Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen (книги серии онлайн .TXT) 📗
shifting their fronds
in the direction of the balmy wind,
monstrous animals
sprayed up out of the ground
settling and unsettling
as in water …
and later in the night
a moment of premonition
when the plenilunar cloudfilled sky
is still and small.
So spent a night
with drug and hammock
at Chichen Itza on the Castle:—
I can see the moon
moving over the edge of the night forest
and follow its destination
through the clear dimensions of the sky
from end to end of the dark
circular horizon.
High dim stone portals,
entablatures of illegible scripture,
bas-reliefs of unknown perceptions:
and now the flicker of my lamp
and smell of kerosene on dust-
strewn floor where ant wends
its nightly ritual way toward great faces
worn down by rain.
In front of me a deathshead
half a thousand years old
—and have seen cocks a thousand
old grown over with moss and batshit
stuck out of the wall
in a dripping vaulted house of rock—
but deathshead’s here
on portal still and thinks its way
through centuries the thought
of the same night in which I sit
in skully meditation
—sat in many times before by
artisan other than me
until his image of ghostly change
appeared unalterable—
but now his fine thought’s vaguer
than my dream of him:
and only the crude skull figurement’s
gaunt insensible glare is left
with broken plumes of sensation,
headdresses of indecipherable intellect
scattered in the madness of oblivion
to holes and notes of elemental stone,
blind face of animal transcendency
over the sacred ruin of the world
dissolving into the sunless wall of a blackened room
on a time-rude pyramid rebuilt
in the bleak flat night of Yucatan
where I come with my own mad mind to study
alien hieroglyphs of Eternity.
A creak in the rooms scared me.
Some sort of bird, vampire or swallow,
flees with little paper wingflap
around the summit in its own air unconcerned
with the great stone tree I perch on.
Continual metallic
whirr of chicharras,
then lesser chirps
of cricket: 5 blasts
of the leg whistle.
The creak of an opening
door in the forest,
some sort of weird birdsong
or reptile croak.
My hat woven of henequen
on the stone floor
as a leaf on the waters,
as perishable;
my candle wavers continuously
and will go out.
Pale Uxmal,
unhistoric, like a dream,
Tulum shimmering on the coast in ruins;
Chichen Itza naked
constructed on a plain;
Palenque, broken chapels in the green
basement of a mount;
lone Kabah by the highway;
Piedras Negras buried again
by dark archaeologists;
Yaxchilan
resurrected in the wild,
and all the limbo of Xbalba still unknown—
floors under roofcomb of branch,
foundation to ornament
tumbled to the flowers,
pyramids and stairways
raced with vine,
limestone corbels
down in the river of trees,
pillars and corridors
sunken under the flood of years:
Time’s slow wall overtopping
all that firmament of mind,
as if a shining waterfall of leaves and rain
were built down solid from the endless sky
through which no thought can pass.
A great red fat rooster
mounted on a tree stump
in the green afternoon,
the ego of the very fields,
screams in the holy sunlight!
—was looking back