Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE UNDERGROUND, by THOMAS MCGRATH


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE UNDERGROUND, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Cities arise
Last Line: The glaciers have set up their tents
Subject(s): Cities; Glaciers; Hallucinations And Illusions; Sex; Violence; Urban Life


I.

Cities arise . . .
Like bric-a-brac on mountains which have not yet been named.
Here, the Pioneers
Arrived, drugged and armed to the eyes, on high-flying bombers --
And most of them think they are still in the flat lands to the west.
Here, on the good days,
In those serious, born-again, apparently-sufficient, imperialist climes --
Where all days are apparently good days the cities ornament themselves:
Among the desolate monsters that sometimes appear after midnight
(Escaped from below) statues spring into being: presidents,
Generals at the center of circles and squares -- stars where converging
Streets may be commanded by gunfire . . .
L'Etoile est plus belle, n'est-ce pas?
Oui. Beautiful.
Et le mitrailleuse de ma tante, aussi.
But my aunt's machine-gun does not command all vistas, for --

Meanwhile, below,
In stopes black as the bore of an outlaw Frontier Colt
(And among the mnemonic plagues of heuristic condemned numbers)
The miners are tearing gold out of the rocks
With their bare hands.
Down here all the machines have failed:
The machines with spark-plugs fired by patriotic cliches
And burning the blood of children in cylinders of law and homicide . . .

Aloft, from balconies spun from hallucinatory silk,
The ladies climb the vertiginous ladders of afternoon TV sex.
(Those same ladders which have only one end).
Their eyes, brilliant with boredom, gaze down the grand avenues
Toward Presidential palaces with their glowing facades of caviar.
The weather is petrified in its windless theater of ice,
And the seasons have been vanished and replaced by appropriate music.
Moon of hypocrites . . .
light . . .
stiffened by black glass . . .
Tomorrow: high tea in the execution chamber.

II.

Underground, the weather goes on in the dim streets:
Among marooned motorcycles dead of too much salvation.
(Mourned by the little cadenzas of torn-out tongues.)
Here are the immense catalogs of lost meat:
The broken wrists of black-gowned washerwomen
The blind tearing off the skin of their eyes to see
The starving child who has eaten his own arm to the elbow
The old who sit in the plaza with guitars full of plastic explosive
And unwanted sex --
here the miners return from their last
Shot in the dark.
Now the square is filled.
They await the Indios . . .

III.

In the bat-freaking twilight, crepuscule du soir,
And down along the old soignee river, the rich
Salauds and assholes, on elite terraces, suffering, perhaps,
From imperfect coronary recall or the rancours of the memory, see,
The necrotic marble of those clouds which are now being towed
Into the blood-warm skies of saltpetre and semen . . .

Yes, lovely twilight up there: the ladies, in electronic nightgowns
Watch while a stone cutter, snatched by night from below,
Is chiselling in granite, over the graveyard entrance:
NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS
And right behind him, another,
(Free-lance) AND NO THINGS WITHOUT SOME GODDAMN KIND
OF IDEA ABOUT THEM!

IV.

Below in the underground square, the peasants,
Drawn by the silver bells of their tiny burros arrive
From the Capitalist and Cocaine dictatorships of imperialist duchies,
Colonies of the dollar and longtime fiefdoms of the CIA.
Now, in the little fiesta of the damned, songs are exchanged,
And tentative sex, and stories are told and politics
Made clear.
The guns are given.
The day of the Rising is set.

V.

Meanwhile, above, in the city,
The elite take to their arms the Commodity Fetish: in boudoirs
Where (the moonlight clotting those mythologies of power and drugs)
The glaciers have set up their tents.


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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