What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
Page 8
will you please go out for a walk and
get run over by a train?
my few friends think I’m a very funny fellow.
tell me about Chinaski, they ask my girlfriend.
oh, she says, he just sits in this big chair
and moans.
they laugh.
I make people laugh.
Assault, I say, do you want something to eat?
were you once a racehorse?
why don’t you
sleep?
take a rest?
die?
Assault follows me across the room
he leaps on my shoulders and shakes me.
Lorca was shot down in the road but here
in America the poets never anger anybody.
the poets don’t gamble.
their poetry has the smell of clinics.
their poetry has the smell of clinics
where people die rather than live.
here they don’t assassinate the poets
they don’t even notice the poets.
I walk out on the street to buy a
newspaper.
Assault follows me.
we pass a beautiful young girl on the sidewalk.
I look into her eyes, she stares
back.
you can’t have her, says Assault, you are an old man,
you are a crazy old man.
I’m aware of my age, I say with some dignity.
yes, and aware of death too.
you’re going to die and
you don’t know where you’re going
but I’m coming along with you.
you rotten bastard, I say, why are you
so fond of me?
I get a newspaper and come back.
we read it together.
ah, my companion!
we bathe together, sleep together, eat
together, we
open letters together.
we write poems together.
we read poems together.
I don’t know if I am Chinaski or
Assault.
some say I love my pain.
yes, I love it so much I’d like to give it to you
wrapped in a red ribbon
wrapped in a bloody red ribbon
you can have it
you can have it all.
I’ll never miss it.
I’m working on getting rid of it, believe me.
I might jam it into your mailbox
or throw it into the back seat of your car.
but now
here on DeLongpre Ave.
we have just
each other.
raw with love
little dark girl with
kind eyes
when it comes time to
use the knife
I won’t flinch and
I won’t blame
you,
as I drive along the shore alone
as the palms wave,
the ugly heavy palms,
as the living do not arrive
as the dead do not leave,
I won’t blame you,
instead
I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.
little dark girl with kind eyes
you have no
knife. the knife is
mine and I won’t use it
yet.
wide and moving
it is 98 degrees and I am standing in the center
of the room in my shorts.
it is the beginning of September
and I hear the sound of high heels biting
into the pavement outside.
I walk to the window
as she comes by
in a knitted see-through pink dress,
long legs in nylon,
and the behind is
wide and moving and grand
as I stand there watching the sun run through
all that movement
and then she is gone.
all I can see is brush and lawn and pavement.
where did she come from?
and what can one do when it comes and leaves
like that?
it seems immensely unfair.
I turn around, roll myself a cigarette,
light it,
stand in front of my air cooler
and feel unjustifiably
cheated.
but I suppose she gives that same feeling to a
hundred men a day.
I decide not to mourn
and remain at the window to
watch a white pigeon
peck in the dirt
outside.
demise
the son-of-a-bitch
was one of those soft liberal guys
belly like butter who
lived in a big house, he
was a professor
and he told
her:
“he’ll be your
demise.”
imagine anybody saying
that: “demise”!
we drove in from the track,
she’d lost $57 and she said:
“we better stop for something to
drink.”
she wore an old army jacket
a baseball cap
hiking boots
and when I came out with the bottle
she twisted the top off
and took a long straight swallow
a longshoreman’s suicide gulp
tilting her head back behind those dark glasses.
my god, I thought.
a nice country girl like that
who loves to dance.
her 4 mad sisters will never forgive me
and that soft left-wing son-of-a-bitch
with a belly like butter (in that big
house) was
right.
the pact
“I called up Harry and his girlfriend
answered,” she said. “so I asked her,
‘can I speak to Harry?’
and she said, ‘Harry’s not here right
now.’
and I said, ‘all right,
I’ll phone him back.’
and Harry’s girlfriend said,
‘listen, I think I’d better tell you.
Harry’s
dead.’”
my girlfriend and Harry used to be
lovers. Harry had a bad heart
and he couldn’t get it up
anymore.
then she told me:
“Harry and I made a pact:
he said
when he died he would
come back from the dead and
let me know that there’s
life after death.
I think I ought to tell you
what he’s going to
try to do.”
“oh really?” I said.
so each morning now when we
wake up I ask her, “well, did
Harry make it back?”
I only get worried at night.
I can see Harry’s ghost bigger
than the Himalayas ripping the
bedspread off us and
sta
nding there
with his heart and
everything else in good
order.
I’ve always had terrible insomnia but
at least now I have something
to wait for
besides
morning.
75 million dollars
there’s Picasso
and now he’s gone.
I know, it’s in the papers.
there has been much about Picasso
in the papers.
we know he painted.
now there’s the division of the estate.
there seem to be many little Picassos.
it will go to court, probably.
75 million dollars.
instead,
I like to think of how he worked with the brush,
doing it. wet paint, canvas, whatever.
the light. him standing there.
the process unwinding and smoking.
there’s light and air and smell and the
idea, the smell of the
idea. and something to
eat. and there’s a clock there.
eat the clock, Pablo. don’t let the clock
eat
you.
the man leaves and his work
remains.
but to me
it’s much more splendid when both
the man and the work are
here. yes, I know, I
know. 75 million dollars.
well, Picasso’s gone.
immortality and fame are not always
different things. Pablo had fame,
now he has the other.
I think of old Henry Miller walking up and down
the floor in Pacific Palisades and waiting,
waiting.
we’re all such good tough creative boys,
why do they let us
die?
75 million dollars.
butterflies
I believe in earning one’s own way
but I also believe in the unexpected
gift
and it is a wondrous thing
when a woman who has read your works
(or parts of them, anyhow)
offers her self to you
out of the blue
a total
stranger.
such an offer
such a communion
must be taken as
holy.
the hands
the fingers
the hair
the smell
the light.
one would like to be strong enough
to turn them away
those butterflies.
I believe in earning one’s own way
but I also believe in the unexpected gift.
I have no shame.
we deserve one
another
those butterflies
who flutter to my tiny
flame
and
me.
4 Christs
when I went up to Santa Cruz to read
they had the four of us
in the restaurant first
at an elevated table
with placards:
Ginsbing, Beerlinghetti, G. Cider and Chinaski.
it wasn’t even the reading yet.
it was dinner first.
it looked like the Last Supper to me.
I arrived late
sat down
a thin man
with a scarf around his throat
got up and stood over me:
“guess you can’t guess who I am?”
I looked.
“no.”
“I’m G. Cider.”
“ah, hello, Garry, I’m Chinaski.”
he went back and sat
down.
Ginsbing and Beerlinghetti looked like they
were used to all the attention
we were getting.
they sat
impervious.
Jack Bitchelene hollered from the scumbag
crowd of minor poets also eating there
that night:
“hey, Chinaski, start some shit!”
“you are shit, Jack!” I hollered back,
“eat yourself and die!”
Jack loved it. he opened his dirty Brooklyn
mouth and laughed all over Santa
Cruz
his filthy grey uncombed hair
hanging in his face.
“look” I asked Beerlinghetti, “don’t they
serve drinks up here
in the stratosphere?”
“we’re waiting for dinner,” he informed
me politely.
I got up from the table and went
over to the bar.
“give me a vodka-7,” I told the
barkeep.
I got it down fast, ordered
a beer
and went back to the Last
Supper.
on the way a guy grabbed my arm:
“Ginsbing says he doesn’t know how to
relate to you,” he said.
I sat down at the table.
dinner came.
we ate it.
then before our transportation to the reading
arrived
we were given orders:
each was to read
20 minutes.
I read 15 minutes.
Beerlinghetti read 25 minutes.
Ginsbing read 30 minutes.
G. Cider read one hour and
12 minutes.
then it was
over.
and now the others say
I am the
Judas
among us.
$180 gone
lost my ass at the races
now sitting with the flu
listening to Wagner on the radio
I’ve got this small heater humming.
I’m not dead yet
yet not dead
I want to see more kneecaps under
tight nylon hose.
I’m re-grouping,
I’m dreaming up the counter-attack.
lost my ass at the races
the Sierra Madre smiling at me
lost my ass at the races
walked through a wall of defeat.
I saw a dead cat this morning
both front legs sheared off
he was lying by the garbage can
as I walked by.
this is the hardest game
defeat grows like flowers
the whores sit in chairs before their doorways
Attila the Hun sleeps in a rubber mask at night.
Wagner died, Rimbaud quit writing, Christ spit it out.
I lost my ass at the races today
and was reminded of history
of waste and of error
and of strangled dreams.
we want it too easy
and this is the hardest game.
the small heater hums
as I smoke
looking at the walls.
blue head of death
listening to Richard Strauss
is most pleasant
when you are blindfolded and up
against the wall again
facing old Spanish muskets and the
heat and the dust, the
blue head of death.
listening to Richard Strauss
reveals flashes of orange, grey and white
light,
lemonade, and cats crouched in the shade
in polarized
afternoons.
things get bad for all of
us, almost continually,
and what we do under the constant
stress
reveals
who/what we are.
Richard Strauss
is a colorful rush of craft and feeling,
he’s like a
loaf of french bread
cut the long way
and then loaded with all the ingredients.
it’s just
right.
I leave my door open and the cats of the
neighborhood all come in. they walk over to me
and across the top of my couch
and into the bathroom, and one of them goes to
sleep on my
bed. one other sits by me and we listen
to Richard Strauss.
we’re in trouble but we don’t
know what to do.
young men
again and again
young men write me
the same letter:
“I can’t write, but I
want to write. I
read your stuff
and I want to
write just like you.
can you
please tell me something
that will help?”
all around me the
hills are on fire,
floodwaters run
through here
swarming with
rats.
the streets roar
and yawn to
swallow me.
I’m choking
and can’t breathe.
they want to write?
like me?
what do they mean?
what’s writing?
I only want to go to
bed
close my eyes
and sleep
forever.
the meaning of it all
born next to cold dogs and
railroad tracks.
born to live with the
lost.
born among faces
uglier than anything
life could
devise.
born to see the 7
horse break its