scotch

to every

plate

But the fumes had drunk

his mind to stuff

and roachie slept

an emperor’s sleep

dreaming of previous lives

in derby hats

when he had slopped

the whiskey

to the floor

crying for the pleasures

of the poor.

There’s one thing about you,
baby

said Sir Cirrhosis,
of all the witches I’ve known
you’re the merriest

and he died

with style.

He died with style

said the witch.

Yes,

said the wind

which rose from

the gin
give him honor in Hell.

When I was

your age

twenty

seven

a dame

could

say

I’ll put

a curse

on

you.

On!

I would say

put a curse

on me

and wonder

why

my voice

would break.

not you
but your cure
do I fear

Oh my love
for your cure
is a

curse
upon me.

BAR TWISTS

I await her

hot-breathed

cigaretted

garlicky

version

of all the lost days.

Cheer up

whispers she

(silently)

hugging

the other

mugger.

Hurts me

loathe chicks

wife

did me in

I cannot

forswear

to gaze

said the rage.

Other drunks spit.

Creepy girls giggle.

EPITAPH OF A RAIL

I used to drink
until six

in the morning
so I could make

dames
and now I drink
until six

in the morning
watching other

guys

make dames.

Eheu Fugaces.

Which means:

Fuck aces!

before the fleeting

years go by

IX

Intermission

(During the Intermission There Will Be a Variety Show)

IAN FLEMING REVISITED

I had a spider once
and fed it neon tubes
until its web did gleam
like Las Vegas in the dawn

Roulette I used to call her
and the spider
drinking dew from grapefruit rind
to oil the knees
would smile and say:

every Roulette has her croupier.

SPORTS CHANNEL

Does the football team

eat a lot?

Oh, I think so, Jim

those football

boys are

are pretty big

down there.

I sure remember

when you

two titans

last met

last November.

So do I.

That fateful

gray day

in Green Bay.

The weather was

so bad we almost

stayed in our

hotel and ate each other.

Our boys were

keyed-up, I tell you.

Let’s
stamp out
bad dialogue.

That’s your problem
said the
toad.

ILLUMINATION
why do

you

always

have

to

go off

on a

tangent

said his mother.

why can’t you

be

nice

and

clean?

Look!

Your handkerchief

has a hole in it.

Let me give you a

new one.

Don’t you dare.

This way

I can

blow my nose

and see what’s

going on

said Rimbaud

at six.

the worst to be said

about mothers

is that they

are prone

to give

kisses

of con-

grat-

u-

lation
that make you feel

like a battleship

on which someone

is breaking

a bottle

X

A. Interplanetary Is Trans-temporal

Of course,

Mr. President,

we

are

indeed hot

on

the track

of the

wonder

disease

and

are

now feeding

tetra-phenomenase

its dose.

Expect to save

it

and all

genome

compounds

if the

Internet

does not collapse.

release
the anger
contained
in a fart
and there’ll
be power
enough
to reach
the moan
said the
physicist
as he
assumed
the throne

I mean
the moon.

B. In Which We Visit the Abductionally Challenged

XI

The Upper Classes

A. Transatlantic

The Prime Minister said:

The higher a man rises

the more he must

dissemble

until he

can no longer
detect his own lies

of course by then

everything

that seems good

betrays me

and everything

which makes

me warm

tastes foul.

Money

is a

river

flowing

downhill

over

hills

of

character

in the

rich

REGISTERS

You must meet her.

She’s rather nice.

she’s an

absolute

brigand

who came out

of a whorehouse

in Baltimore.

Then she married

a Jewish man

from Macy’s

And then my father.

Now she has

the most terrible

dining room

in New York.

It’s all gold.

Last year

she finished

decorating her house

and charged

one thousand dollars

a plate

to let people in.

No drinks.

Of course

it was for

a marvelous charity

called Baskets

For people

without

arms

or legs.

Isn’t that nice?

THE SOCIALITE’S SONG

I love Bobby, Bobby’s divine

The Windsors came to

see him

and the Duke

kept calling for

Bye Bye Blackbird

over and over again.

It was a glorious night.

I borrowed mascara

from the Duchess

before we were done

we were crying

so hard

even the Duke.

How were we to know

that the West

Old World

would shiver from blight

and I would turn

to a Prince

of the Congo

saying: embrace me

darkest delight

for in your firmament

are stars.

Oh blackbird

do not banish us

banish not

the lovers

of Bobby

when he sang

Blackbird

bye-bye

for can it be

we heard

the chord

of the cannibal

sharpening his knife

on a blooded stone

and wept for you

as well as us.

Young winners

make weak old losers

said Bobby
removing his mask
to show
he was now

King
of our

Congo.

DEFINITION OF A LADY

She grasps
the root
while kissing
the bud

DEFINITION OF A HERO

He
thrives
in
dikes

Evil

fingers
up

and
down

my
spine

remind

me

that

sex

is

not

always

divine.

But

sometimes

it is

with

the most

astonishing

collection

of

horrible

people.

ODE TO A LADY

Cold and swinish are your crafts

Mean and nasty, foul your arts

The spirit of a lover you would never kill

’Tis tastier far to deaden him.

Yes, maggots are your pets

and garlic your bouquet

Cold and swinish are your crafts

a pestilence on me

For I have primed my iron

in your lore and now
your faults revealed

my eyes are blinded still

by the image of a woman

who is a virgin to my touch

and never smiles the lover’s dirty grin

of sweets we shared

and share we will again

No, you are a work of art

pristine, inviolate,

shiver of midnight away

from the touch of my tip all

fingers stretched

You call to artists

in other lands

singing sweetly:

Create me

dear singing loin

of some manly harp

create me

for I stifle where I stand

and lady-like

must drown the moment

in the lake of much too many

who leave me lazy like a snake

So, create me, dear man,

beyond my eye.

And I answer:

snake and foulest bitch

swine of a hundred feet

I am your artist across the seas

and love you, heart,

because you are purer far

than all your arts

and all your swilling crafts,

purer far because your heart

dared to call

when others—

cats, grand dames,

fraises fatales,

and all the avaricious humps

could think of nothing

but flight from me.

Come back,

says piggy

Can it be, poor harp

Can it really be

that you are the voice

across the sea?

Yes, come back, says swine-song in your heart

Come back, come back, come back

For names you’ve called me

far and wide

Wine of a hundred feet

Sweet lord you’re kind

Yes come to me honey-bee

and I will kill you.

Over here my lad,

God, you’re bad.

MARRIAGE À LA MODE

Cook for him?

Of course not.

We eat out

all the time.

He’s gotten fat

He’s gotten

very

fat

longing

for good

cooking

said the Bitch

in a voice

of absolute

tenderness for Mr. Bitch

curious fellow

her husband.

DEVILS

One of us
will
be
better
looking
when it’s
all
over.

The Upper Classes

B. Witches and Warlocks

The most

eligible

bachelor

in London

is a category

conceived

by presumptive

witches

weary

of doing

without

their widow’s weeds—

whispered

the epigram

to the boutonniere.

Go fix the flowers fuck-face

was the King’s reply

I’m fast

becoming

a goose

said the bitch

blinking her eye

to the beat

of my

intent

light, deliberate and dry

I hate to have a ball

which goes de trop said I

De trop, or not de trop

dare your

deliberations

go deeper

ducks.

for love

which is light

and dry

makes me think of money

and her dirty bucks.

So waltz me

around again Willie

hard dark and deep

the keys to the dungeon

are buried

in mummie’s

murderous

keep.

You bruise

my

catatonia

said

the saint

to the witch

after he had

fallen

so far

as to nod

assent

to a

shitty suggestion

Is that all

asked the witch

accoutomé ma foi

to eat the shit

of the

superior.

The saint forgave her

and kissed a sore

content with the

notion

it came from mort.

Deep in my dungeon

I welcome you here

Deep in my dungeon

I worship your fear

Deep in my dungeon

I dwell.

I do not know

if I wish you well.

Deep in my dungeon

I welcome you here

Deep in my dungeon

I worship your fear

Deep in my dungeon,

I dwell

A bloody kiss

from the wishing well.

THE RIDE OF THE SAD SAINT

1.

The air was full of curses

looking for no fight.

The devils and the witches

were all alone tonight

save for a saint

who was sad.

Mad, mad, you’re mad,

cried a lad in the garb

of a girl

Saints are not sad

but sadistic.

Cruelty is the kindest wound

for dung, replied the saint.

Go forth and sin

in such a way

you need not run

at break of day.

Not one said yea.

Still, the saint merely sighed

he knew a saint

must not aspire

to the courage of a god

nor try too long

to bear such pain.

Besides, the saint was vain.

It was the drop life left

in his humility

in the couloirs of his humility

in the catatonia of his senility

in the crease of Carmen’s ear

in the crease of Carmen’s ear.

I am brave by an act

of will, said the saint

my nature is to fear

O saint even you must fear

the crease of Carmen’s ear.

2.

For Carmen is a cutthroat

Carmen is a queen

Carmen sings of passion

and blows her breath at me.

Carmen is a royal whore

Carmen is a slut

Carmen has a mustache

and smiles at flowing blood.

I knew Carmen when she was young

Before her mustache bleached

A colored flag around her neck

she kissed the pirate’s fleet

and seduced herself to me

and stole from me a steed.

Her head upon the pillow

she caught her flesh to mine

And went off at a gallop

some galley’s keep to find

presenting me her ear

returning greed a fiend.

Oh, I was a young man

Cold, evil and strong

And few were the ladies

I couldn’t dog, dog-bitch,

you’re in my bed

and cue them out half-dead.

3.

Five children started in my land

Six across the sea.

None knew my hand upon

his head. Royal bastards all.

One swore my death was in

her vow. Loyal bastards royal.

But Carmen was a crueler siege

Than all my evil gathered

And tore the heart right out of the ram

while all that’s vain was shattered.

And now I am a saint. (O pity me.)

Now I am a saint. (O pity me)

I stare into the eyes

of devils,

devils dark and foul

and look them down

and steal their ground
while in me tolls a hollow

by the heart

of Carmen’s ear

near the heart of Carmen’s ear

that scar on horror’s breast

which fears no fire
for death to Carmen is Devil’s dare
for Hell to Carmen is heaven’s mare:

a trot away from this flat world

where saints and witches stale

and war’s too whored for open fight

swears the heart of Carmen’s ear

swings the hooves of Carmen’s steed:

ride, ride, ride with me.

4.

Come ride with me into my land

Down down along my crease

And we will live forever

in the marrow of the beast

and we will live forever

in the sweetmeat of desire

Oh we will live forever

In the sweetmeat of disease

oh we will live forever

by the steeps at Carmen’s knees

we will live forever
in the crease of Carmen’s ear
in the crease
in the crease
in the crease of Carmen’s ear.

The Upper Classes

C. Camembert and Caviar

It’s a fine wine

hearty as one drinks it,

peppery

yet it seems

to come

florid

and

soft

Yes, I answered,

we have an

old peasant

saying:

It’s a fine wine

but the devil

pooted

in it

once.

The second bottle

was

Sierra Blanca

a California

Sauterne,

with a moldy

label
and a green

rusted cork,
age and

color

of

cobweb.

So we

chose it
over a fast

dry

cool

professional

blonde

from

Bordeaux.

Yet when

the

nectar
crested
over
the eddies
of fume
that rose
from
the dust
of the cork,
the wine
was sour
and
squalid
like
bad breath
on a good goose
with bad teeth.

Oh well,
we murmured
never fall
for a
pretty face
again.

Nonetheless, we agreed: Domestic may be the wisest choice

For the ocean voyage spoils the wine.

It is the movement of the waves upon
the memory of a grape

Water lapping water is too sensual to the touch
wine delivers its love to the bottle
before the trip is out.

Ohhhh. Unhappy continent
livid America
the taste of wine, of foreign wine that crossed the sea
is like a taste of love the second time.

Poor wine said Lady Grape shedding a tear.

Vodka is fine
we agreed,
one can keep
one’s character,
it doesn’t do
funny things
to the style
of the soul
departing,
it doesn’t
get into
the end
of one’s
fingers
and leave them weak.

You must never let
anything
get into
the end
of your fingers
but

Love
said evil
getting up
to get another drink.

The caviar is marvelous, however.

(I do love the taste of the soul
in each little egg.) Still!

One does have to entertain the thought
that learning so much about the deep

perhaps,
oh dear God no,
perhaps next life

I will be a fish.

fizz
fire
flash
foo
flesh

went the bubbly.

Como no, Senor

said the sommelier

I know some fine

accommodations

in the sea.

If poetry is the food of the soul
then some poems are like pot roast
lots of meat, pannikins of gravy and
a great deal of taste all very
much the same.

Other poems are fishy
tang, pepper, weed, and green as the
sea. I know a few which stick to the
fingers. Poetaster in patisserie. But my poems—

I want my poems
to be like bones. Bones make it possible
to stay in good form.

And there are
poems which taste of grass, air, earth,
rock salt and old lady granite in the
minerals (not to mention all
the dairy products, milky poems,
vegetables and gourds.)

But I want
my poems to be like bones and shine
silver in the sun.

For poems which
are like bones crackle in my teeth.

Look for the death within the death.

Since Camembert is the King of cheeses
foul, corrupt, redolent of old uses, dirty royal feet
and wealth beneath the ground,
then Brie becomes my Prince
said the air of morning to her appetite.

Still, said Camembert, monarchies produce architecture,
princes bastards
and morning speaking to her appetite is mud
to those who drink with Faust at night

Yes, adventurers gargle the sour blood of dukes
and eat me says Camembert

Power is nothing without the smell
of a royal crevice at your finger.

Oh, says Brie, nothing is so lovely
as the milk of morning on my mouth.

Do not let the world sodden us with its liver,
its poor colon and a smell of the hoarded past

Good architecture comes from young men
stealing the better half of form
from the royal round rump of some majestic lady
who smuggles jewels to the prince
and embezzles deeds from the King.

One cannot give a funeral service to the fart

and yet there are broken winds that walk the plank in pride.

HYMNS

The sweetest

song

I ever heard

was

the sound

of each

tongue

on the

other’s

bung

said a choirmaster

for the Devil.

THE INAUGURAL BALL

1.

There was a time

when fornication

was titanic
and the Devil

had to work

to cheat a womb.

(pride of his teeth

on a root

long enough

to

pluck it out

the green wet sea

of the pussy slue

and down a falling

flight

of cellar stairs

hard, dark, deep

into the maiden brown

rooting out the bowels

which fell

like assassins

upon the white foam

of God’s arrow)

2.

There was a time

when fornication

was satanic

and the Devil

had to work

to cheat a womb.

(licked the liqueur

of milady’s loot

off a hot feathered face

and sobbed in despair

as God won the race

to shoot the fury

of his intentions

to the proper place.)

3.

But now the Devil
smokes a cigar
and has his nose
up U.S. phar-
maceutical

The assassins
who fall on God’s
white arrow
give off the fumes
of chemical
killer bedded
in vaseline
as heroic
in its odor
as the exhaust
which comes off a

New York City

Transportation

System Bus

4.

I do not want

to believe it.

(Ay, no quiero verla!)

that the scent

of the clerk

at Merck

and

Merck

is the last

of the Devil’s odor.

No.

I want
to declaim
that the time

will return

when

Lucifer wrestles

the Lord again

for fucking

all glory

of Heaven’s vault

in flame,

and

mandarins

mad

with

fright

at fucking

and God’s

black

light.

XII

The Lower Classes

There was a meet for the boys

The moolahs the mozzers, the Maf, the Coast and the Nose
even the bonze and the dunes.

They were in to get acquaints for a new soft commodtz
and general affiliate.

How, said the Coaster to the Nostrand
do you think soft sell began?

Well, I’ll tell you said the Maf; we said to the dunes
whaderya trying to shove that shit

down people’s troat for?

Slip it up their stroonz

you asshole

Strike a match!

Said the dunes to the Maf,

Whaderya want to give me a hard-on for?

you have hurt my feels
how much can the heart of my feels take
before the heart of some other Guinea’s feel

is forced to break?

Listen, said the dunes to the Maf—you’re a dunze,

Don’t get hit!

So they had a ruining

They had the runs.

That was some thunder.

Those fartsaroons came close to eating all the prunes.

EAST VILLAGE

In New York
it’s not
enough to be polite,
one must
be
brutally polite,
to wit:

variations
observe
the theme
of foul
economy

Shithead
follows
up your
bunny
honey
in
balance
and propriety

Jew
bastard
if said
in a

Village
bar
is as
gentle
as
spade
creep

Fuck off
can be
returned
with
three
stiff
fingers
to the
plexus
or the neck

The
rule
is
keep
cool

This
is

New

York

Now

these

children

want me

to roast

their tea

said

The Man

with the bag

Do they

think

I’m a

mother

with

shades

and a

furled

umbrella?

Go to sea

Jim,

I have

something

in my

head

that

would

really

kill

you

TO THE GHOST OF SENATOR JOE

Another orphan

said McCarthy

let’s have a high mass

and kiss her ass

before we kick

her cunt in,

sister superior.

Ooooooo

Is this poem good for the Jews?

asked Reverend Godspee

of the Inter-Faith Council

for

The Committee of

Hearth and Heart, Share and Care

Kick his cunt in too

said McCarthy

Reverend Godspee is

a Communist

You’re fucking aye

said all the louts

in all the bars

in Queens

and they were right

for once.

You

can’t

and you

won’t

print that,

said

the Lady who

was running

for office

in a voice

that

released

half

her

souls

from prison

and

dropped

them

into

Hell.

TO THE LOWER CLASSES

Noblesse

Oblige
has one rule

and
one rule only

You must be

so nice

so bright

so quick and

so well turned

that

no one need

tell you

a second time.

Tell me what?

that the world

is well-lost

for love

and the upper

classes

are the

law above?

I tell you this:

if the

upper classes
are kin to God

in style—

(which is one hypothesis

we do not ignore:

how else account

for elegance?)

if the
upper classes
are kin to God

in style
then God has no love
but guilt, nor a style
apart from fashion,
no courage but to
do in duty

what
one does not desire
and no worth
but for His love
at beauty

For there
is noble’s work
their plea:

that they
love in truth
with all sense
of Christian

love

divorced from self
the air of beauty
and her pomp.

The poor know naught

but death
they do not free
they obliterate.

Stripped of its

distinctions

life is a flat city

whose isolated spurs

cut the sky

like housing projects.

Think of the air

whose heart is bruised

by touching such artifacts.

(Does the cutworm forgive

the plow?)

I tell you, say the rich,

the poor are naught

but dirty wind

welling in air-shafts

over the cinders

and droppings of

the past, their

voices thick

with grease

and ordure,

sewer-greed

to corrode the ear

with the horrors

of the past
and the voids

of new stupidity.

One could drown

waiting for the poor

to make

one fine distinction.

Yes, destroy us

say the rich

and you lose

the roots

of God.

Destroy them
say the poor
we cannot breathe
nor give
until we etch
on their rich nerve
the cruel razor
and heartless club
of our past,
those sediments of
waste
which curbed

our genes

and flattened

the vision we

would give

the chromosome.

Yes, destroy them
say the poor
burn them, rob them
gorge their tears
and such half of beauty
lost to pomp
will flower
unglimpsed wonders
in the rose,
will flower
unglimpsed wonders
in the rows.

I wonder,
said the Lord

I wonder if I know the answer

any more.

Panhandling
the Bowery
on Sunday aft
with gray sky
and no butts
we had an
argument
over the

merits
of frozen food
versus canned

Canned is awful,

I said, it comes
out half dead.

Yea, said Red

but

frozen

is stone.

SQUARE DANCE

On the meat of the rich

And the urge of the poor

The purge of the ore

And the grease of the bitch

A lady was burning

A whore was a-scorch

Gorge was the cheese

And ass the itch

Of Pussy and Pick-nose

And swish out the twitch

Deep hurted the liver

Raw buried the sauce

Hotshit the hurricane

Herded the gourd

Howligan, hooligan

Hurry up all

Tonight is the night

Of the Hip Hole Ball

Perfume and heart

Snatch squinch and squeeze

Ear-wax and dingle

Fuck tit and dong

Fling a hole on your point

And sweeten the joint

Tonight is the night

Of the Hip Howl Ball.

XIII

Hunting for Poems

Men who go out for game
hope to find in our blood
the poems of their flesh
said a deer in her pain

BURNT UMBER

YELLOW OCHRE

A crap,

said

the

pedant

picking

his

paws

is an
idealist

who has

not yet decided

he is worthy

to be considered

a shit.

Mon dieu, Feinspan,
in terror, I

exclaimed
abjure the

Anglicans

“Our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

To purify the dialect of the tribe

And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.”

aftersight and foresight

the sound is dull

in the ear

like a bruise

on fruit or

taint

in strong

meat

So curious a man

this Eliot

exquisite, pertinent,

yet dimmed in his climax

aftersight and foresight

hole upon hole

a curse

upon prosody

even when T.S.

sponsors

the hole.

I have a simple mind

and write my words

to sweep across

a broad cloth.

Rich talents go often

to misers who make

diadems of chocolate.

the emperor is

the emperor of ice cream

Yes, the rich speak only

to the purls of their lace.

I want the whole wipe

of the cloth

Or do I delude myself

and merely spit like

a hoodlum

into the wake of phaetons

that drive away?

A writer who

has power

should use it

to extract

such benefits

from his

publisher

as

give

his

words

room

to

breathe

A snake
can’t strike
in a box

you break

up your

line

like

ee

cum

mings

I notice

I am looking

for the

fish who

swim in the

spaces
ee likes the

herbs

in the

letters

Some poems

are mild

and pleasant

little children

who bear no title

and need none

one doesn’t notice

their

nakedness

A title

is not

a hat

but

a suit

so

sometimes

I leave

it at the

bottom of

the page,

for

I don’t want

all these poems

to be

unclothed.

Some should be

standing

with

their trousers

dropped to

their shoes.

Of course

by this logic

a title at the head

is like a dress

lifted over the breast

Poems

written by

masochists

flop like cows

in the meadow.

Take pity on me

they cry, pay

attention, I

am so sensitive

to nature and

full of milk

Poems

should be like pins

that prick the skin

of boredom

and leave

a glow

equal in its pride

to the gait

of the sadist

who stuck

the pin

and walked away

JUSTICE

She’s a

bitch

said

the witch

in a tone

that clarified

the eternal meaning

of the consonants.

No, your honor,

said my voice.

Without vowels

there is no

justice

in human verdict.

We were speaking
of bitches
said
the judge

Ignore eternity
and the color
she gives to legal
utterance

It is better
to chase consonants
than vowels.

consonants are

fact and force

clear as compound
interest
vowels are hot eyes
in hard bodies
bleeding for trouble.

But I replied:

Eternity is first heard

on the pigeon’s wing

of a sigh

breathing alas at

all that passes

and does not live

Judge, Your Honor,

Bind me over

to the next of size

for I do dream

that love there may be

in human flow.

DANGER

Words in the nerve
of becoming
are feathers

of eternity

(insofar

as a poem may become

the death of another

who believed the poem

and so ended in some alley

of bad venture

with the wrong foe)

those
who are alive
look to others
for a mirror
half dead, one drinks

alone at night

and writes poems
bad ones said self
sorry pity
should write so sad
and beg for tears

THE CORNERS OF A SQUARE

1.

It would

be
an aid
if the

blind

came

to the

game
because
their ears

are

clean

said
the dream.

2.

I would

be
afraid
of those

who
hear and
do not

see

said
the word.

3.

I am

in
love with
those who

come
with their
wound to

me
said the
mood

for
those who

see
and do
not hear

wound

others

with their

voice

4.

Those who

hear
and do
not see
give
alms

to Eve

and

other

ill

said

the peace
that comes
from
the police.

Let

at least
a drink

be
named

after me
said the poet

sealing his
fate

for
no bar

in the land
would tease

the police.

XIV

Politicians

EXODUS

Goodbye America

Jesus said.

Come back, boy!

We cried too late.

XV

Hemingway Revisited

Jake pissed
with
stern
loneliness
leaving
a fierce
smell
of the past.

His future
was not
so empty
as he declared,
a girl with
music and grace
tender of face
was waiting
for him.

Hey—

you

sleep

deep—

but what a sight

see

you

soon

beautiful

I hope

Catherine
found this note
by her telephone
on awakening
in an empty bed
after a one night
stand and she called
her best friend
to say;

Guess what?

I feel like

Earth

Mother.

Catherine never blushed

until

she smelled

the fine cheat

in

the line

of the succession

and then

she flushed

furiously

for she thought

the smell

adorable,

it was

so

rich

to rise

from

the poor.

We really ought, Catherine said
to be able to stay together
without making love
all the time.

Yes, said Jake,

I’m sure it’s my fault.

Yes, she said smugly
you smell so greedy

and good

Swarms and swarms

of love

smug, smug, smug.

You may not love me

Jake said

but I love you.

Well, I love you,

said Catherine

so

bad luck.

They loved each other

very much.

They had not taken

a good wash

in three weeks.

It would have been

the next wrong

to murdering

a child.

What the hell

they were both

thirty

forty

tired, tried,

sad, foul

They thought they

had betrayed

something

forever,

And She forgave them.

Or thus they hoped.

So, bad luck

muttered the

horror

of old

habit,

We will die

if we lose

our love.

Mangled, morgued
birched and bruted

they were

hawks

upon the mood

of their

own blessing.

So they scattered,

waiting

for the

curse.

Slack the yaws

tight the jaws

hurricane

the air
of waiting

I feel

like

I’ve been

through purga-

tory, Catherine

said.

Sometimes

I think

it won’t

be bad

when

we die

because

we’ve served

part

of

purgatory al-

ready.

Yes.

It’s been

bad.

But

twelve years

ago

we were

good.

Oh, darling, good, she agreed,

so good.

I used to think

it would
be always,
but it wasn’t, it
turned out
to be
such a little
taste
of
heaven
for twelve
long years.

A little taste

of heaven

is all we get, baby,

said Jake.

through the

microphone

and plate

glass

window

of the visitor’s

room

under

the shotguns

eyes

bellies

and blue serge suits

of the guards

who guard
the sacred heart
of the Republic.

XVI

The Harbors of The Moon

I used

to think

my life

would be

a
destiny

and now

I realize

it’s but a fate

said a man

I met

in Bellevue

for

stabbing

his

brother

with a

kitchen

knife.

One

nerve
screams

before

you

fall

said

the
ledge

on

the
window

of

the
nineteenth

floor

DEATH OF A LOVER WHO LOVED DEATH

1.

I find

that

most

of the people I

know

are immature

and cannot

cope

with reality

said the suicide.

His death

followed

a slash on each wrist.

He coped with

reality

well.

2.

It was unreality

which waited

on a midnight trail
in that
jungle of eternity
he heard murmuring

on the other side.

Oh, night of the jungle,

God of mercy

wept the suicide

do not ask me

to reconnoiter
this

dark

trail

when I am now

without

hands.

IN THE JARDIN EXOTIQUE OF EZE

In the Jardin Exotique of Eze
the cactus come up from the sea
like an anemone wooing a spider
or a pygmy with a blowgun dart.

Silently they smell the breeze,

invertebrate,
their memory as long as the tripe of the Mediterranée.

Was it once or never? that a God from deep waters

dreaming of the moon
fell in love with a gleam from the midnight sky
who, intoxicated with herself
and the rapture of the depths,
like a daughter most fortunate in family,
beautiful, spoiled, innocent of alarm,
wandered down an alley
dark as the pitch of blackest frustration
and there was trapped by the sound of need
in the murmur of an ape.

So did the God of dark waters woo a moon beam
and from their love leave a seed
on the spume of the wrack
which washes a desert shore

Cactus,
mad psychotic bulb of light and dark

spy of the deep sea

intimate of the moon
your form inspires nausea
for love that dares too much
and has no soil but sand
flowers spines of lunar hatred
shapes tubers on the leaf
and gives no wine but visions from peyote
of ether and her gardens
which burn with the
death of suns
and phosphorescent nights.

THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG

I think if I had three good years to give

in study at some occupation

that was fierce and new

and full of stimulation

I think I would become

an executioner

with time spent out in the field

digging graves for bodies I had made

the night before.

You see: I am bad at endings
my bowels move without honor

and flatulence is an affliction

my pride must welcome with gloom

It comes I know from preoccupation

much too much with sex

Those who end well do not spend their time

so badly on the throne

For this reason I expect the task

of gravedigger welcomes me

I would like to kill well and bury well

Perhaps then my seed would not shoot

so frantic a flare.

If I could execute neatly

(with respect for whatever romantic

imagination
gave passion to my subject’s crime)

and if I buried well

(with tenderness, dispatch, gravity
and joy that the job was not jangled—
giving a last just touch of the spade
to the coffin

in order to leave it
quivering

like a leaf—for forget not
coffins quiver as the breath goes out
and the earth comes down)

Yes,
if I could kill cleanly
and learn not to turn my back
on the face of each victim
as he chooses

what is last to be seen
in his eye,

well, then perhaps,
then might I rise so high upon occasion
as to smite a fist of the Lord’s creation
into the womb of that muse
which gives us poems

Yes, then I might

For one ends best when death is clean

to the mind

and calm in its proportion
fire in the orchard and flame at the root.

Is mood a temple

to give us

sanctuary

against

the desire

of our cells

to return to

their beginnings

under a

new master

who promises

that he

will not

repeat

the hesitations,

compassions

and

aesthetic

com-

punctions of God

about

pleasure

profit

and

progress

but

instead

will rip up

the roots
and give us
the broad
macadam

of
eternity without fire
and sucaryl
for the syrup

of the peach.

A WANDERING IN PROSE: FOR HEMINGWAY, SUMMER 1956

Why do you still put on that face
powder which smells like Paris when

I was kicking Seconal and used to
get up at four in the morning and
walk the streets into the long wait
for dawn (like an exhausted husband
pacing the room where you wait for
the hospital to inform you of wife
and birth) visions of my death
already in the nauseas off my tense
frightened liver—such a poor death,
wet with timidity, ordure and the
muck of a Paris dawn, the city more
beautiful than it had ever been, warm
in June and me at five in an Algerian
bar watching the workers take a
swallow of wine for breakfast, the
city gentle in its light even to me
and I sicker than I’ve ever been,
weak with loathing at all I had not done,
and all I was learning of all I would
now never do, and I would come back
after combing the vistas of the Seine
for glints of light to bank in the
corroded vaults of my ambitious and
yellow jaundiced soul and there back
in bed, nada, you lying in bed in hate
of me, the waves of unspoken flesh
radiating detestation into me because

I have been brave a little but not nearly
brave enough for you, greedy bitch,

Spanish lady, with your murderous

Indian blood and your crazy purity
hung on courage in men as if it were
your queen’s own royal balls, and I
would lie down next to you, that smell
of unguent and face powder bleak and
chic as if the life of your skin depended
now not on the life my hands could give
in a pass upon your cheek, but upon the
arts of the corporation mixing your
elixirs in hundred gallon vats by
temperatures calibrated to the thermostat,
bleak and chic like the Hotel Palais

Royale (“my home away from home” we had
seen written by Capote in his cuneiform
script when the guest book was passed
to me for the equivocal cachet of my
signature so dim in its fashion that
year) and I took up the pen thinking
of the buff-colored damp of our indif-
ferent room where we slept in misery
wondering if we had lost the loots of
anticipation we had commanded once so
fierce in one-another—or was it only
me? for that is the thought of a lover
when his death comes over him in that
scent of the creams you rubbed on your
face while I slept the half-sleep of
the addict kicking the authority of
his poison—how bitter and clean was
the taste of the Seconal. And now the scent
of that cream came over me again as you kissed
me here at this instant, wearing it
again, knowing I detest it because again
it drives the secret of my poor augure
for eternity into those caverns of my
nose which lead back among the stalactites
of the nostril to the dream and one’s
nightly dialogue with the fine verdicts
of the city asleep, and all souls on the
prowl talking to one another in the
dark markets of heaven about the future
of what we are to be if one obeys the
shape we gamblers have given to that
tool of destiny—our character. And the
smell of the corporation is still on
your skin mocking what I have done to
mine.

THE HARBORS OF THE MOON

I
know
a town
with
sighs
of
sea
smiled
the
white
witch

I know
a town
that
sails
the
sun

I know
a town
where
light
is dry
and
boats
come
home
with
silver
in their
hold

where
boats
come
home
with
silver
in their
hold

(do not
grieve
the
death
of
little
fish

They
are
lights
that
seek
the
deep)

I know
a town
with
sighs
of sea
white
with
the
tides
of me

white
as the
spine
of the
sea.

APPENDIX

Introduction to
Deaths for the Ladies
(and other disasters)

Deaths for the Ladies was written through a period of fifteen months, a time when my life was going through many changes, including a short stretch in the prison ward of Bellevue, the abrupt dissolution of one marriage, and the beginning of another. It was also a period in which I wrote very little, and so these poems and short turns of prose were my lonely connection to the one act that gave a sense of self-importance. I was drinking heavily in this period, not explosively as I had at times in the past but steadily—most nights, I went to bed with all the vats loaded, and for the first time my hangovers in the morning were steeped in dread. Before, I had never felt weak without a drink—now I did. I felt heavy, hard on the first steps of middle age, and in need of a drink. So it occurred to me it was finally not altogether impossible that I become an alcoholic. I hated the thought of that. My pride and my idea of myself were subject to slaughter in such a vice.

Well, this preface is not to recount the story of those years and how I may have come out of them; no, we are here to give a crack of light to the little book that follows. I used to wake up in those days, as I have just remarked, with a drear hangover, and the beasts who were ready to root in my entrails were prowling outside. To a man living on his edge, New York is a jungle, and such mornings were full of taboo. It was often directly important whether the right or left hand was crossed with water first.

One modest reality used to save such hours from dipping too quickly into too early a drink. It was the scraps of paper I would find in my jacket. There were fragments of poems on the scraps, not poems really, little groupings of lines, little crossed communications from some wistful outpost of my mind where, deep in drink the night before, it had seemed condign to record the unrecoverable nuance of a moment, a funny moment, a mean moment, a moment when something I might always have taken for granted was turned for an instant on its head.

Some of those curious little communications that came riding in on the night through an electrolyte of deep booze were fairly good, many were silly, the best were often indecipherable. This would feel close to tragic. Almost always the sensation of writing a good poem (in the dark of early morning) was followed in the daylight by the knowledge I had gone so deep I could not find my eyes. My handwriting had temporarily disintegrated in the passion of putting down a few words. Somebody had obviously been awash in the rapture of the depths.

It was not so very funny. In the absence of a greater faith, a professional keeps himself in shape by remaining true to his professionalism. Amateurs write when they are drunk. For a serious writer to do that is equivalent to a professional football player throwing imaginary passes in traffic when he is bombed, and smashing his body into parked cars on the mistaken impression that he is taking out the linebacker. Such a professional football player will feel like crying in the morning when he discovers his ribs are broken.

I would feel like crying too. My pride, my substance, my capital, was to be found in my clarity of mind or—since my mind is never so very clear—let us say found in the professional cool with which the brain was able to contend with the temptations and opportunities each leap of intuition offered. It was criminal to take these leaps like an amateur, steeped in drink, wasteful, wanton. To be hearing the inspirations of the angel when one is kissing the fumes is a condition so implicit with agony that it took eighteen centuries of Christendom before Kierkegaard could come back alive with the knowledge that such moments not only existed but indeed were the characteristic way modern man found a knowledge of his soul—which is to say he found it by the act of perceiving that he was most certainly losing it.

I would go to work, however, on my scraps of paper. They were all I had for work. I would rewrite them carefully, printing in longhand and ink, and I would spend hours whenever there was time going over these little poems, these sharp dry crisp little instants, some of them no more and hopefully no less possessed of meaning than the little crack or clatter of an autumn leaf underfoot. Something of the wistfulness in the fall of the wind was in those poems for me. And since I wasn’t doing anything else very well in those days, I worked the poems over every chance I had. Sometimes a working day would go by, and I would put a space between two lines or remove a word. Maybe I was mending. As the sense of work grew a little clearer and the hangover receded, there was a happiness working mornings on Deaths for the Ladies that I had not felt for years. I loved Deaths for the Ladies, not because it was a big book—I knew my gifts as a poet were determined to be small—but because I was in love with its modesty. The modesty of Deaths for the Ladies was saving me. Out of the bonfire I seemed to have made of my life, these few embers were to be saved and set—not every last part of one’s memories would have to be consumed. Besides, I wanted to give pleasure. It seemed to me that Deaths for the Ladies would give more simple pleasure than any book I had ever written, it was pure, it was modest, it was sad, and it was funny—it was so very modest—how could one not like it? And it even had one innovation to offer poets—so I thought. There was no music or prosody or command or rush of language in the book, no power, not much meter, not at all, much of it was poetry only by the arbitrary insistence of the short line, but Deaths for the Ladies was something else, I thought—it was a movie in words. I set it with the greatest care. Every line was placed on the page by me. The spaces were chosen with much deliberation, the repetitions of phrases were like images in a film. The music of the poem as a whole—if it had any—was like the montage of a film. I felt that all of Deaths for the Ladies made up one poem, not all that great a poem, never in any way, but still a modest poem about a man loose in our city, for one cannot talk of New York without saying our city, there, majestic, choking in its own passions, New York, the true capital of the Twentieth Century. And Deaths for the Ladies was like a small sea breeze running through some of those electronic canyons where a myriad of fine moments were forever dying in the iridescence of foam.

Of course, if you fall in love with a book, you may be certain it will drown, suffocate, or expire all alone on an untended bed. Deaths for the Ladies came out in modest edition and sank without a sound. It was only reviewed in three or four places, and the one good review it received (the Sunday New York Times) was six months late. Poets, for the most part, resented it. Why should they not? I had dabbled in that life for which they were willing, if they were good enough, to starve and lose love. They had studied their craft; I had just skipped about in it. They were dedicated to poetry, I was dedicated to climbing out of the hole I had dug for myself, and poetry was offering the first rung. Therefore poets ignored the book, which was a pity, for a good poet might have done something with my little innovation, my movie in words.

But to end on a note less altruistic to the interests of art, let us look at one review. I had secret hopes, I now confess, that Deaths for the Ladies would be a vast success at the bar of poetry. The hopes got bounced. Here is the review in Time, March 30, 1962:

Ever
see
a drunk
come on
daring

I mean
drunk
like
daring
was a
sloppy
entrechat?

Mr M
comes on
with fourbucks
of poems
about sex
not love
that run
down
like this
only
not
lined up
neat.

Having less
than
fourbucks
fun
a reader
counted
the words
and concluded

Mr M
is making up
for his
first book
which had
too many.

You didn’t
score
this
time

M
a
n

But hell you know that.

In a fury of incalculable pains, a poem was written in reply, sent to Time magazine’s column of letters, and printed there.

Poem to the Book Review at Time

You will keep hiring

picadors from the back row

and pic the bull back

far back along his spine

You will pass wine

poisoned on the vine

You will saw the horns off

and murmur

The bulls are

ah, the bulls are not

what once they were

Before the corrida is over

there will be Russians in the plaza

Swine some of you will say
what did we wrong?

And go forth to kiss the conquerer.

Now, on the comfortable flank of this reminiscence, I think I may have been fortunate to get so paltry a reception on Deaths for the Ladies. For if I had been treated well, I might have kept floating on a still little pond and drowned my sorrow for myself in endless wine and scraps of paper and folios of further poems. Instead, the review in Time put iron into my heart again, and rage, and the feeling that the enemy was more alive than ever, and dirtier in the alley, and so one had to mend, and put on the armor, and go to war, go out to war again, and try to hew huge strokes with the only broadsword God ever gave any good writer—a glimpse of something like Almighty prose.

TO NORRIS

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank David Ebershoff, Dwayne R. Prickett, Danielle Mailer, J. Michael Lennon, and Judith McNally for their careful reading and criticism of this book.

ALSO BY NORMAN MAILER

The Naked and the Dead

Barbary Shore

The Deer Park

Advertisements for Myself

Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters)

The Presidential Papers

An American Dream

Cannibals and Christians

Why Are We in Vietnam?

The Deer Park—A Play

The Armies of the Night

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Of a Fire on the Moon

The Prisoner of Sex

Maidstone

Existential Errands

St. George the Godfather

Marilyn

The Faith of Graffiti

The Fight

Genius and Lust

The Executioner’s Song

Of Women and Their Elegance

Pieces and Pontifications

Ancient Evenings

Though Guys Don’t Dance

Harlot’s Ghost

Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

The Gospel According to the Son

The Time of Our Time

The Spooky Art

Why Are We at War?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NORMAN MAILER was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner’s Song. His most recent books, both published by Random House, are The Spooky Art and Why Are We at War? He lives in Provincetown with his wife, Norris Church Mailer.