White breast beaten in sea waves,

Hair tangled in foam,

Lonely sky,

Desolate horizon,

Pale and shining clouds:

All this desolate and shining sea is no place for you,

My dead Columbine.

And the waves will bite your breast;

And the wind that does not know death from life

Will leap upon you and leer into your eyes

And suck at your dead lips.

Oh, my little Columbine,

You will go farther and farther away from me,

Out where there are no ships

And the column clouds

Soar across the somber horizon.

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two—
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

12 October 1962

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

I went to the worst of bars
hoping to get
killed.
but all I could do was to
get drunk
again.
worse, the bar patrons even
ended up
liking me.
there I was trying to get
pushed over the dark
edge
and I ended up with
free drinks
while somewhere else
some poor
son-of-a-bitch was in a hospital
bed,
tubes sticking out  all over
him
as he fought like hell
to live.
nobody would help me
die as
the drinks kept
coming,
as the next day
waited for me
with its steel clamps,
its stinking
anonymity,
its incogitant
attitude.
death doesn't always
come running
when you call
it,
not even if you
call it
from a shining
castle
or from an ocean liner
or from the best bar
on earth (or the
worst).
such impertinence
only makes the gods
hesitate and
delay.
ask me: I'm
72.

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don’t always die,
but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!—
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death’s a sad Bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

     I heed not that my earthly lot

         Hath-little of Earth in it—

     That years of love have been forgot

     In the hatred of a minute:—

     I mourn not that the desolate

         Are happier, sweet, than I,

     But that you sorrow for my fate

     Who am a passer-by.

Once this soft turf, this rivulet’s sands,
   Were trampled by a hurrying crowd,
And fiery hearts and armed hands
   Encountered in the battle cloud.

Ah! I never shall the land forget
   How gushed the life-blood of her brave—
Gushed, warm with hope and courage yet,
   Upon the soil they fought to save.

Now all is calm, and fresh, and still,
   Alone the chirp of flitting bird,
And talk of children on the hill,
   And bell of wandering kine are heard.

No solemn host goes trailing by
   The black-mouthed gun and staggering wain;
Men start not at the battle-cry,
   Oh, be it never heard again!

Soon rested those who fought; but thou
   Who minglest in the harder strife
For truths which men receive not now
   Thy warfare only ends with life.

A friendless warfare! lingering long
   Through weary day and weary year.
A wild and many-weaponed throng
   Hang on thy front, and flank, and rear.

Yet nerve thy spirit to the proof,
   And blench not at thy chosen lot.
The timid good may stand aloof,
   The sage may frown—yet faint thou not.

Nor heed the shaft too surely cast,
   The foul and hissing bolt of scorn;
For with thy side shall dwell, at last,
   The victory of endurance born.

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;
   The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,
   And dies among his worshippers.

Yea, though thou lie upon the dust,
   When they who helped thee flee in fear,
Die full of hope and manly trust,
   Like those who fell in battle here.

Another hand thy sword shall wield,
   Another hand the standard wave,
Till from the trumpet’s mouth is pealed
   The blast of triumph o’er thy grave.