The Roominghouse Madrigals (13 page)

 

I was down by the mill at last,

and I saw a rabbit go by

and a rotten log

and a rotten heart,

and I sat and smoked on a stump

and I watched the ants;

the ants are everywhere

picking up the dead,

their dead and the other dead,

cleaning up the earth,

and the sky was the same old

pale blue

like a weak water color,

and a couple of clouds,

fat and senseless;

and I took out the bottle

and the notebook

and I was a man a thousand years old,

and a thousand years back

or a thousand years ahead,

and I looked down into the oil of water

and the sun came back

painting blurs in my head,

showing me who was master

and how weak I was

and I put my hand flat on the dirt

palm up

and the ants came up

and touched

and passed around

so I guessed that I was not dead,

but no, there was one,

he came up and climbed

and I could feel the thin hair-legs

as he climbed

both of us brilliant in the sunlight,

and then down he went into the dirt,

and he ran ahead, but the next one ran

up my sleeve and then out,

and then stood there in my palm, blind,

looking up at me, and while he stood there

another came up and touched his feelers

and they talked about me,

and then came a third and a fourth

and I felt their excitement:

this palm in the dust could be theirs
,

and I rose with a curse

and pinched and blew them off

like the idiots they were:

their time would come to share with the worm,

but this time this time was mine!

but no matter that I walked off into the pines

and frightened a squirrel,

they had said,

they’d had their say,

and I was done.

 

 

he told me he had all the gas on

without flame

but when I got there

at 11:30 p.m. the gas was flaming and

he was drunk on the couch

with his ragged goatee:

“it got too much,” he told me,

“I got to thinking

and it got too much.”

 

 

which is good enough, we who think

or work with words, we who carve

can come up against this, especially

if we believe our early successes

and believe the game is won.

 

 

I think of Ernie tagging himself

when the time was ready

and I think of Frost

going on,

licking the boots of politicians,

telling the pretty lies

of an addled mind,

and I think,

well, Ernie’s won

another round.

 

 

I pour the kid a drink, then

pour myself one. kid?

hell, he’s 30. a lady’s man

and a master of the English

language with a

peanut-shell soul.

and I? and I? nothing more.

we drink and he reels off

petty larcenies. later I leave,

both of us alive.

 

 

the next Sunday, I’m told,

my friend was in Frisco

in a green bow tie

reading his poems to a

society of misplaced ladies.

 

 

I’m told he

gassed them to

death.

 

 

at 3:30 a.m. in the morning

a door opens

and feet come down the hall

moving a body,

and there is a knock

and you put down your beer

and answer.

 

 

god damn it, she says,

don’t you ever sleep?

 

 

and she walks in

her hair in curlers

and herself in a silk robe

covered with rabbits and birds

 

 

and she has brought her own bottle

to which you splendidly add

2 glasses;

her husband, she says, is in Florida

and her sister sends her money and dresses,

and she has been looking for a job

for 32 days.

 

 

you tell her

you are a jockey’s agent and a

writer of jazz and love songs,

and after a couple of drinks

she doesn’t bother to cover

her legs

with the edge of the robe

that keeps falling away.

 

 

they are not bad legs at all,

in fact, very good legs,

and soon you are kissing a

head full of curlers,

 

 

and the rabbits are beginning

to wink, and Florida is a long way

away, and she says we are not strangers

really because she has seen me

in the hall.

 

 

and finally

there is very little

to say.

 

 

good weather

is like

good women—

it doesn’t always happen

and when it does

it doesn’t

always last.

a man is

more stable:

if he’s bad

there’s more chance

he’ll stay that way,

or if he’s good

he might hang

on,

but a woman

is changed forever

by

children

age

diet

conversation

sex

the moon

the absence or

presence of the sun

or good times.

a woman must be nursed

into subsistence

by love

where a man can become

stronger

by being hated.

I am drinking tonight in Spangler’s Bar

and I remember the cows

I once painted in Art class

and they looked good

they looked better than anything

in here. I am drinking in Spangler’s Bar

wondering which to love and which

to hate, but the rules are gone:

I love and hate only

myself—

the others stand beyond me

like oranges dropped from the table

and rolling away; it’s what I’ve got to

decide:

 

 

kill myself or

love myself?

which is the treason?

where’s the information

coming from?

 

 

books…like broken glass:

I wdn’t wipe my ass with ’em

yet, it’s getting

darker, see?

 

 

(we drink here and speak to

each other and seem knowing.)

 

 

paint the cow with the biggest

tits

paint the cow with the biggest

rump.

 

 

the bartender slides me a beer

it runs down the bar

like an Olympic sprinter

and the pair of pliers that is my hand

stops it, lifts it,

golden, dull temptation,

I drink and

stand there

the weather bad for cows

but my brush is ready

to stroke up

the green grass straw eye

sadness takes me over

and I drink the beer straight down

order a shot

fast

to give me the guts and the love to

go

on.

 

 

I keep practicing death

and as the worms writhe

in agony of waiting

I might as well have another

drink, and I am thinking

I am
there
:

and I cross my legs

in the patio of

some Mexico City hotel

in 1997

and the birds come down

to pick out my eyes

and the birds fly away

and I no longer see

them.

 

 

is it shotguns of cancer

or sun-madness?

 

 

the rotting of the heart,

the gut, the lily.

 

 

now there’s Hem. I always thought of Hem

as a tough old guy frying a steak

in some kitchen

under a bright light. what

happened, Ernie?

 

 

Hem was practicing too.

Everytime he watched a bull die

he got ready. when he lit a cigar

at four in the afternoon, he

got ready.

the bulls, the soldiers, the cities

the towns…

 

 

my sadness, my sadness

(let me have this drink)

could be strung across guitars

everywhere

and played for 10 minutes

with all the generals bowing

whores little girls again

maids kissing my photograph

on the plaza wall haha

and old warriors

rubbing their blue stiff veins

and hoping for one more day

of bravery.

 

 

I practice for you, death:

your wig

that dress

your eyes

these teeth.

 

 

I too am an old man frying a steak

in a small kitchen.

 

 

when I run out of luck

I’ll run out of whiskey

and when I run out of whiskey

the land will not be green,

and my love and my sadness…

who needs these?

 

 

I practice death pretty good:

send in the bull

send in the girl whose white flesh

maddens men on the boulevards,

send in Paris,

send in a car on the freeway

with 6 people going to a picnic,

send in the winner of the 8th,

send in Palm Beach and all the people

on the sand!

and I practice for you

too,

and the man sweeping the sidewalk

and the lady in bed with me

and the poems of Shakespeare

and the elephants

and the queers and the murderers,

I practice for everybody,

but for myself mostly.

 

 

pouring another drink now

at 9:30 in the morning,

the Racing Form on the couch,

the mailman walking toward me

with a loveletter from a lady who

doesn’t want to die and a letter from the

government

telling me to give them money;

and I practice for the government too,

and I’m red, all red inside,

punctured with heart and intestine and lung,

I hope they don’t arrest me,

I practice pretty good

and I’ve got a steak, a cigar

and a fifth of scotch,

I’ve read most of the classics

and I watch the birds fly this morning

and I can see most of them,

many of them that you can’t see,

and I’m going to take a bath pretty soon,

put on some clean clothes

and drive South to the track.

it is not an unusual morning except that

it is one more,

and I want to thank you

for listening.