Painted Beak in My Heart

I have been a wanderer-black cape in the wind,

black hat over knotted brows, eyes seeking,

my feet beating against the frozen earth,

and the days falling like leaves from a dying tree.

I can remember a surly sea gnawing impatiently

at a jagged brown cliff and the sea-birds

screaming restlessly. The clouds rushed down

the rusty sky and the darkness clawed at me.

Why did I ride the machines? There was no escape.

There is no loneliness in the land of machinery.

Flame of steel against the sky, and my face

like a lake at dusk, words riding the night

shouting electric, my voice like an albatross

soaring the placid air and the mocking

symphonies of stone. O mathematical festerings

of man's delirium. Madness is a terrible bird

driving the painted beak into my heart.

The dreary machinations of bright notes,

saxophones at breakfast, trombones

at lunch, tubas at dinner blowing tawdry shapes

through the smoke. Beauty is horrible-

a blurred menace. The scintillating caterpillar

curls in the yellow nest of the lily and

the brilliant blue-bottle hovers over the soft

breast of the rose. Gaudy geraniums bloom

in grimy tedium upon the rickety back-stairs

of tenements. Words slither in the slime

of small bargains. Fish-eyes rot in the alleys,

and the end of love lies swathed in bloody

comics while a ghost of pain begs on the avenues.

Where now, O wanderer, are your winds over mountains

and the still songs of your valleys?

The sharp fierce shrieks of Berlin, Paris,

London and New York race like howling wolves

hurdling the angular forests of skyscrapers,

and a hideous music calls us to the graveyard.

Each oasis of peace dries, shrivels, rots

in the sun, and the dust stirs in the rattling

of the musty pinions of the buzzards.

Their obscene cries echo in my ears.

Now I am walking into the wilderness-

no pylons of crimson flame, no swaying pillars

of turgid smoke, even the pyramids of knowledge

crack and spall and waste into the air.

The words of my dream race over the page

in swift arpeggios. I see the dreary beauty

of a dawn, a noon, and all the emptiness

of planets spinning spinning in a cold dimness,

nothing nothing but the hollow crumble

and the dead echoes of footsteps and the stark

gaunt figure of a woman ragged-bruised,

red-eyed face like a mask of terror-

striding through the dusk of machinery,

wandering the tattered skeletons of sky-dreams,

dissolving stone by spalling stone beam,

by dripping beam and her voice

beating against the lowering clouds, hands

like talons clutching at her frantic breasts,

the wind screaming over the plains and

the shadow of night following slowly.

Stars spin through the heavens and fade

like last year's days, my mind is a waterfall

of tumbling thoughts. There are words not

to be spoken not to be remembered.

Love's ecstatic flower is but the lonely

solemn hour of the night-blooming cereus.

Death is not true for those who live and

life is a brief cry in the desert.

O lovely girl made of forgetfulness,

honey on the mind, dream of the sleep,

peace of the night, butterfly in the sun,

bearer of the hills of serenity,

[18 ]

tell me, voice like a clarinet

in the amber dusk of the corridors where worlds

sapped of their pearly luster roll

endlessly grim forgotten blackened spheres,

where the maker of time counts his hours

and the winds of destiny writhe into birth.

Roar furnace, grow! dynamo, whine turbine, the words

stiffen in the air like waxen poppies

not neon now but blood. What if the steel

is dusty ash against the sky, and the towers

tumble and the pinnacles decay? Where is the answer,

O solitary crowds, O thinkers, in the engines

shredding the clouds, screech of metal

on metal piercing the solid rock, racing the sun

over plain and ocean. Have you not heard

the voice of the moon a green song over firs?

There is a day past the mind where the eagle

wheels over the black mountains and the wanderer

approaches the sheer cliffs, boom of the surf,

lash of the wind, surge of the sea-

standing there breast to the sky

and the mad dirge of nature,

the air throbbing and the bird diving

striking painted beak deep in the heart.