it even killed Beowulf
the brave Beowulf who
had killed Grendel and Grendel’s
mother
look
even the whores at the bar
think about it
drink too much and
almost
forget business.
woman on the street
her shoes themselves
would light my room
like many candles.
she walks like all things
shining on glass,
like all things
that make a difference.
she walks away.
lost in San Pedro
no way back to Barcelona.
the green soldiers have invaded the tombs.
madmen rule Spain
and during a heat wave in 1952 I buried my last concubine.
no way back to the Rock of Gibraltar.
the bones of the hands of my mother are so still.
stay still now, mother
stay still.
the horse tossed the jock
the horse fell
then got up
on only 3 legs—
the 4th bent nearly in two
and all the people anguished for the jock
but my heart ached for the horse
the horse
the horse
it was terrible
it was truly terrible.
I sometimes think about one or the other of my women.
I wonder what we were hoping for when we lived together
our minds shattered like the 4th leg of that horse.
remember when women wore dresses and high heels?
remember whenever a car door opened all the men turned to look?
it was a beautiful time and I’m glad I was there to see it.
no way back to Barcelona.
the world is less than a fishbone.
this place roars with the need for mercy.
there is this fat gold watch sitting here on my desk
sent to me by a German cop.
I wrote him a nice letter thanking him for it
but the police have killed more of my life than the crooks.
nothing to do but wait for the pulling of the shade.
I pull the shade.
my 3 male cats have had their balls clipped.
now they sit and look at me with eyes emptied
of all but killing.
Manx
have we gone wrong again?
we laugh less and less,
become more sadly sane.
all we want is
the absence of others.
even favorite classical music
has been heard too often and
all the good books have been
read…
there is a sliding
glass door
and there outside
a white Manx sits
with one crossed eye
his tongue sticks out the
corner of his mouth.
I lean over
and pull the door open
and he comes running in
front legs working
in one direction,
rear legs
in the other.
he circles the
room in a scurvy angle
to where I sit
claws up my legs
my chest
places front legs
like arms
on my shoulders
sticks his snout
against my nose
and looks at me as
best he can.
also befuddled,
I look back.
a better night now,
old boy,
a better time,
a better way now
stuck together
like this
here.
I am able
to smile again
as suddenly
the Manx
leaps away
scattering across the
rug sideways
chasing something now
that none of us
can see.
the history of a tough motherfucker
he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said, “not much
chance…give him these pills…his backbone
is crushed, but it was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he’ll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he’s been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there…also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off…”
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in de cades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn’t eat, he
wouldn’t touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn’t go anywhere,
I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn’t work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat—I’d had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough…
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.
“you can make it,” I said to him.
he kept trying, getting up and falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn’t want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.
you know the rest: now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed,
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left…
and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say, “look, look
at this!”
but they don’t understand, they say something like, “you
say you’ve been influenced by Céline?”
“no,” I hold the cat up, “by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!”
I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he’s relaxed he knows…
it’s then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.
he too knows it’s bullshit but that somehow it all helps.
bad fix
old Butch, they fixed him
the girls don’t look like much
anymore.
when Big Sam moved out
of the back
I inherited big Butch,
70 as cats go,
old,
fixed,
but still as big and
mean a cat as anybody
ever remembered
seeing.
he’s damn near gnawed
off my hand
the hand that feeds him
a couple of
times
but I’ve forgiven him,
he’s fixed
and there’s something in
> him
that doesn’t like
it.
at night
I hear him mauling and
running other cats through
the brush.
Butch, he’s still a magnificent
old cat,
fighting
even without it.
what a bastard he must have been
with it
when he was 19 or 20
walking slowly down
his path
and I look at him
now
still feel the courage
and the strength
in spite of man’s smallness
in spite of man’s scientific
skill
old Butch
retains
endures
peering at me with those
evil yellow eyes
out of that huge
undefeated
head.
one for the old boy
he was just a
cat
cross-eyed,
a dirty white
with pale blue eyes
I won’t bore you with his
history
just to say
he had much bad luck
and was a good old
guy
and he died
like people die
like elephants die
like rats die
like flowers die
like water evaporates and
the wind stops blowing
the lungs gave out
last Monday.
now he’s in the rose
garden
and I’ve heard a
stirring march
playing for him
inside of me
which I know
not many
but some of you
would like to
know
about.
that’s
all.
my cats
I know. I know.
they are limited, have different
needs and
concerns.
but I watch and learn from them.
I like the little they know,
which is so
much.
they complain but never
worry.
they walk with a surprising dignity.
they sleep with a direct simplicity that
humans just can’t
understand.
their eyes are more
beautiful than our eyes.
and they can sleep 20 hours
a day
without
hesitation or
remorse.
when I am feeling
low
all I have to do is
watch my cats
and my
courage
returns.
I study these
creatures.
they are my
teachers.
Death Wants More Death
death wants more death, and its webs are full:
I remember my father’s garage, how child-like
I would brush the corpses of flies
from the windows they had thought were escape—
their sticky, ugly, vibrant bodies
shouting like dumb crazy dogs against the glass
only to spin and flit
in that second larger than hell or heaven
onto the edge of the ledge,
and then the spider from his dank hole
nervous and exposed
the puff of body swelling
hanging there
not really quite knowing,
and then knowing—
something sending it down its string,
the wet web,
toward the weak shield of buzzing,
the pulsing;
a last desperate moving hair-leg
there against the glass
there alive in the sun,
spun in white;
and almost like love:
the closing over,
the first hushed spider-sucking:
filling its sack
upon this thing that lived;
crouching there upon its back
drawing its certain blood
as the world goes by outside
and my temples scream
and I hurl the broom against them:
the spider dull with spider-anger
still thinking of its prey
and waving an amazed broken leg;
the fly very still,
a dirty speck stranded to straw;
I shake the killer loose
and he walks lame and peeved
towards some dark corner
but I intercept his dawdling
his crawling like some broken hero,
and the straws smash his legs
now waving
above his head
and looking
looking for the enemy
and somehow valiant,
dying without apparent pain
simply crawling backward
piece by piece
leaving nothing there
until at last the red gut-sack splashes
its secrets,
and I run child-like
with God’s anger a step behind,
back to simple sunlight,
wondering
as the world goes by
with curled smile
if anyone else
saw or sensed my crime.
the lisp
I had her for 3 units
and at mid-term
she’d read off how many assignments
stories
had been turned in:
“Gilbert: 2…
Ginsing: 5…
McNulty: 4…
Frijoles: none…
Lansford: 2…
Bukowski: 38…”
the class laughed
and she lisped
that not only did Bukowski
write many stories
but that they were all of
high quality.
she flashed her golden legs
in 1940 and there was something
sexy about her lisp
sexy as a hornet
as a rattler
that lisp.
and she lisped to me
after class
that I should go to
war,
that I would make a
very good sailor,
and she told me about how
she took my stories home
and read them to her husband
and how they both laughed,
and I told her, “o.k., Mrs. Anderson.”
and I’d walk out on the campus
where almost every guy had a
girl.
I didn’t become a sailor,
Mrs. Anderson, I’m not crazy
about the ocean
and I didn’t like war
even when it was the popular
thing to
do.
but here’s another completed assignment
for you
those golden legs
that lisp
still has me typing
love songs.
on being 20
my mother knocked on my rooming-house door
and came in
looked in the dresser drawer:
“Henry you don’t have any clean
stockings?
do you change your underwear?”
“Mom, I don’t want you poking around in
here…”
“I hear that there is a woman
who comes to your room late at
night and she drinks with you, she lives
right down the hall.”
“she’s all right…”
“Henry, you can get a terrible
>
disease.”
“yeah…”
“I talked with your landlady, she’s a
nice lady, she says you must read a lot
of books in bed because as you fall to sleep at
night the books fall to the floor,
they can hear it all over the
house, heavy books, one at midnight,
another at one a.m., another at 2 a.m.,
another at four.”
after she left I took the library books
back
returned to the rooming house and
put the dirty stockings and the dirty
underwear and the dirty shirts into
the paper suitcase
took the streetcar downtown
boarded the Trailways bus to
New Orleans
figuring to arrive with ten dollars
and let them do with me
what they would.
they did.
meanwhile