BANGS THEORY

No blame. Anyone who wrote Howl and Kaddish
earned the right to make any possible mistake
for the rest of his life.
I just wish I hadn’t made this mistake with him.
It was during the Vietnam war
and he was giving a great protest reading
in Washington Square Park
and nobody wanted to leave.
So Ginsberg got the idea, “I’m going to shout
“the war is over” as loud as I can,” he said
“and all of you run over the city
in different directions
yelling the war is over, shout it in offices,
shops, everywhere and when enough people
believe the war is over
why, not even the politicians
will be able to keep it going.”
I thought it was a great idea at the time
a truly poetic idea.
So when Ginsberg yelled I ran down the street
and leaned in the doorway
of the sort of respectable down on its luck cafeteria
where librarians and minor clerks have lunch
and I yelled “the war is over.”
And a little old lady looked up
from her cottage cheese and fruit salad.
She was so ordinary she would have been invisible
except for the terrible light
filling her face as she whispered
“My son. My son is coming home.”
I got myself out of there and was sick in some bushes.
That was the first time I believed there was a war.

At Great Pond
the sun, rising
scrapes his orange breast
on the thick pines, 
and down tumble
a few orange feathers into
the dark water.
On the far shore
a white bird is standing
like a white candle —-
or a man, in the distance,
in the clasp of some meditation —- 
while all around me the lilies
are breaking open again
from the black cave
of the night.
Later, I will consider
what I have seen —-
what it could signify —-
what words of adoration I might
make of it, and to do this
I will go indoors to my desk —-
I will sit in my chair —-
I will look back 
into the lost morning
in which I am moving, now,
like a swimmer,
so smoothly, 
so peacefully,
I am almost the lily —-
almost the bird vanishing over the water
on its sleeves of night.

You’re right. Call our bodies land mines,
Sparrows. Squids that do not sing can die. 
“Then is your ship something to eat?”:
The sparrow’s natural response.

Love is tied to fear; they run to each other.
Spill it, spill us out of hiding.
We hide ourselves together
In ink that grows back.
Arms are for holding; a good body has eight or ten.
The sea has forgotten all of its castles for us.

We have a king, you paupers,
Men, don’t be silly about bodies
That will be alone one day in a bazaar
And simple where they sell their tropical flowers,
Osprey and mink and constellations;
Death is useful there, well watered.
Learn the names of them now, your neighbors on the shelf:
Pisces and Dorado, Hydra, Aquarius.