On Love. Charles Bukowski
Читать онлайн книгу.
like people walking
and the bells ring like bells ringing;
your hands are gold and your voice is gold
and all the children walking
and the trees growing and the idiots selling papers
34256780000 oh while you are
eustachian tube
red fire
greenbugdead
ivy
cardinal and gold
and the words we said tonight
are going away
over the trees
down by the streetcar
and I have closed the book
with the red red lion
down by the gates of gold.
for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough
I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak
to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean upon this,
I lean on all of this
and I know:
her dress upon my arm:
but
they will not
give her back to me.
for Jane
225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.
when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.
what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.
notice
the swans drown in bilge water,
take down the signs,
test the poisons,
barricade the cow
from the bull,
the peony from the sun,
take the lavender kisses from my night,
put the symphonies out on the streets
like beggars,
get the nails ready,
flog the backs of the saints,
stun frogs and mice for the cat of the soul,
burn the enthralling paintings,
piss on the dawn,
my love
is dead.
my real love in Athens
and I remember the knife,
the way you touch a rose
and come away with blood
and how you touch love the same way,
and how when you want to come onto the freeway
the trucks rail you on the inner lane
moonlight and roaring
running down your bravery,
making you touch the brakes
and small pictures come to your mind:
pictures of Christ hung there
or Hiroshima,
or your last wife
frying an egg.
the way you touch a rose
is the way you lean against the coffin-sides
of the dead,
the way you touch a rose
and see the dead whirling back
underneath your fingernails;
the knife
Gettysburg, the Bulge, Flanders,
Attila, Muss—
what can I make of history
when it narrows down
to the three o’clock shadow
under a leaf?
and if the mind grows harrowed
and the rose bites
like a dog,
they say
we have love . . .
but what can I make of love
when we are all born
at a different time and place
and only meet
through a trick of centuries
and a chance three steps
to the left?
you mean
a love I have not met
is less than a selfishness
I call near?
can I say now
with rose-blood upon the edge of mind,
can I say now as the planets whirl
and they shoot tons of force into the end of space
to make Columbus look like an idiot-child,
can I say now
that