got out of bed and said
she had to go—
her boyfriend lived downstairs with her,
and I said goodbye
and she left and
then I looked over at the chair
and I saw the clean white sheets.
she had forgotten to change the sheets
so I got up and
changed the sheets for her.
an agreement on Tchaikovsky
both my legs are broken at the knees
and I can’t move my right arm:
it’s Spring and the birds are popping
in and out of the brush
driving the cats crazy.
my good friend, Randy, frequents the
men’s crappers at the racetrack
looking for wallets: smart boy:
if his folks had been rich
he tells me he would have gone
on to Harvard.
she keeps playing Tchaikovsky’s 4th,
the one that goes
ka plunk plunk plunk plunk plunk;
I don’t like it
but old lady Rose
my neighbor
at the Sunset Park Rest Home
thinks it’s
beautiful.
everybody’s too old here to use
the tennis court
there’s a layer of dust over the whole thing
and the net’s a bunch of busted string.
old lady Rose went to visit her kids today—
that is, they came and got her, the old bag;
she can’t walk at all
and her legs aren’t even busted—
she’s just a tiresome old
fart!
I wheeled myself into her room a while back
and found a 10-dollar bill folded real neat
and tight;
she thought nobody’d find it
in one of her old slippers
but I’ve been around
and she’ll come knocking on my door tonight
asking for a “little touch of scotch”;
man, all that crap about the land she USED
to own in Arizona and how her husband USED
to wear spats and carry a cane!
he don’t need to wear anything where he’s at now;
and while I was in there
I cracked old Tchaikovsky #4 across the arm of a chair
broke it good.
and old lady Rose was right:
it sounded damned beautiful to me:
something like
the cracking of walnuts.
love song to the woman I saw Wednesday at the racetrack
remembering Savannah 20 years ago
a four poster bed
and streets full of helmets and hunters
things I did then
left welts;
ha ha, you say,
but they come alive as I buy bread
or lace a shoe
and it doesn’t matter
except that it works for me
like the legs of that woman worked for me
as the sun works for me as it works for the cactus
and as you work for me
reading this poem.
and the legs of that woman walk
as I watch them
and the horses in the next race
and the mountains stand there
watching
welts and a woman’s legs
10-win on number six
and out in the ocean
or standing in the park
like a statue
I watch her
walking.
horses standing everywhere:
Savannah-like seashells in my pocket:
I have loved you woman
as surely as I have named you
rust and sand and nylon.
you have worked for me
wild thing.
possession
an old woman talks to a girl who is
drying her long black hair while sitting on a back step,
she points her finger and speaks in a foreign tongue
and the sun is very beautiful
as the old woman talks and combs the tangled strands
(so many moons have gone down before and since).
suddenly the young girl cries out and shakes her head
and together they go back into the house
where together they will die,
but don’t they understand
it was mine, not theirs:
the hair, the long black sun-dried hair,
and maybe the girl too?
six
10:30 a.m.
5 coffee drinkers at the Pickwick Café
the boys who work the horse stables
at Hollywood Park
turn in their swivel seats
together,
one, two, three, four, five,
they turn
leaving their cooling coffees and their
small talk
to stare at a girl walking by
who comes in and sits in a booth.
it is hardly an unusual girl,
just a girl,
and one, two, three, four,
four of them turn back to their coffees;
the 5th, a young healthy blond boy
continues to look
with his nice vacant blue eyes.
then, at last, he turns back to his coffee.
it has to be more than it appears, I think,
ah yes, let me see,
they are thinking, that’s the one who fucked Mick
out behind the stables last night.
yes, yes, of course, they are punishing her
for not fucking them.
nasty boys; little horse turd egos.
they all believe they have cocks like stallions.
“another coffee?” the waitress asks me.
“yes, thanks,” I say, thinking, I should get a
better look at that girl
myself
man mowing the lawn across the way from me
I watch you walking with your machine.
ah, you’re too stupid to be cut like grass,
you’re too stupid to let anything violate you—
the girls won’t use their knives on you
they don’t want to
their sharp edge is wasted on you,
you are interested only in baseball games and
western movies and grass blades.
can’t you take just one of my knives?
here’s an old one—stuck into me in 1955,
she’s dead now, it wouldn’t hurt much.
I can’t give you this last one—
I can’t pull it out yet,
but here’s one from 1964, how about taking
this 1964 one from me?
man mowing the lawn across the way from me
don’t you have a knife somewhere in your gut
where love left?
man mowing the lawn across the way from me
don’t you have a knife somewhere deep in your heart
where love left?
man mowing the lawn across the way from me
don’t you see the young girls walking down the sidewalks now
with knives in their purses?
don’t you see their beautiful eyes and dresses and
hair?
don’t you see their beautiful asses and knees and
ankles?
man mowing the lawn across the way from me
>
is that all you see—those grass blades?
is that all you hear—the drone of the mower?
I can see all the way to Italy
to Japan
to Honduras
I can see the young girls sharpening their knives
in the morning and at noon and at night, and
especially at night, o,
especially at night.
the girl outside
it is 1:30 p.m.
Monday
65 degrees in November
on Western Avenue.
a girl walks out of a doorway
and stands in front.
an older woman comes out and leans
against the doorway.
the girl is in her early twenties
dressed in a short buttoned-up
red dress. she has on panty hose and
orange slippers
and gives the appearance of one
who has just awakened.
she grins in the afternoon.
she does a short sexy dance and grins.
she is pale. she is blonde.
suddenly she waves at somebody passing
in a car.
life is interesting.
she is young.
she is a girl.
she dances again. she waves. she
grins.
that’s all very nice for 1:30 in the
afternoon at 65 degrees.
she wants money.
she waves. she dances.
she grins.
the older woman is bored and walks back
inside.
I start my car in the parking lot across the
street.
I drive west down Oakwood and no longer see
the girl.
it’s so strange. I think,
we all need money.
then I turn on the radio and try to
forget about
that.
the chicken
I came by, she said,
and I hung this roasted chicken on your doorknob
and two days later it was still hanging there
swinging in the wind.
you should have seen that thing!
and your car was outside
and the chicken kept swinging
and I said to my husband,
what’s that stink?
he must be dead.
the wind was really blowing that
chicken around, you should have seen that
chicken swing, and I told my husband,
that crazy son-of-a-bitch must be dead
in there.
so he got the key and we went in.
yeah, I said, what did you find?
just empty bottles and garbage. you
were gone. you weren’t in
there.
did you look in all the closets?
we looked everywhere, under the bed,
everywhere.
I wonder where I was?
I dunno. where did you get that big scab on your head?
I was toasting a marshmallow on a coat hanger and
burned my fore-
head.
oh, I thought maybe somebody hit you.
uh-uh, I said, uh-uh.
an ancient love
I don’t remember our ages:
we must have been between 5 and 7,
there was this girl next door about my age.
I do remember her name: Lila Jane.
and one thing she would do every day,
once a day, was to ask me:
“are you ready?”
and I would indicate that I was
and she would lift her dress and
show me her panties and they were
a different color each day.
several decades later she somehow found me
and came by with her boyfriend
some fellow who smoked a pipe
and who read my books
and she crossed her long beautiful legs
high
but not high enough for me to see the panties.
and when they were ready to leave
I gave her a hug and
I shook hands with her boyfriend
and I never saw him or her
or her panties
ever again.
match point
read in the paper where a 72-year-old wife strangled her
91-year-old husband with his
necktie.
she said the age difference was
unbearable and added that
when they had met on a tennis court 30 years
earlier
the age gap had not seemed
important.
it looks like I’ve been in serious danger
at least a half dozen times
in the last 25 years or so and still
am.
there’s just one necktie in my
closet, purchased it to go to a funeral
not long ago,
but I’ve never played
tennis and don’t intend to
try.
I also like to look at ceilings
there are policemen in the street
and angels in the clouds
and jockeys riding in their silks.
down through the mornings
up through the nights
parallel to the afternoons
there are crippled dogs in
East Kansas City
vampires in Eugene, Oregon
and a long walk for a glass of water in the
Twin Cities.
I meant to write Angela
I really did
and thank her for everything
because I sincerely
liked the way she draped shawls on her
staircase
and her herb tea
and the green vines in her
bathroom
the view from her bedroom
and her collection of
Vivaldi.
but I didn’t.
I guess I’m crueler than
I think I am.
no Cagney, me
I had a borrowed tv set for a month
and saw some old Cagney movies.
much of Cagney’s interaction with women
takes place in the kitchen.
they say something he doesn’t
like. he slaps them with a dish towel
or pushes a grapefruit into their
face. they weep and fall
into his arms.
me, I am always being attacked by
women
especially when I am discouraged or
tired. they push me out of doorways
into the rain, into mud puddles on my
back. they pour beer over my head
come at me with knives and bookends
they attack
snarling like the leopard
they rip my coats and shirts
apart.
they attack me at the moment
I am casually talking to a
friend or while I am
asleep. sometimes they also beat their heads
against the wall.
I’m leaving, I say.
oh, you always want to end it,
don’t you?
well, Christ, you act like you don’t
like it.
well, go then, go!
I go. no Cagney, me. I drive away
thinking, oh shit, God, it’s so nice to
be alone again.
you had it, Jimmy.
what a woman wants is a
reaction.
what a man wants is a
woman.
you’re best.
soup, cosmos and tears
I’ve known some crazy women
but the craziest was
Annette
and it seems the crazier they are
the better the lay,
and what bodies they
have. Annette always lived with
Chinese men
but you never saw them
that’s what scared you,
even the Mafia is scared of the Chinese—
“where’s the dragon, kid?”
“that’s all right. he knows you’re all right.”
“you sure? when they put the X on you,
you might as well
forget it.”
“I told them you were all right. that’s all
they need.”
Annette had incense burning,
all sorts of charts and weirdo books,
she always talked about the gods
she had a direct line to the gods.
“you have been selected by the gods,” she told
me.
“o.k., babe, let’s make it
then.”
“not right now. I want you to try this special soup
I’ve made.”
“special soup?”
“yes, eat it and you will inherit the forces of
earth and sun, the entire
cosmos.”
I went and ate the soup. frankly, it tasted all right,
though a bit rusty. no telling what the hell she had
put in there. I finished
it.
“I feel like a man of steel
now.”
“you have inherited the force,” she said, “the gods are
proud of you.”
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