Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen. Страница 194

Each day I give the sea is one of death.

This is the last night of the outward journeying,

The darkness falleth westward unto thee;

And I must end my labors of this evening,

And all the last long night, and all this day:

It doth give peace, thus to torment the soul,

Till it is sundered from its forms and sense,

Till it surrendereth its knowledge whole,

And stares on the world out of a sleepless trance.

So on these stanzas doth a peace descend,

Now I have journeyed through these images

To come upon no image in the end.

So are we consummated in these passages,

Most near and dear and far apart in fate.

As I mean no mere sweet philosophy,

So I, unto a world I must create,

Turn with no promise and no prophecy.

South Atlantic, 1947

          Sweet Levinsky

27 LEVINSKY: Leon Levinsky is a character in Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City.

          A Poem on America

72 ACIS AND GALATEA … versilov: In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s penultimate novel, A Raw Youth, hero Dolgoruki’s father, Versilov, the ex-revolutionary, wore a hair shirt and mused on Poussin’s painting.

II

THE GREEN AUTOMOBILE

(1953–1954)

The Green Automobile

94 NEAL: Neal Cassady, to whom the poem is dedicated.

Neal Cassady (1925–1968) in his first suit, bought second hand in Chinatown, 1946, the day before his return to Denver on Greyhound bus.

Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain

98 SAKYAMUNI: Buddha (563–483 B.C.) Sage born to warrior-caste Sakya family; human aspect of Buddha. Poem interprets noted Chinese painting, Sung dynasty.

98 ARHAT: Self-liberated sage who has not taken Bodhisattva’s vows to liberate all sentient beings.

Havana 1953

100 CAB CALLOWAY: (b. 1907) Ex-law student, stage-show black jazz singer, slick-haired satin-suited early hipster popular band leader who composed and sang “Minnie the Moocher,” “Are You Hep to the Jive,” “Are You All Reet” and “Hi-De-Ho Man.”

101 VIVA JALISCO: Mexican state mariachi music macho whoop, like Viva Texas!

101 FREER: Gallery of Oriental Art, Mall adjunct to Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution.

Siesta in Xbalba

105 UXMAL …: Proper names mentioned in the first part of the poem are those of ruined cities. Xbalba, translatable as Morning Star in Region Obscure, or Hope, and pronounced Chivalva, is the area in Chiapas between the Tabasco border and the Usumacinta River at the edge of the Peten rain forest; the boundary of lower Mexico and Guatemala today is thereabouts. The locale was considered a Purgatory, or Limbo (the legend is vague), in the (Old) Mayan Empire. To the large tree at the crest of what is now called Mount Don Juan, at the foot of which this poem was written, ancient craftsmen came to complete work left unfinished at their death.

On Burroughs Work

122 Written on receiving early “routines” from Burroughs in Tangier, including Dr. Benway in the Operating Room and The Talking Asshole.

W. S. Burroughs, 206 East 7th Street, N.Y.C., Fall 1953, at time assembling “Yage Letters” and visioning Inter-zone Market Naked Lunch. Photo by A.G.

III

HOWL, BEFORE AND AFTER: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

(1955–1956)

Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo

131 MALEST, CORNIFICI, TUO CATULLO: Catullus #38, probably addressed to the erotic “new poet” friend of Catullus, a verse note beginning “I’m ill, Cornificus, your Catullus is ill,” asking for a little friendly word, and ending “Maestius lacrimis Simonideis”—“Sad as the tears of old Simonides.” Ginsberg to Kerouac, on meeting Peter Orlovsky.

Peter Orlovsky by Robert LaVigne, 1954, San Francisco. Author met Orlovsky immediately after viewing this painting, 1403 Gough Street.

Jack Kerouac on Avenue A, Manhattan, 1953, at time of The Subterraneans. Photo by A.G.

Dream Record: June 8, 1955

132 HUNCKE: Herbert E. Huncke (1915–1996), American prose writer. Friend and early contact for Kerouac, Burroughs and the author in explorations circa 1945 around Times Square, where he hung out at center of the hustling world in early stages of his opiate addictions. He served as connection to midtown’s floating population for Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s interviews with that population segment in his celebrated surveys of human sexuality. Huncke introduced Burroughs and others to the slang, information and ritual of the emergent “hip” or “beat” subculture. See the author’s preface to Huncke’s book of sketches and stories, The Evening Sun Turned Crimson (Cherry Valley, N.Y.: Cherry Valley Editions, 1980): “Huncke’s figure appears variously in Clellon Holmes’s novel Go, there is an excellent early portrait in Kerouac’s first bildungsroman The Town and the City, fugitive glimpses of Huncke as Gotham morphinist appear in William Lee’s Junkie, Burroughs’ dry first classic of prose. He walked on the snowbank docks with shoes full of blood into the middle of Howl, and is glimpsed in short sketches by Herb Gold, Carl Solomon and Irving Rosenthal scattered through subsequent decades. … Kerouac always maintained that he was a great story teller.”

Herbert Huncke, 1983. Photo by A.G.

Howl

134 PARADISE ALLEY: A slum courtyard N.Y. Lower East Side, site of Kerouac’s Subterraneans, 1958.

139 ELI ELI LAMMA LAMMA SABACTHANI: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Christ’s last words from the cross (“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani”: Matthew 27:46).

139 MOLOCH: Or Molech, the Canaanite fire god, whose worship was marked by parents burning their children as propitiatory sacrifice. “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech” (Leviticus 18:21).

A Supermarket in California

144 GARCiA LORCA

Not for one moment, old beautiful Walt Whitman,

have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies

nor your corduroy shoulders worn down by the moon …

Not for one moment, virile beauty who in mountains of coal, posters and railroads,