egg?
all right, she said to me, you don’t have to
sit there looking like that.
oh, mother, he said, you broke the yolk.
I can’t eat a broken yolk.
all right, she said to me, you’re so tough,
you’ve been in the slaughter houses, factories,
the jails, you’re so goddamned tough,
but all people don’t have to be like you,
that doesn’t make everybody else wrong and you
right.
mother, he said, can you bring me some cokes
when you come home from work?
look, Raleigh, she said, can’t you get the cokes
on your bike, I’m tired after
work.
but, mama, there’s a hill.
what hill, Raleigh?
there’s a hill,
it’s there and I have to pedal over
it.
all right, she said to me, you think you’re so
goddamned tough. you worked on a railroad track
gang, I hear about it every time you get drunk:
“I worked on a railroad track gang.”
well, I said, I did.
I mean, what difference does it make?
everybody has to work somewhere.
mama, said the kid, will you bring me those
cokes?
I really like the kid. I think he’s very
gentle. and once he learns how to crack an
egg he may do some
unusual things. meanwhile
I sleep with his mother
and try to stay out of
arguments.
a killer gets ready
he was a good one
say 18, 19,
a marine
and every time
a woman came down the train aisle
he seemed to stand up
so I couldn’t see
her
and the woman smiled at him
but I didn’t smile
at him
he kept looking at himself in the
train window
and standing up and taking off his
coat and then standing up
and putting it back
on
he polished his belt buckle with a
delighted vigor
and his neck was red and
his face was red and his eyes were a
pretty blue
but I didn’t like
him
and every time I went to the can
he was either in one of the cans
or he was in front of one of the mirrors
combing his hair or
shaving
and he was always walking up and down the
aisles
or drinking water
I watched his Adam’s apple juggle the water
down
he was always in my
eyes
but we never spoke
and I remembered all the other trains
all the other buses
all the other wars
he got off at Pasadena
vainer than any woman
he got off at Pasadena
proud and
dead
the rest of the train ride—
8 or 10 miles—
was perfect.
in the center of the action
in the center of the action
you have to lay down like an animal
until it
charges, you
have to lay down
in the center of the action
lay down and wait until it charges then you
must get
up
face it get
it before it gets
you
the whole pro cess is more
shy than
vulnerable so
lay down and wait sometimes it’s
ten minutes sometimes it’s years sometimes it
never arrives but you can’t rush it push
it
there’s no way to cheat or get a
jump on it you have to
lay down
lay down and wait like
an animal.
poetry
it
takes
a lot of
desperation
dissatisfaction
and
to
write
a
few
good
poems.
it’s not
for
everybody
either to
write
it
or even to
read
it.
notes upon the flaxen aspect:
a John F. Kennedy flower knocks upon my door and is
shot through the neck;
the gladiolas gather by the dozens around the tip of
India
dripping into Ceylon;
dozens of oysters read Germaine Greer.
meanwhile, I itch from the slush of the Philippines
to the eye of the minnow
the minnow being eaten by the cumulative dreams of
Simón Bolívar. O,
freedom from the limitation of angular distance would be
delicious.
war is perfect,
the solid way drips and leaks,
Schopenhauer laughed for 72 years,
and I was told by a very small man in a New York City
pawnshop
one afternoon:
“Christ got more attention than I did
but I went further on less…”
well, the distance between 5 points is the same as the
distance between 3 points is the same as the distance
between one point:
it is all as cordial as a bonbon:
all this that we are wrapped
in:
eunuchs are more exact than sleep
the postage stamp is mad, Indiana is ridiculous
the chameleon is the last walking flower.
the fisherman
he comes out at 7:30 a.m. every day
with 3 peanut butter sandwiches, and
there’s one can of beer
which he floats in the bait bucket.
he fishes for hours with a small trout pole
three-quarters of the way down the pier.
he’s 75 years old and the sun doesn’t tan him,
and no matter how hot it gets
the brown and green lumberjack stays on.
he catches starfish, baby sharks, and mackerel;
he catches them by the dozen,
speaks to nobody.
sometime during the day
he drinks his can of beer.
at 6 p.m. he gathers his gear and his catch
walks down the pier
across several streets
where he enters a small Santa Monica apartment
goes to the bedroom and opens the evening paper
as his wife throws the starfish, the sharks, the mackerel
into the garbage
he lights his pipe
and waits for dinner.
the 1930s
places to hunt
places to hide are
getting harder to find, and pet
canaries and goldfish too, did you notice
that?
I remember when pool halls were pool halls
not just tables in
bars;
and I remember when neighborhood women
used to cook pots of beef stew for their
unemployed husbands
when their bellies were sick with
fear;
and I remember when kids used to watch the rain
for hours and
would fight to the end over a pet
rat; and
I remember when the boxers were all Jewish and Irish
and never gave you a
bad fight; and when the biplanes flew so low you
could see the pi lot’s face and goggles;
and when one ice cream bar in ten had a free coupon inside;
and when for 3 cents you could buy enough candy
to make you sick
or last a whole
afternoon; and when the people in the neighborhood raised
chickens in their backyards; and when we’d stuff a 5-cent
toy auto full of
candle wax to make it last
forever; and when we built our own kites and scooters;
and I remember
when our parents fought
(you could hear them for blocks)
and they fought for hours, screaming blood-death curses
and the cops never
came.
places to hunt and places to hide,
they’re just not around
anymore. I remember when
each 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlord
only got his rent
when you had
it, and each day was clear and good and each moment was
full of promise.
the burning of the dream
the old L.A. Public Library burned
that library downtown
and with it went
a large part of my
youth.
I sat on one of those stone
benches there with my friend
Baldy when he
asked,
“you gonna join the
Abraham Lincoln
Brigade?”
“sure,” I told
him.
but realizing that I wasn’t
an intellectual or a political
idealist
I backed off on that
one
later.
I was a reader
then
going from room to
room: literature, philosophy,
religion, even medicine
and geology.
early on
I decided to be a writer,
I thought it might be the easy
way
out
and the big boy novelists didn’t look
too tough to
me.
I had more trouble with
Hegel and Kant.
the thing that bothered
me
about everybody
is that they took so long
to finally say
something lively and /
or
interesting.
I thought I had it
over everybody
then.
I was to discover two
things:
a) most publishers thought that anything
boring had something to do with things
profound.
b) that it would take de cades of
living and writing
before I would be able to
put down
a sentence that was
anywhere near
what I wanted it to
be.
meanwhile
while other young men chased the
ladies
I chased the old
books.
I was a bibliophile, albeit a
disenchanted
one
and this
and the world
shaped me.
I lived in a plywood hut
behind a rooming house
for $3.50 a
week
feeling like a
Chatterton
stuffed inside of some
Thomas
Wolfe.
my greatest problem was
stamps, envelopes, paper
and
wine,
with the world on the edge
of World War II.
I hadn’t yet been
confused by the
female, I was a virgin
and I wrote from 3 to
5 short stories a week
and they all came
back
from The New Yorker, Harper’s,
The Atlantic Monthly.
I had read where
Ford Madox Ford used to paper
his bathroom with his
rejection slips
but I didn’t have a
bathroom so I stuck them
into a drawer
and when it got so stuffed with them
I could barely
open it
I took all the rejects out
and threw them
away along with the
stories.
still
the old L.A. Public Library remained
my home
and the home of many other
bums.
we discreetly used the
restrooms
and the only ones of
us
to be evicted were those
who fell asleep at the
library
tables—nobody snores like a
bum
unless it’s somebody you’re married
to.
well, I wasn’t quite abum. I had a library card
and I checked books in and
out
large
stacks of them
always taking the
limit
allowed:
Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence,
e. e. cummings, Conrad Aiken, Fyodor
Dos, Dos Passos, Turgenev, Gorky,
H.D., Freddie Nietzsche, Art
Schopenhauer,
Steinbeck,
Hemingway,
and so
forth…
I always expected the librarian
to say, “you have good taste, young
man…”
but the old fried and wasted
bitch didn’t even know who she
was
let alone
me.
but those shelves held
tremendous grace: they allowed
me to discover
the early Chinese poets
like Tu Fu and Li
Po
who could say more in one
line than most could say in
thirty or
a hundred.
Sherwood Anderson must have
read
these
too.
I also carried the Cantos
in and out
and Ezra helped me
strengthen my arms if not
my brain.
that wondrous place
the L.A. Public Library
it was a home for a person who had had
a
home of
hell
BROOKS TOO BROAD FOR LEAPING
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
POINT COUNTER POINT
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER
James Thurber
John Fante
Rabelais
de Maupassant
some didn’t work for
me: Shakespeare, G. B. Shaw,
Tolstoy, Robert Frost, F. Scott
Fitzgerald
Upton Sinclair worked better for
me
than Sinclair Lewis
and I considered Gogol and
Dreiser complete
fools
but such judgments come more
from a man’s
forced manner of living than from
his reason.
the old L.A. Public
most probably kept me from
becoming a
suicide
a bank
robber
a
&
nbsp; wife-
beater
a butcher or a
motorcycle policeman
and even though some of these
might be fine
it is
thanks
to my luck
and my way
that this library was
there when I was
young and looking to
hold on to
something
when there seemed very
little
about.
and when I opened the
newspaper
and read of the fire
which
destroyed the
library and most of
its contents
I said to my
wife: “I used to spend my
time