B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S |
Two Jazz Poems
This Night Only
Venice
Travelers in Erewhon
Oaxaca 1925
From The Heart’s Garden, The
Garden’s Heart
A girl in a torn chemise
Weeps by a dirty window.
Jaws are punched in the street.
A cat is sick in the gutter.
Dogs bark up nightbound alleys.
There’s nothing like the sorrow
Of the jukeboxes at dawn.
Dice girls going home.
Whores eating chop suey.
Pimps eat chile mac.
Drowsy flatfeet, ham and eggs.
Dawn of labor, dawn of life.
The awakening noises
Of the old sacrifices.
The snow blows down the bare street
Ahead of the first streetcar.
The lovers light cigarettes,
And part with burning eyes,
And go off in the daylight.
I didn’t want it, you wanted it.
Now you’ve got it you don’t like it.
You can’t get out of it now.
Pork and beans, diapers to wash,
Too poor for the movies, too tired to love.
There’s nothing we can do.
Hot stenographers on the subway.
The grocery boy’s got a big one.
We can’t do anything about it.
You’re only young once.
You’ve got to go when your time comes.
That’s how it is. Nobody can change it.
Guys in big cars whistle.
Freight trains moan in the night.
We can’t get away with it.
That’s the way life is.
Everybody’s in the same fix.
It will never be any different.
[1960/1963]
Moonlight now on Malibu
The winter night the few stars
Far away millions of miles
The sea going on and on
Forever around the earth
Far and far as your lips are near
Filled with the same light as your eyes
Darling darling darling
The future is long gone by
And the past will never happen
We have only this
Our one forever
So small so infinite
So brief so vast
Immortal as our hands that touch
Deathless as the firelit wine we drink
Almighty as this single kiss
That has no beginning
That will never
Never
End
[1962]
Once more it is early summer,
Like an opal, in Venice.
I listen to the monks sing
Vespers in San Giorgio Maggiore.
Ten years have gone by. I am
No longer alone. My little
Daughter and I sit hand in hand,
As the falling sunlight rises
Up Palladio’s noble aisles
And shimmers in the incense.
The incense billows over
The altar. The Magnificat
Of May Day surges through the incense.
Six years ago, another May Day,
Mary played in a meadow stream,
And caught emerald green baby frogs.
Overhead then, dive bombers wrote
Monograms of death in the sky.
They are still there. Now they have
A new trick. At “He has put down
The mighty from their seat,” one
Of them breaks the sound barrier
With a shuddering belch of hate,
One omnipresent sound in
The sky of Tiepolo.
The same shave jowled apes sit at
The same round mahogany tables,
Just across those pretty mountains.
They are pushing all this pretty
Planet, Venice, and Palladio,
And you and me, and the golden
Sun, nearer and nearer to
Total death. Nothing can stop them.
Soon it will be over. But
This music, and the incense,
And the solemn columned thought,
And the poem of a virgin,
And you and me, and Venice
In the May Day evening on the
Fiery waters, we have our own
Eternity, so fleeting that they
Can never touch it, or even
Know that it has passed them by.
Ten years, and it’s still on the
Radio. La Vie en rose
Spills out of a dozen windows
Onto the canal. A woman
And her son in a vegetable
Barge sing it. A man polishing
The prow of his gondola
Sings it while his dog wags its tail.
Children playing hopscotch sing it.
Grimy half washed clothes hang overhead.
Garbage floats in the narrow canal.
More radios join in. Across
The canal, beyond the iron windows
Of the Women’s Prison, a hundred
Pure voices of pickpockets
And prostitutes start to sing it.
It is just like being in church.
The next number is Ciao, ciao, bambina.
It rains on the roofs
As it rains in my poems
Under the thunder
We fit together like parts
Of a magic puzzle
Twelve winds beat the gulls from the sky
And tear the curtains
And lightning glisters
On your sweating breasts
Your face topples into dark
And the wind sounds like an army
Breaking through dry reeds
We spread our aching bodies in the window
And I can smell the odor of hay
In the female smell of Venice
[1959/1964-1965]
You open your
Dress on the dusty
Bed where no one
Has slept for years
An owl moans on the roof
You say
My dear my
Dear
In the smoky light of the old
Oil lamp your shoulders
Belly breasts buttocks
Are all like peach blossoms
Huge stars far away far apart
Outside the cracked window pane
Immense immortal animals
Each one only an eye
Watch
You open your body
No end to the night
No end to the forest
House abandoned for a lifetime
In the forest in the night
No one will ever come
To the house
Alone
In the black world
In the country of eyes
[1965]
You were a beautiful child
With troubled face, green eyelids
And black lace stockings
We met in a filthy bar
You said
“My name is Nada
I don’t want anything from you
I will not take from you
I will give you nothing”
I took you home down alleys
Splattered with moonlight and garbage and cats
To your desolate disheveled room
Your feet were dirty
The lacquer was chipped on your fingernails
We spent a week hand in hand
Wandering entranced together
Through a sweltering summer
Of guitars and gunfire and tropical leaves
And black shadows in the moonlight
A lifetime ago
[1965]
Water is always the same —
Obedient to the laws
That move the sun and the other
Stars. In Japan as in
California it falls
Through the steep mountain valleys
Towards the sea. Waterfalls drop
Long musical ribbons from
The high rocks where temples perch.
Ayu in the current poise
And shift between the stones
At the edge of the bubbles.
White dwarf iris heavy with
Perfume hang over the brink.
Cedars and cypresses climb
The hillsides. Something else climbs.
Something moves reciprocally
To the tumbling water.
It ascends the rapids,
The torrents, the waterfalls,
To the last high springs.
It disperses and climbs the rain.
You cannot see it or feel it.
But if you sit by the pool
Below the waterfall, full
Of calling voices all chanting
The turmoil of peace,
It communicates itself.
It speaks in the molecules
Of your blood, in the pauses
Between your breathing. Water
Flows around and over all
Obstacles, always seeking
The lowest place. Equal and
Opposite, action and reaction,
An invisible light swarms
Upward without effort. But
Nothing can stop it. No one
Can see it. Over and around
Whatever stands in the way,
Blazing infinitesimals —
Up and out — a radiation
Into the empty darkness
Between the stars.
[1967]
NOTES
Rexroth read Married Blues to Duke Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” on Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk (Fantasy, 1960). You can hear it online here.
You can hear Rexroth reading This Night Only to the original Erik Satie accompaniment here (the poem starts a little after 12 minutes into the reading).
Venice. I have taken the liberty of putting these three poems together, though the last one was published separately from the first two. All three probably date from or refer back to Rexroth’s 1959 visit to Venice. La vie en rose (“Life through rose-colored glasses”) is Edith Piaf’s 1946 popular song.
The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart was written in Japan.
Copyright 1963, 1966, 1967 Kenneth Rexroth. Copyright 2003 Copper Canyon Press. Reproduced by permission of Copper Canyon Press and New Directions Publishing Corp.
Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
www.bopsecrets.org knabb@bopsecrets.org