The Teeth Mother Naked At Last

The Teeth Mother Naked at Last

by Robert Bly


I

Massive engines lift beautifully
from the deck.
Wings appear over the trees,
wings with eight hundred rivets.

Engines burning a thousand gallons
of gasoline a minute sweep over the huts
with dirt floors.
The chickens feel the new fear deep
in the pits of their beaks.
Buddha with Padma Sambhava.

Meanwhile, out on the China Sea,
immense gray bodies are floating,
born in Roanoke,
the ocean on both sides expanding,
"buoyed on the dense marine."

Helicopters flutter overhead. The death-
bee is coming. Super Sabres
like knots of neurotic energy sweep
around and return.
This is Hamilton's triumph.
This is the advantage
of a centralized bank.
B-52s come from Guam. All the teachers
die in flames.
The hopes of Tolstoy fall asleep
in the ant heap.
Do not ask for mercy.

Now the time comes to look
into the past-tunnels,
the hours given and taken in school,
the scuffles in coatrooms,
foam leaps from his nostrils,
now we come to the scum you take
from the mouths of the dead,
now we sit beside the dying,
and hold their hands,
there is hardly time for good-bye,
the staff sergeant from North Carolina
is dying; you hold his hand,
he knows the mansions
of the dead are empty,
he has an empty place inside him,
created one night when his parents
came home drunk.
He uses half his skin to cover it,
as you try to protect a balloon
from sharp objects. . . .

Artillery shells explode.
Napalm canisters roll end over end.
Eight hundred steel pellets fly
through the vegetable walls.
The six-hour old infant puts his fists
instinctively to his eyes
to keep out the light.
But the room explodes,
the children explode.
Blood leaps on the vegetable walls.

Yes, I know, blood leaps on the walls...
Don't cry at that.
Do you cry at the wind
pouring out of Canada?
Do you cry at the reeds shaken
at the edge of the marsh?
The Marine battalion enters.
This happens when the seasons change,
This happens when the leaves begin
to drop from the trees too early
"Kill them: I don't want to see
anything moving."
This happens when the ice begins
to show its teeth in the ponds
This happens when the heavy layers
of lake water press down
on the fish's head,
and send him deeper,
where his tail swirls slowly,
and his brain passes him
pictures of heavy reeds,
of vegetation fallen on vegetation. . . .
Now the Marine knives sweep around
like sharp-edged jets;
they slash open the rice bags,
the reed walls the mattresses
Marines kill ducks
with three-hundred-dollar shotguns
and lift cigarette lighters
to light the thatched roofs of huts.
They watch the old women warily

II

Excellent Roman knives slip along the ribs.
A stronger man starts to jerk up
the strips of flesh.
"Let's hear it again,
you believe in the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Ghost?"
A long scream unrolls.
More.
"From the political point of view,
democratic institutions are being built
in Viet Nam, wouldn?t you agree?"

A green parrot shudders
under the fingernails.
Blood jumps in the pocket.
The scream lashes like a tail.

"Let us not be de-terred from our task
by the voices of dis-sent. . . ."
The whines of the jets
pierce like a long needle,

As soon as the President finishes
his press conference,
black wings carry off the words,
bits of flesh still clinging to them.


* * *


The ministers lie, the professors lie,
the television lies, the priests lie.
What are these lies?
They mean that the country wants to die.
Lie after lie starts out
into the prairie grass,
like enormous caravans of Conestoga wagons
crossing the Platte.

And a long desire for death goes
with them, guiding it all from beneath:
"a death longing if all longing
else be vain," stringing together
the vague and foolish words.


It is a desire to eat death,
to gobble it down,
to rush on it like a cobra with mouth open.
It's a desire to take death inside,
to feel it burning inside,
pushing out velvety hairs,
like a clothes brush in the intestines?

This is the thrill that leads
the President on to lie


* * *


Now the Chief Executive enters,
and the press conference begins.
First the President lies about the date
the Appalachian Mountains rose.
Then he lies about the population
of Chicago,
then the weight of the adult eagle,
and then the acreage of the Everglades
Next he lies about the number of fish
taken every year in the Arctic.


He has private information about which
city is the capital of Wyoming.
He lies about the birthplace
of Attila the Hun,
Then about the composition
of the amniotic fluid,


He insists that Luther was never
a German,
and that only the Protestants
sold indulgences,
He declares that Pope Leo X wanted
to reform the church, but the
liberal elements prevented him.
He declares the Peasant's War
was fomented by Italians from the North.
And the Attorney General lies
about the time the sun sets.


* * *


These lies mean that something
in the nation wants to die.
What is there now to hold us to earth?
We long to go.
It is the longing for someone
to come and take us by the
hand to where they all are sleeping:
where the Egyptian pharaohs are asleep,
and our own mothers,
and all those disappeared children,
who went around with us
on the rings at grade school. . . .

Do not be angry at the President?
he is longing to take in his hand
the locks of death hair:
to meet his own children, dead,
or never born. . . .

He is drifting sideways toward
the dusty places

III

This is what it's like for a rich country
to make war
this is what it's like to bomb huts
(afterwards described as "structures")
this is what it's like to kill
marginal farmers
(afterwards described as Communists")

this is what it's like to watch
the altimeter needle going mad:


Baron 25, this is 81.
Are there any friendlies in the area?
81 from 25, negative on the friendlies.
I'd like you to take out
as many structures
as possible located in those
trees within 200 meters east and west
of my smoke mark.


diving, the green earth swinging,
cheeks hanging back,
red pins blossoming ahead of us,
20-millimeter cannon fire, leveling off,
rice fields shooting by like telephone
poles, smoke rising, hut roofs loom up
huge as landing fields, slugs going in,
half the huts on fire, small figures
running, palm trees burning, shooting past,
up again
. . . blue sky
. . . cloud mountains . . .

This is what it's like to have
a gross national product.

This is what it's like to send firebombs
down from air-conditioned cockpits.

This is what it's like to be told to fire
into a reed hut with an automatic weapon.

It's because we have new packaging
for smoked oysters that bomb holes appear
in the rice paddies


When St. Francis renounced his father's goods,
when he threw his clothes on the court floor,
then the ability to kiss the poor leapt up
from the floor to his lips.
We claim our father's clothes,
and pick up other people's;
finally we have three or four layers
of clothes.
Then all at once it is fated,
we cannot help ourselves,
we fire into a reed hut
with an automatic weapon.


It's because the aluminum window-shade
business is doing
so well in the United States
that we spread fire over entire villages.
It's because the trains coming
into New Jersey hit the right
switches every day.
That Vietnamese men are cut in two
by bullets that
follow each other like freight trains.
It's because the average hospital bed
now costs two hundred
dollars a day
That we bomb hospitals in the north.


It is because we have so few women sobbing
in back rooms,
because we have so few children's heads
torn apart by high-velocity bullets,
because we have so few tears falling
on our own hands
that the Super Sabre turns and screams
down toward the earth.

IV

I see a car rolling toward a rock wall.
The treads in the face begin to crack.
We all feel like tires being run down
roads under heavy cars.

The teen-ager imagines herself
floating through the Seven Spheres.
Oven doors are found
open.
Soot collects over the doorframe,
has children, takes courses,
goes mad, and dies.

There is a black silo inside our bodies,
revolving fast.
Bits of black paint are flaking off,
where the motorcycles roar,
around and around,
rising higher on the silo walls,
the bodies bent toward the horizon,
driven by angry women dressed in black.


* * *


I know that books are tired of us.
I know they are chaining the Bible
to chairs.
Books don't want to remain
in the same room with us anymore.
New Testaments are escaping . . .
dressed as women . . .
they slip off after dark.
And Plato! Plato . . . Plato
wants to hurry back up the river of time,
so be can end as a blob of seaflesh
rotting on an Australian beach.

V

Why are they dying?
I have written this so many times.
They are dying because the President
has opened a Bible again.
They are dying because gold deposits
have been found among
the Shoshoni Indians.
They are dying because money
follows intellect,
And intellect is like a fan
opening in the wind.

The Marines think that unless they die
the rivers will not move.
They are dying so that the mountain
shadows will continue to fall
east in the afternoon,
so that the beetle can move along
the ground near the fallen twigs.

VI

But if one of those children came near
that we have set on fire,
came toward you like a gray barn,
walking,
you would howl like a wind tunnel
in a hurricane,
you would tear at your shirt
with blue hands,
you would drive over your
own child's wagon trying to back up,
the pupils of your eyes would go wild.

If a child came by burning,
you would dance on your lawn,
trying to leap into the air,
digging into your cheeks,
you would ram your head against
the wall of your bedroom
like a bull penned too long
in his moody pen.

If one of those children came toward me
with both hands in the air,
fire rising along both elbows,
I would suddenly go back
to my animal brain,
I would drop on all fours, screaming,
my vocal chords would turn blue;
so would yours,
it would be two days before
I could play with one of my own
children again.

VII

I want to sleep awhile in the rays
of the sun slanting over the snow.
Don't wake me.
Don't tell me how much grief
there is in the leaf with its natural oils.
Don't tell me how many children
have been born with stumpy hands
all those years we lived
in St. Augustine?s shadow.

Tell me about the dust that falls
from the yellow daffodil
shaken in the restless winds.
Tell me about the particles
of Babylonian thought that
still pass through the earthworm every day.
Don't tell me about
"the frightening laborers who do not
read books."

The mad beast covered with European hair
rushes towards the mesa bushes
in Mendocino County
Pigs rush toward the cliff.
The waters underneath part:
in one ocean luminous globes float up
(in them hairy and ecstatic men);
in the other, the Teeth Mother,
naked at last.

Let us drive cars
up
the light beams
to the stars . . .

And return to earth crouched inside
the drop of sweat
that falls from the chin
of the Protestant tied in the fire.


Robert Bly

Posted over on Caterina