What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
Page 6
keeps scolding and
screaming
she’s screaming at her child
now she’s clearing her
throat
I lean forward
to get a book of matches to
light my
cigarette
then she screams again
she’s beating her child
the child screams
then it’s quiet
all I can hear are the
crickets
droning
planet earth: where
Christ came
and
never experienced
sex with a
woman or a
man.
the angel who pushed his wheelchair
long ago he edited a little magazine
it was up in San Francisco
during the beat era
during the reading-poetry-with-jazz experiments
and I remember him because he never returned my manuscripts
even though I wrote him many letters,
humble letters, sane letters, and, at last, violent letters;
I’m told he jumped off a roof
because a woman wouldn’t love him.
no matter. when I saw him again
he was in a wheelchair and carried a wine bottle to piss in;
he wrote very delicate poetry
that I, naturally, couldn’t understand;
he autographed his book for me
(which he said I wouldn’t like)
and once at a party I threatened to punch him and
I was drunk and he wept and
I took pity and instead hit the next poet who walked by
on the head with his piss bottle; so,
we had an understanding after all.
he had this very thin and intense woman
pushing him about, she was his arms and legs and
maybe for a while
his heart.
it was almost commonplace
at poetry readings where he was scheduled to read
to see her swiftly rolling him in,
sometimes stopping by me, saying,
“I don’t see how we are going to get him up on the stage!”
sometimes she did. often she did.
then she began writing poetry, I didn’t see much of it,
but, somehow, I was glad for her.
then she injured her neck while doing her yoga
and she went on disability, and again I was glad for her,
all the poets wanted to get disability insurance
it was better than immortality.
I met her in the market one day
in the bread section, and she held my hands and
trembled all over
and I wondered if they ever had sex
those two. well, they had the muse anyhow
and she told me she was writing poetry and articles
but really more poetry, she was really writing a lot,
and that’s the last I saw of her
until one night somebody told me she’d o.d.’d
and I said, no, not her
and they said, yes, her.
it was a day or so later
sometime in the afternoon
I had to go to the Los Feliz post office
to mail some dirty stories to a sex mag.
coming back
outside a church
I saw these smiling creatures
so many of them smiling
the men with beards and long hair and wearing
bluejeans
and most of the women blonde
with sunken cheeks and tiny grins,
and I thought, ah, a wedding,
a nice old-fashioned wedding,
and then I saw him on the sidewalk
in his wheelchair
tragic yet somehow calm
looking greyer, a profile like a tamed hawk,
and I knew it was her funeral,
she had really o.d.’d
and he did look tragic out there.
I do have feelings, you know.
maybe tonight I’ll try to read his book.
the circus of death
it’s there
from the beginning, to the middle, to the
end,
there from light to darkness,
there through the wasted
days and nights, through
the wasted years,
the continuance
of moving toward death.
sitting with death in your lap,
washing death out of your ears
and from between your toes,
talking to death, living with death while
living through the stained walls and the flat
tires
and the changing of the guard.
living with death in your stockings.
opening the morning blinds to death,
the circus of death,
the dancing girls of death,
the yellow teeth of death,
the cobra of death,
the deserts of death.
death like a tennis ball in the mouth of
a dog.
death while eating a candlelight dinner.
the roses of death.
death like a moth.
death like an empty shoe.
death the dentist.
through darkness and light and
laughter,
through the painting of a
masterpiece,
through the applause for the bowing
actors,
while taking
a walk through Paris,
by the broken-winged
bluebird,
while
glory
runs through your fingers as
you
pick up an orange.
through the bottom of the sky
divided into sections like a
watermelon
it
bellows
silently,
consumes names and nations,
squirrels, fleas, hogs,
dandelions,
grandmothers, babies,
statues,
philosophies,
groundhogs,
the bullfighter, the bull and
all those killers in the
stadium.
it’s Plato and the murderer of a
child.
the eyes in your head.
your fingernails.
it’s amazing, amazing, amazing.
we’re clearly at the edge.
it’s thunder in a snail’s shell.
it’s the red mark on the black widow.
it’s the mirror without a reflection.
it’s the singular viewpoint.
it’s in the fog over Corpus Christi.
it’s in the eye of the hen.
it’s on the back of the turtle.
it’s moving at the sun
as you put your shoes on for the last
time
without
knowing
it.
the man?
my daughter said this when she was 5:
HERE COMES THE MAN!
what? I said. what?
I looked all around.
HERE COMES THE MAN!
O, HERE COMES THE MAN!
I went to the window and
looked out. I checked the latch
on the door.
she came out of the kitchen
with a spoon and a piepan:
clang, clang, clang!
HERE COMES THE MAN!
HERE COMES THE MAN!
O, LOOK, SEE THE MAN!
SEE THE MAN NOW!
HERE COMES THE MAN!
she means something else,
I thought, and I clapped my hands in
rhythm and we both
marched around and
sang and
loudest.
Christmas poem to a man in jail
hello Bill Abbott:
I appreciate your passing around my books in
jail there, my poems and stories.
if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with
my books, fine.
but literature, you know, is difficult for the
average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too);
I don’t like most poetry, for example,
so I write mine the way I like to read it.
poetry does seem to be getting better, more
human,
the clearing up of the language has something to
do with it. (w.c. williams came along and asked
everybody to clear up the language)
then
I came along.
but writing’s one thing, life’s
another, we
seem to have improved the writing a bit
but life (ours and theirs)
doesn’t seem to be improving very
much.
maybe if we write well enough
and live a little better
life will improve a bit
just out of shame.
maybe the artists haven’t been powerful
enough,
maybe the politicians, the generals, the judges, the
priests, the police, the pimps, the businessmen have been too
strong? I don’t
like that thought
but when I look at our pale and precious artists,
past and present, it does seem
possible.
(people don’t like it when I talk this way.
Chinaski, get off it, they say,
you’re not that great.
but
hell, I’m not talking about being
great.)
what I’m saying is
that art hasn’t improved life like it
should, maybe because it has been too
private? and despite the fact that the old poets
and the new poets and myself
all seem to have had the same or similar troubles
with:
women
government
God
love
hate
penury
slavery
insomnia
transportation
weather
wives, and so
forth.
you write me now
that the man in the cell next to yours
didn’t like my punctuation
the placement of my commas (especially)
and also the way I digress
in order to say something precisely.
ah, he doesn’t realize the intent
which is
to loosen up, humanize, relax,
and still make as real as possible
the word on the page. the word should be like
butter or avocados or
steak or hot biscuits, or onion rings or
whatever is really
needed. it should be almost
as if you could pick up the words and
eat them.
(there is some wise-ass somewhere
out there
who will say
if he ever reads this:
“Chinaski, if I want dinner I’ll go out and
order it!”)
however
an artist can wander and still maintain
essential form. Dostoevsky did it. he
usually told 3 or 4 stories on the side
while telling the one in the
center (in his novels, that is).
Bach taught us how to lay one melody down on
top of another and another melody on top of
that and
Mahler wandered more than anybody I know
and I find great meaning
in his so-called formlessness.
don’t let the form-and-rule boys
like that guy in the cell next to you
put one over on you. just
hand him a copy of Time or Newsweek
and he’ll be
happy.
but I’m not defending my work (to you or him)
I’m defending my right to do it in the way
that makes me feel best.
I always figure if a writer is bored with his work
the reader is going to be
bored too.
and I don’t believe in
perfection, I believe in keeping the
bowels loose
so I’ve got to agree with my critics
when they say I write a lot of shit.
you’re doing 19 and 1/2 years
I’ve been writing about 40.
we all go on with our things.
we all go on with our lives.
we all write badly at times
or live badly at times.
we all have bad days
and nights.
I ought to send that guy in the cell next to yours
The Collected Works of Robert Browning for Christmas,
that’d give him the form he’s looking for
but I need the money for the track,
Santa Anita is opening on the
26th, so give him a copy of Newsweek
(the dead have no future, no past, no present,
they just worry about commas)
and have I placed the commas here
properly,
Abbott?
snake eyes?
it was not a good day.
there was a jagged wretchedness inhabiting
my part of the world
and now I sit at this machine
tonight
hoping for some luck and some
light
but they refuse to
fire, things refuse to
fire.
Wagner on the radio is
grand
but whatever was born in me
today
has been stamped
out, tossed
away.
I don’t ask for your
sympathy
during this
Twilight of the Gods,
I am just speaking to myself
and this is the medium through
which I speak.
still, if somebody reads
this
and your day and your
night
were
akin to mine,
then somehow we’ve touched,
strange brother or
sister,
and we both understand that death is
not the
tragedy.
you are alone and I am
alone
and it’s best that we aren’t
together
comparing our pitiful
sorrows.
only let me sit before this
tired machine,
strange friend,
and write this
final
dull
line:
thank you for reading
this far.
my friends down at the corner:
dirty little bugger
about 10 years old
he sits on a box near the newsboy
he has nothing to do
but sit on that box near the newsboy
and watch
and he watches me
as I buy a newspaper
and then he runs in after me
as I go into the liquor store
and he stands there watching as I pay for a
6-pack,
dirty little bugger.
I interest him; he sickens me.
we are natural enemies.
I leave him in there.
fuck that newsboy too,
at 55 he looks like a
cantaloupe.
why is it such a problem to buy
a newspaper and a few
beers?
smiling, shining, singing
my daughter looked like a young Katharine Hepburn
at the grammar school Christmas presentation.
she stood there with them
smiling, shining, singing
in the long dress I had bought for her.
she looks like Katharine Hepburn, I told her mother
who sat on my left.
she looks like Katharine Hepburn, I told my girlfriend
who sat on my right.
my daughter’s grandmother was another seat away;
I didn’t tell her anything.
I never did like Katharine Hepburn’s acting,
but I liked the way she looked,
class, you know,
somebody you could talk to in bed for
an hour or two before going to
sleep.
I can see that my daughter is going to be a
beautiful woman.
someday when I am old
she’ll probably bring the bedpan with a
kindly smile.
and she’ll probably marry a truckdriver with a
heavy tread
who bowls every Thursday night
with the boys.
well, all that doesn’t matter.
what matters is now.
her grandmother is a hawk of a woman.
her mother is a psychotic liberal and lover of life.
her father is an asshole.
my daughter looked like a young Katharine Hepburn.
after the Christmas presentation
we went to McDonald’s and ate, and fed the sparrows.
Christmas was a week away.
we were less concerned about that than nine-tenths of the town.
that’s class, we both have class.
to ignore Christmas takes a special wisdom
but Happy New Year to
you all.
Bruckner
listening to Bruckner now.
I relate very much to him.
he just misses
by so little.
I ache for his dead
guts.
if we all could only move it
up one notch
when necessary.
but we can’t.
I remember my fight in the