Incidents of Travel in Poetry

We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy

and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became

Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the

steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants

were waiting for him to unearth the sun in Elissa. The clouds

were as cool as a dog’s nose pressed against our cheeks. I

notice your eggshell skin is as creamy as a lion’s armpit as we

cross the horizon on strands of Yeats’ silver hair. There is a

light coffee flame in his eyes guiding us like an old Irish house

cleaner holding a candle in a black and white English movie.

Yeats’ lips look like an angry Rimbaud illuminating poetry with

his youth and vigorous sunlight. He knew eternity would vanish

the sun at dusk. He caught it with a rainbow tied to his finger.

There was nothing left after that. We cross the equator

heading north following Emily Dickinson’s black bag containing

stems of her longer poems preserved in darkness and memory

like wild pearls thrown overboard to avoid capture by Spanish

pirates. The islands below float by like water hearts in a child’s

aquarium. We are candy wrappers being blown across the

waxed floors of poetry. We land on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Whitman’s past-port face is grinning at the nineteenth century

in the thorny arms of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose head was

set on fire by God’s little hands. The hands that circumcised

the world. Gertrude Stein is a match flaring on a young

woman’s pillow whose birthmarks have been stolen. We cross

the green Atlantic into World War One. We are met by Rilke

dressed in his Orpheus uniform wearing white sonnet gloves

that once belonged to a stone angel. Rilke offers us a glass of

amontillado made from Lorca’s private stock of gypsy tears.

The sherry is not quite as dry as Wallace Stevens’ lush mango

metaphors of familiar objects. Although Stevens’ poems are

fragrant, there is a lingering afterthought of Pound on the

tongue. Pound collected his misty feelings to make raindrops

into European and American poetry. Vagueness became as

sharp as a pencil. Our blue box is not allowed to attend

Apollinaire’s birthday party held by the august Académie

française on the Eiffel Tower. He is being awarded the “Golden

Frog Souffle Award” and a one-way ticket to the Greek and

Roman past to spend afternoons with Williams filling wheel-

barrows with the twentieth century. Both Apollinaire and

Williams could hail a cab on Madison Avenue in any country.

After the bash we toured Paris and London with D.H. Lawrence

who kept stopping to relieve himself of the great mysteries of

life whenever we went by a Bavarian gentian plant. He claimed

he was writing poetry for his new book: Acts of Attention for

Love Poems. Eliot was rebuilding London when we left. It

reminded him of Detroit or Cincinnati or Saint Louis. He was

removing despair from the weather. He thought it affected

people’s minds and did not want to overload Mayakovsky’s

emptiness with old English churches that pray for water heaters

and cloudless nights. Mayakovsky, on the other hand, insisted

there were bugs in Russia who could write poetry just as

interestingly as Eliot. The Russian winter is elegant cruelty

compared with the English milk-toast weather: “A man without

a cloud in his trousers is not a man.” Eliot thought this was the

most boring statement he had ever heard. Although

Cummings’ poems appear unintentional on the surface, he did

not act like a drunken amputee at the dinner table and always

said pleasant things that came out of nowhere. His

conversation was experimental but logical and he investigated

words, mixing them on paper with a pencil. Cummings was all

etcetera after a few drinks. We move the sun to South

America. Neruda had become an organic poet writing about

the fulcra of yes and no. He wasn’t home when we got there,

so we went over to Allen’s for some microbiotic poetry. As

usual, Allen was rolling incense and howling at America. Allen

was always mystical and beautiful when he walked on the

Lower East Side. When he stepped into the old Jewish

pavement, he mystified the habitués. David Shapiro, the Djinn

of subatomic poetry, asked Allen what was the future of poetry

in the borough of Queens? Allen placed the palm of his right

hand on David’s glistening forehead and said: “David, don’t you

know? The future has no future. It is very old and doesn’t

worry about its future anymore, because it has so little left of

it.” Allen made suicide exhilarating when he wrote Kaddish.

Finally, suicide could talk about the pain of living with

unbearable beauty. Beauty was Frank O’Hara talking to Second

Avenue with a diamond in his head. We were the personal

details in Frank’s harem of private lives when LeRoi insisted on

becoming black, abandoning us for a noble cause, according to

Frank, who loved Imamu Amiri Baraka. We were the details in

Frank’s poems and living one’s life was a detail in Frank’s life.

John Ashbery arrived from Paris on a plane made of expensive

suits, shirts, and ties. Like his poems, he was sparkling and

squeaky clean, dressed in elegant language. He is the

daydream that had become a poet. His subject is to have no

subject. Perhaps a casual reference to someone special. He is

a poet of the less obvious in life: the sestina made of clouds.

We crossed the equator on our way to a cocktail party for Gary

Snyder. There is no other life for his outdoor poems,

hitchhiking on hands-on love. Gary seems to have time to

write poems about the notes in his life. Kenneth, on the other

hand, has a paper cup full of wonderful poems. He can write a

poem about a cathedral living in a paper cup. Kenneth travels

everywhere with his paper cup. At a certain time of day,

Kenneth finds room in his paper cup for perfect days and

perfect moments:

Perfect moments when Frank spoke to us.

Perfect moments when Allen spoke to us.

And they sang to us

with human wings

upon which we sleep.