Another Way to Play
Page 26
and his average was 97.2. We were
all very excited about it. His marks
were Religion 95, Arith. 96, English 97,
History 98, Reading 99, Geog. 100, Spelling
96, Penmanship (like all the rest of you
kids) 85.
. . . Michael has a teacher this year (it is
her first year teaching) and she told
Joan that he is a brilliant child (?).
We shall see by the end of the year if
she knows what she is talking about.
I doubt it.
[ . . . ]
from THE RAIN TRILOGY
[ . . . ]
7—my son—with me
missing his mother & sister
his sister with his mother
missing him & me—
me missing his sister, having
missed him before he was
with me—everyone sad—
*
9 years old—my daughter
I wanted to take her with us
I am conciliatory or resigned
[ . . . ]
“boom” my son
asleep
crouched at the end
of a narrow bed
“the way he likes it”
& me
working hard at
“the job”—
like “dues”—
endless & pointless
call from her—
job no longer “pointless”
now necessary to make
money to live “the life”
(dinner, dance, date,
“darling” . . . )—
[ . . . ]
shit—
I need her
and a month ago
I didn’t even know her—
[ . . . ]
I just flash all day
on her smile and touch
and all the good things
I love so much—
everything—oh oh oh—
[ . . . ]
meanwhile Miles
cried after West
Side Story (on TV)
“not because I’m
sad—but because
it was so good”
said it was his
favorite movie—even
better than Star
Wars
—later
said he’d wear his
levis, a plain tee
shirt (“no writing
on it”) and his
reversible jacket
with the beige side
out—as an extension
of West Side Story style—
7 years old!—a “genius”
[ . . . ]
still not only “good”
but getting better!
made love 4 times after
waking up—3 times before
going to sleep!—and
could’ve kept going
[ . . . ]
the sunsets from
the Chrysler building & beyond
& love
[ . . . ]
have so much to do
& I’m not doing
any of it
etc.
*
(reading Laura Riding
& Gerald Burns)
(talking with Miles—football,
school, food, the past, etc. & reading to him
from William Saroyan story collection)
[ . . . ]
my son— & me—
our love—
what I had long wanted—
more than etc.
*
raining
I love it
dark days in the city
somehow
so many in the ’50s
early ’60s—when I was
here—considering it home
no matter where I was
“stationed” or coming from—
alone on the wet streets
cold, but not freezing—
reading the
atmosphere
the sound of the car tires
on the slick dark
the ways the water
falling makes everyone
eccentric
and alone—
I always loved rainy days like today
so much more than etc.
[ . . . ]
BROTHER CAN YOU SPARE A RHYME?
Once upon a time
I could rhyme
anything, but
thought it was
a cheap trick,
like being born
with a big dick
and using it
to get ahead
in Hollywood.
I would never do that.
Or like those old
cowboy movies
where the hero
always wore a white hat,
and the bad guys black.
That seemed to be
a California perception
of what looked good
on a handsome man.
Back East white was
the color for dairy queens
and guys so rich they
were terminally passive.
Black was the color
for the kind of men
who wouldn’t have
known what a den
is for, or ever bore
us with their lack
of passion.
The hottest women
wore black, and
the classiest,
the saddest,
the smartest.
White and black,
now and then,
me and you,
what’ll we do
about all we know
to be no longer true,
and yet still be truthful
so we can survive
these new dark ages, huh?
Maybe, you can go
home again
if you’re willing to
take responsibility for
what you find there.
Even the air
is tired from what we’ve
all been through,
the scare
we’ve all been talking to
when we talk to each other
and discover
we’re all a lot more
careful in the ways
we own our lives.
Some people say
there’s an art to that—
yeah, the art of compromise.
KNOW
Gertrude Stein
wine
I don’t know
I think they’ve lost their glow
for me.
See, I haven’t been able to
drink either one for years now.
How did I know?
I mean, what to keep and
what had to go—
Like all those William Saroyan and
William C. Williams tomes—
those little homes I grew up in
even if I was already grown
when I first started reading them.
J.W. Dant bourbon was the thing
I liked the most.
Toasting is what Blacks called
rapping back in the old days
before it became a part of the music biz.
“The Wiz” was an underrated movie,
says D. M., as he produces another
amazing TV show, buys and sells horses,
makes his BMW go with me in it
and I still owe him several big ones.
The man’s a genius, says his agent,
after he tells me “your eyes glow,”
and all I know is my heart has broken
like those horses they send out too soon
to compete in races they can’t win yet.
Only I ain’t no horse,
and I been out there for years,
they didn’t just send me out too early.
Although—
Hey, what do I know?
WALK ON THE WILD SIDE
I’m so dependent on what other people think about me.
That’s not the way I want to be.
I don’t want to be like Lawrence Harvey in
Walk on the Wild Side either. I only saw it
because it was the first time Jane Fonda played a whore.
That was long before the Viet Nam war—
or not, that wasn’t a war, I forgot, Congress never
declared war on anybody in that one, that was—
what? What was that one? Not a “police action”—
that was the Korean War—it’s funny isn’t it,
how we’re allowed to call them wars after they’re over—
well, they’re never really over, anyway—
I can’t remember anything about that movie—
except Jane Fonda was almost as young as I was then,
and she was beautiful in this fragile sexy
teenage woman kind of way that she isn’t today—
somewhere in there she turned from fragile to brittle,
the kind of distinctions real poets love to play with
but not before they throw out a lot of obviously
intelligent and imaginatively deep images so that
everyone will know it’s poetry—and smart poetry
which is why I stopped doing that a long time ago
except now and then just to slow down the pace
of the ideas that always race through my mind
when it’s time to write a poem which for me is
any and all the time because you see I’m a poet
and I can always make it rhyme just like the
rappers do, only middle-aged white poets ain’t
supposed to, they’re supposed to write about
how the rocks are talking to them tonight in
the muffled tones of their ex-wife which
implies a marriage to the earth that has been
broken up, only, when the rocks talk to me they
say stuff like what up honky homey? or whoa,
you see that stone, check her out, or, hey man,
it’s okay, you’re gonna make it through today
and come tonight you’ll be alright no matter
what they say, you are just as much who you
were meant to be as we are brother, and the
earth is our mother too, hey someday you
might be a rock yourself like you
thought you were in 1956—
when the colored girls did go
“doo, da doo, da doo”—
THE HEALING POEM
When I wrote this poem
I thought there was a healing going on—
a profound healing. I thought it was
no accident that movies like
Field of Dreams and Rain Man
(no matter how we feel about
their politics or art) were proving
the lie in all the cynical projections
of what people want. What they want
is a healing to take place.
Gorbachov became a hero
around the world not because
he knew how to manipulate
the media—remember his speeches?
It wasn’t him, it was what he represented,
the healing of a wound almost
a century old. Wasn’t it obvious
by the response of the world to him,
or to the Chinese students in
Tieneman Square, or the release
of Nelson Mandela, or the fall of the
Berlin Wall, or the Russian people
standing up to the tanks & the old ideas—
it’s a healing we all want?
& hey, I knew all about “wilding”
and gang rape and gang violence
and gang stupidity and cowardice
and all the rest. I was in a couple
of gangs when I was a kid. I also
know the cops can be a gang too sometimes.
I come from a family of cops, &
if you don’t think it’s tough being
stopped by the police & hearing
“What’s your brother gonna say?”
—just think about a cop asking—
“What’s this gonna do to Ma?”
But I think we know and so do
those kids what’s good for the soul,
the spirit, the heart. Yet when that good
has been torn apart by public figures
who act as if they have no responsibility
toward this world—whose world is it anyway?
Or rocknrollers or movie stars
or TV celebrities who speak out
about pollution and then personalize it in
their own lives by polluting hearts
and souls and minds with messages
they take no responsibility for.
And I’m not talking about sexual
jokes and innuendoes. I’m talking
about violence that is presented as power,
and reward and even inspirational.
I’m talking about accepting and even
celebrating the cynical attitudes that everyone
seemed to acquiesce to in the ’80s—
the “Reagan Years”—for which we are
all now paying the price. I’m talking about
adding to the confusion and fear
and hatred and rage by accepting
the unacceptable, by ignoring the unignorable,
by pretending reality is worse than
it is and then giving in to that pretension
until it becomes reality. I WANT THE HEALING.
And I believe with everything that’s in me
that even those who will write parodies,
or speak them, as soon as they finish reading this,
of what they can easily dismiss
and turn into a self-defensive joke
about my own hypocrisy or pretensions—
even the wits who can turn misery
into charisma, and though I know I’m
no wit I also know I sometimes can do it too—
even us poor victims of our own
delusions of sincerity, no matter how hip,
WANT A HEALING TO OCCUR and want it now.
The whole world is longing and
has been longing for just that.
Why else is Jesus so popular? Or Buddha?
Or the Mohammed of the real Koran?
What is it that repulses us in the struggle
of the Arabs and the Jews, or Bosnians and
Serbs or Blacks and Whites in
South Africa or here not so long ago,
but the lack of a healing between two cultures
that generate all our own fears
about differences and the rage
that fear of the different and unknown
can create in total strangers
when they see us tearing down
the walls that make those differences.
I’ve said it before and I’m not
gonna stop—I don’t care if
you’re from Time because you think
some “star” is reading poetry
somewhere, or from the academy
because you think one of your own is there—
or look down your nose at those
whose poetry is accessible and
even vital to people who don’t care—
that’s not what people come out to hear—
I believe they come for the healing, for in
hearing the troubles and longings and truth
of other lives, no matter how famous or rich
or unknown or Jewish or young or frail or
perfect or a wreck, they see the common thread,
that it isn’t about women and men
and yo
ung and old and black and white
and rich and poor and famous and unknown,
it’s about this deep and abiding and
relentless yearning for a healing to
take place in all of us and between all of us.
It’s not even about humans and animals
and nature and commerce and all that either.
Because even there, even businesses and trees
and cars and the very air and sea
and earth itself are making that
longing known. You can hear it in the wind
and smell it on the flower. All creation
is crying out for a healing to take place.
It is time. It is beyond time, it is timeless.
And yes of course it begins with me
and you, who else? And yes I have
felt it since we met and held each other in a way
that offered no defenses no obeisance
to the differences that we know so well
and so truly are just the flowering of the creative
imagination of the universe and not
a reason to run or quit or give up in
frustration and anger and cynicism. No,
the differences only help us to see
how much we are the same in our souls—
soulmates for sure. How else explain that two
such unlikely people can feel
so comfortable in each other’s arms,
can ignore all the warnings from past experiences
and cynical friends that something
is unreal if there is no doubt, no struggle.
The only struggle is with acceptance—acceptance
of the truth. And the truth is
we all need a healing. And you
and I can feel it happening for us, in ways that
go beyond our simple male and
femaleness, our white and blackness,
our age differences, our family and career and
neighborhood and all the other
differences, beyond our humanness—
a healing that like Selby says heals those issues
for all time, in all eternity, for all
the years we’ve spent on earth so far
and all we will continue to spend. And if that
can happen for us, in the simple act
of trust—what more can it do for
the rest of the world.
I never believed people who said
you can’t make movies or music or
books that don’t have violence or superficial values
or all the bullshit negativity
this town and every town and
every business tries to lay on those of us
who refuse to relinquish our
innocence and hope because
we have not succumbed to the dope of
giving up. Hey I know this sounds
like preaching, so hold me accountable.
I’m talking about a healing here, that I needed
desperately all my life and still do,
and that I finally feel has truly begun