Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen (книги серии онлайн .TXT) 📗
with eyes shut to
where they crawled
like ants on brown old temples
building their minute ruins
and disappearing into the wild
leaving many mysteries
of deathly volition
to be divined.
I alone know the great crystal door
to the House of Night,
a legend of centuries
—I and a few Indians.
And had I mules and money I could find
the Cave of Amber
and the Cave of Gold
rumored of the cliffs of Tumbala.
I found the face of one
of the Nine Guardians of the Night
hidden in a mahogany hut
in the Area of Lost Souls
—first relic of kind for that place.
And I found as well a green leaf
shaped like a human heart;
but to whom shall I send this
anachronistic valentine?
Yet these ruins so much
woke me to nostalgia
for the classic stations
of the earth,
the ancient continent
I have not seen
and the few years
of memory left
before the ultimate night
of war—
As if these ruins were not enough,
as if man could go
no further before heaven
till he exhausted
the physical round
of his own mortality
in the obscure cities
hidden in the aging world
… the few actual
ecstatic conscious souls
certain to be found,
familiars …
returning after years
to my own scene
transfigured:
to hurry change
to hurry the years
bring me to my fate.
So I dream nightly of an embarkation,
captains, captains,
iron passageways, cabin lights,
Brooklyn across the waters,
the great dull boat, visitors, farewells,
the blurred vast sea—
one trip a lifetime’s loss or gain:
as Europe is my own imagination
—many shall see her,
many shall not—
though it’s only the old familiar world
and not some abstract mystical dream.
And in a moment of previsioning sleep
I see that continent in rain,
black streets, old night, a
fading monument…
And a long journey unaccomplished
yet, on antique seas
rolling in gray barren dunes under
the world’s waste of light
toward ports of childish geography
the rusty ship will
harbor in …
What nights might I not see
penniless among the Arab
mysteries of dirty towns around
the casbahs of the docks?
Clay paths, mud walls,
the smell of green cigarettes,
creosote and rank salt water—
dark structures overhead,
shapes of machinery and facade
of hull: and a bar lamp
burning in the wooden shack
across from the dim
mountain of sulphur on the pier.
Toward what city
will I travel? What wild houses
do I go to occupy?
What vagrant rooms and streets
and lights in the long night
urge my expectation? What genius
of sensation in ancient
halls? what jazz beyond jazz
in future blue saloons?
what love in the cafes of God?
I thought, five years ago
sitting in my apartment,
my eyes were opened for an hour
seeing in dreadful ecstasy
the motionless buildings
of New York rotting
under the tides of Heaven.
There is a god
dying in America
already created
in the imagination of men
made palpable
for adoration:
there is an inner
anterior image
of divinity
beckoning me out
to pilgrimage.