Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame Read Free Page A

dying too.
     
     
    for there is nothing as crappy dissolute
    as an old poet gone sour
    in body and mind
    and luck, the horses running nothing but out,
    the Vegas dice cancer to the thin green wallet,
    Shostakovich heard too often
    and cans of beer sucked through a straw,
    with mouth and mind broken in
    young men’s alleys.
    in the hot noon window
    I swing and miss a razzing fly,
    and ho, I fall heavy as thunder
    but downstairs they’ll understand:
    he’s either drunk or dying,
    an old poet nodding vaguely in halls,
    cracking his stick across the backs
    of innocent dogs
    and spitting out
    what’s left of his sun.
    the mailman has some little thing for him
    which he takes to his room
    and opens like a rose,
    only to scream loudly and vainly,
    and his coffin is filled
    with notes from hell.
    but in the morning you’ll see him
    packing off little envelopes,
    still worried about
    rent
    cigarettes
    wine
     
     
    women
    horses,
    still worried about
    Eric Coates, Beethoven’s 3rd and
    something Chicago has held for three months
    and his paper bag of wine
    and Pall Malls.
    42 in August, 42,
    the rats walking his brain
    eating up the thoughts before they
    can make the keys.
    old poets are as bad as old queers:
    there’s something quite unacceptable:
    the editors wish to thank you for
    submitting but
    regret…
    down
    down
    down
    the dark hall
    into a womanless hall
    to peel a last egg
    and sit down to the keys:
    click click a click,
    over the television sounds
    over the sounds of springs,
    click clack a clack:
    another old poet
    going off.
     

the race
     
     
    it is like this
    when you slip down,
    done like a wound-up victrola
    (you remember those?)
    and you go downtown
    and watch the boys punch
    but the big blondes sit with
    someone else
    and you’ve aged like a punk in a movie:
    cigar in skull, fat gut,
    but only no money,
    no wiseness of way, no worldliness,
    but as usual
    most of the fights are bad,
    and afterwards
    back in the parking lot
    you sit and watch them go,
    light the last cigar,
    and then start the old car,
    old car, not so young man
    going down the street
    stopped by a red light
    as if time were no problem,
    and they come up to you:
    a car full of young,
    laughing,
    and you watch them go
    until
    somebody behind you honks
    and you are shaken back
    into what is left
    of your life.
    pitiful, self-pity,
    and your foot is to the floor
    and you catch the young ones,
    you pass the young ones
    and holding the wheel like all love gone
    you race to the beach
    with them
    brandishing your cigar and your steel,
    laughing,
    you will take them to the ocean
    to the last mermaid,
    seaweed and shark, merry whale,
    end of flesh and hour and horror,
    and finally they stop
    and you go on
    toward your ocean,
    the cigar biting your lips
    the way love used to.
     

vegas
     
     
    there was a frozen tree that I wanted to paint
    but the shells came down
    and in Vegas looking across at a green sunshade
    at 3:30 in the morning,
    I died without nails, without a copy of the Atlantic Monthly,
    the windows screamed like doves moaning the bombing of Milan
    and I went out to live with the rats
    but the lights were too bright
    and I thought maybe I’d better go back and sit in a
    poetry class:
     
     
    a marvelous description of a gazelle
    is hell;
    the cross sits like a fly on my window,
    my mother’s breath stirs small leaves
    in my mind;
     
     
    and I hitch-hiked back to L.A. through hangover clouds
    and I pulled a letter from my pocket and read it
    and the truckdriver said, what’s that?
    and I said, there’s some gal up North who used to
    sleep with Pound, she’s trying to tell me that H.D.
    was our greatest scribe; well, Hilda gave us a few pink
    Grecian gods in with the chinaware, but after reading her
    I still have 140 icicles hanging from my bones.
     
     
    I’m not going all the way to L.A., the truckdriver said.
     
     
    it’s all right, I said, the calla lilies nod to our minds
    and someday we’ll all go