The King of Harlem

With a spoon
he scooped out crocodiles’ eyes
and whacked monkeys’ backsides.
With a spoon.

The fire of forever slept in the flints
and beetles drunk on anis
forgot the village moss.
The old mushroom-covered man
went to where the blacks wept
while the king’s spoon crackled
and tanks of putrid water arrived.

Roses fled along the ridge
of air’s last curves
and on the mounds of saffron
children squashed little squirrels
flushing red in tainted frenzy.

You have to cross the bridges
and reach the black murmur
so that the scent of lungs
hits your temples, dressed
in warm pineapple.

You must kill the blond-haired brandy-seller
and every friend of sand and apple
and with clenched fists you must beat
the trembling little Jewish women full of bubbles
so the king of Harlem may sing with his throng,
the crocodiles sleep in long rows
beneath the moon’s asbestos,
and no one doubt the infinite beauty
of dusters, graters, copperware, kitchen pans.

Ay Harlem, Harlem, Harlem!
There’s no anguish like your oppressed reds,
or the shudder of your blood within the dark eclipse,
or your garnet violence, deaf and dumb in the shadows,
or your great king held captive in a commissioner’s coat.

*

The night was rent, and there were silent ivory salamanders.
American girls
carried children and coins in their bellies
and boys fainted racked on the cross.

They.
They who drink silver whisky by volcanoes
and swallow little pieces of heart on the frozen mountains of the bear.

*

That night the king of Harlem with an indestructible spoon
scooped out crocodiles’ eyes
and whacked monkeys’ backsides.
With a spoon.

Blacks wept confounded
among golden suns and umbrellas,
mulattos stretched rubber, keen to get to white torsos,
and the wind clouded mirrors
and broke the dancers’ veins.

Blacks, blacks, blacks, blacks.

Blood has no doors in your night on its back.
No flush. Bad blood beneath the skin,
alert in the dagger’s thorn and the landscapes’ heart,
under the pincers and the Spanish broom of Cancer’s celestial moon.

Blood searching a thousand highways for flour-sprinkled deaths, spikenard ash,
rigid angled skies where colonies of planets
can roll along beaches with the jetsam.

Blood looking askance, slow,
made of dried esparto, underground nectars.
Blood that oxidizes the careless trade wind in a footprint,
and dissolves butterflies on window-panes.

It’s the blood that comes, that will come
over roofs and terraces, from everywhere,
to burn the chlorophyll of fair-haired women,
to moan at the foot of beds before the insomnia of basins
and smash against a yellow-bile tobacco dawn.

Flee,
you must flee round corners, lock yourself on top floors,
because the pith of the forest will come through cracks
to leave on your flesh the faint trace of an eclipse
and the false sadness of discoloured glove and chemical rose.

*

It’s in this wisest silence
that waiters, cooks, and tongues that clean
the wounds of millionaires
search the streets and saltpetre corners for the king.

A south wind of wood, slanting through black mud,
spits at broken boats, drives nails in its shoulders,
a south wind that carries
alphabets, sunflowers, tusks
and a battery with drowned wasps.

Oblivion was expressed in three drops of ink on the monocle.
Love, in one invisible face on the surface of the stone.
Marrow and corollas on the clouds formed
a desert of stalks without a single rose.

*

To the left, to the right, south and north,
the wall rises impervious
to mole or spike of water.
Don’t search, blacks, for a breach

where you might find the infinite mask.
Turn into a buzzing pineapple,
seek the great central sun.
The sun that glides through the woods
certain it won’t meet a nymph,
the sun that kills numbers, that’s never met a dream,
tattooed sun, moving downriver, bellowing,
with alligators in pursuit.

Blacks, blacks, blacks, blacks.

Never did snake, zebra, mule
grow pale at death.
The woodcutter doesn’t know when
the clamouring trees he cuts expire.
Wait in the leafy shadow of your king
until hemlock and thistle and nettles disturb the furthest terrace roots.

Then blacks, then, then
you can plant frenzied kisses on bicycle wheels,
put pairs of microscopes in squirrels’ nests,
and dance at last with confidence, while bristling flowers
mow down our Moses close to the reeds of heaven.

Ay, Harlem in disguise!
Ay Harlem, threatened by a gang of headless costumes!
Your murmur reaches me
through tree-trunks and lifts,
through sheets of grey metal
where your cars float bristling with teeth,
through dead horses and petty crimes,
through your great despairing king
whose beard reaches the sea.