Awakening with Rimbaud

I did not understand Rimbaud, but I loved him.

Early spring and youth are ragged twins.In March, which is a
glimmer of light and warmth, the snow starts to melt. But the dirt
driveway is a mudsucking trench and then frozen wheeltrack ruts at
night when the warmth and everything else is gone again.

The young stay out at night, more at home in the dark than the
daylight. It's cold and lonely in the dim bars where rock and roll
bands hammer and slam, or folk singers tune and retune acoustic
guitars and mumble into the mikes. We drank beer late into the
night until the pale fluorescent lights came on and blear-eyed
bartenders cleared the bottles off the table. We felt unutterably
lonely.

If you woke up with some pasty-faced lonely girl in the morning, it
was worse. Everyone felt cheated.

My boots clomped home over the melting pavement and I read
Rimbaud in the afternoon. There was a place to live. The world was
transformed.

On the slope of the embankment angels whirl their woolen robes in
steel and emerald pastures.
Close by, flames leap up to the nipple of the hill. To the left the
compost-ridge is stamped down by all murders and battles, and all
disastrous clamors spin out their curves. Behind the ridge to the
right, the line of orients, of progress.
And while the band high in the scene is formed by the whirling roar
and leaping seashells, and of human nights,
The florid sweetness of the stars and sky and the rest settles on the
embankment, like a basket - close to our face, and reveals the blue,
widening chasm there below.

What all this meant about language, or angels, or my own sanity, I
have no idea. But the reading was like a pane of ice skimmed just as
winter breaks and it becomes possible to wake up in daylight
instead of waiting for night to resume.

Life lived as Rimbaud lived it. I had no idea how to speak of
Rimbaud, no idea what he was talking about. What he and Verlaine
were doing in London, or how Verlaine's love could degenerate into
fear so abject he'd shoot the boy. Absinthe, dangerous. Hashish,
available. LSD, too disruptive to the rational mind trying
desperately to control the fears of people and authority transformed
in childhood into monsters.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, the world would appear
to man as it is, infinite." Rimbaud was like a call in the wilderness
to arm the spirit. But what did he mean? It would be desirable to
break through to the other side of consciousness where reality lay.
The real, the real. The black muck of March, the cold upswelling
potholes in the road. The agony of lust and loneliness.

Rimbaud drove daggers in the heart. Now is the time of the
assassins, or might be, if life were lived outside the shell of fear and
daylong sleep. As Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg lived the day, on
fire. If only the glands could be appeased but what resistance to the
license of sex and drugs waged war in me. The many waitresses and
their swaying haunches and smiles that made me horny sick and sad
and miserable. It would not do to fuck away my worries, all that's
in the mind. Except at night when reality crushes everything, every
nightmare of fire and cowled demons and angry police-headed
authorities tear through the weak membranes of the emotions and
expose nerves. Neither innocent nor experienced I read and wrote
poetry for all it was worth, as though it were contraband smuggled
from a dimension of the spirit into the abject loneliness of physical
life.

As time and words wore on, it slowly dawned on me, through
college, Paradise Lost and Henry Vaughan that even though I took
my waking slow I was awakening, painfully, groggily, moment to
moment. Words plowed through and faint illuminations blinded my
vision.

It felt dangerous, and I was never brave. I dreamed of a gorgeous,
glittering green tree growing up from the rotting log-strewn forest
floor.

Rimbaud in Paris, seeing visions. Rimbaud in Charleville, writhing
and writing. Rimbaud in Java, jumping ship. Rimbaud the first
white man in boiling Ethiopia in a long, long time. Rimbaud in
agony on a stretcher. Death in the south of France.

Not long afterward, Ezra Pound sat at a desk in a small, dimly lit
room reading my manuscripts. Old man with thin white hair and a
pair of glasses hung around his neck. He slammed his fist on the
table and growled, "You've got to get passion into your work.
There's no literature without passion." Flipping pages, reading and
repeating, "More passion, more passion." Only emotion endures. I
woke up with tears, not for the visitation, which was astonishing,
but because he was right. My suffering and my bad poetry struggled
out of ground half-frozen by the sick privilege of the rational
intellect, half-thawed by the French voice calling drunken from the
boat, there, on the ocean, archetype of eternity.

Hail holy light, this morning, at the age of 23, when I awoke from
dreams of Ezra Pound and read his translation of Rimbaud who
spoke directly like a killer to my heart.

Got my legs stretched out
And was looking at the simple tapestries,
Very nice when the gal with the big bubs
And lively eyes,

Not one to be scared of a kiss and more,
Brought the butter and bread with a grin

Everything's on the table. It's a matter of work, now, though rarely
do I realize that's the case. The next step: understand what's
happening in Hell. Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

* * *

Aube

I embraced the summer dawn.

Nothing stirred, even in front of the palaces. The water was dead.
Armies of shadows lingered on the forest road. I walked, dreaming
the warm, brisk winds, and jewels watched, and wings rose
soundlessly.

The first risk, in the path already filled with fresh, wan gleams, was
a flower who told me her name.

I laughed at the white waterfall which ran raggedly through the
firs: at its silver summit I recognized the goddess.

Then I lifted the veils, one by one. In the walk, waving my arms. In
the field, where I betrayed her to the cock. In the city she fled
through the steeples and domes, and running like a beggar on the
marble piers, I chased her.

Above the road, near a stand of laurels, I enclosed her with her
mass of veils and sensed, a little, her immense body. Dawn and
child fell into the woods.

When I awoke it was midday.