A Poem for Painters by John Wieners
Our age bereft of nobility
How can our faces show it?
I look for love.
My lips stand out
dry and cracked with want
of it.
Oh it is well.
Again we go driven by forces
we have no control over. Only
in the poem
comes an image-that we rule
the line by the pen
in the painter's hand one foot
away from me.
Drawing the face
and its torture.
That is why no one dares tackle it.
Held as they are in the hands
of forces they
cannot understand.
That despair
is on my face and shall show
in the fine lines of any man.
I had love once in the palmn of my hand.
See the lines there.
How we played
its game, are playing now
in the bounds of white and heartless fields.
Fall down on my head,
love, drench my flesh in the streams
of fine sprays. Like
French perfume
so that I light up as
morning glorys and
I am showered by the scent
of finished line.
No circles
but that two parallels do cross
And carry our souls and
bodies together as the planets
Showing light on the surface
of our skin, knowing
that so much flows through
the veins underneath.
The checks puffed with it.
Our pockets full.
2.
Pushed On by the incompletion
of what goes before me
I hesitate before this paper
scratching for the right words.
Paul Klee scratched for seven years
on smoked glass to develop
his line, Lavigne says: Look
at his face! he who has spent
all night drawing mine.
The sun
also rises on the rooftops
beginning with violet.
I begin in the blue knowing what's cool.
3.
My middle name is Joseph and I
walk beside an ass on the way to
what Bethlehem, where a new babe is born.
Not the second hand of Yeats but
first prints on a cloudy windowpane.
4.
America, you boil over
The cauldron scalds.
Flesh is scarred.
Eyes shot.
The street aswarm with
vipers and heavy armed bandits,
There are bandages on the wounds
but blood flows unabated.
Oh stop
up the drains.
We are run over.
5.
Let us stay with what we know.
That love is my strength, that
I am overpowered by it:
Desire
that too
is on the face: gone stale.
When green was the bed my love
and I laid down upon.
Such it is, heart's complaint,
You hear upon a day in June.
And I see no end in view
when summer goes, as it will,
upon the roads, like singing
companions across the land.
South of Mission, Seattle,
over the Sierra Mountains,
the Middle West and Michigan,
moving east again, easy
coming into Chicago and
the cattle country, calling
to each other over canyons,
careful not to be caught
at night, they are still out,
the destroyers, and down
into the South, familiar land,
lush places, blue mountains
of Carolina, into Black Mountain
and you can sleep out, or
straight across into states
I cannot think of their names
this nation is so large, like
our hands, our love it lives
with no lover, looking only
for the beloved, back home
into the heart, New York
New England, Vermont, green
mountains and Massachusetts
my city, Boston and the sea
again to smell what this clam
ocean cannot tell us. The seasons,
Only the heart remembers
and records in the words
6.
At last, I come to the last defense.
My poems contain no
wilde beestes, no
lady of the lake, music
of the spheres, or organ chants.
Only the score of a man's
struggle to stay with
what is his own, what
lies within him to do.
Without which is nothing,
And I come to this
knowing the waste,
leaving the rest up to love
and its twisted faces
my hands claw out at
only to draw back from the
blood already running there.
