guts.
I wave the girl and the nurse
away.
IV.
the woman is still stunned with
drugs but I tell her
a great woman has arrived!
and make my fists into little balls and I
hold up my arms and
snarl-cry.
the nurse is fat and Mexican, has eaten too many
tortillas.
nice to have met you, sweetheart, I
tell her.
V.
then I am back at the shack. I sit down and listen to
the bathtub drip.
I go over and pull all the blinds down and fall on the
couch. all I can hear is tires on
steel streets.
VI.
there is a meeow from the screen and I let him
in: sober, indifferent,
hungry.
VII.
we walk into the kitchen
male, swaggering under the electric light;
4 balls, 2 heads
dominion over all the continent
over ships that sail in and out
over small female things and jewels.
I get down the can of
cat food and open
it. Plato is left in the
glove compartment.
on getting famous and being asked:
can you recite?
can you be there at nine?
…and all they know is kill, these pungent insects,
and as we whirl in new worlds
I am filled with space and I
am ill; I roll a child’s marble
upon the rug, then hear it
clatter off into some new corner
and I puke as the telephone rings;
MR. SPANISH, A VOICE SAYS, WE WANT
YOU TO SPEAK BEFORE THE
SOCIETY. WE FEEL IT WILL BE
VITAL. I hang up, of course,
and I find an orange
in the icebox, but before
I can peel it and eat it
I am ill again.
and
I take off
and fold my shoes, sit down cross-
legged, (like a statue I wish I
owned), and wait, at 3 p.m.,
to die.
the great one:
down at the end of the bar
he used to bum
drinks, now he is a balding man and
I lean close:
you are the finest poet
of our age, you are the
only one that everybody
understands…
we drink coffee, we sit in his small
poorly furnished house, his oil paintings
are on the walls. I am going to give him
money, paper, paint, a better
typewriter. he is going to give me some
original
manuscripts.
I look at him and sense that he fears
me. he coughs, his stomach must feel
oily, dense,
ill.
I tell him:
I know all about you:
you had a cruel Spanish
stepfather, you lived with
numerous whores, drank yourself
senseless,
starved…
yeah, he
says.
I lean closer:
in my own quiet way,
I am a worshipper of
heroes…
when I leave with his manuscripts (signed)
and one of his oils plus
3 wire-coiled and unreadable
notebooks
he doesn’t come to the door with me. there is a
mirror and he
bows his head, ashamed and
finished.
“The Artist,” an ancient sage had once said,
“is always sitting on the doorsteps of the
rich.”
I swing into my caddy, throw the junk in the back and
drive off.
yellow
Seivers was one of the hardest running backs since
Jimmy Brown, and lateral motion too,
like a chorus girl, really, until one day he got hit on
the blind side by Basil Skronski; we carried Seivers off the field
but Skronski had gotten one rib and cracked another.
the next year Seivers wasn’t even good in practice, gun shy as a
squirrel in deer season; he stopped contact, fumbled, couldn’t even
hold a look-in pass or a handoff—all that wasted and he could go the 100 in 9.7.
I’m 45 years old, out of shape, too much beer, but one of the best
assistant coaches in the pro game, and I can’t stand to see a man
jaking it. I got him in the locker room the other day when the whole
squad was in there. I told him, “Seivers, you used to be a player
but now you’re chickenshit!”
“you can’t talk that way to me, Manny!” he said, and I turned him
around, he was lacing on a shoe, and I right-cracked him
right on the chin, he fell against a locker
and then he began to cry—the greatest since Brown,
crying there against the locker, one shoe off, one on.
“come on, men, let’s get outa here!” I told the gang, and we ran
on out, and when we got back he had cleared out, he was gone, his
gear was gone. we got some kid from Illinois running his spot now,
head down, knees high, he don’t care where’s he’s going.
guys like Seivers end up washing dishes for a buck an hour
and that’s just what they deserve.
::: the days run away like wild horses over the hills
the phone rings and it is usually the woman with the
sexy voice from the phone company telling me
to please pay my phone bill,
but this time a voice says quietly,
“you son of a bitch,”
and it is the editor of a dozen magazines,
everything from religious pamphlets
to do-it-yourself abortions,
and he asks,
“why haven’t you called?”
and I say, “we don’t get along.”
“catalysis,” he says,
“dig?”
“dig,” I say,
and then he tells me that he has seen me
in issue No. 5 of Crablegs and Muletears
and that I am getting better,
and I tell him that I am a slow starter
and being only 42
I still stand a chance to spread sand
in Abdulah’s garden,
and he says come on over
I want you to meet a friend
and I tell him I will give him a ring
after the track…
it is Saturday and hot
and the faces of greed rushing past
pinched and dried and impossible
want to make me kneel amongst the lilies and pray
but instead I go to a bar
where I can get good vodka and orange for 70¢
and people keep talking to me,
it is one big lonely hearts club,
people lonely for a voice and a million dollars
and not getting much of either,
and by the 9th race I am one hundred dollars in the hole
and a big colored guy walks up to me
and spreads the tickets of the last winner in his hand
like violin music,
and I say
“fine, fine,”
and he says, “I am with a couple of old broads
and now they are trying to find me,
but I am ducking out, I am going to lock the doors
and get drunk.”
“fine,” I say,
and he walks off
and I keep wondering why so many colored people
talk to me, and then I remembered
I was in a bar once and a big black guy swore me into
something called the Muslims;
I had to repeat a lot of fancy words and
we drank all night,
but I thought he was kidding:
I am not out to destroy all the white race—
only a small part of it:
myself.
“who you like?” another guy asks me
and I say “the 3rd horse,” and he says
“the 3 is out,” and walks off
and that is all I want to hear
and I put 20 to win on the 3,
get a screwdriver
and walk down to the last turn
where if you’ve been around long enough
you can pick out the winner
before the stretch drive begins.
and I’m there when the 3 drives past
a length and a half behind the 6,
the others are out,
and it looks close, both are running hard
without signs of tiring
but I have to close the gap
and I look up at the board and see that
the 6 is 25-1 and I am only 7-1
and with a little luck I might make it,
and I did by three-quarters of a length
and the frogs of my mind lined up and
jumped over death (for a little while)
and I walked over and got my $166.
I was in the tub with a beer when the phone rang,
“bastard, where are you?”
it was the editor.
“see you in 30 minutes,” I told him.
“I don’t want any stuff outa you or I’ll lay
you out,” he tells me.
“fine,” I say, “30 minutes then.”
which gives me time for a couple more beers.
the place is in the back in South Hollywood,
a small cell with a water heater
in the bathroom, and a rack of books take up
half the room: much Huxley (Aldous), Lawrence
(not of Arabia), and a lot of tomes and vessels
of people halfway in the playground
between poetry and the novel
and lacking either the motivation or the discipline
to write straight philosophy,
and he had a woman in there
in the last peach fuzz of her youth,
pale orange, a little spiritless,
but quiet, which was good,
and he said, “baby, get the man a beer,”
and I threw him my latest book
which I inscribed, “to a connoisseur
of vagina and verse…”
and he said, “you are getting fat, bastard,
but you are looking better than the last time
I saw you.”
“was that in Paris?” I asked.
“Pasadena, Calif.,” he answered.
“Faulkner’s dead now too,” I said.
“how do you like the bitch?” he asked,
“look at her.”
I looked at her and thanked her for the beer.
“fair stand the fields of France,”
I said.
“I need a hundred and a half,” he told me.
“Jesus,” I answered,
“I was just gonna ask you for the same thing.”
“I hear Harry is back with his old lady.”
“yeah. looking for a job. painting furniture, baby-sitting.
he was even a bartender one night.”
“Harry? a bartender?”
“just for 3 hours. then he said he got tired.”
“tired?”
“‘tired’ is the word he used.”
“I need a hundred and a half.”
“who the hell doesn’t?”
“Faulkner doesn’t,” he said.
“I wonder what he mixed in his drinks? I’ve got to slow
down…”
the bitch had some poems she wrote and I read them
and they were not bad considering that she was built for
other things, and the rest of the night was fairly dull,
no fist fights, too old to tango, tiger asleep in the shade,
and I promised I would write an essay ON THE MEANING OF
MODERN POETRY which he promised to print unseen
and which I knew I would never write.
the night was full of promises, an old tiger
and a peach. I drove home down the side streets,
swinging wide around the police station,
smoking king-sized and humming parts from Carmen
because it was very dark and Bizet drove better than
Ludwig who had his mind on more important things.
I parked out in front and no sooner did I get the car door open
than the rummy downstairs said,
“hey, ace, how about a cold one?”
I took a beer out of the bag and slipped it in through the screen.
“I need a dollar,” he said.
“now, ain’t that a bitch? I was just gonna ask you for the same thing.”
“you’re in a bad mood,” he said.
“sure,” I said, “haven’t you heard? Faulkner’s dead.”
“Faulkner? wasn’t he a bullring jock? Pomona Fairgrounds?
Rudioso? Caliente? you knew the kid?”
“I knew the kid,” I said
and then walked on upstairs.
the rest of the night was no-account, as the Arkies say,
and there were a couple of numbers I could dial,
4 or 5 numbers, some black, some white,
some old, some young,
but I kept thinking of white hospitals
and palm trees in the shade,
and it was quiet, at last it was quiet,
and there are times when you have to come back
and look around, there are times of Ludwig,
there are times of walls,
there are times of thinking of Ernest
and that shotgun raised to his head;
there are times for thinking
of dead loves, dead flowers,
of all the dead, dead people who give you a name,
from Florida to Del Mar, Calif.,
all the sadness like a parade
of gentle fools gone,
water running in sinks,
stockings washed,
gowns worn, thrown away,
the ugly duckling world
quietly slipping away from me
and myself slipping away,
an old tiger,
sick of the battle.
the next morning I was awakened by a knock on the door,
so I ignored it, I never answer the door,
I don’t want to see anybody,
but it kept up with a kind of gentle persistence
so I got up and put on my old yellow robe
dead voices from bedrooms
and opened the door.
“I am here to help the handicapped people,” she said.
“do come in,” I said.
she was a young girl 19, 20, 21,
her eyes as innocent as the map of Texas spread
over the clouds,
and she walked across the rug and sat down
and I went into the kitchen and took the cap
off of 2 beers. my goldfish swam like crazy.
I walked out with the beers, I said,
“love must be always
because stones gone flat with leaning
take ships to sea
take cats and dogs and
everything.”
she laughed and the day began without
error.
worms
a guy told me,
you don’t have to worry about worms when you’re
dead
they never get to you
the body changes like in all different
ways—by the time
they’ve worked through the casket
things have happened and it
always happens
different—
they’ve dug up these old kings outa tombs, ya
know:
one guy was just
a little splotch of black
water, another had a
beard 18 feet long and another had
turned to a kind of rock-like
salt.
yeah? I said.
yeah, he said.
he knew all these things.
he lived high in the hills and had these
tremendous brains.
before I left I reached out and
pulled the worms out of his
eyes nose belly shoes hair ears
and then he said
good night
and I said
good night
and I got in my car and drove off
and the worms laughed
all the way home.
to hell with Robert Schumann
I finished my drink and went back
upstairs to hear the second half—
another piano concerto, and
2 are too many and
I couldn’t make it out
having lost my program so
I left the place and drove 21 blocks
South and East
to where 2 flyweights
a Jap and a Mexican were
going at it. the
Mexican butted the Jap and
the Jap bled from a cut
above the eye
but only fought harder