JONAS MEKAS POEMS

From "THE TALK OF FLOWERS"

I do not know, whether the sun

accomplished it,
the rain or wind
but I was missing so
the whiteness and the snow.

I listened to the rustling

of spring rain,
washing the reddish buds
of chestnut-trees,
and a tiny spring ran down
into the valley from the hill
and I was missing
the whiteness
and the snow.

And in the yards, and on the slopes

red-cheeked
village maidens
hung up the washings
blown over by the wind
and, leaning,
stared a long while
at the yellow tufts of sallow:

For love is like the wind,

And love is like the water

it warms up with the spring,
and freezes over in the autumn.
But to me, I don't know why,
whether the sun
accomplished it,
the rain or wind
but I was missing so
the whiteness and the snow.

I know the wind

will blow and blow the washings,
and the rain
will wash and wash the chestnut-trees,
but love, which melted with
the snow
will not return.

Deep below the snow sleep

words and feelings:
for today, watching
the dance of rain between the door
the rain of spring!
I saw another:

she walked by in the rain,

and beautiful she was,
and smiled:

For love is like the wind,

and love is like the water

it warms up with the spring
and freezes over in the autumn,
though to me, I don't know why,
whether the sun
accomplished it,
the rain or wind
but I was missing so
the whiteness and the snow.

FROM NOWHERE:
1
I will speak
only
in pronouns,
verbs,
things,
possessive
adjectives,
such as
wide,
blue,
fragrant.

FROM NOWHERE:

There is the word,

and music
of the word.

And there are

things,
dreams
and
images.

I pick
one thing,
the
thing itself
is
poetry,
dream
and
reality:

ars
poetica.

FROM NOWHERE:

The one
desire I have:

to say
the word
for real,

palpable,
plain,

and speak
straight to the heart
of those
still able
to hear,
way under
the ice.

From "IDILES OF SEMENIKIAI"

First Idyll

Old is rain gushing down shrubstems

Old is rain gushing down shrubstems,

cockgrouse drumming in the red summer dawn.
Old is our talk of this.

And of the fields, yellowing barley and oats,

the cowherd fires wetblown in lonesome autumn.
Of the potato digs,
the heavy summer heat,
white winter glare and sleigh-din down unending roads.
Of heavy timber hauls, stony fallows,
the red brick ovens and outlying limerock.
Then by the evening lamps, in autumn, while fields turn gray
of wagonloads ready for tomorrow's market,
the roads, in October, washed out and swamped,

the potato digs drenched.

Old is our life here, long generations

pacing the fields off, wearing down plowland,
each foot of earth able to speak, still breathing of fathers.
Out of these cool stone wells
they drew water for their returning herds,
and when the flooring in the place wore down,
or the housewall quietly started to crumble, they dug their
yellow clay form the same pits,
their sand gold-fresh from the same fields.
And even with us gone
there will be others, sitting out on blue fieldstones,
mowing the overgrown meadows, plowing these plains,
and when they come in at the end of their day and sit down to the tables,
each table, each clay jug,
each beam in the wall will speak,
they'll have the sprawling yellow sandbanks to remember,
and ryefields swaying in the wind,
the sad songs of our women from the far side of a flax field,
and one smell, on first entering a new parlor,
the scent of fresh moss!

Oh, old is the flowering clover,

horses snorting in the summer night,
rollers, harrows and plows scouring tillage,
the heavy millstones rumbling,
and women weeding the rows, their kerchiefs glimmering white.
Old is rain gushing down shrubstems,
cockgrouse drumming in the red summer dawn.

Old is our talk of all this.

Ninth Idyll
Villages and Plains the Streams Flow Through

You too return, along with days gone,

and flow again, my blue rivers,

to carry on the songs of washerwomen,

fishermen's nets and grey wooden bridges.
Clear blue nights, smelling warm,
streams of thin mist off the meadow drift in
with distinct hoof-stomps from a fettered horse.

To carry off rioting spring thaws,

willows torn loose and yellow lily cups,
with children's shrill riots.
The summer heat, its midday simmer:
lillypads crowd, where a riverbed's narrowed,
while mud in the heat smells
of fish and rock-studded shallows.

And even at the peak, when the heat

locked in with no wind appears to shiver and burn,
and barn siding cracks in the sun, even then
this water touches shade, down in the reeds,
so you can feel the pull and crawl,
one cool blue current through your fingers,
and bending over its clear blue flow
make out field smells, shimmering meadows,

other villages passed on the way here,

remote unfamiliar homesteads,
the heavy oakwood tables
heaped with bread, meat, and a soup of cold greens,
the women waiting for the reapers to return.

Fouteenth Idyll
Market days
Mondays, way before dawn,
before even the first hint of blue in the windows,
we'd hear it start, off the road past our place,
over on the highway nearby,
in a clatter of market-bound traffic.

Riding the rigs packed with fruit and crated live fowl,
or on foot, with cattle hitched to tailgates slowing the pace,
or sitting up high, on raised seats
(the women all wore their garish kerchiefs,
the knot under each chin carefully tied)

so jolting along, lurching in their seats,

in and out of woods, fields, scrub barrens,
with dogs out barking from every yard along the way,
in a cloud of dust.

And on, by narrow alleyways,

rattling across the cobbles,
up to the well in the market square.
With a crowd already there,
the wagons pull up by a stone wall

and people wave across to each other,

a bright noisy swarm.

And from there, first tossing our horse a tuft of clover,

father would go to look the livestock over.
Strolling past fruitwagons loaded with apples and pears,
past village women seated on wheelframes
and traders laid out along the base of the well,
he'd make his way to one large fenced-in yard
filled with bleating sheep, with horses and cows,
the air full of dung-stench and neighing,
hen squalls, non-stop bawling,
the farmers squabbling...

And mother, mindful of salt she needed to get,

as well as knitting needles, rushed right off;
and we'd be looking on to help our sister pick her thread,
dizzy from this endless spread of bright burning colors in front of us,
till mother pulled us back from the booths,

had us go past wagonloads of fruit and grain

to skirt the crowding square,

then head up that narrow, dusty side street

to see our aunt Kastn;
later, we'd still be talking away, when she hurried us back
past the tiny houses shoved up next to each other, along the river
and down to the mill, where with the last
of the rye-flour sacks stacked up in the wagon
and his shoes flour-white, his whole outfit pale flour-dust,

father would be waiting.

And on past nightfall, farmwagons keep clattering

back past scattered homesteads,
then on through the woods; while up ahead
cowherds perch impatient on top of the gateposts,
their caps pulled down on their eyes,
still waiting for us to get back.

22. Neighbors
Where are you, old Ignotas, coming every autumn,
carrying swingle and hackle -- to thresh rye,
comb the flax or dig potatoes --

where are you, Martynas, in your white linen trousers,

collecting the milk cans every morning,
jingling down the road to the dairy --

through stands of alder, over the fresh growth of red willows,

over clearings, patches of ripe raspberries
overgrown with thistle and switches of meadow rue;
where are you, Kazimieras, then drunk at night,
singing and blundering in the bushes -- and Jokubas,
astride the shining new bicycle,
a flaming dahlia tied to the handlebars -and the men coming to help mow the hay
or to lug, to pitchfork the manure,
rattling home from the fields in empty carts
whistling in the clearings.

And you in the warm summer nights

gathered in groups, and arms linked
singing high and loudly -- or dancing
in a field staked out with birch saplings and branches

or riding out together to work on roads

or in the fall, to the retting ponds in the bushes
wading in cold water, rolling aside
slippery black stones
and with wide hooks hauling out the flax,

or after a snowfall, on white roads

you plodded into the forest for firewood
carrying saws slung over your shoulders -hearing how the forest, the entire horizon
echoed the axe blows and how cracking
and breaking down branches, the pines fell,

and sledges loaded with heavy timbers

you moved on wintry roads, over frozen rivers
past the smoke rising from snowed-in homesteads.

Where are you now, my old friends,

the people I grew up with -and the brushes, the fields, the gravel pits on the hills
-- where are you now, and where are those fields,
where are the retteries, where is the high summer sky,
where is that snow of December?

25. Children

Where are you, fair-haired children of the farms,

when we walked stopping at every ditch,
when we ran to the school -- with small
wooden satchels, with little pen boxes.
By the fields and on roads, on narrow field tracks
and from a distance we saw near the woods
the white of the school house.

Where are you, quite Mykoliukas, waiting

by the road, and you, Maryte, running up the path
from the river. Where are you, Adomelis, where are you all,
when on the snowdrift covered roads,
faces stinging and burning in the cold,
under big winter halts and wrapped
deep in fur coats -- we walked over the white wintry fields,
watching how the wind gusting over the meadows
drove strands of cold dry snow,
how in the very tree tops, perched rigid and still,
the crows kept vigil, how frozen, how stiff
was every branch, the cold willow bushes -when we, a chattering bunch, walked down frozen rivers,
sliding across puddles, through the brittle
willow brush, chasing and then hanging on to the sledges
of the men driving to the forest -waving our wooden satchels.

26 WINTER
When the snow blankets the houses, covers te fields,
the pastures, and the river valley and the fish traps -the cold sets in. And in stinging blows the wind

drives the dry and cold snow across the field.

Having dug a path to the stables, the men haul

water from the snowed-over, ice-encrusted well,
wrapped up in fur coats
and thick woolen mittens,
they drag straw litter in the stable for the cattle
and slide around the frozen icy well,
women with an armful of firewood or a pail of milk
hurry across the yard -- and girls
running out bareheaded,
throw out sweepings on the snow
or a bucketful of clear blue dye.

With only their noses showing from under the caps

wrapped up in fur coats
men chop firewood by the barn -or inside the barn, behind closed doors propped up with a stick,
they scutch flax, listening to the wind howling outside the walls
and watching how through a gap under the propped up door
it sweeps in handfuls of frozen white snow,
and they listen how up in the rafters,
in the piles of brushwood, and in the eaves of the barn
freezing and covered in snow dust chirp the sparrows.

And then come blizzards, and the wind

rushes day and night across the fields
burying in drifts the gardens, roads and houses,
and the farmers cannot keep up with the digging of paths,
and the cold burns and singes face,

and the wind keeps on blowing across the fields

swirling and driving the snow.
Sitting inside the house, weaving baskets
or making rope tethers for the cattle, the men watch
the women busy weaving at the loom
or the sister with knitting needles -how fast and quick her fingers move
knitting large colorful flowers;
they talk or listen to the brother
reading aloud from the newspaper
or from a book brought home from school -about Gulliver tied and tethered by Lilliputians,
about Nonni lost in snowdrifts
or Little Dorrit crying and alone -outside the window the wind still rages
and blows the snow -- the sweeps creak in the yard.

And the brothers with baskets on their shoulders

and axes in hands walk on the frozen river,
and chop open fishing holes iced up in the night
to shake out on the snow the sparkling jumping fish
and watch how staight, as if to heaven, rises
the smoke of the homesteads, how will stand
the wayside birch trees -- how a solitary
sleigh in haste glides down the road,
how the snow crunches.

FROM "DIENORAIAI 1970 1982"

1.

I sit
drink beer
gaze through the window
it's raining
a man rushes past
with a newspaper
on his head

a woman
a green rain coat
red
intersections

the wet
sidewalk
ripples
I sit
drink beer
gaze through the window

4.

I
wander
and
wander

sad
beneath
streets

of words

waiting
until
someone
takes
me by the hand
and
leads me
home

6.

I pound
on my own door...
on my own door
I pound ...

Heavy stones
lie on my heart, on my memory,
and separate me from myself,
growing always heavier and heavier,
and the roots of words
burn.

(Does the wind wail or do the fields

complain...?)

Have mercy on me, gods.

Gods, solidify my longing,

and shower, shower

the rains of paradise
on memory's roots.

9.

Times were hard.

Now everything
has gone
into the past.

Only the pain

alone
remains
impaled
across
the lake.

P.S:
A detail:
Father shoved up against
a wall.
I lie
with my face to the ground.

White potato
blossoms.

11.

Days pass.
Nothing changes.
In the newspapers
there is a huge political scandal...

Ah, and by the way

they've scrambled up onto the moon!

Only my life
remains boring, monotonous,
and papers lie scattered
across my desk ...
I feel empty and guilty;
in my heart
there is confusion.

Outside it begins to rain.

So I throw on a jacket,
and like one of Schiller's romantics,
a touch angry,
a touch melancholy

slowly lifting one foot

after the other
I walk the wet, crowded streets,
drowning inside myself.

41.

Lush

tree tops
rush past ...

Verdant ...
Civilization's
death throes
quiver

in the wounded
nuclear power plant
air.

71.

So Onute, you say you don't remember (maybe

just in a dream the colors, the scents, the sounds
are wrong)

you don't remember

how the wind fondled your blond wisps of hair

through the open car window
Vilnius

Montefiascone
you don't remember

we stood on the shores of Lake Bolsan

in the gold of the sunset
just a pair of friends

oh!

the silence! such peace

ah, paradise is not yet
entirely lost, no
we said, joking,
and emotion bobbed in the water

blown by ecstasy's sails.

We stood
and evening's arms
stroked a circle around us
and your hair.

76.

Damp, cold,
and like on the Western Front
Nothing has Changed.

I walk along and I think to myself

In Lithuanian
damp
Sunday

the squidgy corner

of a newspaper

red,

reflections of light
a sidewalk,
America.

Have you ever walked alone

like this
on the streets of a foreign city,

knowing
that you are alone

with your wet,

Autumn
raincoat

alone, all alone

with your
Lithuanian words?

Autumn a wet sidewalk

wind damp
on the Western Front
Nothing has Changed.

8.

My head sags
from prowling
to salvage
scraps
of my days.

This morning, it snowed.

Now, it's raining.

In a wheezing
voice,
the preacher
curses
his city.

Head
hits
night's
down.

28.

I learned my geography
from war
maps.

Human anatomy
I came to grasp
from
accounts of
concentration camps.

47.

The Dachau trails

it's raining
on
thirty years
later

wet
underfoot
nameless
gravel.

48.

Sing in
calm
I no longer can.

In deep
anguish
I cant write down

I follow
the death
of my own
irresponsible
generation.

52.

late at night
drinking wine
think of friends
late at night

late city night

outside the window
words stack up
late at night

late at night

think of friends
drinking wine
late at night

heart sore and how

memory quakes
this late a night
the wine I drink

53.

O when we stomped
we stomped, tracking the flax

for tears.

O when we dug
we dug
canals
digging down deep

not enough to keep

bones of our pals.

57.

What went unrecorded, I

Adam,
do now
attest.

How the sadness

lags my heart!

For no sooner had we made

one day's journey by road, when
at the limits of pain and thirst, stretched
to recover in the shade of a heated boulder,

unconvinced as yet our fate had real edge,

we saw the vast hub of paradise

split up in an innumerable mess of fragments
then come pouring, raining down,
on the skyline

and on my soul.

68.

fruit
bread
milk

death

life

this month
dropped

one half
percent

you pay
more for
everything

nothing for
nothing

night on
cold
concrete

* * *

I don't know, whether it was

the sun had done it,
the rain or wind,
but I really missed
both snow and whiteness.

While listening to showers

rinsing the pink
fresh chestnut buds,
and the high brook running
downhill in rivulets,
I missed the snow
and whiteness.

Now while the yards

fill out with sound,
the red-cheeked
farmgirls string their wash
out in the wind,
then leaning back
stand there to watch
fresh yellow willow banks.

For love is like the wind,

and love is like water:
turning warm in spring,
freezing over in autumn.

But I, I don't know why,

whether the sun
had done it,
the rain or wind,
I really missed both
snow and whiteness.

This wet wind blows the wash

will blow again, I know;
just as the same old rain
rains in the chestnuts now.
Though love the snow took off with
will not be back,
asleep in deep snow
as words and heart are;

I watched it rain just now,

the first spring rain
dancing, at my open door!
Someone I never noticed before

went by in the downpour;

looking just lovely, she
even smiled at me.

So love is like the wind,

and like water too,
turning warm in spring,
freezing over in autumn,
and yet I still don't know
why: whether it was the sun,
the rain or wind
had done it,
I really miss both
snow and whiteness.

Update (2003)
Winter, don't ever be over. So that Spring
never has to show up, and no armies can
come marching in on us, while they're still waiting for Spring. Wild
forest creatures will stay calm asleep, dreaming of
utopia.

Winter, don't ever be over. All will stay shut in

at home, sleeping all the while, with the vile evildoers, tramps

and wheeler dealers all frozen stiff, all will be drinking

with prostitutes, like children in their innocence
until the Spring,
which is never to come.

Don't show up, Spring. Keep all your

blossoms, smells, kisses and crusts -I want to stay calmly drinking my wine
with old friends -- while it's still winter,
while the armies haven't marched in yet --

O snow, keep on snowing, as deep, impenetrable,

cold, as in the winter of 1812,
until it's Spring,
that's never to come.

It was already summer, when we left Flensburg.

Sailboats filled the bay, and
out on the shoreline piers, over open water and the fishing boats
there was a shimmer of heat.
And once we'd made our way
out to Gluecksburg,
the children there were noisily splashing
in a thick-grown forest of reeds.

We felt the pull of distance.

War was just over, with its last
shells, its last bomb blasts
still echoing off the slopes. Past stations in rubble,

and gutted, charred little towns,

we kept moving on, pushing our way in
among women and children,
war prisoners and miserable soldiers
squatted down in muggy heat, slumped together
with the swarms of refugees
on grimy floors, with hunger and thirst
to stretch our hands out toward any well
or cup of water,
and snatch up tiny, under-ripe green apples
gritty and battered off railroad embankments,
or out of ditches below the tracks.

So, slowly, we pushed on that summer, laying in

at every train stop, beside each bridge,
trudging down blackened knolls and
out along narrow fieldpaths,
spending the nights on burned-out platforms
and charred tracks.

You remember. That time we were in Hanover,

sprawled out where the station had burned to the ground,
looking up at the bright nightsky that June,
hearing those heavy wornout ravings,
freightyard hoisting-cranes, the wrenching
sad city noises filled with uncertain steps,
with death and grief:

staring at a pale moonlit night

that felt so worn out, worked over, scorched

and shattered from what not long before had been the proud
the core and center of Europe.

With eyelids dropping, the feeling gone

from each nerve-end, we kept on pushing south that summer
through heavy rumblings, beyond exhaustion,
and each town, each horizon,
each trainstop along the way
gave off a lingering stench of death and smoke,
now with brokendown, burned-out tanks and fortified trenches,
highways blown up
and bomb craters midfield deep hollows
staring back black death
the only scrawny vague
surviving witnesses
under the first flowers of spring.

On and on we kept pushing

through towns in rubble, past wrecked horizons
with villages razed, acres of cannon and truck,
whole graveyards of steel,
and squads of an occupying army,
their painted guardrails around town squares glaring white.

So we pushed on
and saw people starved down to nothing
come out from under the broken brickwork, in clusters
up from the dust, in vivid stripes of concentration-camp inmates,
death-like, their hands shrunk to nothing,
the women and children surfacing in swarms.

And the war prisoners. Ringed in by shabby, grimy barracks

they sang in a pale haze under the sun, played cards
while waiting for the last trucks, freedom
bound, to take them home.

There was one young German soldier, still a child,

all of a child standing there
inside the burned-out Hanau station, staring at
the heaped up brick and stone, the skeletal steel,
treetrunk, smokestack and dirt charred the same overall black,
windows wrenched out of their frames, a meshwork
of iron and steel sagging down
his childhood in shreds, all that was left of it.
Tears ran like water down his face,
just like water.

We had crossed salt-marshes up north, desolate fields,

black Ruhr Valley skylines,
to push farther south, through dense
midGerman towns. So that
now it was August, maybe only
the end of July time went and faded out
we found ourselves in Wrzburg.

It was still morning, yet the air

flared a real summer flame.
All tired out, we stood on a platform
and stared at the stubs of masonry left,
the rolling hills, the gold

summer shimmer:

and felt this sudden urge

to go out in the fields!
It was the pull of summer, the burning Bavarian sky
and sunlight
and taking what was left of our memories with us,
our pitifew packings for the trip (the towel
mother made us take, a scarf from our sister,
some snapshots now faded), we were
suddenly high up inside the orchards.

Now here we were months later, after all that death,

eyeing orchard slopes, trees,
and villas that hugged the hillsides,
not believing any of it yet,
still full of the road we'd gone, the swarm
of pounding noises.
And yet these apples, ripe and full, were not the charred
green apples from the railroad tracks.
This was Bavaria we were in.

Look, my brother was saying: how green

the fields and trees all around!
As we climbed on up to the top of the orchards
and walked the fields
half crazed, drinking in the smell of wild roses,
the shade of the orchards.

This was life reviving, in every

apple bough and vineslope.

And the people,
the grown girls, women in gaudy summer kerchiefs,
with wicker baskets full, ripe as orchards
alongside the men, making their way down into town.

Dizzy with summer blossoming,

all that vitality, that vineland fragrance,
we sat there on a hillside, looking down
the deep track the stream of the Neckar had carved, and out
past the ruins of Wrzburg, reflecting
on the years of suffering, death and despair,

and marveled at the life coming back each sign we saw of it

and the earth's strength.

II
Under a burning Australian sky
lies my Regina's grave. Burned by the sun,
with hot sands and cool nights like hands
caressing, keeping it safe.

Sleep, and go on sleeping, under your skyblue eyes; not that

I'll get to see them again, any more than they'll ever see
our faraway childhood sky.
Still, I do keep them like two
tiny dew-beaded pearls.

That time we went together, one last time

across a flower-crested field, scanning

the hillsides for approaching rain,

then stopped in the doorway to a bokendown old house
and watched a bright green, rainwashed field,
shiny with beads of rain, and listened
to the thunder rumbling, the rain hissing in
over the hills.

Your eyes of rain-washed field,

two beads of rain.
Maybe I really
should not have taken your hand that time.
Maybe not, after all. Hands join like roots,
and not just to uncover lives.

Sleep, under the wide span of a silk horizon,

and go on listening to that strange balmy wind
gusting in through forests, level sands and laketops,
all that way across briny high seas
and faraway islands -still listening for that faraway echo of childhood,
the one voice your friends had in common -while I keep on going, growing more and more remote.

And where, with your eyes open wide, so clear and child-like,
are you now, Marcele -- left behind as you were
in some small nameless town in central Germany -and you, Vladas?

The time I met you two, that spring,

sunk in the teeming green at Wilhelmshhe,

guiding each other along past the falls
on your way down a gushing hillside in spring,
watching the high water, branches on trees,
you held hands all the while.

And it never crossed my mind, not once,

not even the time a whole bunch of us went singing
through flowering midsummer fields,
along the pale Wiesbaden streets -I never once even happened to think...

the gray Hessen sky,

all the pale little towns, would stay so entranced, listening
for the approaching laughter, those sweet
friendships...

that it was all one woven into you all beauty

and love and suffering sleep little one sleep
while I keep going on to make my rounds complete

III
Again I see that powerful broad stream, one nonstop shimmer of colors

It was summer, that last time, I saw you

awash in sunlight, with bright rowboats
crawling slowly, singing and playing, past the islands,
bridges, castles hugging the slopes,

and everything shining back sunlit.

Now it's September, showing other colors.

The islands transparent, with leaves washed far out to sea,
cold foam breaks from the slow-plowing
dark tugboats,
their black shingled cabins spattered with rain,
smoke trailing into a cold, black streak
overhead.

With you the same old Rhine as ever, the wine

makes men sing up and down both shores, still the same
with long-haul sailors yelling down at grimy
toyboats, your birds
the same white hens perched on wooden
bridge-posts.

No matter that the bridges gave out

under the crush of marching feet, or that the city chimneys
turned solitary rigid scarecrows,
you stay the same, as dark, as powerful,
carrying timber and white blood.

Without our gazing at the Rhine that summer,

or crossing the bridge at Mainz, or letting ourselves go
in a fragrance of sunlight and roses down those vineslopes,
or making the Mainz-Kastel run on that tiny little train
with the basketloads of cherries and apples, white grapes
and yellow gold apricots;
somehow, without our being there, there'd be no trace of either

that summer or those days.

Still it is strange how happy a summer that one was for us.
Even its bleak phases, for all our standing around with food parcels
or soup tins, had a shining
off the slopes and orchards and townships;
even while hanging out wash in the yards, or scanning
bulletins for the names of lost ones,
or grimly pacing the small squares
to track down each scrap of fresh news,
we kept a child's feeling for white Wiesbaden.

In going off to sit out a spell on some sun-drenched slope,

or down the banks to the Rhine to watch
the barges, down in that deep-carved track,
plod by under full loads of coal and timber
along the floodlit banks,
vinyards, bridges in rubble under water,
with the last war blasts
echoing off the slopes.

Even while sitting in some low, cool beerhall off the marketplace,
scanning notices posted on walls, taking the cool summer air
with a pale green Rhine wine -- hearing the farmhorses
and girls in clogs clop by over the cobbles
down narrow alleyways -- all the while drinking in
a chestnut-and-apple smell.

IV
Early that fall, midSeptember already,

with the rains just starting, we left Wiesbaden.

Mud was waiting for us, when we got to Kassel,

along with the white-washed wooden barracks, that autumn.
Trudging cold water, while the wind and rain
blew right through us,
we patched cracks in the barrack walls,
gathered up rain-soaked alder sticks,
and talked cold weather, mud,
on-coming winter.

And it was not much later

the snow arrived,
fuming in over the Wilhelmshohe ridges and treelines.

Yet winter, even that one, passed;

soon it was summer, then one more fall
coming on, as we watched the woods go under, out on the slopes,
while we stood by the trolleys,
or with our skimpy pouches
waited in long lines for bread,
milk and vegetables,
or tugged at carts the coal and alder-logs
loaded down.

Past thrashing and screeching from a pond inside our compound,

where children splashed unsettled black water on each other,
we'd stroll the schoolhouse path
hand in hand, in pairs or clusters,
and passing the commissary along the way we'd hear

strokes from constant, on-going ping-pong inside,

the voices of Sipas and Tony,
old records, an accordion wheezing.

Sundays, we'd go roam the fields,

or just stand around, down by the gameyard,
to watch the men tossing a basketball
get worked up over each point,
or sit back inside our low-slung shed of a moviehall
to watch some cheap slapstick, and then
pour out shouting, the whole slew of us
flooding one hillside,

while down below in the Yugoslav hall

harmonicas played and the dancing went on, with
frog-croaks drifting above the fields and on through
gardens where people wandered the hedgerows and bushes
as solitary dreamers
to look off toward a blazing shimmer of lights
in faraway Kassel and hear
the trains go pounding by,

until one day, toward spring, the departures started.

Saying our good-byes, kissing each other
as old friends down the years, having shared the long haul,
one room, one fate,
we carried out our pitiful belongings,
our bits and relics,
and climbed up into the trucks to look back
from under the canvas top at friends who were to stay behind,

eyeing their small cluster,

the few faces there, people standing
lined up by the edge of the lot, already starting to fade back:

and listened for the last time

to the noises of the compound, and looked at the barracks,
that cloud of dust off the road a last cover
hanging back there, obscuring the years,
the friends and the past, our shared memories:
looked out from under the canvas,
eyes steady, fixed on the road.

I. Images
1.
Someone
stands

where he
waded in,
midstream.

Nothing
seems
to be
bothering
him,

standing
there
calm,

stock
still,
to watch

the
float
bobbing,
fog
drifting.

2.
Once
again,
it's
raining.

I
lie
here
and
listen

to
rain
drops
breaking

on the
yard

as
though
raining
into
the soul
itself.

3.
The man
sitting

deep in
orchard
shade

is
watching
appletrees
the heat
struck

sky
all
trembling
linden.

4.
It's just

this image

just this
river
-willow
a bird
swings

just this
burning
sun
in the lips
of a stream

just this.

5.
Motion
-less
skiffs
burn

in a pale
noonday
sun.

Where
I
sit

there's
no
breeze,
no
sound,

except
for a
power
-boat
from

across
the
bay.

6.
Someone
sitting
on
shore

watches
the sun
being
reflect
-ted,

the
grass

shifting,

then
lifts
his
eyes
back
up.

II. In the Woods

1.
I
too,
now
halfway
through
my life,

entered
a
dark
woods,

lost
track,
saw
no
more
signs,

and
now
have
to
start
all
over
again,

and
all
I thought,
I thought
was
my
real
self,

drops
off
just
now,

so
I
stand
stripped
down
to

basic
first
things,

asking
where
I
am
and
what
I am,

straining
to
hear
some
-thing
in the
silence,

hearing
bound
-less
void
inside
things,

seeing
the
past

keep
falling
back,

feeling
that
with
each
new
word,
urge,
sense
that

I am,
I am
back
at my
source,

with
all
my
gain
and
loss,

sheer
night
all

around
me

now
I
stand
here
alone.

2.
I
look for
new
forms
which
would
let me,
let me
disclose
the whole
memory
of my
experience.

Aimlessly
pacing,
going
this
way
and

that,

just
to keep
coming
back,
while
everything
inside,
breaking
and
raging,
raging
to escape,

stays
locked up,
un
-told.

Life's
abs
-cess!

Was
all
I drummed
myself
up
for,

for nothing,
nothing at all,
going
deeper,
deeper
in,

going

in
ever
widening
circles,
in
-scribing,
scribing
ever
larger
circles
inside,
trying
and
trying,

again
and
again,
to reach,
reach for
the untold

sense and
purpose
to
my
existence,

asking
and
asking,
starting
again

to listen
in on
silence
itself,

ignoring
the fact
that
silence
never
speaks,

or
the fact
there's
nothing
to follow
the

question,

that
the
answer
to
every
question
is
still
only
silence,

not believing
in
silence,
I go
on,

to no end
touching,
touching
and
rubbing up
to
things:

their
cold
stare

comes
piercing
through
and
stays here,
stays in,
im
-pene
-trable,
dumb,

to corroborate
all there is.

3.
So
I'm
back,
back
to
trying,
trying to
wrench the
mystery
out
from
the core
of myself,

trapped

inside
an un
-breach
-able
isolation,

stray
-ing
deeper
and
deep
-er
in.

In
rock
I
found
my
source
solid
stiff,
waiting.

At times,
it seems
I'm
so
close,
close

to
things,

I tremble
to set
foot on
the earth.

All you
people
I've
seen
no
more
into
than
into
things -

seeing
you
merely
as
move
-ment,
po
-etry --

just as
a rain

-drop
will
spill from
a brim
-ming
cloud,

not
of
its own
force,
or
heat,
yet
in
-sep
-erable
from
both.

Just
what
makes
you
so
different,
or better,
more in
-depen

-dent,
or
free,
and
what
from?

No
-thing
I
can
say.

From the
brink of
dreams,

I
look
into
the rain
as
into
my
-self,

my eyes
fix
on

things

and
so
merge
with

things
I look
at
as
at
myself,

just as
remote
from both --

so
the fault
right there
is
my own
fault.

My own
wretched
head.

4.

O
friends,

I was
aching
to tear,
tear out
some
bit
of
the
truth
from
inside
myself,

or of
beauty,

fingers
grop
-ing
blind
in a
thicket
all emotion.

For
all
the

many
times
I tried
to get
clear,
I
just
strayed
deeper
in.

Silence
is all
there now
appears
to be,
as I
look out
from
inside,

an artic
music
of the spheres
the only
sound
agrippa
von
nettes
-heim

the
time
-lines
runn off
and
merge.

O
my friends,

I
didn't follow
your
fate,

nor
you
mine,

and
I
don't know
where
we are
now,

what
distance
or

nearness
we
share,

if it's
language
of matter
or
of spirit
we
speak --

the con
-spiracy
of things
I'm
trying
to
break
free of --

my
heart's
own
impul
-ses
drive
me
to

disrupt
my
rhythms
and
constantly

confine me
to
the heart
of space,

without
reprieve.

5.
O
Europe,
like a
child,
you
still
have
a gleaming
past.

Though
you
shattered

my childhood --

so I
still
carry
my
rui
-ins,
even now,
sorting
and
patching,

trying to
pick
out
some
sense of
unity,

or
conti
-nuity.

And
it
was
you
turned
and

burned
me
into
a

stray
scrap,
with no
place to
fit in,

fall
-ing
and
fall
-ing.

6.
To
-day
it
all
fell apart,

nothing
makes
sense,

it's

things
I'm alone
with.

No more,
to
aim for,

except this
desire
thirsting
under
a heavy
sky.

And
second
now,
I might
break
apart.

Alone,
I sit
staring
out
the window.

In
daytime,

street
noises
are like
a knife.

I don't
know how
I hold
out, with
-out
shatter
-ing,
col
-lap
-sing --

Looking
at
my
hand,

the
veins
twisting --

un
-able
to
solve
life's

rid-dling

si
-lence,
I sink
deeper
in.

7.

To
-day,
I'm
all
alone,
all
by
myself,

trying
to grasp
every
-thing
over
again,
fresh

from
the

first,
out of
nothing --

pre
-positions,
propositions,
words,
things --

start
out
word
by word,
thought
by thought,
act
by act,

and try
to build
myself
up

by leaving
everything
open,

with no

assumed
direc
-tion --

all on
intu
-ition,
letting
improvi
-sation
guide me,

a
-voiding
the
paved
roads

(I know
where
they
lead
to,
Eu
-rope!)

or any
straight
lines --

even
to
going
around
dis
-oriented,
in
no
hurry,

with
no
place
to go,
no
more
to
look at
either,

so
to
go
this
way
or
that,
to
no
purpose,

and
listen
in
on
each
and
every
new
er

-eratic
heart
-beat,

non
-sense
soun
-ding
new
word,

soul
shim
-mer,

try to
start
prying
the

truth
open
again --

not
by
questioning,
or
responding,
but
by a given
grace;

leaving
logic
and
reason
behind.

(I
know
that
logic
and
reason
of
yours,
Eu
-rope!)

So
I go
more
by
instinct
than
insight --

groping
-ly,
strain
-ing
to
hear,
going
by
touch,
as
often
getting
lost,

fin
-gering
tracks
that
cen
-tur
-ies
im

-bed
-ded.

There
are
times
I'll
feel
a breeze
fresh

on my
fingers
or
eyes --

or
less
often,
drops
of
light,
spray
-ing
sparks,

briefly
throw
light
on

the
horizon -then go
all
dark
again --

8.
I
keep
going
in
circles.

Grasp
-ing
none
of
it,

while
the
latest

words
and
images
drift

out
of
reach,
ir
-retrievable.

Darkness
encloses
me
on
all
sides.

I'm
standing at
the last
stop
there
is.

It's
here
the
fo
-rests,
vast
deserts
start,

dark

-ness
and
silence
alone
wait
for
me.

Old Is The Hush of Rain

Old is the hush of rain over the branches of underbrush; and the hoarse
cries of the black cocks are old in the red summer dawn

old, this our speech:

of yellow fields of oats and barley, of shepherds' campfires in the blown

wet loneliness of autumn,
of the potato harvests, of the summer heats, of winter's white glint,
creak and hiss of sleighs

of wagons log-laden, of stones in fallow fields, of red brick stoves,

of gypsum in the pastures

and then at lamplit evening, as the autumnal fields go gray,

of wagons for tomorrow's market, of drowned October highways washed away

days of the potato harvest.

Old, this our life interminable generations

that walked over the fields
and traced their steps over the black earth

each foot of land still speaks and breathes the fathers. For from
these cool stone wells
they watered their evening herds,
and when the clay floors of their cottages wore out

and the walls crumbled slowly,

from these fields they dug up the yellow sand,
from these pits, yellow clay.
And when we too depart, others will rest on the same boundary-stones,
scythe down the same lush meadows, plough these fields. And as they sit
beside the tables, after work, each table, each clay pitcher, each beam in
the wall will speak. They will remember wide gravel-pits of yellow sand,
and in wind-ruffled fields of rye the voices of our women singing from the
flaxen edges

and this first scent in a new cottage: fresh fragrance of moss!

Old is the hush of rain over the branches the horses whinnying in the
summer nights, the chirp and chime of harrows, rollers, ploughs,
grindstones of the mills, the green smells from the meadow, steeping flax,
white gleam of kerchief of the weeders in the gardens.

Old is the hush of rain over the banches of underbrush; and the hoarse
cries of the black cocks are old in the red summer dawn

old, this our speech.

From Letters
In Praise of Heat
Ah, the summers of
New York!
Adrenalin of 95 degrees! 100!
Happy I walk the streets of New
World, panicking about the next
bill, on top of all the others -banks, Ft.Lee, and the Fluxus artists
of last October, still not paid -I don't open Jackson Mac Low's
letters --

ah, I need it all, it drives me mad

and keeps me going, these debts and these
constant emergencies, threatenings,
each worse than the other,
since... since winter 1953 on
Avenue A, Gallery East -- not far from where
I met Lilly -no, I didn't move far away, my friends,
not far at all --

and, I tell you, you get used to it all

and it's just another heat, another
day and 95 degrees and then maybe
goes up to 100 and everything seems to
about to crash or, say, melt, and Robert,
even Robert seems to lose his cool -- I wish
he'd eat some chocolate, but he's forbidden to do
so -- so we write some desperate irrational
letters and sit on phones and,
I tell you, it's very very hot and
we sleep horribly and sweat -- it goes up to
105 and more, maybe 120.

Ah, no end to our summer heat, but that's

adrenalin we need to live, it's our way
of living, it seems, and if, imagine!
suddenly everything would get normal and
cool and suddenly no angry calls
and threats to turn off electricity
and phones, and close the Ft.Lee vault,

and Nat West, three months behind

by now in payments -- and what's her
name, calling for her $75 from four
years ago -the heat would drop to maybe 70
and we'd look around and listen in disgust:

ah, how normal, disgustingly, and how like

everybody else's
our lives have become, with no
threats and no crashes and no emergencies
and no crazy woman coming to our door about
the street lamps with no bulbs because we have
no three dollars to buy them --.

Ah! I like this heat! I think it's

reaching one hundred, it's going up,
I am all excited -- the rats are leaving the
ship -- they think it will sink -- Ah, you
little ratties, you don't know we are the
super rats, Jack knew it! -- and no hurricane
no heat will sink us!
It's in our blood, the disasters, shipwrecks and
supper heats & constant sinkings -- it's
our very nature! So let's go to Sophie,
Julius, let's have a beer -- later
we'll stop at Max Fish, to see Gloria
who just shaved her head & put her hair in
a jar of formaldehyde, in a Gallery -Ludlow street, just a door from Gallery

East, anno 1953 -she serves us beer for free, and we'll
play pool, maybe --

"It hits you like a hot hair dryer, this heat,"

said Raimund. "This is what Peter said,"
he continued, as we were driving
in his happy jeep through the 110 degrees
of New York evening. "He said 'when
the lemmings are marching towards their mass
suicide, the avantgarde stays
in the back,' "
and we laughed. Ah, Peter, we wish you'd be
here with us this evening and
P.Adams, and Gozo, Istvan, Giuseppe,
Hermann, and DoDo Jin Ming --

So be calm, be calm, dear friends, be calm

in the very eye of
storm: we do not budge, we enjoy the sweat,
we like the scorching heat, we like
when it hits 100 and
more --

go, heat, go go go, rise up and up and

up -- we are the junkies of the constant
heat! we are the Super Rats of
cinema --

go up, heat,

go!

A Requiem for the XXth Century

Millennium ended fifteen minutes
ago,
I watched it all on TV.
Fiji, New Zealand, Tokyo, Moscow,
Paris, etc.
It happened as I was splicing
my film, it fell between the splices,
so to speak. Between the splices of a film
entitled As I Was Moving Ahead
Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses
Of Beauty.
Wiener Waltz is playing on radio,
a minute ago was the
Ninth Symphony.

Now I am typing and thinking of

you, my dear friends,
in Tokyo, Paris, Hamburg, Vilnius, So
Paolo, Madrid and many other cities
and towns and villages, some of them
nameless.
Ah, Peter and Hermann, I almost forgot
Vienna! That will cost me a bottle of
Veltliner.

The radio guy is yapping now about all the

great events of the century.

But I still have to hear about Apollinaire
and Vallejo and Buuel and Trakl, Huidobro,
Cocteau, Yessenin, Isidore Isou,
Gertrude Stein, and the donkeys of
Avila, and Julius and Auguste, and my
childhood river Roveja, and Maxi,
Anthology's cat, and the names of all
the women I loved, and anything that
really matters and formed the mind & essence
of my century.

But I don't really care this way or

that, because Harry Smith, who still lives
at Anthology /he was heard doing research
in the Library last night/ -- he told me
that everything remains in the stars
eternally,
and Harry knew it, Agrippa von Nettesheim
knew it too, & so knew Giordano Bruno &
Giuseppe Zevola & Barbara Rubin &
especially, I am sure of that,
Storm De Hirsch.

So it's all here now and

tomorrow, the poets and things that really
matter, like friendship, love,
angels, fluttering of butterfly wings
in China, and things
like that, and I would include the poetry of

Jackson McLow, Basho and, absolutely,

potato pancakes, the kind I make, the kind
my mother taught me to make / no onions,
please! /.

So I celebrate it all now, late this

night, exactly thirty minutes into the
Third Millennium, and I drink to you all -and ah, to Robert Kelly and Tuli Kupferberg too -as we move ahead... Dear Gozo, it's all
a big joke on us, anyways, invented
by some Zen lunatic or
Taylor Mead.

NEXT DAY
we sat at Dempsey's /we didn't feel like
going to the Mars Bar somehow/
Audrius and Auguste, drinking our Irish amber
beer. "I saw the morning come," said
Auguste, "and it was a very clear &
beautiful morning, so it's a good sign
for the Millennium."
So we drank to that. Then Auguste said, "Ah,
remember how they gave us
all that stuff, in madhouse, the Russians,
and I used to push it under my tongue
and later spit it out."
"I did the same," said Audrius.

This was a conversation absolutely not like in

Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz, but I thought

it summed up for me the
Twentieth Century, I mean, the one that people
are talking about & celebrating,
not mine.

Ah, how many pills, injections did your body

take, dear Auguste,
how many injections were forced upon you,
it's amazing you still play music and sing
and paint and are alive.

EARLIER that day

we sat around the Round Table, at
Anthology. We waited for Masha, but she
called in, was sick. She had planned to bring
some Russian herring & cabbage &
stuff.
So we had some wine instead.
How come, we wondered, with all the haloobaloo,
Y2K and everything, how come there was no mention
of the Person responsible for it all!
So we drank to Jesus Christ. Auguste
drank red Rhone wine, I drank cheap
Vino Verde because I am all in
Spain, these days, I think I am half
Spanish.

Ah, my friends!
We all had some great times occasionally.

Red, blue, and yellow & orange

times. Not everything was that black,
you have to
admit.
We all saw some glimpses of beauty &
happiness as we moved ahead, even in
stagnation,
as we moved ahead through the horrors of
the Twentieth Century -- did you see the picture
of the mother carrying a child, in
Sarajevo, or was it in some other
bloody place, blood running over the
child's face, the picture was in
color. Ah, ah, what a way to begin
life! Twentieth Century, I hope it will never come back,
not even in bad dreams, I hope it will be
swallowed by some deep hole and spat out
into Dante's circle number
Nine.

Scars are on our bodies, minds,

souls even,
some of us do not always sleep well
all night -- I don't -- sometimes we still
jump up, not knowing why, as horrors
linger.

But I embrace you, the new Millennium, full of

hope, fool's hope, trustingly,
still believing in miracles, Santa Teresa de

Avila & St.Francis, little birds & bugs

& I cried for the broken trees of Versailles,
I still believe in all things unimportant &
useless for my contemporaries
as I move ahead,
as we all do,
all alone in our essential,
binding loneliness, still believing in
Paradise,
very very invisible but transparently
shining and
inevitable.

It's late at night.

I can not sleep. It's
three in the morning. I keep writing.
What else can I do. What else
can I do. What else can I
do.

Even the flesh is not

burning.
Eyes, and where are the
eyes. I want to see the
eyes.
Tell me, tell me -- and do not
turn away.
I want to look into them. But I do not
dare, from fear what's in
them --

as I keep moving ahead,

ahead.

End of Year Letter to Friends

11:30 at night this 23rd of December. Tomorrow my
birthday.
Message from Stan, on phone. Cancer is "terminal."
That's what they call it.
"They quit, gave up. Cancer too spread. Doctors won't
operate."
Message from Fred Camper: Stan broke, no money to pay
doctors, hospitals.

Walked to Anthology. Snowing lightly.

Paul Morrissey came. Legstiff, arthritis... Hopped
up & down the stairs, on one leg, in a funny
way.

What else is bad?

Eight Palestinians killed... Small type,
page sixteen.

Last night we stayed till 1:00, Anthology's

Christmas party.
Now it's late. The day gone by. Pip, Julius,
Fabiano, drinking at Dempsey's, reviewing the
year. Not thinking about the horrors,
trying to be positive. But I am very skeptical

about it all, the world is so bad, I mean, the

people, the whites, the jews, the muslims, africans,
mexicans, russians -- all bad bad
bad.

I am innocent, I said last night. I only hurt some small

animals, as a child. But I have asked their forgiveness
so many times now, so many times, I've even cried
remembering what I did to baby crows, frogs.
I think they have forgiven me.
So I am innocent, I don't think I have done any real
bad thing in my mature grown-up life,
I really feel so.
I don't even know how to get angry, or shout,
it always shocked me, it shocks me when I hear high angry
voices.
No no no, I don't understand any of it,
no, I don't, I don't.

But tomorrow is my birthday and I should feel

more grown up, especially at my age, I should know more
about the real ways of this world.
But I don't.

The world passed me by, I missed it, I only heard

noise and I saw blood in newspapers and salesmen on TV
selling things I have no use for.
I only own two pairs of pants, some shirts, ran out of
socks last week.

So where am I? The ultimate failure, according to the

statistics and evaluations of real life authorities
in Terra anno 2002 -- just before my birthday,
which is tomorrow /same as Joseph Cornell's and Louise
Bourgeois -- Happy B'Day, Joseph, and Chre
Louise/.

NEXT DAY:
We all had a lot of music and dance and wine at
Anthology, and the Indians, the Uta Nation came and blessed
the avantegarde, they never did that for
Hollywood. And the Bear Boy sang a Uta Nation song in
our honor. And the snow was still falling
outside.

DAY AFTER:
Espresso with Raimund. More bad news. Robert
just moved out of his Bleecker Street place, his leg
hurts too much, can not be operated, heart too weak,
moved into a room with an elevator, now looking at
New York through a twentieth floor window,
a great view, he said /supposedly/.
And DoDo is very very depressed, she said so on phone,
very depressed.

"I know that I am because my little dog recognizes

me," said Gertrude Stein, it's on my wall.
That much for all the philosophy of
Being.

Peter is in Brasil. He hates Christmas in Vienna, the

shopping. And P.Adams still doesn't drink.
And Annette had three trips to hospital this year,
she just called, is back home, in a wheel chair,
broken leg.

"I wish you a better year, only one break, one

trip to the hospital next year, not three," I said.
"No no no," she said, "don't say that..."

NEXT DAY:
The snow melted. I spent three hours chipping ice
from the sidewalk, with Andy and Robert. Broke the
shovel.

My eyes are about to close, it's very late. But I

refuse to sleep. Go to the icebox, get some wine.
Wonder, I wonder where is agns, and Brigitte. And all
three Domoniques and three Daniles.
Reading Cendrars.

The mind is failing. Maybe I should watch TV.

Maybe there is something with Clint Eastwood or
Bruce Willis -- some action, yes, some
action, that's what I need right now --

NEXT DAY:
Talk with Stan. "I have accepted it, I am not
worrying about it any more. I am continuing
my work, now, scratching film with my nails &

spit. I have no problems with dying at

all. But it's hard for the children as they watch
me die."

LATER:
We played and danced into the morning at Anthology,
all the lonely souls with no other place
to go New Year's Night. It was really quite amazing
with all those musicians coming from the street
out of the Lower East Side night -our own Free Music Philharmonic sort of,
we thought. And we all had a great time & at
midnight we all went into the streets and danced
and played happily, not minding the cold
at all --.

Yes, life is going on. Forget the utopias:

life is here and now.
I suddenly wonder: where is Harmony tonight, what
crazy fantasies are fluttering around his amazing
head. Sebastian just called from somewhere in
China, somewhere near Burma and Tibet.

"Have you tried any dog meat yet," I asked.

"No," he said, "And I am not sure I will -- You know
how they kill the dogs here, in the markets? In the
bags, with knives, they stab them, in the bags,
and you'll never hear a more terrible bloody
cry like that of the dog dying, stabbed, bagged,
helpless, I don't know how I managed to take

it," he said.

NEXT DAY:
Pip came back, visited Stan. In bed all the
time, too weak. "They told me I should self-hypnotize
myself and face the cancer cells and kill them.
Which I did -- I mean, it's no big deal for me
to go in that kind of state -I've done it all my life, working on my
films. So I faced them. I saw them, the cancer
cells. And I saw they were so beautiful, I couldn't
kill them, no..." said Stan.

Later, Peter calls, from Vienna, just back from

Brasil. They still kill Indians there even now,
the gold diggers do. And they the diggers are killed
by the gold merchants. "I am resigning from the
human race," he said. "I'll do the same,"
I said.

So that's that.
But this doesn't mean I am giving up in what all those
before me, before us, those who were foolish like me
and some of you, of us, believed in and worked hard
to preserve in order that the City
wouldn't be destroyed by gods -- that is, as long
as there is at least one who believes in the not
believable, in short, in
Poetry.