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read

these

too.

I also carried the Cantos

in and out

and Ezra helped me

strengthen my arms if not

my brain.

that wondrous place

the L.A. Public Library

it was a home for a person who had had

a

home of

hell

BROOKS TOO BROAD FOR LEAPING

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

POINT COUNTER POINT

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

James Thurber

John Fante

Rabelais

de Maupassant

some didn’t work for

me: Shakespeare, G. B. Shaw,

Tolstoy, Robert Frost, F. Scott

Fitzgerald

Upton Sinclair worked better for

me

than Sinclair Lewis

and I considered Gogol and

Dreiser complete

fools

but such judgments come more

from a man’s

forced manner of living than from

his reason.

the old L.A. Public

most probably kept me from

becoming a

suicide

a bank

robber

a

wife-

beater

a butcher or a

motorcycle policeman

and even though some of these

might be fine

it is

thanks

to my luck

and my way

that this library was

there when I was

young and looking to

hold on to

something

when there seemed very

little

about.

and when I opened the

newspaper

and read of the fire

which

destroyed the

library and most of

its contents

I said to my

wife: “I used to spend my

time

there…”

THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER

THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN.

sit and endure

well, first Mae West died

and then George Raft,

and Eddie G. Robinson’s

been gone

a long time,

and Bogart and Gable

and Grable,

and Laurel and

Hardy

and the Marx Brothers,

all those Saturday

afternoons

at the movies

as a boy

are gone now

and I look

around this room

and it looks back at me

and then out through

the window.

time hangs helpless

from the doorknob

as a gold

paperweight

of an owl

looks up at me

(an old man now)

who must sit and endure

these many empty

Saturday

afternoons.

Goldfish

my goldfish stares with watery eyes

into the hemisphere of my sorrow;

upon the thinnest of threads

we hang together,

hang hang hang

in the hangman’s noose;

I stare into his place and

he into mine…

he must have thoughts,

can you deny this?

he has eyes and hunger

and his love too

died in January; but he is

gold, really gold, and I am gray

and it is indecent to search him out,

indecent like the burning of peaches

or the rape of children,

and I turn and look elsewhere,

but I know that he is there behind me,

one gold goblet of blood,

one thing alone

hung between the reddest cloud

of purgatory

and apt. no. 303.

god, can it be

that we are the same?

finish

the hearse comes through the room filled with

the beheaded, the disappeared, the living

mad.

the flies are a glue of sticky paste

their wings will not

lift.

I watch an old woman beat her cat

with a broom.

the weather is unendurable

a dirty trick by

God.

the water has evaporated from the

toilet bowl

the telephone rings without

sound

the small limp arm petering against the

bell.

I see a boy on his

bicycle

the spokes collapse

the tires turn into

snakes and melt

away.

the newspaper is oven-hot

men murder each other in the streets

without reason.

the worst men have the best jobs

the best men have the worst jobs or are

unemployed or locked in

mad houses.

I have 4 cans of food left.

air-conditioned troops go from house to

house

from room to room

jailing, shooting, bayoneting

the people.

we have done this to ourselves, we

deserve this

we are like roses that have never bothered to

bloom when we should have bloomed and

it is as if

the sun has become disgusted with

waiting

it is as if the sun were a mind that has

given up on us.

I go out on the back porch

and look across the sea of dead plants

now thorns and sticks shivering in a

windless sky.

somehow I’m glad we’re through

finished—

the works of Art

the wars

the decayed loves

the way we lived each day.

when the troops come up here

I don’t care what they do for

we already killed ourselves

each day we got out of bed.

I go back into the