New Orleans street
and that very night
I sat with my friends and acted vile and
the ass
much mouth and villainy
and cruelness
and they never
knew why.
Very
I take the taxi to Newport and study the wrinkles in the
driver’s skull; all anticipation is gone:
defeat has come so often
(like rain)
that it has assumed more meaning
than victory; the player is good at
the piano
and we wait in a corner
(this poet!)
waiting to recite
poems; it’s like a cave here:
full of bats and whores
and bodiless music
moving at the back of the world; my head aches,
and seeking a deliberate door
I think gently of successful papa Haydn
rotting in the rainy garden
above copulating
tone-deaf gophers…
the sun is in a box somewhere
asleep like a cat;
the bats flit, a body
takes my hand (the one with the drink:
the right hand is the drinker)
a woman, a horrible
damned woman,
something alive
sits
and blinks
at me:
Hank, it says,
they want you up
front!
fuck ’em, I say, fuck ’em.
I have grown quite fat and
vulgar (a deliberate death
on the kitchen floor) and
suddenly I laugh
at my excellent condition
like some swine of a businessman
and I don’t even feel
like getting up
to piss…
Angels,
we have grown apart.
The Look:
I once bought a toy rabbit
at a department store
and now he sits and ponders
me with pink sheer eyes:
He wants golfballs and glass
walls.
I want quiet thunder.
Our disappointment sits between us.
One Night Stand
the latest sleeping on my pillow catches
window lamplight through the mist of alcohol.
I was the whelp, the prude who shook when
the wind shook blades of grass the eye could see
and
you were a
convent girl watching the nuns shake loose
the Las Cruces sand from God’s robes
you are
yesterday’s
bouquet so sadly
raided, I kiss your poor
breasts as my hands reach for love
in this cheap Hollywood apartment smelling of
bread and gas and misery.
we move through remembered routes
the same old steps smooth with hundreds of
feet, 50 loves, 20 years.
and we are granted a very small summer, and
then it’s
winter again
and you are moving across the floor
some heavy awkward thing
and the toilet flushes, a dog barks
a car door slams…
it’s gotten inescapably away, everything,
it seems, and I light a cigarette and
await the oldest curse
of all.
Poem to a Most Affectionate Lady
Please keep your icecream hands
for the leopard,
please keep your knees
out of my nuts;
if women must love me
I ask them also
to cook me sauerkraut dinners
and leave me time
for games of gold
in the mind,
and time for sleep
or scratching
or rolling upon my side
like any tired bull
in any tired meadow.
love is not a candle
burning down—
life is,
and love and life are
not the same
or else
love having choice
nobody would ever die.
which means? which means:
let loose a moment
your hand upon my center—
I’ve done you well
like any scrabby plant
upon a mountain, so
please be kind enough
to die for an hour
or 2,
or at least
take time
to turn the
sauerkraut.
Parts of an Opera, Parts of a Guitar, Part of Nowhere
I don’t know, it was raining and I had fallen down
somewhere but I seemed to have money so it didn’t
matter, and I went into the opera to dry off, and it
was opening night and everybody was dressed and
trying
to act very polite and educated but I saw a lot of
guys there mean as hell, I don’t mean mean enough
to be
a Dillinger but mean enough to be successful in
business and their wives were all tone deaf
and even the people hollering in the opera
were not enjoying it but hollering because it was the
thing to do, like wearing bermudas in the summer, and
I thought, I’ll never write an opera because
and that very night
I sat with my friends and acted vile and
the ass
much mouth and villainy
and cruelness
and they never
knew why.
Very
I take the taxi to Newport and study the wrinkles in the
driver’s skull; all anticipation is gone:
defeat has come so often
(like rain)
that it has assumed more meaning
than victory; the player is good at
the piano
and we wait in a corner
(this poet!)
waiting to recite
poems; it’s like a cave here:
full of bats and whores
and bodiless music
moving at the back of the world; my head aches,
and seeking a deliberate door
I think gently of successful papa Haydn
rotting in the rainy garden
above copulating
tone-deaf gophers…
the sun is in a box somewhere
asleep like a cat;
the bats flit, a body
takes my hand (the one with the drink:
the right hand is the drinker)
a woman, a horrible
damned woman,
something alive
sits
and blinks
at me:
Hank, it says,
they want you up
front!
fuck ’em, I say, fuck ’em.
I have grown quite fat and
vulgar (a deliberate death
on the kitchen floor) and
suddenly I laugh
at my excellent condition
like some swine of a businessman
and I don’t even feel
like getting up
to piss…
Angels,
we have grown apart.
The Look:
I once bought a toy rabbit
at a department store
and now he sits and ponders
me with pink sheer eyes:
He wants golfballs and glass
walls.
I want quiet thunder.
Our disappointment sits between us.
One Night Stand
the latest sleeping on my pillow catches
window lamplight through the mist of alcohol.
I was the whelp, the prude who shook when
the wind shook blades of grass the eye could see
and
you were a
convent girl watching the nuns shake loose
the Las Cruces sand from God’s robes
you are
yesterday’s
bouquet so sadly
raided, I kiss your poor
breasts as my hands reach for love
in this cheap Hollywood apartment smelling of
bread and gas and misery.
we move through remembered routes
the same old steps smooth with hundreds of
feet, 50 loves, 20 years.
and we are granted a very small summer, and
then it’s
winter again
and you are moving across the floor
some heavy awkward thing
and the toilet flushes, a dog barks
a car door slams…
it’s gotten inescapably away, everything,
it seems, and I light a cigarette and
await the oldest curse
of all.
Poem to a Most Affectionate Lady
Please keep your icecream hands
for the leopard,
please keep your knees
out of my nuts;
if women must love me
I ask them also
to cook me sauerkraut dinners
and leave me time
for games of gold
in the mind,
and time for sleep
or scratching
or rolling upon my side
like any tired bull
in any tired meadow.
love is not a candle
burning down—
life is,
and love and life are
not the same
or else
love having choice
nobody would ever die.
which means? which means:
let loose a moment
your hand upon my center—
I’ve done you well
like any scrabby plant
upon a mountain, so
please be kind enough
to die for an hour
or 2,
or at least
take time
to turn the
sauerkraut.
Parts of an Opera, Parts of a Guitar, Part of Nowhere
I don’t know, it was raining and I had fallen down
somewhere but I seemed to have money so it didn’t
matter, and I went into the opera to dry off, and it
was opening night and everybody was dressed and
trying
to act very polite and educated but I saw a lot of
guys there mean as hell, I don’t mean mean enough
to be
a Dillinger but mean enough to be successful in
business and their wives were all tone deaf
and even the people hollering in the opera
were not enjoying it but hollering because it was the
thing to do, like wearing bermudas in the summer, and
I thought, I’ll never write an opera because
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