Love Is a Dog From Hell_ Poems, 1974-1977 - Charles Bukowski [38]
you often wish you were a crane
standing on one leg
in blue water
but there’s
the
old up-bringing
you know:
you don’t want to be
a crane
standing on one leg
in blue water
the distress is not
enough
and
the victory
limps
a crane can’t
buy a piece of ass
or
hang itself at noon
in Monterey
those are some of
the things
humans can do
besides
stand on one leg
a gold pocket watch
my grandfather was a tall German
with a strange smell on his breath.
he stood very straight
in front of his small house
and his wife hated him
and his children thought him odd.
I was six the first time we met
and he gave me all his war medals.
the second time I met him
he gave me his gold pocket watch.
it was very heavy and I took it home
and wound it very tight
and it stopped running
which made me feel bad.
I never saw him again
and my parents never spoke of him
nor did my grandmother
who had long ago
stopped living with him.
once I asked about him
and they told me
he drank too much
but I liked him best
standing very straight
in front of his house
and saying, “hello, Henry, you
and I, we know each
other.”
beach trip
the strong men
the muscle men
there they sit
down at the beach
cocoa tans
with the weights
scattered about them
untouched
they sit as the
waves go in and
out
they sit as the
stock market
makes and breaks
men and families
they sit while
one punch of a button
could turn their
turkeynecks to
black and shriveled
matchsticks
they sit while
suicides in green rooms
trade it in for space
they sit while former
Miss Americas
weep before wrinkled
mirrors
they sit
they sit with less
life-flow than apes
and my woman stops and
looks at them:
“oooh oooh oooh,” she
says.
I walk off with
my woman as the waves
go in and out.
“there’s something wrong
with them,” she said, “what
is it?”
“their love only runs in
one direction.”
the seagulls whirl and
the sea runs in and out
and we left them
back there
wasting themselves
time
this moment
the seagulls
the sea
the sand.
one for the shoeshine man
the balance is preserved by the snails climbing the
Santa Monica cliffs;
the luck is in walking down Western Avenue
and having the girls in a massage
parlor holler at you, “Hello, Sweetie!”
the miracle is having 5 women in love
with you at the age of 55,
and the goodness is that you are only able
to love one of them.
the gift is having a daughter more gentle
than you are, whose laughter is finer
than yours.
the peace comes from driving a
blue 67 Volks through the streets like a
teenager, radio tuned to The Host Who Loves You
Most, feeling the sun, feeling the solid hum
of the rebuilt motor
as you needle through traffic.
the grace is being able to like rock music,
symphony music, jazz…
anything that contains the original energy of
joy.
and the probability that returns
is the deep blue low
yourself flat upon yourself
within the guillotine walls
angry at the sound of the phone
or anybody’s footsteps passing;
but the other probability—
the lilting high that always follows—
makes the girl at the checkstand in the
supermarket look like
Marilyn
like Jackie before they got her Harvard lover
like the girl in high school that we
all followed home.
there is that which helps you believe
in something else besides death:
somebody in a car approaching
on a street too narrow,
and he or she pulls aside to let you
by, or the old fighter Beau Jack
shining shoes
after blowing the entire bankroll
on parties
on women
on parasites,
humming, breathing on the leather,
working the rag
looking up and saying:
“what the hell, I had it for a
while. that beats the
other.”
I am bitter sometimes
but the taste has often been
sweet, it’s only that I’ve
feared to say it. it’s like
when your woman says,
“tell me you love me,” and
you can’t.
if you see me grinning from
my blue Volks
running a yellow light
driving straight into the sun
I will be locked in the
arms of a
crazy life
thinking of trapeze artists