your sadness and loss and warmth
also mine,
I have memorized you
each shape of you
the feel of your cunt-hairs in my teeth
gently-pulling, and
you
who made me laugh at the
appropriate times
always.
little dark girl of kindness
you have no
knife. it’s
mine and I don’t want to use it
yet.
a love poem for all the women I have known
all the women
all their kisses the
different ways they love and
talk and need.
their ears they all have
ears and
throats and dresses
and shoes and
automobiles and ex-
husbands.
mostly
the women are very
warm they remind me of
buttered toast with the butter
melted
in.
there is a look in the
eye: they have been
taken they have been
fooled. I don’t know quite what to
do for
them.
I am
a fair cook a good
listener
but I never learned to
dance—I was busy
then with larger things.
but I’ve enjoyed their different
beds
smoking cigarettes
staring at the
ceilings. I was neither vicious nor
unfair. only
a student.
I know they all have these
feet and barefoot they go across the floor as
I watch their bashful buttocks in the
dark. I know that they like me, some even
love me
but I love very
few.
some give me oranges and pills;
others talk quietly of
childhood and fathers and
landscapes; some are almost
crazy but none of them are without
meaning; some love
well, others not
so; the best at sex are not always the
best in other
ways; each has limits as I have
limits and we learn
each other
quickly.
all the women all the
women all the
bedrooms
the rugs the
photos the
curtains, it’s
something like a church only
at times there’s
laughter.
those ears those
arms those
elbows those eyes
looking the fondness and
the waiting I have been
held I have been
held.
fax
it beats love because
there aren’t any wounds
flopping about. in the
morning she turns on the
radio to Brahms or Ives
or Stravinsky or Mozart.
she boils the eggs count-
ing the seconds out loud:
56, 57, 58. she peels
the eggs, brings them to
me in bed. after break-
fast it’s the couch, we
put our feet on the same
chair and listen to the
classical music. she’s
on her first glass of
scotch and her third
cigarette. I tell her
I must go to the race-
track. she’s been about
2 nights and 2 days.
“when will I see you
again?” I ask. she suggests
that might be up to me.
I nod and Mozart plays.
one for the shoeshine man
the balance is in the snails climbing the
Santa Monica cliffs;
the luck is in walking down Western Avenue
and having one of the girls from a massage
parlor holler at you, “Hello, Sweetie!”
the miracle is in having five women in love
with you at the age of 55,
and the goodness is that you are only able
to love one of them.
the gift is in having a daughter more gentle
than you are, whose laughter is finer
than yours.
the placidity is in being able to drive a
blue 67 Volks through the streets like a
teenager, the radio on to The Host Who Loves You
Most, feeling the sun, feeling the solid hum
of the rebuilt motor
as you needle through traffic
pissing-off the dead.
the grace is in being able to like rock music,
symphony music, jazz . . .
anything that contains the joy of original
energy.
and the mathematic that returns
is the deep blue low
yourself flat upon yourself
within the guillotine walls—
angry at the sound of the phone
or anybody’s footsteps passing;
and the other mathematic:
the imminent lilting high that follows
making the guys who sit on the benches
outside the taco stands
look like gurus
making the girl at the checkstand in the
supermarket look like
Marilyn
like Zsa Zsa
like Jackie before they got her Harvard lover
like the girl in high school that
all us boys followed home.
and the neatness which makes you believe
in something else besides death
is Sandy Hawley bringing in
five winners at Hollywood Park on off-form horses,
none of them favorites,
or somebody in a car approaching you
on a street too narrow,
and he or she pulls aside to let you
by, or the old fighter Beau Jack
shining shoes
after blowing the entire bankroll
on parties
on women
on parasites,
humming, blowing on the leather,
working the rag,
looking up and saying:
“What the hell, I had it for a
while. that beats the
other.”
I act very bitter sometimes
but the taste has often been
sweet, it’s only that I’ve
feared to say it. it’s like
when your woman says,
“tell me you love me,” and
you can’t say it.
if you ever see me grinning from
my blue Volks
running a yellow light
driving straight into the sun
without dark shades
I will only be locked into the
afternoon of a
crazy life
thinking of trapeze artists
of midgets with big cigars
of a Russian winter in the early forties
of Chopin with his bag of Polish soil
or an old waitress bringing me an extra
cup of coffee and seeming to laugh at me
as she does so.
the best of you
I like more than you think.
the others don’t count
except that they have fingers and heads
and some of them eyes
and most of them legs
and all of them
good and bad dreams
and a way to go.
the balance is everywhere and it’s working
and the machineguns and the frogs
and the hedges will tell you
so.
who in the hell is Tom Jones?
I was shacked
with a 24 year old
girl from New York
City for two weeks,
along about the time
of the garbage strike
out there, and one night
this 34 year old woman
arrived and she said,
“I want to see my rival,”
and she did and then
she said, “o, you’re a
cute little thing!”
next I knew there was a
whirling of wildcats—
such screaming and scratching,
wounded animal moans,
blood and piss . . .
I was drunk and in my
shorts. I tried to
separate them and fell,
wrenched my knee. then
they were through the
door and down the walk
and out in the street.
squadcars full of cops
arrived. a police helicopter
circled overhead.
I stood in the bathroom
and grinned in the mirror.
it’s not often at the
age of 55
that such splendid
action occurs.
it was better than the
Watts riots.
then the 34 year old
came back in. she had pissed
all over herself and her
clothing was torn and
she was followed by 2 cops
who wanted to know
why.
pulling up my shorts
I tried to explain.
sitting in a sandwich joint just off the freeway
my daughter is most
glorious.
we are eating in my
car in Santa Monica.
I say, “Hey, kid,
my life has been
good, so good.”
she looks at me.
I put my head down
lean over the steering
wheel, then I kick
the door open, “I’m a
GENIUS!”
then I put on a mock-
puke.
she laughs, biting
into her sandwich.
I straighten up,
pick up 4 french fries,
put them into my mouth,
chew them.
it is 5:30 p.m.
and the cars run up
and down past
us.
I sneak a look.
she’s grinning,
her eyes bright with
the remainder of the
world.
we’ve got all the luck
we need.
a definition
love is nothing but headlights at
night running through the fog
love is nothing but a beercap
that you step on while on the way
to the bathroom
love is a lost key to your door
when you’re drunk
love is what happens one day a
year
one year in ten
love is the crushed cats
of the universe
love is an old newsboy on the
corner who has
given it up
love is the first 3 rows of
potential killers at the
Olympic Auditorium
love is what you think the other
person has destroyed
love is what vanished with the
age of battleships
love is the phone ringing
and the same voice or another
voice but never the right
voice
love is betrayal
love is the burning of the
wino in the alley
love is steel
love is the cockroach
love is a mailbox
love is rain upon the roof
of the cheapest hotel
in Los Angeles
love is your father in a coffin
who hated you
love is a horse with the
broken leg
trying to stand on it
while 55,000 people
watch
love is the way we boil
like the lobster
love is a filter cigarette
stuck in your mouth and
lighted the wrong way
love is everything we said
it wasn’t
love is the Hunchback of
Notre Dame
love is the flea you can’t
find
love is the mosquito
love is 50 grenadiers
love is the emptier of
bedpans
love is a riot at Quentin
love is a madhouse full
love is a donkey shitting in a
street of flies
love is a barstool when there is
nobody sitting on it
love is a film of the Hindenburg
curling to pieces
in years that still scream
love is Dostoyevsky at the
roulette wheel
love is what crawls along
the ground
love is your woman dancing
pressed against a stranger
love is an old woman
pinching a loaf of bread
love is a word used
constantly
ever most constantly
love is red roofs and green
roofs and blue roofs
and flying in jet airliners
that’s all.
an acceptance slip
16 years old
during the Depression
I’d come home drunk
and all my clothing—
shorts, shirts, stockings,
suitcase, and pages of
short stories
would be thrown on the
front lawn and about the
street.
my mother would be waiting
behind a tree:
“Henry, Henry, don’t
go in . . . he’ll
kill you, he’s read
your stories . . .”
“I can whip his
ass . . .”
“Henry, please take
this . . . and
find yourself a room.”
but it worried him
that I might not
finish high school
so I’d be back
again.
one evening he walked in
with the pages of
one of my short stories
(which I had never submitted
to him)
and he said, “this is
a great short story,”
and I said, “o.k.,”
and he handed it to me
and I read it.
it was a story about
a rich man
who had a fight with
his wife and had
gone out into the night
for a cup of coffee
and had noticed
the waitress and the spoons
and forks and the
salt and pepper shakers
and the neon sign
in the window
and then had gone back
to his stable
to see and touch his
favorite horse
who then
kicked him in the head
and killed him.
somehow
the story held
meaning for him
though
when I had written it
I had no idea
of what I was
writing about.
so I told him,
“o.k., old man, you
can
have it.”
and he took it
and walked out
and closed the door.
I guess that’s
as close
as we ever got.
the end of a short affair
I tried it standing up
this time.
it usually doesn’t
work
this time it seemed
to be . . .
she kept saying,
“oh my god, you’ve got
beautiful legs!”
it was all right
until she took her feet off the
ground
and wrapped her legs
around my center.
“oh my god, you’ve got
beautiful legs!”
she weighed about 138
pounds and hung there as I
worked.
it was when I climaxed
that I felt the pain
fly straight up my
spine.
I dropped her on the
couch and walked around
the room.
the pain remained.
“look,” I told her,
“you’d better go. I’ve got
to develop some film
in my dark room.”
she dressed and left
and I walked into the
kitchen for a glass of
water. I got a glass full
in my left hand.
the pain ran up behind my
ears and
I dropped the glass
which broke on the floor.
I got into a tub full of
hot water and Epsom salts.
I just got stretched out
when the phone rang.
as I tried to straighten
my back
the pain extended to my
neck and arms.
I flopped about,
gripped the sides of the tub,
got out
with shots of green and yellow
and red light
whirling in my head.
the phone kept ringing.
I picked it up.
“hello?”
“I LOVE YOU!” she said.
“thanks,” I said.