Burning in Water, Drowing in Flame (6 page)

at the window

I watch a man with a

power mower

the sounds of his doing race like

flies and bees

on the wallpaper,

it is like a warm fire, and

better than eating steak,

and the grass is green enough

and the sun is sun enough

and what’s left of my life

stands there

checking glints of green flying;

it is a giant disrobing of

care, stumbling away from

doing.

suddenly I understand

old men in rockers

bats in Colorado caves

tiny lice crawling into

the eyes of dead birds.

back and forth

he follows his gasoline

sound. it is

interesting enough,

with

the streets

flat on their Spring backs

and smiling.

3 small boys run toward me

blowing whistles

and they scream

you’re under arrest!

you’re drunk!

and they begin

hitting me on the legs with

their toy clubs.

one even has a

badge. another has

handcuffs but my hands are high in the air.

when I go into the liquor store

they whirl around outside

like bees

shut out from their nest.

I buy a fifth of cheap

whiskey

and

3

candy bars.

she came to my place drunk

riding a deer up on the front porch:

so many women want to save the world

but can’t keep their own kitchens straight,

but
me
…

we went inside where I lit three red

candles

poured the wine and I took notes on

her:

latitude behind,

longitude in

front. and the

rest. amazing.

a woman such as this

could find

a zinnia in Hot Springs

Arkansas.

we ate venison for three weeks.

then she slept with the landlord to help pay

the rent.

then I found her a job as a waitress.

I slept all day and when she came home

I was full of the brilliant conversation that she

so much

adored.

she died quickly one night leaving the world

much the way it had

been.

now I get up early and

go down to the loading docks and wait for

cabbages

oranges

potatoes

to fall from the trucks or to be

thrown away.

by noon I have eaten and am asleep

dreaming of paying the rent

with numbered chunks of plastic

issued by a better

world.

they laugh continually

even when

a board falls down

and destroys a face

or distorts a

body

they continue to

laugh,

when the color of the eye

becomes a fearful pale

because of the poor

light

they still laugh;

wrinkled and imbecile

at an early age

they joke about it:

a man who looks sixty

will say

I’m 32, and

then they’ll laugh

they’ll all laugh;

they are sometimes let

outside for a little air

but are chained to return

by chains they would not

break

if they could;

even outside, among

free men

they continue to laugh,

they walk about

with a hobbled and inane

gait

as if they’d lost their

senses; outside

they chew a little bread,

haggle, sleep, count their pennies,

gaze at the clock

and return;

sometimes in the confines

they even grow serious

a moment, they speak of

Outside,
of how horrible

it must be

to be

shut
Outside

forever, never to be let

back in;

it’s warm as they work

and they sweat a

bit,

but they work hard and

well, they work so hard

the nerves revolt

and cause trembling,

but often they are

praised by those

who have risen up

out of them

like stars,

and now the stars

watch

watch too

for those few

who might attempt a

slower pace or

show disinterest

or falsify an

illness

in order to gain

rest (rest must be

earned
to gain strength

for a more perfect

job).

sometimes one dies

or goes mad

and then from
Outside

a new one enters

and is given

opportunity.

I have been there

many years;

at first I believed the work

monotonous, even

silly

but now I see

it all has meaning,

and the workers

without faces

I can see are not really

ugly, and that

the heads without eyes—

I know now that those eyes

can see

and are able to

do the work.

the women workers

are often the best,

adapting naturally,

and some of these I

made love to in our

resting hours; at first

they appeared to be

like female apes

but later

with insight

I realized

that they were things

as real and alive as

myself.

the other night

an old worker

grey and blind

no longer useful

was retired

to the
Outside
.

speech! speech!

we demanded.

it was

hell, he said.

we laughed

all 4000 of us:

he had kept his

humor

to the

end.

this is important enough:

to get your feelings down,

it is better than shaving

or cooking beans with garlic.

it is the little we can do

this small bravery of knowledge

and there is of course

madness and terror too

in knowing

that some part of you

wound up like a clock

can never be wound again

once it stops.

but now

there’s a ticking under your shirt

and you whirl the beans with a spoon,

one love dead, one love departed

another love…

ah! as many loves as beans

yes, count them now

sad, sad

your feelings boiling over flame,

get this down.

here I am

    in the ground

          my mouth

         open

   and

  I can’t even say

     
mama,

     and

the dogs run by and stop and piss

on my stone; I get it all

except the sun

and my suit is looking

                                bad

and yesterday

    the last of my left

                                    arm      gone

very little left, all harp-like

without music.

at least a drunk

in bed with a cigarette

might cause 5 fire

            engines and

            33 men.

I can’t

    do

    any

                  thing.

but p.s.—Hector Richmond in the next

tomb thinks only of Mozart and candy

caterpillars.

  he is

  very bad

                      company.

I feel gypped by dunces

as if reality were the property

of little men

with luck and a headstart,

and I sit in the cold

wondering about purple flowers

along a fence

while the rest of them

stack gold

and Cadillacs and

ladyfriends,

I wonder about palmleaves

and gravestones

and the preciousness of a

cocoon-like sleep;

to be a lizard would be

bad enough

to be scalding in the sun

would be bad enough

but not so bad

as being built up to

Man-size and Man-life

and not wanting the

game, not wanting

machineguns and towers and

timeclocks,

not wanting a carwash

a toothpull

a wristwatch, cufflinks

a pocket radio

tweezers and cotton

a cabinet full of iodine,

not wanting cocktail parties

a front lawn

sing-togethers

new shoes, Christmas presents

life insurance,
Newsweek

162 baseball games

a vacation in Bermuda.

not wanting not wanting,

and I judge the purple flowers

better off than I

the lizard better off

the dark green hose

the ever grass

the trees the birds,

the cats dreaming in the butter

sun are

better off than

I, getting into this old coat now

feeling for my cigarettes

car keys

a roadmap back,

going out

down the walk

like a man to be executed

walking toward it

surely,

going into it

without guards

driving toward it

racing at it

70 miles per hour,

jockeying

cussing

dropping ashes

deadly ashes of every

deadly thing

burning,

the caterpillar knows less

horror

the armies of ants are

braver

the kiss of a snake

less ravenous,

I only want the sky

to burn me more and more

burn me out

so that the sun begins at

6 in the morning

and goes past midnight

like a drunken door always open,

I drive toward it

not wanting it

getting it getting it

as the cat stretches

yawns

and rolls over into

another dream.

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

bluejays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey

grey.

good days too of wine and shouting, fights

in alleys, fat legs of women striving around

your bowels buried in moans,

the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering

Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground

telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves

that robbed you.

days when children say funny and brilliant things

like savages trying to send you a message through

their bodies while their bodies are still

alive enough to transmit and feel and run up

and down without locks and paychecks and

ideals and possessions and beetle-like

opinions.

days when you can cry all day long in

a green room with the door locked, days

when you can laugh at the breadman

because his legs are too long, days

of looking at hedges…

and nothing, and nothing. the days of

the bosses, yellow men

with bad breath and big feet, men

who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk

as if melody had never been invented, men

who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and

profit, men with expensive wives they possess

like 60 acres of ground to be drilled

or shown-off or to be walled away from

the incompetent, men who’d kill you

because they’re crazy and justify it because

it’s the law, men who stand in front of

windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,

men with luxury yachts who can sail around

the world and yet never get out of their vest

pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men

like slugs, and not as good…

and nothing. getting your last paycheck

at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an

aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a

barbershop, at a job you didn’t want

anyway.

income tax, sickness, servility, broken

arms, broken heads—all the stuffing

come out like an old pillow.

we have everything and we have nothing.

some do it well enough for a while and

then give way. fame gets them or disgust

or age or lack of proper diet or ink

across the eyes or children in college

or new cars or broken backs while skiing

in Switzerland or new politics or new wives

or just natural change and decay—

the man you knew yesterday hooking

for ten rounds or drinking for three days and

three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now

just something under a sheet or a cross

or a stone or under an easy delusion,

or packing a bible or a golf bag or a

briefcase: how they go, how they go!—all

the ones you thought would never go.

days like this. like your day today.

maybe the rain on the window trying to

get through to you. what do you see today?

what is it? where are you? the best

days are sometimes the first, sometimes

the middle and even sometimes the last.

the vacant lots are not bad, churches in

Europe on postcards are not bad. people in

wax museums frozen into their best sterility

are not bad, horrible but not bad. the

cannon, think of the cannon. and toast for

breakfast the coffee hot enough you

know your tongue is still there. three

geraniums outside a window, trying to be

red and trying to be pink and trying to be

geraniums. no wonder sometimes the women

cry, no wonder the mules don’t want

to go up the hill. are you in a hotel room

in Detroit looking for a cigarette? one more

good day. a little bit of it. and as

the nurses come out of the building after

their shift, having had enough, eight nurses

with different names and different places

to go—walking across the lawn, some of them

want cocoa and a paper, some of them want a

hot bath, some of them want a man, some

of them are hardly thinking at all. enough

and not enough. arcs and pilgrims, oranges

gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of

tissue paper.

in the most decent sometimes sun

there is the softsmoke feeling from urns

and the canned sound of old battleplanes

and if you go inside and run your finger

along the window ledge you’ll find

dirt, maybe even earth.

and if you look out the window

there will be the day, and as you

get older you’ll keep looking

keep looking

sucking your tongue in a little

ah ah no no maybe

some do it naturally

some obscenely

everywhere.