H e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s b e r g

N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i v e s E d i t i o n

ANNE WALDMAN

So Help Me Sappho (from Iovis 2)

I will

taste your sex, your flower, the white city

can you forget in our poetry

where love making was

sharp

& loosened my limbs

we did many beautiful

things & spoke

together, now

when Adonis dies

we shriek

& tear our dresses

we cry out in a dream

& pray the night last

twice as long

*

got love back a second time

how thoroughly occasional

we cannot know

the precise secret of the accent,

the tonos

but

the bright ribbon reminds

I bite my tongue not to explode

& take a place

around the

alter

do I still long for my virginity?

Hymen! Hymen!

It never left me, girls.

I lay out

soft pillow for your body

& yet

she is subjugated before a father

she is subjugated before a brother

before a son

Tried a hand, he was great at it, cold, torn, speech. A lot of talk, lateral spin. She, the other

one, a creature rapt longer than space in attention, treats the night as warm as comforting. A

wand, read sceptre, old dying grace or place strummed a measure of quality, speed, tension, glut.

And the world market would put up a glut for her gentrification, dress torn. Don’t walk there

in another’s frail grace, don’t walk there where a motor could spin out of control, don’t summon

the wrong kind of warmth like murderer’s breath on a body chaste and rapt in gauze, a chador,

a holy veil. Why motion, what tension, why spit and thrust? Truck roars by, rapt in headgear

or hard line I wasn’t aware of, wasn’t glutted enough for on bad news, wasn’t warmed over

enough for him get off of me in Bosnia in cold thicket’s spin, crying “mercy” in my own religion,

crying Allah’s hard grace. What about doing it, revenge too subtle a grace period, demilitarized

zone, war rapt in no just cause, no mustached force, never positive spin and he, a doctor, was

arguing point of view of brainwashing, propaganda glut. Not old smile-rivalries no more,

but black jealousies, shuddering tremors to tear, to tear the curtain down. Torn. Of stripe

but what of it? Loyalty? What cries the infant who has “seen it all: but warm me, warm me! A

nature of our paralysis, of our lukewarm scream alarms the tabloid reader and she suspects

basic political carriage’s grace has gone awry. Was book a carrier of old psychic pain wrapped

tight as coiled knot in brain, genesis old disputes war-torn hand-written beyond countryside?

beyond borders? A bridge cross over, thug’s glutinous sex-perversion, his head you want to

cut it off & spin & spin & spin & spin & spin outta here, out of whatever hell’s hottest, where

no one cares, where world’s grace is cheap, where no one is watching the show, watching

how pain builds on pain. The Ottoman Empire gloats no more over rich spoils held tight.

What conquering holy rapture could hold sway in valley so desperate, so torn? They are

perpetually wrapt in pain, no end to gluttony of genocide and its spins, absence of grace the

torn worn flame-land.

each according to her own kind bunch of it

stalk

by

root

connect

might induce melancholy

but never fall into illusion

ford the river

heaven on earth

Anarcho Tao / Chaos Linguistics (read “human”, please)

what need of guns

Le Fevre who was a mother

mired in a kind of rant-box

co-congealed

like a huge knot

lambasted

a simple folk

a civilized action

This was an excuse

accused of “turning Sapphic”

in her seventies

a logic to frustration with me

who dares to be different

Albegensian ethos

got sent off

heretical

got sent off

awfully strange

got sent off

the trees, the land. . .

got sent

under someone’s cold eye

got sent off

but wanted to go his own accord

got sent up

prison, prison all the way

what was sent?

his suit of clothes, his criminal mind

got sent up for petty larceny

got sent off

his boat disappearing, Morocco this time?

(I was reading the life of Jean Genet)

got sent

it was overdue

we were all waiting

expel, exile, export

expire not quite yet

nor die of raging fever

skin bloodied

didn’t cut it

tempered by a sinister plan

married to a French woman

forest, to burn, to burn

wooded down

hooded down

bedded down

ashes she didn’t get to sift through

his ashes

but I bought a little metal box

for the ashes of

John Marvin Waldman

as the stars are my witness:

Lesley Waldman, Anne

a matrix

a discipline to be

Grace in her name

but obstacle

her naught legacy

[Originally published in NHS 1996, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs96/index.html#27.]