Autobiography 1997 The First One Hundred
1 Archipelago of the wandering dream 2 A castle with two bodies 3 The figure of Rosa Luxemburg among the animals in cages 4 Midnight forest 5 Trains circling below the icy waters 6 A meeting in the bourse 7 The men come into the small locker room & order drinks 8 Picasso wears a hat with roses 9 He has shoes aglow with little lights 10 Electricity runs along the floor & in between the tables 11 Picasso & Rosa Luxemburg converse 12 Her face is the face of our old friend Hannah Weiner 13 "Time is abolished" someone says "the world is o'er" 14 Letters dance into the infinite 15 She wears the infinite around her neck 16 He keeps another infinite inside one earring 17 They live in a world made up of infinites 18 How small a thought it takes to fill the world 19 When we gut up to dance the java it is 5 o'clock 20 Robert Filliou acts the role of Picasso & doesn't like it 21 It makes us look too small 22 A crowd of diplomats crosses the first rhine bridge 23 There is a place called holy mountain where the ghost of Goebbels wanders 24 Picasso the tap dancer 25 Rosa Luxemburg the temptress on the hill she holds a faded banner 26 A group of soldiers pokes her from the rear 27 A castle opens up 28 The lady with the playing cards is only half familiar 29 I make a phone call to Lynn Lonidier I have to read her book 30 Twice Rosa Luxemburg shows us her breasts 31 Picasso & Paul Blackburn are throwing a ball back & forth 32 It hits Zukofsky who calls out in pain "they hit the poet" 33 A ladder hangs in space 34 I climb it & look down 35 The soldiers of the revolution block every street 36 A line of cars reaches the Seine 37 Tomorrow when you go shopping bring back some cheese 38 Exchange the news with the Jabèses 39 I want all my friends to live where I live especially the dead 40 A banquet in a factory 41 The statue of a woman standing with spread legs between her legs a fire 42 A table piled with roasted meats & spirits 43 I ravished you 44 They embraced at length 45 The armies of drunk artists spread out through the forests 46 Children with their throats cut open 47 In a room with photographs tacked to the walls 48 The mouths are packed with gravel 49 They run the women down for pleasure 50 When the earth shakes bulbs drop from the chandeliers 51 An artist trembles in his atelier 52 In the cold air fingers burn & stretch 53 A holy sacrament begins 54 He swallows air & spits out fire 55 The gardens drop their leaves the leaves crack under foot 56 The carnival comes rushing by 57 We watch it from a window in the bombed-out town 58 My fist is beating on a stranger's vest 59 The forest comes alive with sounds of cuckoos 60 Clocks & death our password 61 In the night George Oppen still a soldier guards our house 62 Disney among the metaphysicals 63 Picasso in the Louvre hiding with his loot 64 We are all too human 65 She was not the first victim nor will she be the last 66 Napoleon standing on the altar of the world 67 The battle is engaged 68 The beasts in the fountain cry with pain 69 December is the cruelest month 70 There is an avant-garde that cannot be defeated 71 Robert Duncan rides his elevator up to heaven 72 It drops us back to earth 73 The airplane rushes blindly up the city streets 74 Find me a place to hide and I will love you dearly dearly 75 Here is a beer hall called the Holy Ghost 76 My socks in tatters 77 A geranium 78 The way to rub out wine stains is to pour on salt 79 A soldier with a line of watches on each arm 80 The rat inside the lion's cage 81 Someone follows someone up the hill & stops 82 "Why shouldn't we be a live?" he asks & no one answers 83 She has a stone to mark her grave her friend has none 84 Christ in a woman's dress with hefty boobs 85 I might have known it 86 He pours a black blob on the sheet & blows on it until it dries 87 The circle of their friends draws closer 88 The retrieval of a body in the early dawn 89 It is an accident of weather 90 From too much the process leads into a dearth of themes 91 My country is an amphitheater 92 A peacock bed pharaoh the lord of Egypt 93 A nickel flattened by a trolley spreading lead across the street 94 They slide the body back onto the bed & leave 95 Down in the restaurant a sailor lying on a table sleeping 96 Steps with blue messages are everywhere 97 Blue tambourine blue nails blue poppy seeds blue powdered hair 98 Too tardy & too premature for god 99 Tell Rosa Luxemburg to wait for Monday 100 It is eight a.m. in Paris
Credit
From A Paradise of Poets. Copyright © 1991 by Jerome Rothenberg. Reprinted with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Date Published
01/01/1991