Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen (книги серии онлайн .TXT) 📗

hundreds of millions shiver in the north

students rise at dawn and run around the soccerfield

Workmen sing songs in the dark to keep themselves warm

while I sleep late, smoke too much cough,

turn over in bed on my right side

pull the heavy quilt over my nose and go back

to visit the dead my father, mother and immortal

friends in dreams. Supper’s served me,

I can go out and banquet, but prefer

this week to stay in my room, recovering

a cough. I don’t have to sell persimmons on the streetcurb

in Baoding like the lady with white bandanna’d head

Don’t have to push my boat oars around a rocky corner

in the Yangtze gorges, or pole my way downstream

from Yichang through yellow industrial scum, or carry water

buckets on a bamboo pole over my shoulder

to a cabbage field near Wuxi—I’m famous,

my poems have done some men good

and a few women ill, perhaps the good

outweighs the bad, I’ll never know.

Still I feel guilty I haven’t done more;

True I praised the dharma from nation to nation

But my own practice has been amateur, seedy

—even I dream how bad a student I am—

My teacher’s tried to help me, but I seem

to be lazy and have taken advantage of money

and clothes my work’s brought me, today

I’ll stay in bed again & read old Chinese poets—

I don’t believe in an afterworld of god or even

another life separate from this incarnation

Still I worry I’ll be punished for my carelessness

after I’m dead—my poems scattered and my name

forgotten and my self reborn a foolish workman

freezing and breaking rocks on a roadside in Hebei.

Shanghai, December 5, 1984, 10 A.M.

II

“Ignorant and contentious” I spent lunch

arguing about boys making love with a student.

Still coughing, reclusive, I went back to bed

with a headache, despite afternoon sun

streaming through the French windows

weakly, to write down these thoughts.

Why’ve I wanted to appear heroic, why

strain to accomplish what no mortal could—

Heaven on earth, self perfection, household

security, & the accomplishment of changing the World.

A noble ambition, but that of a pathetic dreamer.

Tomorrow if I recover from bronchitis

I’ll put on a serious face and go down to the Market.

2:30 P.M.

III

Lying head on pillow aching

still reading poems of Tang roads

Something Bai said made me press my finger

to my eyes and weep—maybe his love

for an old poet friend, for I also

have gray on my cheek and bald head

and the Agricultural poet’s in the madhouse this week

a telegram told me, more historical

jackanapes maybe tragic maybe comic

I’ll know when I come home around the world.

Still with heavy heart and aching head I read on

till suddenly a cry from the garden reminded me

of a chicken, head chopped off running circles spurting blood

from its neck on farm yard dirt, I was eleven years old,

or the raptured scream of a rabbit—I put down my book

and listened carefully to the cry almost drowned

by the metal sound of cars and horns—It was a bird

repeating its ascending whistle, pipe notes burst

into a burble of joyful tones ending wildly

with variable trills in swift succession high and low

and high again. At least it wasn’t me, not my song,

a sound outside my mind, nothing to do with my aching brow.

3:30 P.M.

IV

I lay my cheek on the pillow to nap

and my thoughts floated against the stream

up to Zhong Xian west of the Three Gorges

where Bai Juyi was Governor.

“Two streams float together and meet further on

and mingle their water. Two birds fly upward

beneath the ninth month’s cold white cloud.

Two trees stand together bare branched

rooted in the same soil secretly touching.

Two apples hung from the same bough last

month and disappeared into the Market.”

So flowed my mind like the river, like the wind.

“Two thoughts have risen together in dream therefore

Two worlds will be one if I wake and write.”

So I lifted my head from my pillow and Woke

to find I was a sick guest in a vast poor kingdom

A famous visitor honored with a heated room,

medicines, special foods and learned visitors

inquiring when I’d be well enough to lecture my hosts

on the musics and poetics of the wealthy

Nation I had come from half way round the world

8:15 P.M.

V  China Bronchitis