L.E. Sissman

“Very few people know where they will die,But I do; in a brick-faced hospital,Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,Into three parts; the Dean MemorialWing, in the classic cast of 1910,Green-grated in unglazed, AeolianEmbrasures; the Maud Wiggin Building, whichCommemorates a dog-jawed Boston bitchWho fought the brass down to their whipcord kneesIn World War I, and won enlisted menSome decent hospitals, and, being rich,Donated her own granite monument;The Mandeville Pavilion, pink-brick tentWith marble piping, flying snapping flagsAbove the entry where our bloody ragsAre rolled in to be sponged and sewn again.Today is fair; tomorrow, scourging rain(If only my own tears) will see me inThose jaundiced and distempered corridorsOff which the five-foot-wide doors slowly close.White as my skimpy chiton, I will cringeBefore the pinpoint of the least syringe;Before the buttered catheter goes in;Before the I.V.’s lisp and drip beginsInside my skin; before the rubber handUpon the lancet takes aim and descendsTo lay me open, and upon its thumbRetracts the trouble, a malignant plum;And finally, I’ll quail before the hourWhen the authorities shut off the powerIn that vast hospital, and in my bedI’ll feel my blood go thin, go white, the red,The rose all leached away, and I’ll go dead.Then will the business of life resume:The muffled trolley wheeled into my room,The off-white blanket blanking off my face,The stealing secret, private, largo raceDown halls and elevators to the placeI’ll be consigned to for transshipment, casedIn artificial air and light: the wardThat’s underground; the terminal; the morgue.Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,A booted man in black with a peaked capWill call for me and troll me down the hallAnd slot me into his black car. That’s all.”

“No matter how awful it is to be sitting in thisTerrible magazine office, and talking to thisCircular-saw-voiced West side girl in a dirt-Stiff Marimekko and lavender glasses, and thisCake-bearded boy in short-rise Levi’s, and hearingThe drip and rasp of their tones on the softeningStone of my brain, and losingThe thread of their circular words, and lookingOut through their faces and soot on the window toWinter in University Place, where a blue-Faced man, made of rags and old newspapers, facesA horrible grill, looking in at the food and the facesIt disappears into, and feeling,Perhaps, for the first time in days, a hunger insteadOf a thirst; where two young girls in peacoats and hairAs long as your arm and snow-sanded sandalsProceed to their hideout, a festering cold-water flatAnimated by roaches, where their lovers, loafing in waitTo warm and be warmed by brainless caresses,Stake out a stateOf suspension; and where a black Cadillac 75Stands by the curb to collect a collector of rents,Its owner, the owner of numberless tenement flats;And swivelling backTo the editorial padOf Chaos, a quarter-old quarterly of the arts,And its brotherly, sisterly staff, told hardly apartIn their listlessly colored sackcloth, their ash-colored skins,Their resisterly sullenness, I suddenly thinkThat no matter how awful it is, it’s better than itWould be to be dead. But who can be sure about that?”

“3. AloneThe long march up the fulvous ridgebacks toThe marches, the frontiers of difference --Where flesh marches with bone, day marches withHis wife the night, and country marches withAnother country -- is accomplished best,By paradox, alone. A world of twos,Of yangs and yins, of lives and objects, ofSound grasses and deaf stones, is best essayedBy sole infiltrators who have cast offTheir ties to living moorings, and stand outInto the roads of noon approaching nightCasting a single shadow, earnest ofTheir honorable intention to lay downTheir lives for their old country, humankind,In the same selfish spirit that inspiredTheir lifelong journey, largely and at lastAlone, across the passes that divideA life from every other, the sheer cragsOf overweening will, the deepening scarpsLike brain fissures that cunningly cut offEach outcrop from the main and make it oneWhile its luck lasts, while its bravura holdsAgainst all odds, until the final climbAcross the mountains to the farther shoreOf sundown on the watersheds, where self,Propelled by its last rays, sways in the swayOf the last grasses and falls headlong inThe darkness of the dust it is part ofUpon the passes where we are no more:Where the recirculating shaft goes homeInto the breast that armed it for the air,And, as we must expect, the art that thereTurned our lone hand into imperial RomeReverts to earth and its inveterate loveFor the inanimate and its return. FINIS-- from 'Tras Os Montes”

“Struck dumb by love among the walrusesAnd whales, the off-white polar bear with stuffingMissing, the mastodons like muddy buses,I sniff the mothproof air and lack for nothing.”

“The serious writer must take serious vows....a vow of silence, except through his work. A vow of consistency, sticking with writing to the exclusion of other fields. A vow of ego-chastity, abstaining from adulation. A vow of self-regard, placing the self as writer before the self as personality.”