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THE NEXT ROOM OF THE DREAM (1962)
As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,
The interpretation is only the next room of the dream.
“To Clio, Muse of History”
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1
Effigies
TO CLIO, MUSE OF HISTORY
On learning that The Etruscan Warrior
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
is proved a modern forgery
One more casualty,
One more screen memory penetrated at last
To be destroyed in the endless anamnesis
Always progressing, never arriving at a cure.
My childhood in the glare of that giant form
Corrupts with history, for I too fought in the War.
He, great male beauty
That stood for the sexual thrust of power,
His target eyes inviting the universal victim
To fatal seduction, the crested and greaved
Survivor long after shield and sword are dust,
Has now become another lie about our life.
Smash the idol, of course.
Bury the pieces deep as the interest of truth
Requires. And you may in time compose the future
Smoothly without him, though it is too late
To disinfect the past of his huge effigy
By any further imposition of your hands.
But tell us no more
Enchantments, Clio. History has given
And taken away; murders become memories,
And memories become the beautiful obligations:
As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,
The interpretation is only the next room of the dream.
For I remember how
We children stared, learning from him
Unspeakable things about war that weren’t in the books;
And how the Museum store offered for sale
His photographic reproductions in full color
With the ancient genitals blacked out.
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SANTA CLAUS
Somewhere on his travels the strange Child
Picked up with this overstuffed confidence man,
Affection’s inverted thief, who climbs at night
Down chimneys, into dreams, with this world’s goods.
Bringing all the benevolence of money,
He teaches the innocent to want, thus keeps
Our fat world rolling. His prescribed costume,
White flannel beard, red belly of cotton waste,
Conceals the thinness of essential hunger,
An appetite that feeds on satisfaction;
Or, pregnant with possessions, he brings forth
Vanity and the void. His name itself
Is corrupted, and even Saint Nicholas, in his turn,
Gives off a faint and reminiscent stench,
The merest soupçon, of brimstone and the pit.
Now, at the season when the Child is born
To suffer for the world, suffer the world,
His bloated Other, jovial satellite
And sycophant, makes his appearance also
In a glitter of goodies, in a rock candy glare.
Played at the better stores by bums, for money,
This annual savior of the economy
Speaks in the parables of the dollar sign:
Suffer the little children to come to Him.
At Easter, he’s anonymous again,
Just one of the crowd lunching on Calvary.
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TO THE MANNEQUINS
Adorable images,
Plaster of Paris
Lilies of the field,
You are not alive, therefore
Pathos will be out of place.
But I have learned
A fact about your fate,
And it is this:
After you go out of fashion
Beneath your many fashions,
Or when your elbows and knees
Have been bruised powdery white,
So that you are no good to anybody—
They will take away your gowns,
Your sables and bathing suits,
Leaving exposed before all men
Your inaccessible bellies
And pointless nubilities.
Movers will come by night
And load you into trucks
And take you away to the Camps,
Where soldiers, or the State Polic...
