please get dressed!
why does it take you so long to
get dressed?
where’s the brush?
all right, I’ll give you a head
band!
what time is it?
where’s the clock?
where did you put the clock?
aren’t you dressed yet?
where’s the brush?
where’s your sandwich?
did you make a sandwich?
I’ll make your sandwich.
honey and peanut butter.
and an orange.
there.
where’s the brush?
I’ll use a comb.
all right, holler. you lost the brush!
where did you lose the brush?
all right. now isn’t that better?
where’s your coat?
go find your coat.
your coat has to be around somewhere!
listen, what are you doing?
what are you playing with?
now you’ve spilled it all!
I hear them open the door
go down the stairway,
get into the car.
I hear them drive away. they are gone, down the hill
on the way to
nursery school.
grass
at the window
I watch a man with a
power mower
the sounds of his doing race like
flies and bees
on the wallpaper,
it is like a warm fire, and
better than eating steak,
and the grass is green enough
and the sun is sun enough
and what’s left of my life
stands there
checking glints of green flying;
it is a giant disrobing of
care, stumbling away from
doing.
suddenly I understand
old men in rockers
bats in Colorado caves
tiny lice crawling into
the eyes of dead birds.
back and forth
he follows his gasoline
sound. it is
interesting enough,
with
the streets
flat on their Spring backs
and smiling.
crucifix in a deathhand
yes, they begin out in a willow, I think
the starch mountains begin out in the willow
and keep right on going without regard for
pumas and nectarines
somehow these mountains are like
an old woman with a bad memory and
a shopping basket.
we are in a basin. that is the
idea. down in the sand and the alleys,
this land punched-in, cuffed-out, divided,
held like a crucifix in a deathhand,
this land bought, resold, bought again and
sold again, the wars long over,
the Spaniards all the way back in Spain
down in the thimble again, and now
real estaters, subdividers, landlords, freeway
engineers arguing. this is their land and
I walk on it, live on it a little while
near Hollywood here I see young men in rooms
listening to glazed recordings
and I think too of old men sick of music
sick of everything, and death like suicide
I think is sometimes voluntary, and to get your
hold on the land here it is best to return to the
Grand Central Market, see the old Mexican women,
the poor…I am sure you have seen these same women
many years before
arguing
with the same young Japanese clerks
witty, knowledgeable and golden
among their soaring store of oranges, apples
avocados, tomatoes, cucumbers—
and you know how these look, they do look good
as if you could eat them all
light a cigar and smoke away the bad world.
then it’s best to go back to the bars, the same bars
wooden, stale, merciless, green
with the young policeman walking through
scared and looking for trouble,
and the beer is still bad
it has an edge that already mixes with vomit and
decay, and you’ve got to be strong in the shadows
to ignore it, to ignore the poor and to ignore yourself
and the shopping bag between your legs
down there feeling good with its avocados and
oranges and fresh fish and wine bottles, who needs
a Fort Lauderdale winter?
25 years ago there used to be a whore there
with a film over one eye, who was too fat
and made little silver bells out of cigarette
tinfoil. the sun seemed warmer then
although this was probably not
true, and you take your shopping bag
outside and walk along the street
and the green beer hangs there
just above your stomach like
a short and shameful shawl, and
you look around and no longer
see any
old men.
the screw-game
one of the terrible things is
really
being in bed
night after night
with a woman you no longer
want to screw.
they get old, they don’t look very good
anymore—they even tend to
snore, lose
spirit.
so, in bed, you turn sometimes,
your foot touches hers—
god, awful!—
and the night is out there
beyond the curtains
sealing you together
in the
tomb.
and in the morning you go to the
bathroom, pass in the hall, talk,
say odd things; eggs fry, motors
start.
but sitting across
you have 2 strangers
jamming toast into mouths
burning the sullen head and gut with
coffee.
in 10 million places in America
it is the same—
stale lives propped against each
other
and no place to
go.
you get in the car
and you drive to work
and there are more strangers there, most of them
wives and husbands of somebody
else, and besides the guillotine of work, they
flirt and joke and pinch, sometimes tend to
work off a quick screw somewhere—
they can’t do it at home—
and then
the drive back home
waiting for Christmas or Labor Day or
Sunday or
something.
millionaires
you
no faces
no faces
at all
laughing at nothing—
let me tell you
I have drunk in skid row rooms with
imbecile winos
whose cause was better
whose eyes still held some light
whose voices retained some sensibility,
and when the morning came
we were sick but not ill,
poor but not deluded,
and we stretched in our beds and rose
in the late afternoons
like millionaires.
when you wait for the dawn to crawl through the
screen like a burglar to take your life away
screen like a burglar to take your life away
the snake had crawled the hole,
and she said,
tell me about
yourself.
and
I said,
I was beaten down
long ago
in some alley
in another
world.
and she said,
we’re all
like pigs
slapped down some lane,
our
grassbrains
singing
toward the
blade.
by
god,
you’re an
odd one,
I said.
we
sat there
smoking
cigarettes
at
5
in the morning.
the talkers
the boy walks with his muddy feet across my
soul
talking about recitals, virtuosi, conductors,
the lesser known novels of Dostoyevsky;
talking about how he corrected a waitress,
a hasher who didn’t know that French dressing
was composed of so and so;
he gabbles about the Arts until
I hate the Arts,
and there is nothing cleaner
than getting back to a bar or
back to the track and watching them run,
watching things go without this
clamor and chatter,
talk, talk, talk,
the small mouth going, the eyes blinking,
a boy, a child, sick with the Arts,
grabbing at it like the skirt of a mother,
and I wonder how many tens of thousands
there are like him across the land
on rainy nights
on sunny mornings
on evenings meant for peace
in concert halls
in cafes
at poetry recitals
talking, soiling, arguing.
it’s like a pig going to bed
with a good woman
and you don’t want
the woman any more.
art
as the
spirit
wanes
the
form
appears.
advice for some young man in the year 2064 A.D.
let me speak as a friend
although the centuries hang
between us and neither you nor I
can see the moon.
be careful less the onion blind the eye
or the snake sting
or the beetle possess the house
or the lover your wife
or the government your child
or the wine your will
or the doctor your heart
or the butcher your belly
or the cat your chair
or the lawyer your ignorance of the law
or the law dressed as a uniformed man and killing you.
dismiss perfection as an ache of the
greedy
but do not give in to the mass modesty of
easy imperfection.
and remember
the belly of the whale is laden with
great men.
(uncollected)
ice for the eagles
I keep remembering the horses
under the moon
I keep remembering feeding the horses
sugar
white oblongs of sugar
more like ice,
and they had heads like
eagles
bald heads that could bite and
did not.
The horses were more real than
my father
more real than God
and they could have stepped on my
feet but they didn’t
they could have done all kinds of horrors
but they didn’t.
I was almost 5
but I have not forgotten yet;
o my god they were strong and good
those red tongues slobbering
out of their souls.
girl in a mini skirt reading the Bible
outside my window
outside my window
Sunday. I am eating a
grapefruit. church is over at the Russian
Orthodox to the
west.
she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down. a small red and black
Bible, and as she reads
her legs keep moving, moving,
she is doing a slow rhythmic dance
reading the Bible…
long gold earrings;
2 gold bracelets on each arm,
and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that cloth,
she twists this way and that,
long young legs warm in the sun…
there is no escaping her being
there is no desire to…
my radio is playing symphonic music
that she cannot hear
but her movements coincide exactly
to the rhythms of the
symphony…
she is dark, she is dark
she is reading about God.
I am God.
hell is a lonely place
he was 65, his wife was 66, had
Alzheimer’s disease.
he had cancer of the
mouth.
there were
operations, radiation
treatments
which decayed the bones in his
jaw
which then had to be
wired.
daily he put his wife in
rubber diapers
like a
baby.
unable to drive in his
condition
he had to take a taxi to
the medical
center,
had difficulty speaking,
had to
write the directions
down.
on his last visit
they informed him
there would be another
operation: a bit more
left
cheek and a bit more
tongue.
when he returned
he changed his wife’s
diapers
put on the tv
dinners, watched the
evening news
then went to the
bedroom, got the
gun, put it to her
temple, fired.
she fell to the
left, he sat upon the
couch
put the gun into his
mouth, pulled the
trigger.
the shots didn’t arouse
the neighbors.
later
the burning tv dinners
did.
somebody arrived, pushed
the door open, saw
it.
soon
the police arrived and
went through their
routine, found
some items:
a closed savings
account and
a checkbook with a
balance of
$1.14
suicide, they
deduced.
in three weeks
there were two
new tenants:
a computer engineer
named
Ross
and his wife
Anatana
who studied
ballet.
they looked like another
upwardly mobile
pair.
the girls and the birds
the girls were young
and worked the
streets
but often couldn?
??t
score, they
ended up
in my hotel
room
3 or 4 of
them
sucking at the
wine,
hair in face,
runs in
stockings,
cursing, telling
stories…
somehow
those were
peaceful
nights
but really
they reminded me
of long
ago
when I was a
boy
watching my grandmother’s
canaries make
droppings
into their
seed
and into their
water
and the
canaries were
beautiful
and
chattered
but
never
sang.
1813–1883
listening to Wagner
as outside in the dark the wind blows a cold rain the
trees wave and shake lights go
off and on the walls creak and the cats run under the
bed…
Wagner battles the agonies, he’s emotional but
solid, he’s the supreme fighter, a giant in a world of
pygmies, he takes it straight on through, he breaks
barriers
an
astonishing FORCE of sound as