This book is for
Roxy and Judy Gordon.
Some of these poems first appeared in Poetry, Rolling Stone, San Francisco Express Times, The Free You, Heliotrope Catalogue, and The San Francisco Public Library: a Publishing House.
Published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
New York, New York 10017
Copyright © 1970 by Richard Brautigan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.
Laurel ® TM 674623, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
ISBN: 0-440-37496-0
Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press
A Seymour Lawrence Book
New York, New York 10017
Cover photographs by Edmund Shea
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Laurel printing—August 1973
Sixth Laurel printing—February 1985
ROMMEL DRIVES ON DEEP INTO EGYPT:
ROMMEL DRIVES ON DEEP INTO EGYPT
A 48-Year-Old Burglar from San Diego
Have You Ever Had a Witch Bloom
like a Highway
The Memoirs of Jesse James
Flora Shakespeare
15%
Romeo and Juliet
Have You Ever Felt like a Wounded Cow
Mrs. Myrtle Tate, Movie Projectionist
Critical Can Opener
Love’s Not the Way to Treat a Friend
The Net Wt. of Winter Is 6.75 Ozs.
Abalone Curry
Cannibal Carpenter
Sheep
Donner Party
Formal Portrait
—2
The Sister Cities of Los Alamos, New Mexico,
and Hiroshima, Japan
Wood
Negative Clank
Jules Verne Zucchini
She Sleeps This Very Evening in
Greenbrook Castle
Third Eye
You’ll Have to Buy Some More Chairs
Feasting and Drinking Went on Far into
the Night
1891-1944
Hinged to Forgetfulness like a Door
Affectionate Light Bulb
Just Because
The History of Bolivia
Wildwood Shadow
Propelled by Portals Whose Only Shame
Clad in Garments like a Silver Disease
Lions Are Growing like Yellow Roses
on the Wind
Nice Ass
Casablanca
8 Millimeter (mm)
At the Earliest Dark Answer
All Girls Should Have a Poem
We Stopped at Perfect Days
Chosen by Beauty to Be a Handmaiden
of the Stars
30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love
Please
There Is Darkness on Your Lantern
Professional, Nonoffensive, Bland
Cellular Coyote
Parking Omelet
Yeah, There Was Always Going to Be a
June 5, 1968
Lemon Lard
Just an Ordinary Girl, 118
Restaurant
It Was Your Idea to Go to Bed with Her
April 7, 1969
Shellfish
A Closet Freezes
Late Starting Dawn
A Witch and a 6 Pack of Double Century Ale
Flight Handbook
Mouths That Kissed in the Hot Ashes
of Pompeii
The Elbow of a Dead Duck
Diet
The Alarm-Colored Shadow of a
Frightened Ant
Cameo Turret
33-⅓ Sized Lions
The Virgo Grace of Your Ways Versus
This Poem
A Lyrical Want, an Endocrine Gland Fancy
The Moon Versus Us Ever Sleeping
Vampire
January 17
Too Many Lifetimes like This One, Right?
Color as Beginning
In Her Sweetness Where She Folds
My Wounds
Up against the Ivory Tower
All Secrets of Past Tense Have
Just Come My Way
Melting Ice Cream at the Edge of
Your Final Thought
My Concern for Your Tomato Plants
“88” Poems
Pity the Morning Light That Refuses
to Wait for Dawn
Snow Makes Me Sad
As the Bruises Fade, the Lightning Aches
I Am Summoned by a Door
At Last Our Bodies Coincide
Let Us Please Learn New Words That Mean
As Much As Direction
Deer Tracks
ROMMEL DRIVES ON DEEP INTO EGYPT
—San Francisco Chronicle Headline
June 26, 1942
Rommel is dead.
His army has joined the quicksand legions
of history where battle is always
a metal echo saluting a rusty shadow.
His tanks are gone.
How’s your ass?
A 48-Year-Old Burglar from San Diego
Have You Ever Had a Witch Bloom like a Highway
Have you ever had a witch bloom like a highway
on your mouth? and turn your breathing to her
fancy? like a little car with blue headlights
passing forever in a dream?
The Memoirs of Jesse James
I remember all those thousands of hours
that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.
Flora Shakespeare
Acting out the place where the flowers die,
circling their graves with themselves,
your costume is perfect, you’re on stage.
15%
She tries to get things out of men
that she can’t get because she’s not
15% prettier.
Romeo and Juliet
If you will die for me,
I will die for you
and our graves will
be like two lovers washing
their clothes together
in a laundromat.
If you will bring the soap,
I will bring the bleach.
Have You Ever Felt like a Wounded Cow
Have you ever felt like a wounded cow
halfway between an oven and a pasture?
walking in a trance toward a pregnant
seventeen-year-old housewife’s
two-day-old cookbook?
Mrs. Myrtle Tate, Movie Projectionist
Mrs. Myrtle Tate, movie projectionist
died Wednesday in San Francisco.
She was 66, retired.
We must remember again the absolute
excitement of the moon and think lyrically
about her death.
It is very important for our Twentieth Century
souls because she was “one of the few women
who worked as a movie projectionist.”
Oh, honor this mothersisterbride
of magic lanterns with an endless waterfall of
visions.
Critical Can Opener
There is something wrong
with this poem. Can you
&n
bsp; find it?
Love’s Not the Way to Treat a Friend
Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t
want to see your eyes forgotten
on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse
of those who can remember nothing.
Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I don’t want to see you end up that way
with your body being poured like wounded
marble into the architecture of those who make
bridges out of crippled birds.
There are so many better things for you
than to see your feelings sold
as magic lanterns to somebody whose body
casts no light.
The Net Wt. of Winter Is 6.75 Ozs.
The net wt. of winter is 6.75 ozs.
and winter has a regular flavor
with Fluoristan to stop tooth decay.
A month ago I bought a huge tube
of Crest tooth paste and when I put it
in the bathroom, I looked at it
and said, “Winter.”
December 4, 1968
Abalone Curry
I have Christmas dinner every year with Michael
and he always cooks abalone curry. It takes
a long time because it tastes so good and the afternoon
travels pleasantly by in his kitchen that is halfway
between India and Atlantis.
Cannibal Carpenter
He wants to build you a house
out of your own bones, but
that’s where you’re living
any way!
The next time he calls
you answer the telephone with the
sound of your grandmother being
born. It was a twenty-three-hour
labor in 1894. He hangs
up.
Sheep
Three sheep in a field
grazing beside a FOR SALE sign
are like pennies in the hand
of a child who will buy what
he wants to.
Donner Party
Forsaken, fucking in the cold,
eating each other, lost, runny noses,
complaining all the time like so
many people that we know.
Formal Portrait
I like to think of Frankenstein as a huge keyhole
and the laboratory as the key that turns the lock
and everything that happens afterward as just the
lock turning.
—2
Everybody wants to go to bed
with everybody else, they’re
lined up for blocks, so I’ll
go to bed with you. They won’t
miss us.
The Sister Cities of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hiroshima, Japan
It was snowing hard when we drove
into Los Alamos. There was a clinical feeling
to the town as if every man, woman and child.
were a doctor. We shopped at the Safeway
and got a bag of groceries. A toddler
looked like a brain surgeon. He carefully
watched us shop at the exact place where he would
make his first incision.
Wood
We age in darkness like wood
and watch our phantoms change
their clothes
of shingles and boards
for a purpose that can only be
described as wood.
Negative Clank
He’d sell a rat’s asshole
to a blindman for a wedding
ring.
Jules Verne Zucchini
Men are walking on the moon today,
planting their footsteps as if they were
zucchini on a dead world
While over 3,000,000 people starve to death
every year on a living one.
Earth
July 20, 1969
She Sleeps this very Evening in Greenbrook Castle
She sleeps this very evening in Greenbrook Castle
without the comfort of husband,
and what she knows is what she dreams. He isn’t dead
and he isn’t alive,
and the crack of light beneath the door is like the tail
of a cat as she paces in her room.
She sleeps this very evening in Greenbrook Castle
without the comfort of husband,
and what she knows is what she dreams. He isn’t dead
and he isn’t alive,
and the light in her window is like a wedding ring
shining to the dark and distant woods.
She sleeps this very evening in Greenbrook Castle
without the comfort of husband,
and what she knows is what she dreams. He isn’t dead
and he isn’t alive,
and the light that reflects her golden hair is the answer
to her marriage and the children of her prayers.
Third Eye
For Gary Snyder
There is a motorcycle
in New Mexico.
You’ll Have to Buy Some More Chairs
If you love a statue start a mirror.
Your friends will admire you.
If you love a mirror start a statue.
Make room for new friends.
Feasting and Drinking Went on Far into the Night
Feasting and drinking went on far into the night
but in the end we went home alone to console
ourselves which seems to be what so many things
are all about like the branches of a tree just after
the wind stops blowing.
1891-1944
Hinged to Forgetfulness like a Door
Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,
she slowly closed out of sight,
and she was the woman that I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams.
Affectionate Light Bulb
l have a 75 watt, glare free, long life
Harmony House light bulb in my toilet.
I have been living in the same apartment
for over two years now
and that bulb just keeps burning away.
I believe that it is fond of me.
Just Because
Just because people love your mind,
doesn’t mean they have to have your body,
too.
The History of Bolivia
“Butch didn’t die in Bolivia. He came
home to Utah—I saw him after he got back.
The Sundance Kid was killed in Bolivia
and it grieved Butch to leave him there.”
Wildwood Shadow
He taught me to love him
and called me his flower
An old woman clutches a bagfull of groceries
to her chest. A loaf of white bread sticks
out the top. She has forgotten to put her
food stamps away. They’re still in her hand.
Propelled by Portals Whose Only Shame
Propelled by portals whose only shame
is a zeppelin’s shadow crossing a field
of burning bathtubs,
I ask myself: There must be more to life
than this?
Clad in Garments like a Silver Disease
Clad in garments like a silver disease
you parade around the house. You’re quite happy.
The lights are out. The shades are down.
It’s your own business.
Lions Are Growing like Yellow Roses on the Wind
Lions are growing like yellow roses on the wind
and we turn gracefully in the medieval garden
of
their roaring blossoms.
Oh, I want to turn.
Oh, I am turning.
Oh, I have turned.
Thank you.
Nice Ass
There is so much lost
and so much gained in
these words.
Casablanca
Where I come from it’s just
another carrot in the patch.
Where do you come from,
stranger?
8 Millimeter
At the Earliest Dark Answer
At the earliest dark answer
she turns her hair toward
the door.
She’ll learn, she’ll learn
that life is more than a
closing comb.
All Girls Should Have a Poem
For Valerie
All girls should have a poem
written for them even if
we have to turn this God-damn world
upside down to do it.
New Mexico