Hoteldreaming of flying fish
and he said “hello friend
you’re looking good.
me, I’m not so well,
they’ve plucked out my hair
taken my bowels
and the color in my eyes
has gone back into the sea.”
I sat down and listened
to him breathe
his last.
a bit later the clerk came over
with his green eyeshade on
and then the clerk saw what I knew
but neither of us knew
what the old man knew.
the clerk stood there
almost surprised,
taken,
wondering where the old man had gone.
he began to shake like an ape
who’d had a banana taken from his hand.
and then there was a crowd
and the crowd looked at the old man
as if he were a freak
as if there was something wrong with him.
I got up and walked out of the lobby
I went outside on the sidewalk
and I walked along with the rest of them
bellies, feet, hair, eyes
everything moving and going
getting ready to go back to the beginning
or light a cigar.
and then somebody stepped on
the back of my heel
and I was angry enough to swear.
I am driving down Wilton Avenue
when this girl of about 15
dressed in tight blue jeans
that grip her behind like two hands
steps out in front of my car
I stop to let her cross the street
and as I watch her contours waving
she looks directly through my windshield
at me
with purple eyes
and then blows
out of her mouth
the largest pink globe of
bubble gum
I have ever seen
while I am listening to Beethoven
on the car radio.
she enters a small grocery store
and is gone
and I am left with
Ludwig.
something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you …
we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there’s something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you …
something at 8 a.m., something in the library
something in the river,
everything and nothing.
in the slaughterhouse it comes running along
the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it—
one
two
three
and then you’ve got it, $200 worth of dead
meat, its bones against your bones
something and nothing.
it’s always early enough to die and
it’s always too late,
and the drill of blood in the basin white
it tells you nothing at all
and the gravediggers playing poker over
5 a.m. coffee, waiting for the grass
to dismiss the frost …
they tell you nothing at all.
we have everything and we have nothing—
days with glass edges and the impossible stink
of river moss—worse than shit;
checkerboard days of moves and countermoves,
fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as
in victory; slow days like mules
humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
up a road where a madman sits waiting among
blue jays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey
