The Roominghouse Madrigals (20 page)

 

the love of the bone

where the earth chewed it down, that’s

what lasts,

and I remember sitting on the grass

with the negro boy,

we were sketching housetops and

he said,

you’re leaving some out,

you’re cheating,

and I walked across the street

to the bar

and

then he came in—

you are due back in class

at 2, he told me,

then he left.

 

 

class doesn’t matter, I thought,

nothing matters that we’re told,

and if I am a fly I’ll never know

what a lion really is.

 

 

I sat there until 4:30

and when I came out,

there he was.

 

 

Mr. Hutchins liked my

sketch, he told me.

 

 

that was over 20 years

ago.

 

 

I think

I saw him the other night.

he was a cop in the city jail

and he pushed me into

a cell.

 

 

I’m told

he doesn’t paint

any

more.

 

 

I tried all night to sleep

but I couldn’t sleep

and I began drinking

around 5:30

and reading about Delius

and Stravinsky,

and soon I heard them getting up

all over the building,

putting on coffee,

flushing toilets,

and then the phone rang

and she said,

“Sam, you haven’t been in jail?”

“not lately,”

I told her,

and then she asked where the hell

I had been and all that,

and finally I got rid of her

and pulled up the shades

and put my clothes on,

and I went down to the coffeeshop

and they were all sitting there

with bacon and eggs.

I had a coffee and went on in.

 

 

I emptied the baskets and

ashtrays, put toilet paper

in the women’s john

and then scattered the compound

to sweep. the old man came in

and eyed me riding the broom.

“you look like hell,” he said, and

“did you

put paper in the ladies’ room?”

I spit into the compound and

nodded. “that package to

McGerney’s,” he said. “12 pints

of floor wax…”

“yeah?” I asked.

“he says 7 of them pints

were broken. did you pack them right?”

“yeah.”

“did you put FRAGILE labels

on them.”

“yeah.”

“if you run out of FRAGILE

labels, let me know.”

“O.K.”

“…and be more careful

from now on.”

he went into the office and

I swept on toward the back.

a few minutes later

I heard him laughing with

the secretaries.

 

 

I unlocked the back door, brought in

the empty trashcans, sat down and
smoked

a cigarette. I began to get sleepy

at last.

 

 

one of the secretaries came back

rotating her can,

pounding her spikes

on the cement floor.

 

 

she handed me a stack of orders

to pick and pack, and this look, this
smile

on her face saying—

 

 

I don’t have to do much work,

but you do.

then she walked away wobbling,

wobbling meat.

 

 

I put some water in the tape machine

and stood there

waiting

waiting for 5:30.

 

 

Here without question is the bird-torn design,

drunk here in this cellar

amongst the flabby washing machines

and last year’s rusty newspapers;

the ages like stone

whirl above my head

as spiders spin sick webs;

I can leech here for years

undetected

sleeping against the belly of a boiler

like some growthless

hot yet dead

foetus;

I lift my bottle like a coronet

and sing songs and fables

to wash away

the fantastic darkness

of my breathing;

oh, coronet, coronet:

sing me no bitterness

for I have tasted stone,

sing me no child’s pouting and hate

for I am too old for night;

I am with the roots

of flowers

entwined, entombed

sending up my passionate blossoms

as a flight of rockets

and argument;

wine churls my throat,

above me

feet walk upon my brain,

monkies fall from the sky

clutching photographs

of the planets,

but I seek only music

and the leisure

of my pain; oh, damned coronet:

you are running dry
!

…I fall beneath the spiders,

the girders move like threads,

and feet come down the stairs,

feet come down the stairs, I think,

belonging to the golden men

who push the buttons

of our burning universe.

 

 

bluewhite bird-light

nothing but the motor of sand

noticing bits of life:

I and fleas and chips of wood,

wind sounds, sounds of paper

caught with its life flapping,

deserted dogs

as content as rock,

facing rump to sea

furred against sun and sensibility,

snouting against dead crabs

and last night’s bottles…

everything dirty, really,

really dirty,

like back at the hotel,

the white jackets and 15
^c
tips,

the old girls skipping rope

not like young neighborhood girls

but for room, bottle and trinket,

and the hotel sits behind you

like grammar school and old wars

and you simply roll upon your stomach,

skin against warm dirty sand

and a dog comes up with his ice-nose

against the bottoms of your feet

and you howl angry laughter

through hangover and forty-year old kisses,

through guilty sun and tired wave,

through cheap memories that can never be

transformed by either literature or love,

and the dog pulls back

looking upon this stick of a white man

with red coal eyes

through filtered smoke,

and he makes for the shore, the sea,

and I get up and chase after him,

another hound, I am,

and he looks over a round shoulder,

frightened, demolished,

as our feet cut patterns of life,

dog-life, man-life,

lazy indolent life, gull-life

and running, and the sharks

out beyond the rocks

thrashing for our silly blood.

 

 

it is an orange

animal

with

hand grenades

fire power

big teeth and

a horn of smoke

 

 

a colored man

with cigar

yanks at

gears and the damn thing never gets

tired

 

 

my neighbor

…an old man in blue

bathing trunks

…an old man

a fetid white obscene

thing—

the old man

lifts apart some purple flowers

and peeks through the fence at the

orange animal

 

 

and like a horror movie

I see the orange animal open its

mouth—

it belches it has teeth fastened onto a giraffe’s

neck—

and it reached over the fence and it gets the

old man in his blue

bathing trunks

neatly

it gets him

from behind the fence of purple flowers

and his whiteness is like

garbage in the air

and then

he’s dumped into a

shock of lumber

 

 

and then the orange animal

backs off

spins

turns

runs off into the Hollywood Hills

the palm trees the

boulevards as

 

 

the colored man

sucks red steam

from his

cigar

 

 

I’ll be glad when it’s all

over

the noise is

terrible and I’m afraid to go and

buy a

paper.

 

 

they live down by the sea…these men

and you see them going to the gray public bath

like colonels on parade;

they have trailers and dogs and wives and children

in that importance; they crawl upon the rocks

as turtles do and dream sun-dreams

turtle-dreams

that do not hurt;

—or you see them singly…standing with their poles

the sea climbing their ankles and ignored like some

useless oil

and their long lines search and wait beyond the breakers,

a vein from life to life and calm brisk death.

 

 

I have never seen their fish, or their gods

or the color of their eyes—though I imagine

the palest shade of pink,

like small-sweet pickled onions, and their bellies

like the bellies of jellyfish hiding in flowers

beneath the rock.

 

 

they are there all year, I’m told…these same men

with their rusty lives. when it rains the sand gets wet,

not as bad as mud, and they never die: you see

their fires at night as you drive back from the track,

nothing moving except the flame a little and the sea

changing shape, and you can see the threads of smoke

easing into the sky;

and as their camp goes by, leaving you vacant

you stare again into a world of red tail lights

and turn on the radio

and through the glass like the hand of some

forgotten god

you watch

a gull dip over your car

and then rise and fly out toward the sea.

 

 

naked

unarmored

before the open window

sitting at the table

drinking tomato juice

the publicly unpardonable part

of my body

below the table

I watch

a man in an orange robe

and bedroom slippers

shit his dog upon the lawn

both of them

tempered by sparrows.

 

 

we are losers; even at high noon

or late evening

none of us dresses well

in this neighborhood

none of us studies the grace of high

finance

successfully enough

to shake

ugly things away

(like needing the rent or

drinking 59 cent wine).

 

 

yet now

the wind comes through the window

cool,

as pure as a cobra;

it is a sensible time

undivided

either by

explanation

deepeyed cats

life insurance or

Danish kings.

 

 

I finish the

tomato

juice and

go to

bed.