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The Poet Laureate of the City of
San Francisco since 2006 (his term is ending in October 2008).
Jack Hirschman
has published more than a hundred books and chapbooks, half of
them translations of poets from 9 languages.
His own masterwork is The Arcanes (available through aggiefalk@hotmail.com).
This year City Lights Books has published his All That's Left in
its Poet Laureates Series of poems. He lives in San Francisco
THE HOUSE OF THE SETTING SUN
'Become
a rag again and the poorest may wave you'
---Pier Paolo
Pasolini: To the Red Flag
I put my mouth to your misery, New Orleans,
inundated and soaking with death.
Here lies: war lies piled so high, this floating
prison of a cemetery cries out of rage
at the end of its breath. Here, in the last delta,
Desire lies on its side, is rolled, and rolled
over upon by its own government, and crushed.
Summertime is over and the livin' is dead,
and 'round midnight all hopes are looted.
No one will come clean of the Katrina
of New Orleans in this sinking
house of the setting sun.
Bodies so Black and so blue from loving
what wouldn't spit on their shoes if they
needed a shine. Let alone a dime. Or water.
America, you were always scorched earth
in our mouths, always a baptism of crap,
always a rain of disaster streaming
down the panes of our broken eyes.
Now our rags are the most torn,
our jazz the most blue, our poor the poorest
that can be worn in the soul's thrift-shop.
Now that all is lost and there's only nothing
to lose…'Long live the courage
and the sorrow and the innocence of the poor!'
The real flag’s in tatters. Begin to wave it.
THE WAYS OF LOVE ARCANE
' Only in its being gone does it exist, '
I whispered in the candle-lit dark.
Your response was the art of loving
which is a part of what I meant.
And it was a masterpiece you wrote
with your tongue.
***
But is Love gone' That love, yes, has.
But there's no end of loving here
or wherever you are, or even where
nowhere is.
It’s not a fool or a rule, it doesn't mistake
the image for its intended effect,
like eating vodka. It includes the image
and the eaten vodka because it began
both of them in the first place by simply
being Being. A man knows no other
word for it except perhaps to write a poem,
and he does that even fitting a screw
into a wall, or drinking a cold glass of beer,
or hooraying at a sports event,
or wearing his woman's brassiere, that's how
everything it is.
***
You cling to my mouth and I to yours
because the meaning of us is our voices.
I fell for yours before I knew what the rest
of your body can do.
The japasutram of your mouth already was
preparing this mat of soft straw
on which we're set in an erotic iconography
many turn the pages of and see
us delighting in making love to the sound
of their eyes.
That is the commune of voices our own
have striven to bring to a world
disappearing into voicelessness. Your lips
obsess me, above and below.
How they adore being the two fingers of a
swooning scream. And with my body
half-turned, legs spread high apart, how
your tongue at my taint and your ream
ecstasizes me to bury my own in the depths
of that rose that never is seen except,
fold by lobe and petal by petal, by a braille
my tongue alone reads, opening the sun
in the darkness to the slow explosions of
blinding inner sight.
***
This primitive of me is natural. Mind is not.
Hey, animal, show me your instincts.
They won't scare me, even unto death.
Mind does.
I'd like to go to sleep with utter mindlessness.
I'd stroke your nipples and now
that the rain's falling go between the drops
with my want of all your tit.
This is form of mindless reason grounded
in the reign of body. Nothing would be
a shiver in the wind if we didn’t give it shape.
Mind does that, but from the body mind is in.
So admit: Body's all. Mind should be that, but
only when it's lost does it become true body.
Your body came to me through a bodily
gesture that was mine on yours. It began
the end of your mind though you fight like
the dickens to keep it.
Our love is mindless, that is we truly care
and don't just stare at it.
***
And if I whisper, if I but move in the minutest
way, I'm so afraid of losing you, I would die
of being unable to wake beside your shape;
and so I freeze in my heat and let you rummage
through my body, pat, softly slap my ass and play
under my bra (which I always wear because
my breasts are afraid of your hands except when
I'm sitting straight up on you and you whisper
how extraordinarily ripe and voluptuous they are
for one as old as I am).
***
You tell me I make loud animal sounds in my sleep.
I am an animal. I'm a buffalo-unicorn. A bare bear.
I eat the depths of meat and bite its lips. I swell
with smitten and yoga on the belly of your sex.
I am sated with emptiness as in a sutra. Let's face
it: the best of us is Buddhist, the vestigial
bone of the bone of shmoogadoo I smoked last
night, made love with you, slept ten hours
gloriously without any animal sounds, and so
can't sleep tonight without writing this poem.
Want another? I'll give you another anytime.
I’m a man. Past a point I'm afraid of nothing.
O for those Floating Bear days when we wrote
hugs and published our syllables along with our feet.
***
Listen, this is the sound of my sleepless breathing.
I know nothing but this slavery.
I never intended it, it fell into my arms, a silent
abundance. I couldn't keep it away from
the center of my essence, and now it’s too late,
I'm gone to the dogs with you. Everything is
nothing until you wipe my ass with your kisses
and I go forward back to originary light.
***
I’m going to alight on your sleeping eyelid and close
my wings there. And sleep with you as if there were
no need anymore to waken. And when the sun rises,
it will be inside you, and I'll see everything.
THE BEARD ARCANE
1.
The beard I told you of, Marabou,
not the one between thighs, not
the seeable, haveable or ungetat-
able delicious thicket under a
discreet garment, but the truly
hidden one given me to see and
to turn the inner key of the secret
door open to the kabbala balance
of your lovingly deep affections---
this is to praise that beard, which
is concealed and most precious in
all its dispositions, beard which
neither superior nor inferior have
known, which is the praise of all
praises---beard which no man or
prophet or saint has approached
to be able to behold it, whose
hairs hang down to the breast, the
concealment of concealments, the
truth of all truth, which possessed
me from the moment I beheld it in
you on the eve of the 26th birthday
of the death of my son David, and
the memorial reading for Sandy
Taylor, the revolutionary publisher
of our works, for whom you'd come
to San Francisco to pay poetic tribute.
2.
How borne from both of them and from
the Russian in me must be my feelings,
for my mouth simply fills with kisses
whenever we’re together, Marabou.
I want to kiss and kiss the mystery in you,
which is no freaky curiosity: you aren't
a sideshow in a circus but a lovely African-
American woman, mother of two grown
sons, a poet of Motown in rhythm and
sensitivity. For months after I first saw it
in you I asked: Why that? and Who? And
today, two months later, in Italy I was
struck by the mezla-flash of truth: I asked
your image: Who are you? And it answered:
'I have 70 names that reflect all the energies
in the world and all are based on the name
of the king of kings but mine calls me: Youth.
My essence is boundless jubilation for I'm a
blue river of flame amid the fire that cries out
the name Metatron.' Then I saw David within
you, and with him my old poet friend Allen
---our grandparents, O golden sunflowers, were
from the same town, Kamenetz in Ukrania---
and all of you were one prince of the presence,
which is the Shekinah, which is s/he as you are,
and Enoch as well, angel and scribe, sammasa
and guide and counsel, and in fact the blazing
letters of the holy tetragrammaton .
3.
In the body of beautiful you, O Marabou,
in the vessel you brought with your love,
whose laughter is bright white teeth in a
silken black face, with memory of hands
swinging up and down together like the
swing on the swings in the park known as
paradise---O, I could cover that innermost
beard with the kisses come from the heart
of that star forgotten all these days of both
outright and subtle dismissal! O death giving
back to me what's never left! I'm going to
africa as a molten verb: O jaw, chin, neck,
cheeks and lips, I'm erupting kisses, potselui,
in memory of you whose lights are out yet
who burn forever in my twilight's mourning.
Walk me nowhere. Your hair my years still
sorrows. My clear everything you were. Then
I wanted, now I keep. Many you. Da. Both.
Came the just in my mouth. Came the thirty-
seventh. Framework and then the penning
that opens nothing. What do you want to say?
I love you. Is there more? I walked around
your life for so many years. Now words fill
the silence they fail. No one laters and, across
the meadow of water, my thirst. Open your
mouth, you star of my dying, you broken
bread of me, dead of me, sing.
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