saw …
there’s no silk scarf about one’s neck,
no English accent,
no remittance checks from aristocratic ladies in Europe
with blind and impotent
husbands.
it’s more like a fast hockey game
or putting on the gloves with a man
50 pounds heavier and ten years
younger, or
it’s like steering a ship through the fog
with a mad damsel clinging to your
neck
and all along you know you’ve gotten away
with some quite obvious stuff, that
you’ve been given undeserved credit, for stuff
that you either wrote offhand or
hardly meant or hardly cared
about.
well, it helps to be
lucky.
yet, on the other hand, you have sometimes
done it as you always knew it should
be done, and you knew then that it was
as good as it could be done,
and that maybe you had done it better,
in a way,
than anybody else had done it for a long time
and
you allowed yourself to feel
good about that
for a moment or
two.
they put the pressure on you
with statements about 200 years,
and when only one individual says it, that’s all
right
but when 2 or 3 or 4 say it—
that’s when they tend to open the door to a
kookoo bin.
they tell you to give up cigarettes and
booze, and then they tell you that you
have 25 more good years ahead of you and
then
perhaps ten more years to enjoy your old
age
as you suck on
the rewards and
memories.
Patchen’s gone, we need you, man,
we all need you for that
good feeling just above the
belly button—
knowing that you are there in some small room in
northern California writing poems and
killing flies with a torn
flyswatter.
they can kill you,
the praisers can kill you,
the young girls can kill you,
as the blue-eyed boys in English depts.
who send warm letters
handwritten
on lined paper
can kill you,
and they’re all correct:
2 packs a day and the bottle
can kill you
too.
of course,
anything can kill you
and something eventually
will. all I can say is that
today
I have just inserted a new
typewriter ribbon
into this old machine
and I am pleased with the way it
works and that makes for more than just an
ordinary day, thank
you.
there’s an old movie
based on a Hemingway short story
I saw the beginning of it
again on late night /
early morning tv
but the fellow who plays
Hem
his ears aren’t right
neither are
his chin
his hair
his voice;
and there’s this lovely
wench
in the film
with perfect buns
whose role it is to
endure his precious
literary abuse
while he slowly dies in the
African jungle.
I click the movie off.
of course, I never met
Hemingway.
maybe he was like that fellow.
I hope
not.
then I look about my bedroom and
think, Jesus Jesus,
why am I so upset by this
lousy tv movie?
what did I want them to make him
look like?
act like?
he was just a journalist from
Michigan who liked to shoot
big game
and his last kill was his
biggest;
surely he would have deserved the
nice buns
and the adoring eyes
of that actress who
he never saw and
who
in real life
later
drank herself to
death.
(the actor
who plays Hem
in the film is
still around
however
but barely
functioning.)
I guess when I look at that
movie
all I can think of to say
is:
bwana,