I rode my bicycle down to lower Manhattan on Saturday afternoon in an
attempt to get to "ground zero." I dopped off some things at
the Javits Center, and the void at the southern tip of the island kept
pulling me closer. I asked myself why I had the need to get there, and
all I kept telling myself was that I prefer an open casket, to see the
body in the coffin. At Canal and the West Side Highway, three kids on
bikes told me that they had just returned from Stuyvesant, that there was
a way down "there." I almost got there, but the cops decided to
clear everyone out of there. I rode east and tried to get there from the
southern part of the island. I got as close as Nassau and Liberty, and as
I rode through the smoke and ash and smell of electrical fires and death,
I kept hearing Ginsberg reading "Kaddish." I kept hearing
Ginsberg reading "Kaddish." --Ak
====================
from Kaddish
- for Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I
walk on
the sunny pavement
of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night,
talking,
talking, reading
the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the
phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years
after--
And read Adonais'
last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing
how we
suffer--
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,
prophesy as in the
Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-
swers--and my own
imagination of a withered leaf--at dawn--
Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine accelerating toward
Apoca-
lypse,
the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a
phantom
Russia, or a
crumpled bed that never existed--
like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion--
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the
Dream,
trapped in its
disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom,
worship-
ping each
other,
worshipping the God included in it all--longing or inevitability?--while
it
lasts, a
Vision--anything more?
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my
shoulder,
Seventh Avenue,
the battlements of window office buildings shoul-
dering each other
high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant--and
the sky above--an
old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the south, to--as I walk toward the Lower East
Side
--where you walked
50 years ago, little girl--from Russia, eating the
first poisonous
tomatoes of America frightened on the dock
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward
what?--toward
Newark--
toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned
ice
cream in backroom
on musty brownfloor boards--
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching
school,
and learning to be
mad, in a dream--what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window--and the great Key lays its head of
light
on top of
Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the
sidewalk--in a
single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward
the Yiddish
Theater--and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now--Strange to have moved
thru Paterson, and
the West, and Europe and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys
on
the street, fire
escapes old as you
--Tho you're not old now, that's left here with me--
Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe--and I guess that dies
with
us--enough to
cancel all that comes--What came is gone forever
every time--
That's good! That leaves it open for no regret--no fear radiators,
lacklove,
torture even
toothache in the end--
Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul--and the lamb, the
soul,
in us, alas,
offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair
and teeth--and the
roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,
braintricked
Implacability.
Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you're out, Death
let you out,
Death had the
Mercy, you're done with your century, done with
God, done with the
path thru it--Done with yourself at last--Pure
--Back to the Babe
dark before your Father, before us all--before the
world--
There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you've
gone, it's good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more
fear of
Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades,
debts,
loves, frightened
telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands--
No more of sister Elanor,--she gone before you--we kept it secret
you
killed her--or she
killed herself to bear with you--an arthritic heart
--But Death's
killed you both--No matter--
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks
and
weeks--forgetting,
agrieve watching Marie Dressler address human-
ity, Chaplin dance
in youth,
or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping
Czar
--by standing room
with Elanor & Max--watching also the Capital-
ists take seats in
Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL's hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym
skirts
pants, photograph
of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and
laughing eye, too
coy, virginal solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave--lucky
to
have husbands
later--
You made it--I came too--Eugene my brother before (still grieving now
and
will dream on to
his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer--or kill
--later
perhaps--soon he will think--)
And it's the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself,
now
--tho not
you
I didn't foresee what you felt--what more hideous gape of bad mouth came
first--to you--and
were you prepared?
To go where? In that Dark--that--in that God? a radiance? A Lord in
the
Void? Like
an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with
you?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow
skull
in the grave, or a
box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon--Deaths-
head with
Halo? can you believe it?
Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of
existence,
than none ever
was?
Nothing beyond what we have--what you had--that so pitiful--yet
Tri-
umph,
to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower--fed to
the
ground--but made,
with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,
shaken, cut in the
head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth
wrapped,
sore--freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.
No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought
the
knife--lost
Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy--even in the Spring--strange ghost
thought
some--Death--Sharp icicle in his hand--crowned with old
roses--a dog for
his eyes--cock of a sweatshop--heart of electric
irons.
All the accumulations of life, that wear us out--clocks, bodies,
consciousness,
shoes,
breasts--begotten sons--your Communism--'Paranoia' into
hospitals.
You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later.
You of
stroke.
Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death.
Is
Elanor
happy?
Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache
over
midnight
Accountings, not sure. His life passes--as he sees--and
what does he doubt
now? Still dream of making money, or that might
have made money,
hired nurse, had children, found even your Im-
mortality,
Naomi?
I'll see him soon. Now I've got to cut through to talk to you as I
didn't
when you had a
mouth.
Forever. And we're bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson's
horses
--headed to the
End.
They know the way--These Steeds--run faster than we think--it's our
own
life they
cross--and take with them.
Magnificent,
mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, mar-
ried dreamed, mortal changed--Ass and face done with murder.
In the world,
given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under
pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One
Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,
Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am
unmarried, I'm
hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven,
after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not
light or darkness, Dayless Eternity--
Take this, this
Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some
of my Time, now given to Nothing--to praise Thee--But Death
This is the end,
the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won-
derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by
weeping
--page beyond Psalm--Last change of mine and Naomi--to God's
perfect
Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms!
II
Over and over--refrain--of the Hospitals--still haven't written
your
history--leave it abstract--a few images
run thru the mind--like the saxophone chorus of houses and years--
remembrance of electrical shocks.
By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your
nervousness--you were fat--your next move--
By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you--
once and for all--when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with
my
opinion of the cosmos, I was lost--
By my later burden--vow to illuminate mankind--this is release of
particulars--(mad as you)--(sanity a trick of agreement)--
But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and
spied a mystical assassin from Newark,
So phoned the Doctor--'OK go way for a rest'--so I put on my coat
and walked you downstreet--On the way a grammarschool boy screamed,
unaccountably--'Where you goin Lady to Death'? I shuddered--
and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask
against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by
Grandma--
And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of
the gang? You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on--to
New
York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound--