t e r r i b l y  c u n e i f o r m

The Speakers

“A equals X,” says Mister One.
“A equals B,” says Mister Two.
“A equals nothing under the sun
But A,” says Mister Three. A few
Applaud; some wipe their eyes;
Some linger in the shade to see
One and Two in neat disguise
Decapitating Mister Three.

“This age is not entirely bad.”
It’s bad enough, God knows, but you
Should know Elizabethans had
Sweeneys and Mrs. Porters too.
The past goes down and disappears,
The present stumbles home to bed,
The future stretches out in years
That no one knows, and you’ll be dead.

A Distance from the Sea

To Ernest Brace

And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was
about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto
me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and
write them not. —REVELATIONS, x, 4.

That raft we rigged up, under the water,
Was just the item: when he walked,
With his robes blowing, dark against the sky,
It was as though the unsubstantial waves held up
His slender and inviolate feet. The gulls flew over,
Dropping, crying alone; thin ragged lengths of cloud
Drifted in bars across the sun. There on the shore
The crowd’s response was instantaneous. He
Handled it well, I thought—the gait, the tilt of the head, just right.
Long streaks of light were blinding on the waves.
And then we knew our work well worth the time:
The days of sawing, fitting, all those nails,
The tiresome rehearsals, considerations of execution.
But if you want a miracle, you have to work for it,
Lay your plans carefully and keep one jump
Ahead of the crowd. To report a miracle
Is a pleasure unalloyed; but staging one requires
Tact, imagination, a special knack for the job
Not everyone possesses. A miracle, in fact, means work.
—And now there are those who have come saying
That miracles were not what we were after. But what else
Is there? What other hope does life hold out
But the miraculous, the skilled and patient
Execution, the teamwork, all the pain and worry every miracle involves?

Visionaries tossing in their beds, haunted and racked
By questions of Messiahship and eschatology,
Are like the mist rising at nightfall, and come,
Perhaps to even less. Grave supernaturalists, devoted worshippers
Experience the ecstasy (such as it is), but not
Our ecstasy. It was our making. Yet sometimes
When the torrent of that time
Comes pouring back, I wonder at our courage
And our enterprise. It was as though the world
Had been one darkening, abandoned hall
Where rows of unlit candles stood; and we
Not out of love, so much, or hope, or even worship, but
Out of the fear of death, came with our lights
And watched the candles, one by one, take fire, flames
Against the long night of our fear. We thought
That we could never die. Now I am less convinced.
—The traveller on the plain makes out the mountains
At a distance; then he loses sight. His way
Winds through the valleys; then, at a sudden turning of a path,
The peaks stand nakedly before him: they are something else
Than what he saw below. I think now of the raft
(For me, somehow, the summit of the whole experience)
And all the expectations of that day, but also of the cave
We stocked with bread, the secret meetings
In the hills, the fake assassins hired for the last pursuit,
The careful staging of the cures, the bribed officials,
The angels’ garments, tailored faultlessly,
The medicines administered behind the stone,
That ultimate cloud, so perfect, and so opportune.
Who managed all that blood I never knew.

The days get longer. It was a long time ago.
And I have come to that point in the turning of the path
Where peaks are infinite—horn-shaped and scaly, choked with
thorns.
But even here, I know our work was worth the cost.
What we have brought to pass, no one can take away.
Life offers up no miracles, unfortunately, and needs assistance.
Nothing will be the same as once it was,
I tell myself.—It’s dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting
darker.
It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy.
Was it sunlight on the waves that day? The night comes down.
And now the water seems remote, unreal, and perhaps it is.

Interregnum

Butcher the evil millionaire, peasant,
And leave him stinking in the square.
Torture the chancellor. Leave the ambassador
Strung by his thumbs from the pleasant
Embassy wall, where the vines were.
Then drill your hogs and sons for another war.

Fire on the screaming crowd, ambassador,
Sick chancellor, brave millionaire,
And name them by the name that is your name.
Give privilege to the wound, and maim
The last resister. Poison the air
And mew for peace, for order, and for war.

View with alarm, participant, observer,
Buried in medals from the time before.
Whisper, then believe and serve and die
And drape fresh bunting on the hemisphere
From here to India. This is the world you buy
When the wind blows fresh for war.

Hide in the dark alone, objector;
Ask a grenade what you are living for,
Or drink this knowledge from the mud.
To an abyss more terrible than war
Descend and tunnel toward a barrier
Away from anything that moves with blood.

End of the Library

When the coal
Gave out, we began
Burning the books, one by one;
First the set
Of Bulwer-Lytton
And then the Walter Scott.
They gave a lot of warmth.
Toward the end, in
February, flames
Consumed the Greek
Tragedians and Baudelaire,
Proust, Robert Burton
And the Po-Chu-i. Ice
Thickened on the sills.
More for the sake of the cat,
We said, than for ourselves,
Who huddled, shivering,
Against the stove
All winter long.

In memory of Warren Zevon

I

I want you to tell me if, on Grammy night, you didn’t get one hell of a kick
out of all those bling-it-ons in their bullet-proof broughams,
all those line-managers who couldn’t manage a line of coke,

all those Barmecides offering beakers of barm –
if you didn’t get a kick out of being as incongruous
there as John Donne at a Junior Prom.

Two graves must hide, Warren, thine and mine corse
who, on the day we met, happened
also to meet an individual dragging a full-length cross

along 42nd Street and kept mum, each earning extra Brownie points
for letting that cup pass. The alcoholic
knows that to enter in these bonds

is to be free, yeah right. The young John Donne who sets a Glock
on his dish in the cafeteria
knows that, even as he plots to clean some A&R man’s clock,

his muse on dromedary
trots to the Indias of spice and mine
and the Parsi Towers of Silence, even as he buses his tray

with its half-eaten dish of beef chow mein
to the bus-station, he’s already gone half-way to meet the Space Lab.
The Space Lab (italics mine),

where you worked on how many mint juleps
it takes to make a hangover
while playing piano for all those schlubs you could eclipse

and cloud with a wink. I long to talk to some old lover’s
ghost about the night after night you tipped the scales
for the Everly Brothers,

Frank and Jesse, while learning to inhale
through a French inhaler like a child soldier from the Ivory Coast
learning to parch a locust on a machete, a child soldier who would e-mail

you, at your request,
a copy of “ Death Be Not Proud ”, a child soldier who would hi-lite
a locust with a flame. If your grave be broke up again some second guest

to entertain, let it serve as hallowed
ground where those young shavers
from the Ivory Coast may find their careers, as you found yours, on hold,

where Tim McGraw and OutKast, not to speak of those underachievers
who don a black hat or a goatee
as a computer screen dons a screen-saver

or the Princeton sky its seventeen-year cicadas,
will find themselves on hold. You who went searching for a true, plain heart
as an unreconstructed renegade

must have come to believe, with Frank and Jesse, no hate could hurt
our bodies like our love. Another low-down
dirty shame . . . To wicked spirits horrid

shapes assigned . . . Every nickel nudging the nickelodeon.
O wrangling schools . . . O wrangling schools that search what fire
shall burn this world, had none the wit to smell Izaak Walton

pressing down on Donne’s funeral pyre,
yeah right, to smell the locust parched by that Ivory Coast subaltern,
had none the wit unto this knowledge to aspire,

that this your fever, the fever that still turns
the turntable, might be it? For every turn, like every tuning, is open,
every thorn a durian,

every “bin” a “ben”
on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Such a pilgrimage were sweet,
Warren, barreling down the autobahn

through West Hollywood
in your little black Corvette (part-barge,
part hermaphrodite brig), our eyes set not on the noted weed

but the noted seaweed of Nobu Matsuhisa. Those child soldiers who parch
a locust on a machete while tending a .50 caliber
Browning with a dodgy breech

will know how the blood labors
to beget Matsuhisa-san’s seared toro. At the winter solstice, as I filed
past a band of ticket-scalpers

who would my ruined fortune flout
at Madison Square Garden, I glimpsed a man in a Tibetan
cap, nay-saying a flute,

whom I took at first to be an older Brian Jones, what with his flipping a butane
lighter in my face and saying, “I shall be made thy music . . .”
At that very moment, quite unbidden,

the ghost of Minoru Yamasaki
(who had trailed me from the bar at Nobu) exhorted me to “Turn them speakers
up full blast now Lucies, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks,

is sunk so low as my Twin Towers . . .”. Brian Jones’s patent winkle-pickers
reflected a patent sky. “All strange wonders that befell
me while the rest of them recorded Beggars

Banquet and I was sunk so low in Twickenham, lovers coming with crystal vials
to take my tears . . .”. “I’ll do my crying in the rain
with Don and Phil,”

said Yamasaki-san, “I’ll do my crying with Frank and Jesse waiting for a train . . .
Those lines you wrote about the blood-bath
at my Twin Towers, about the sky being full of carrion,

those were my Twin Towers, right?” Brian, meanwhile, continued to puff
on the flute as if he were indeed corporeal,
as if he were no less substantial than the elder-pith

nay on which he played a hurry home early
version of “Walk Right Back”, the “Walk Right Back”
you yourself had played night after night with Frank and Jesse Everly.

II

I knelt beside my sister’s bed, Warren, the valleys and the peaks
of the EKGs, the crepusculine X-rays,
the out-of-date blister-packs

discarded by those child soldiers from the Ivory Coast or Zaire,
and couldn’t think that she had sunk so low
she might not make the anniversary

of our mother’s death from this same cancer, this same quick, quick, slow
conversion of manna to gall
from which she died thirty years ago. I knelt and adjusted the sillyhow

of her oxygen mask, its vinyl caul
unlikely now to save Maureen from drowning in her own spit.
I thought of how the wrangling schools

need look no further than her bed
to find what fire shall burn this world – or that heaven
which “is one with” this world – to find how gold to airy thinness beat

may crinkle like cellophane
in a flame, like cellophane or the flimmerings of gauze
by which a needle is held fast in a vein.

So break off, Warren, break off this last lamenting kiss
as Christ broke with Iscariot
and gave himself to those loosey-goosey

Whisky A Go Going mint julep- and margarita-
and gimlet-grinders, those gin fizz-
iognomists. My first guitar, a Cort, and my first amp, a Crate,

I myself had tried to push through a Fuzz Face
or some shit-kicking stomp box
till I blew every fuse

in Central New Jersey. At the autumnal equinox
as on St Lucies when sunbeams in the east are spread
I’d pretend the Crate was a Vox

AC-50 Super Twin. I was playing support
for some star in the unchangeable firmament
in which the flesh, Warren, is merely a bruise on the spirit,

a warm-up for the main event
as the hymnal ushers in the honky-tonk
or the oxygen tent

raises the curtain on the oxygen mask. How well you knew that dank
spot on the outskirts
of Jerusalem where the kids still squeeze between the tanks

to suck the life out of a cigarette,
the maple-bud in spring like something coming to a head,
some pill that can’t be sugared,

another hit
of hooch or horse that double-ties the subtile knot
to which we’ve paid so little heed

all those years of running amuck in Kent.
Go tell court-huntsmen that the oxygen-masked King will ride
ten thousand days and nights

on a stride piano, yeah right,
through the hell in which Ignatius of “Ignatius His Conclave”
was strung out on Mandrax and mandrake root,

ten thousand nights of the “chemical life”
(as Auden styled it, turning the speakers up full blast),
the “chemical life” that gives way to ten thousand days of rehab and golf

in the afternoon, televangelists,
push up and bench press with Buddhist and Parsi,
ten thousand days after which you realized

the flesh is indeed no more than a bruise
on the spirit. The werewolf with the Japanese menu in his hand,
keen as he was to show his prowess

with the chopsticks, realized it ain’t
that pretty, ain’t that pretty at all
to be completely wasted when you’re testing your chops, hint hint,

on a Gibson Les Paul
overdriven through a Fender Vibratone,
ain’t that pretty to crawl

to Ensenada for methadone.
Were we not weaned till then from Mandrax and mandrake
or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den
a line of coke, or wore long sleeves to cover the wreak
of injecting diacetylmorphine?
I was playing a Fender through a Marshall rig

that was so massively overdriven
I couldn’t hear the phone ring, didn’t hear that excitable boy
extol the virtues of Peruvian

over Bolivian marching powder, that excitable hula-hula boy,
the Jackson Browne sound-alike,
who waited on us in Nobu (Nobu or Koi?)

where the fishionistas (sic) walked the catwalk
for as long as they could manage a line
of coke with their sushi deluxe,

for as long as they were able for the baby abalone
with garlic sauce. We watched those two parascenders parascend
off Malibu like two true, plain

hearts who struggle to fend
off the great crash – two true, plain hearts like yourself and Maureen
who struggled to fend off the great crash that has us end

where we began, all strung out on heroin
on the outskirts of La Caldera,
our last few grains of heroin-ash stashed in a well-wrought urn.

III

I want you to tell me, Warren, if you didn’t watch those two hang-gliders
and think of the individual we saw drag
his full-length cross through the under-the-counter-culture

of 42nd Street? 42nd or Canal? A certain individual, whatreck,
who might easily have taken in a 4 a.m. show at the Clark and got to grips
with the usherette’s leg in the dark,

who might have recognized the usherette for a certain demirep
who’d registered her domain
in the Adelphi, having already learned the ropes

from the old bluesmen
who played in the Blue Note. That must have been your first brush
with greatness, in Chicago, before the mean

streets of LA where your Moses met the bulrush
of Stravinsky and every chord became a cordon sanitaire
against the bum’s rush

your Russian Jewish father had given you in Culver and Century
Cities, your G major seeing his G major
in gloves-off gambling, and though music did in the center

sit right through that Wanderjahre
with Stravinsky, I’m certain it would also lean and hearken
after the jubilation and the jeers

of the boxing ring in which your father took on some cocksure Puerto Rican,
in which every Baby Grand cried out for a Crybaby
and the Everlasting Life we bargain

for was invented by some record company Pooh-Bah
who has forgotten, in the midst of things,
that every operation’s mom-and-pop,

your Scottish Mormon mother teaching you the right swing
against your father’s left, your common
G on the Chickering

sounding against the G-men
who plagued him about that pyramid scheme he set up in the Faeroes
with Mr Cambio and Mr Gombeen.

I want you to tell me if grief, brought to numbers, cannot be so fierce,
pace Donne’s sales pitch,
for he tames, that fetters it in verse,
throwing up a last ditch
against the mounted sorrows, for I have more, Warren, I have more,
more as an even flame two hearts did touch

and left us mere
philosophers whose blood still labors to beget
child-soldiers toasting locust S’mores,

the A&R men lining their pockets
while Roland battled the Bantu to their knees,
the Bantu who boogie-woogied

with Saint Ignatius
through their post traumatic stress disorder,
the Les Paul pushed through a Pignose

like a, yeah right, Rotorooter
through a sewage line, the A&R men taking the mazuma
and crossing the border

to load up on sashimi
with Yamasaki-san, a headless Childe Roland
coming to his dark twin Towers of Silence, zoom zoom,

those Towers the Parsis still delineate
as scaffolds for sky-burial, a quorum
of vultures letting their time-chastened lant

fall to their knees as they hold on like grim
death to the bellied-up Brian Jones, their office indulgently to fit
actives to passives in the doldrums

of the swimming-pool, the fishionistas (qv) with their food fads
having nothing on these rare
birds that divide

the spoils, Warren, these rare
birds that divide the spoils
with the gasbag, gobshite, gumptionless A&R

men who couldn’t tell a hollow-body Les Paul with double-coil
pickups pushed through a Princeton Reverb
from a slab of London broil

an excitable boy might rub
all over his chest, the vultures working piecemeal
at his chest like the chest on which a Russian Jewish cardsharp

and a Scottish Mormon broke the seal
as surely as one VIP opening her bosom made one Viper Room
an everywhere, every Glock sighing for a glockenspiel,

every frame a freeze-frame
of two alcoholics barreling down to Ensenada
in a little black Corvette, vroom vroom,

for Diet, yeah right, Diet Mountain Dew,
that individual carrying his cross knowing the flesh is a callus
on the spirit as surely as you knew the mesotheliomata

on both lungs meant the situation was lose-lose,
every full-length cross-carrier almost certainly up to some sort of high jinks
else a great Prince in prison lies,

lies belly-up on a Space Lab scaffold where the turkey buzzards pink
Matsuhisa-san’s seared toro,
turkey buzzards waiting for you to eclipse and cloud them with a wink

as they hold out their wings and of the sun his working vigor borrow
before they parascend through the Viper Room or the Whiskey A Go Go,
each within its own “cleansing breeze”, its own cathartes aura.

[Published in The Times Literary Supplement, June 2, 2006.]