Trout Fishing in America (17 page)

 

Big Sur
February 1958

 

 

I changed her bedroom:
raised the ceiling four feet,
removed all of her things
(and the clutter of her life)
painted the walls white,
placed a fantastic calm

in the room,

a silence that almost had a scent,
put her in a low brass bed
with white satin covers,
and I stood there in the doorway
watching her sleep, curled up,
with her face turned away

from me.

 

 

The sea is like
an old nature poet
who died of a
heart attack in a
public latrine.
His ghost still
haunts the urinals.
At night he can
be heard walking
around barefooted
in the dark.
Somebody stole
his shoes.

 

 

What a good time fancy!
like a leisure white interior
with long yellow curtains.
I'll take it to sleep with me tonight
and hope that my dreams are built
toward beautiful blonde women eating

indirect popcorn.

 

 

I sit here
on the perfect end
of a star,

 

watching light
pour itself toward

me.

 

The light pours
itself through
a small hole
in the sky.

 

I'm not very happy,
but I can see
how things are

faraway.

 

 

For Susan

 

Last night (here) a long pretty girl
asked me to write a poem about Albion,
so she could put it in a black folder
that has albion printed nicely

in white on the cover.

 

I said yes. She's at the store now
getting something for breakfast.
I'll surprise her with this poem

when she gets back.

 

 

There are doors
that want to be free
from their hinges to
fly with perfect clouds.

 

There are windows
that want to be
released from their
frames to run with
the deer through
back country meadows.

 

There are walls
that want to prowl
with the mountains
through the early
morning dusk.

 

There are floors
that want to digest
their furniture into
flowers and trees.

 

There are roofs
that want to travel
gracefully with
the stars through
circles of darkness.

 

 

I'm sitting in a cafe,
drinking a Coke.

 

A fly is sleeping
on a paper napkin.

 

I have to wake him up,
so I can wipe my glasses.

 

There's a pretty girl
I want to look at.

 

 

The smell

    of vegetables

          on a cold day

performs faithfully an act of reality
like a knight in search of the holy grail
or a postman on a rural route looking
for a farm that isn't there.

Carrots, peppers and berries.

Nerval, Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

 

 

Dance toward me, please, as
if you were a star
with light-years piled
on top of your hair,

smiling,

 

and I will dance toward you
as if I were darkness
with bats piled like a hat

on top of my head.

 

 

There are three quail in a cage next door,
and they are the sweet delight of our mornings,
calling to us like small frosted cakes:

bobwhitebobwhitebobwhite,

but at night they drive our God-damn cat Jake crazy.
They run around that cage like pinballs
as he stands out there,
smelling their asses through the wire.

 

 

Piano tree, play
in the dark concert halls
of my uncle,
twenty-six years old, dead
and homeward bound
on a ship from Sitka,
his coffin travels
like the fingers
of Beethoven
over a glass
of wine.

 

Piano tree, play
in the dark concert halls
of my uncle,
a legend of my childhood, dead,
they send him back
to Tacoma.
At night his coffin
travels like the birds
that fly beneath the sea,
never touching the sky.

 

Piano tree, play
in the dark concert halls
of my uncle,
take his heart
for a lover
and take his death
for a bed,
and send him homeward bound
on a ship from Sitka
to bury him
where I was born.

 

 

ZAP!
unlaid / 20 days

 

my sexual image
isn't worth a shit.

 

If I were dead
I couldn't attract
a female fly.

 

 

All the rivers run into the sea;
yet the sea is not full;
unto the place from whence the rivers come,
thither they return again.

 

It is raining today

in the mountains.

 

It is a warm green rain

with love
in its pockets
for spring is here,
and does not dream
of death.

 

Birds happen music

like clocks ticking heavens
in a land
where children love spiders,
and let them sleep
in their hair.

 

A slow rain sizzles

on the river
like a pan
full of frying flowers,
and with each drop
of rain
the ocean
begins again.

 

 

I had a good-talking candle
last night in my bedroom.

 

I was very tired but I wanted
somebody to be with me,

so I lit a candle

 

and listened to its comfortable
voice of light until I was asleep.

 

 

Once upon a valley
there came down
from some goldenblue mountains
a handsome young prince
who was riding
a dawncolored horse
named Lordsburg.

 

I love you
You're my breathing castle
Gentle so gentle
We'll live forever

 

In the valley
there was a beautiful maiden
whom the prince
drifted into love with
like a New Mexico made from
apple thunder and long
glass beds.

 

I love you
You're my breathing castle
Gentle so gentle
We'll live forever

 

The prince enchanted
the maiden
and they rode off
on the dawncolored horse
named Lordsburg
toward the goldenblue mountains.

 

I love you
You're my breathing castle
Gentle so gentle
We'll live forever

 

They would have lived
happily ever after
if the horse hadn't had
a flat tire
in front of a dragon's
house.

 

 

With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka's hat.

 

It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.

 

 

It's night

 

and a numbered beauty
lapses at the wind,

 

chortles with the
branches of a tree,

 

giggles,

 

plays shadow dance
with a dead kite,

 

cajoles affection
from falling leaves,

 

and knows four
other things.

 

One is the color
of your hair.

 

 

When he went out the door,
he said he wasn't coming back,
but he came back, the son-
ofabitch, and now I'm pregnant,
and he won't get off his ass.

 

 

A girl in a green mini-
skirt, not very pretty, walks
down the street.

 

A businessman stops, turns
to stare at her ass
that looks like a moldy refrigerator.

 

There are now 200,000,000 people

in America.

 

 

It's spring and the nun
like a black frog
builds her tarpaper shack
beside the lake.
How beautiful she is
(and looks) surrounded
by her rolls of tarpaper.
They know her name
and they speak her name.

 

 

Driven by hunger, I had another
forced bachelor dinner tonight.
I had a lot of trouble making
up my mind whether to eat Chinese
food or have a hamburger.   God,
I hate eating dinner alone.   It's

like being dead.

 

When I was hitch-hiking down to Big Sur,

Moby Dick stopped and picked me up. He was driving

a truckload of sea gulls to San Luis Obispo.

“Do you like being a truckdriver better than you

do a whale?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Moby Dick said. “Hoffa is a lot better

to us whales than Captain Ahab ever was.

The old fart.”

 

I cannot answer you tonight in small portions.
Torn apart by stormy love's gate, I float
like a phantom facedown in a well where
the cold dark water reflects vague half-built

         stars

and trades all our affection, touching, sleeping
together for tribunal distance standing like
a drowned train just beyond a pile of Eskimo

         skeletons.

 

 

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by

one evening

when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge

of my affection

and think, “It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish

somebody loved me,”

I'd
love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be

at peace,

and ask yourself, “I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them.”

 

 

She's mending the rain with her hair.
She's turning the darkness on.

Glue / switch!

That's all I have to report.

 

 

July 19, a dog has been run over by an airplane,
an act that brings into this world the energy
that transforms vultures into beautiful black

race horses.

 

Yes, the horses are waiting at the starting gate.
Now the sound of the gun and this fantastic race begins.
The horses are circling the track.

 

 

When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people

lost inside of you.

 

 

My magic is down.
My spells mope around
the house like sick old dogs
with bloodshot eyes
watering cold wet noses.