Siesta in Xbalba and Return to the States

I
(...)
So I dream nightly of an embarcation,
captains, captains,
iron passageways, cabin lights,
Brooklyn across the waters,
the great dull boat, visitors, farewells,
the blurred vast sea -
one trip a lifetime's loss or gain:

as Europe is my own imagination
- many shall see her,
many shall not -
though it's only the old familiar world
and not some abstract mystical dream.

And in a moment of previsioning sleep
I see that continent in rain,
black streets, old night, a
fading monument...

And a long journey unaccomplished
yet, on antique seas
rolling in grey barren dunes under
the world's waste of light
towards ports of childish geography
the rusty ship will
harbor in...

What nights might I not see
penniless among the Arab
mysteries of dirty towns around
the casbahs of the docks?
Clay paths, mud walls,
the smell of green cigarettes,
creosote and rank salt water -
dark structures overhead,
shapes of machinery and facade
of hull: and a bar lamp
burning in the wooden shack
across from the dim
mountain of sulphur on the pier.

Toward what city
will I travel? What wild houses
do I go to ocupy?
What vagrant rooms and streets
and lights in the long night
urge my expectation? What genius
of sensation in ancient
halls? what jazz beyond jazz
in future blue saloons?
what love in the cafes of God?

I thought, five years ago
sitting in my apartment,
my eyes were opened for an hour
seeing in dreadful ecstasy
the motionless buildings
of New York rotting
under the tides of Heaven.

There is a god
dying in America
already created
in the imagination of men
made palpable
for adoration:
there is an inner
anterior image
of divinity
beckoning me out
to pilgrimage.

O future, unimaginable God.

Finca Tacalapan de San

Leandro, Palenque,

Chiapas, Mexico 1954 -
San Francisco 1955

Allen Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches, The Pocket Poets Series, Number Eighteen, City Lights Books, 1968.