there…”
THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER
THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN.
sit and endure
well, first Mae West died
and then George Raft,
and Eddie G. Robinson’s
been gone
a long time,
and Bogart and Gable
and Grable,
and Laurel and
Hardy
and the Marx Brothers,
all those Saturday
afternoons
at the movies
as a boy
are gone now
and I look
around this room
and it looks back at me
and then out through
the window.
time hangs helpless
from the doorknob
as a gold
paperweight
of an owl
looks up at me
(an old man now)
who must sit and endure
these many empty
Saturday
afternoons.
Goldfish
my goldfish stares with watery eyes
into the hemisphere of my sorrow;
upon the thinnest of threads
we hang together,
hang hang hang
in the hangman’s noose;
I stare into his place and
he into mine…
he must have thoughts,
can you deny this?
he has eyes and hunger
and his love too
died in January; but he is
gold, really gold, and I am gray
and it is indecent to search him out,
indecent like the burning of peaches
or the rape of children,
and I turn and look elsewhere,
but I know that he is there behind me,
one gold goblet of blood,
one thing alone
hung between the reddest cloud
of purgatory
and apt. no. 303.
god, can it be
that we are the same?
finish
the hearse comes through the room filled with
the beheaded, the disappeared, the living
mad.
the flies are a glue of sticky paste
their wings will not
lift.
I watch an old woman beat her cat
with a broom.
the weather is unendurable
a dirty trick by
God.
the water has evaporated from the
toilet bowl
the telephone rings without
sound
the small limp arm petering against the
bell.
I see a boy on his
bicycle
the spokes collapse
the tires turn into
snakes and melt
away.
the newspaper is oven-hot
men murder each other in the streets
without reason.
the worst men have the best jobs
the best men have the worst jobs or are
unemployed or locked in
mad houses.
I have 4 cans of food left.
air-conditioned troops go from house to
house
from room to room
jailing, shooting, bayoneting
the people.
we have done this to ourselves, we
deserve this
we are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting
it is as if the sun were a mind that has
given up on us.
I go out on the back porch
and look across the sea of dead plants
now thorns and sticks shivering in a
windless sky.
somehow I’m glad we’re through
finished—
the works of Art
the wars
the decayed loves
the way we lived each day.
when the troops come up here
I don’t care what they do for
we already killed ourselves
each day we got out of bed.
I go back into the kitchen
spill some hash from a soft
can, it is almost cooked
already
and I sit
eating, looking at my
fingernails.
the sweat comes down behind my
ears and I hear the
shooting in the streets and
I chew and wait
without wonder.
dreaming
I live alone in a small room
and read the newspapers
and sleep alone in the dark
dreaming of crowds.
(uncollected)
my special craving
what is it about lobsters and crabs?
those white-pink shells
that always make me hungry just
looking at them there
in the butcher’s display case
tossed casually one upon the other
so kind and pink and waiting.
even alive they make me hungry.
I used to unload them from trucks
for the kitchen at the Biltmore Hotel,
and they looked dangerous
moving about in their slatted boxes
but still they made me
hungry. there is something about
crabs and lobsters
they deserve to be eaten,
they go so well with
french fries, french bread, radishes
and beer. they tell me that they boil them
alive, and this does
cause some minor sense of disturbance within
me, but outside of that
lobsters and crabs are one of the few things
that make the earth a happy place.
I suppose that this is my special
craving. when driving along the beachfront
and I see a sign,
LOBSTER HOUSE, my car turns in of its own
accord. (if a man can’t allow himself a
few luxuries
he just isn’t going to last very
long.) crabs, beer, lobsters,
an occasional lady,
2 or 3 days a week at the track,
my small daughter bringing me a bottle of beer
from the refrigerator while
grinning proudly,
there are some wonderful things in life,
(let each man find his own)
I say lighting my cigar,
thinking about Sunday night lobster dinner,
love love love
running wild,
it feels good sometimes just to be living
with something so nice
in store.
(uncollected)
A Love Poem
all the women
all their kisses the
different ways they love and
talk and need.
their ears they all have
ears and
throats and dresses
and shoes and
automobiles and ex-
husbands.
mostly
the women are very
warm they remind me of
buttered toast with the butter
melted
in.
there is a look in the
eye: they have been
taken they have been
fooled. I don’t quite know what to
do for
them.
I am
a fair cook a good
&nb
sp; listener
but I never learned to
dance—I was busy
then with larger things.
but I’ve enjoyed their different
beds
smoking cigarettes
staring at the
ceilings. I was neither vicious nor
unfair. only
a student.
I know they all have these
feet and barefoot they go across the floor as
I watch their bashful buttocks in the
dark. I know that they like me, some even
love me
but I love very
few.
some give me oranges and vitamin pills;
others talk quietly of
childhood and fathers and
landscapes; some are almost
crazy but none of them are without
meaning; some love
well, others not
so; the best at sex are not always the
best in other
ways; each has limits as I have
limits and we learn
each other
quickly.
all the women all the
women all the
bedrooms
the rugs the
photos the
curtains, it’s
something like a church only
at times there’s
laughter.
those ears those
arms those
elbows those eyes
looking, the fondness and
the wanting I have been
held I have been
held.
one writer’s funeral
there was a rock-and-mud slide
on the Pacific Coast Highway and we had to take a
detour and they directed us up into the Malibu hills
and traffic was slow and it was hot, and then
we were lost.
but I spotted a hearse and said, “there’s the
hearse, we’ll follow it,” and my woman said,
“that’s not the hearse,” and I said, “yes, that’s the
hearse.”
the hearse took a left and I followed
it as it went up
a narrow dirt road and then pulled over and I
thought, “he’s lost too.” there was a truck and a man
selling strawberries parked there
and I pulled over
and asked
where the church was and he gave me directions and
my woman told the strawberry man, “we’ll buy some
strawberries on the way back.” then I swung
onto the road and the hearse started up again
and we continued to drive along
until we reached that
church.
we were going
to the funeral of a great man
but
the crowd was very sparse: the
family, a couple of old screenwriter friends,
two or three others. we
spoke to the family and to the wife of the deceased
and then we went in and the ser vice began and the
priest wasn’t so good but one of the great man’s
sons gave a fine eulogy, and then it was over
and we were outside again, in our car,
following the hearse again, back down the steep
road
passing the strawberry truck again and my
woman said, “let’s not stop for strawberries,”
and as we continued to the graveyard, I thought,
Fante, you were one of the best writers ever
and this is one sad day.
finally we were at the graveside, the priest
said a few words and then it was over.
I walked up to the widow who sat very pale and
beautiful and quite alone on a folding metal chair.
“Hank,” she said, “it’s hard,” and I tried in vain
to say something that might comfort her.
we walked away then, leaving her there, and
I felt terrible.
I got a friend to drive my girlfriend back to
town while I drove to the racetrack, made it
just in time for the first race, got my bet
down as the mutuel clerk looked at me in wonder and
said, “Jesus Christ, how come you’re wearing a
necktie?”
the wine of forever
re-reading some of Fante’s
The Wine of Youth
in bed
this mid-afternoon
my big cat
BEAKER
asleep beside
me.
the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.
Fante’s pure and magic
emotions
hang on the simple
clean
line.
that this man died
one of the slowest and
most horrible deaths
that I ever witnessed or
heard
about…
the gods play no
favorites.
I put the book down
beside me.
book on one side,
cat on the
other…
John, meeting you,
even the way it
was was the event of my
life. I can’t say
I would have died for
you, I couldn’t have handled
it that well.
but it was good to see you
again
this
afternoon.
the pile-up
the 3 horse clipped the heels of
the 7, they both went down and
the 9 stumbled over them,
jocks rolling, horses’ legs flung
skyward.
then the jocks were up, stunned
but all right
and I watched the horses
rising in the late afternoon,
it had not been a good day for
me
and I watched the horses rise,
please, I said inside, no broken
legs!
and the 9 was all right
and the 7
and the 3 also,
they were walking,
the horses didn’t need the van,
the jocks didn’t need the
ambulance.
what a beautiful day,
what a perfectly beautiful day,
what a wondrously lovely
day—
3 winners in a
single race.
my big night on the town
sitting on a 2nd-floor porch at 1:30 a.m.
while
looking out over the city.
it could be worse.
we needn’t accomplish great things, we only
need to accomplish little things that make us feel
better or
not so bad.
of course, sometimes the fates will
not allow us to do
this.
then, we must outwit the fates.
we must be patient with the gods.
they like to have fun,
they like to play with us.
they like to test us.
they like to tell us that we are weak
and stupid, that we are
finished.
the gods need to be amused.
we are their toys.
as I sit on the porch a bird begins
to serenade me from a tree nearby in
the dark.
it is a mockingbird.
I am in love with mockingbirds.
I make bird sounds.
he waits.
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then he makes them back.
he is so good that I laugh.
we are all so easily pleased,
all of us living things.
now a slight drizzle begins to
fall.
little chill drops fall on my
hot skin.
I am half asleep.
I sit in a folding chair with my
feet up on the railing
as the mockingbird begins
to repeat every bird song
he has heard that
day.
this is what we old guys do
for amusement
on Saturday
nights:
we laugh at the gods, we
settle old scores with
them,
we rejuvenate
as the lights of the city
blink below,
as the dark tree
holding the mockingbird
watches over us,
and as the world,
from here,
looks as good as it ever
will.
close encounters of another kind
are we going to the movies or not?
she asked him.
all right, he said, let’s go.
I’m not going to put any pan ties on
so you can finger-fuck me in the
dark, she said.
should we get buttered popcorn?
he asked.