Coffin Lumber
<Coffin Lumber
by Michael Andrews
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-80485
Copyright © 1995 Michael Andrews
ISBN 0-941017-50-8
6x9, perfect bound.
128 pages set with New Yorker and New Yorker Engraved.
$12.00
CONTENTS
Foreword
Ah Life!
Fat Chance
Angela the Old Street Woman
She Broke the Rules
Old Woman in the Tehran Post Office
Serapes
I Lost It
Daedalus and Icarus
A Conversation with Charles Bukowski
The Poets Always Lie
Women are People Too
Maps and Metaphors
Flag Decal
The Ends of the Earth
Altaplana
A Significant Poet
Coffin Lumber
Life Insurance is Not the Answer
To the Reader From the Heart of the Moment
Harry Clitus, Pea Soup and the Paradox of the River
Mozart's Birthday
Singing to Flo
Tenting the House
Trashy Lingerie
The Visiting Poet at the Dakota Cafe
Three Frosty Beers
A Day On the Net
The Last Line
The Philosophy of Renunciation
The Toilet
The Economic Cog
The First Day
Dandelion
Tiffany
The Gnomes of Uncertainty
Author's Biography
Foreword
The editorial criteria for this collection of poems and other writing is based simply on everything that was published in ONTHEBUS since 1989, some other poems published elsewhere during the same time frame, plus a few other that have never been published. Poems that have already been collected in The Poet from the City of the Angels, and In Country were excluded.
The order is, more or less, the order in which they were published.
I deeply want to thank everyone who ever got anything from any of the work. You made the words something more than just a waste of time.
The work itself, I assume, will die with me.
The politics of art, the academics, the grants, the prizes, the publishing industry and the predatory economics that have destroyed literature, art and philosophy have also stolen my voice.
I have thrown my life away on something of no particular consequence.
So my debts are paid. I owe nothing to life. In a way, I guess I am free.
Now I am just another economic cog, an employee, a consumer and a future statistic.
I wish you all profound joy, lasting peace and great love. I wish you all outrageous good fortune. You're going to need it.
As for me, I have pursued the dreams and potentials of my life with diligence and good faith, and I have used my every talent to the best of my ability, and still -- life wasted me.
MA, 1996
I'm walking down Eisenhower --
the only street in Tehran
named after an American idiot
instead of an Islamic idiot --
for all the world like a free man.
The men are busy picking their noses,
scratching their crotches
and exposing pathetic equipment.
The women see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.
The more nothing they see,
the more the men go insane.
They call every woman a whore,
with the single exception of mother.
Not a one of them has figured out
that this makes each man's mother
every other man's whore.
Instead they talk dirty and wag their weenies,
cop feels and imprison their sisters.
So when I hear the crowd gasp
I turn just in time to see this lady
swing her purse at arm's length.
The purse is loaded with
powdered brick and plumber's lead.
She hits this guy along side the head
and lays him out, flat on the asphalt.
"Hal-a-fucking-lew-ya," I think.
I don't know what this asshole did,
I just know that he deserved it.
The next thing that crosses my mind
is a picture of this mob of angry morons
beating a single woman to death --
a taste of Islamic justice.
"No goddamn way," I think,
puffing out my chest like John Wayne,
flexing righteous biceps,
flashing the heroic glare.
If they want to hassle this
Iranian Joan of Arc, they are going
to have to go through me --
But the men don't do a thing.
About thirty women jump the lady
and right there in the middle
of Eisenhower Street
they beat the liberation
clean out of her.
Daedalus was a simple soul.
He loved inventing things,
sitting up till dawn
stoking his brain with problems,
solving riddles,
pondering imponderables.
One day he met a girl and the world changed.
Naucrate was a mystery he couldn't crack.
She came without operating instructions and
she kept him in a constant state of befuddlement.
Suddenly he had mortgages to pay,
bean fields to plow, and picket fences to paint.
He couldn't think straight anymore.
He slept all night long
without a single brainstorm.
One day Naucrate gave him a son.
Icarus came as a complete surprise to Daedalus
who spent the next year awake,
elbow deep in runny infant shit,
pondering the mysteries of generation.
Icarus didn't like thinking at all.
He liked candy, fast chariots and loose women.
He sure as hell didn't savor problems.
Naucrate swore off sex in order
to spoil Icarus like soft brown bananas.
Icarus absolutely hated riddles.
And he really didn't give damn about imponderables.
Icarus liked sweet barley cakes,
fondling his erection
and smashing Dad's models of labyrinths.
One day Queen Pasiphae jumped Daedalus' bones.
It didn't clear his mind, but it was better
then plowing the bean fields and eating worms.
King Minos took umbrage at this and imprisoned
both Daedalus and Icarus in the Labyrinth.
He needed someone who could think.
He was a king, so he had problems
and he wanted Daedalus to solve them.
Naucrate became a priestess of the moon
and let her genitals shrivel to dust and leather.
Pasiphae turned to white bulls for comfort.
Minos forged swords, minted coins and hired detectives.
Daedalus plotted escape, dreamed of flight
and constructed the machines of freedom.
Instead of helping him try to escape
Icarus was busy kissing the king's butt,
begging for a sycophant's job
and sniffing around the princesses.
Daedalus invented wings with wax and feathers.
He dragged Icarus, kicking and screaming to the nearest cliff,
strapped on the wings and gave him the boot.
As they flapped along he told Icarus the facts --
don't fly near the sun; it will melt your wax.
Icarus never believed a word the old man said
and after taking a few swoops and dives
he lets out an heroic, "Yahoo"
and flaps toward the sun.
Five minutes later he plummets
past Daedalus, with a horrified look
stamped into his simple face.
It is the first time he ever
figured anything out.
Daedalus watches Icarus make
his one and only big splash.
"Fucking idiot," he mutters to himself
and flaps over the horizon
into a truly spectacular sunset.
This conversation with Charles Bukowski and his wife, Linda, occurred sometime before John Fante and James Cagney died, as Bukowski was preparing for a reading in Redondo Beach. Since then his screenplay, Barfly, has been made into a major motion picture starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. An internationally famous figure in contemporary poetry and prose, Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920, and brought to the U.S. at the age of three. He has published over forty books including his highly acclaimed novel Hollywood. Charles Bukowski died in 1994.
Bukowski: So, are we going to try an interview, or something like that?
Andrews: I guess.
Bukowski: I think we need a few more drinks. . . . I just hate to start cold.
Andrews: It embarrasses the shit out of me, anyway.
Bukowski: Me, too. I've given a lot of them, but still I always feel like a damn fool. Really, I do.
Linda: Well, you haven't had anything to drink.
Andrews: I talked to you on the phone once.
Bukowski: What'd I do? Snarl and rag?
Andrews: Um, um. You said, `Buy the books.'
Bukowski: Oh, buy the books. That used to be one of my passwords.
Andrews: The last thing I read along those lines was your preface to Ask the Dust. Knocking on the gods' doors.
Linda: Did you read the book?
Andrews: Oh, yeah.
Bukowski: The old boy, he phoned the other night. He said, `Well I haven't written much lately, Hank, but now I'm going to start again. . . .' He's finished one, the Dreams of Bunker Hill, and now he's starting another god damn book!
Linda: He got inspired by the fact that they republished Ask the Dust. It just sort of brought new life back into him, which is beautiful. He was ready to die a couple years ago with diabetes, and they expected him to live no more than a few months. But he just hung on and on. And since that republishing of that book he's just . . .
Andrews: Ready to go.
Linda: At it again.
Bukowski: Yeah.
Linda: Yeah, he's blind.
Andrews: Did he do any more movie work since, what was the last one, A Walk on the Wild Side? That was some time ago.
Bukowski: Yeah, I think, you know, with having the one leg and not seeing . . . he calls it his tragic movie career. . . . Any how. You know the story. He was the guy who got me zipping.
Andrews: Um, um. Fact I got a little bit of a chuckle out of the fact that you're only a block away from Bandini.
(Laughter)
Bukowski: Well, I saw the street when we were looking at the house and I said, `Hey! . . .' I said, `That means something, that's a good sign.' But I don't know. Now we find out that the kitchen wall and the kitchen ceiling's falling in. The water's dripping through --
Linda: The plumbing is messed up --
Andrews: That's standard for an old house, I guess.
Bukowski: You know, you live in these cheap rooms and apartments like I used to, you just call the landlord. `The toilet's fucked up. Come on and fix it. . . .' On the other hand, you don't have to listen to other people's TV, and you can scream a little more, make more noise without the cops coming around.
Andrews: Yeah. It's quiet here.
Bukowski: Usually, until I start yelling.
Andrews: Put on Bartok?
Bukowski: Not exactly. . . . Then the neighbors don't speak to me for a couple of days. They look at me strangely.
Andrews: Well, that's all right.
Bukowski: Sure. I don't mind. . . . So I finished the god damn screen play, finally.
(conversation truncated here ... there is considerably more)
Some people claim
there's a woman to blame
but I know --
it's my own damn fault
Jimmy Buffett, Margaritaville
Three hours of bad road-
it's as far as I can run,
hard driven and hard times
and the jungle just sucks me in
and doesn't even notice my scream.
We bounce out of Tarapoto down 15 klicks
of highway, four lanes of bad dirt
rippled ruts and hot white clouds
floating in the erupting blister of the sky.
So much for the good part.
We hit the Mayo river, big and brown
boiling mud and foam
running from the kerosene streams
and coca plantations in the upper Huallaga Valley
until it dumps into the Huallaga river
cream and coffee, bigger, browner and running
for the Amazon, the sea, the clouds.
I am dehydrated and weak as a freeze-dried potato,
dropping weight like a pig on laxatives,
fasting for the ayahuasca,
boiled oats and plantains in the jungle
we roll into Shapaha, the last town
last chance, last gas
and the place is a forest of shotguns,
drug runners and coca pickers.
The Toyota collectivo
jars and grinds second gear through the jungle,
over streams, into an exploding cloud of butterflies,
a flurry of color splashed against the jungle,
potholes deeper than a rich man's bathtub
twisted mountains reaching for the sky,
steam and heat, mud and dust.
I watch the jungle slide by,
the Huallaga shooting its rapids
and I think about a woman
closed into herself like a half mad clam
and me, looking for Jacob's ladder
in the last place on earth,
bouncing over the worst road on the continent
in a Toyota pickup, dirt and mud
and boulders the size of shopping carts,
mountains and rivers, ruts and rocks,
on some road to Chazuta in the upper Huallaga Valley
somewhere in the Peruvian Amazon
and I know exactly where I am lost.
I ain't never going to leave.
I ain't never going home.
I give the finger to insane men
with M-16s on full-auto, safety off,
and I know that the jungle wants
to compost me into an ant hill-
that ayahuasca dehabituates
dreams die, time flies, love suffocates
and life kills.
So who gives a shit if a child
starves to death in Calcutta.
This place is as good as any.
Give me a good knife and half a chance.
Send this letter home.
So what if they hate Americans
and they ask questions later.
It ain't what I'm alive for.
Can't think of a single reason
to see tomorrow's sunset.
Tell me I'm wrong.
The phone is armed and dangerous.
Suzanne shoots out of the receiver
like an armor piercing bullet --
"The LA Poetry Festival is having a contest."
I hide my wallet. It's another rigged poetry contest.
"It's for the best poem," she tells me.
"You ought to submit.
You're a ... significant poet in LA."
Between the lines I can hear "barely significant."
If I squeeze my ear into the receiver
I can hear "well, maybe in South Bay."
I have a book on the bookstore shelves.
It's called "The Poet From the City of the Angels."
I wasn't even asked to read.
The Society of Political Poets wants
me to make the contest look legitimate.
They want my money to pay for the prize
that they intend to give to Eloise.
I sold my pot to piss in for an empty notebook
so I guess I'm out of the running.
Eloise is well established up the ladder.
She paid her dues, a card carrying member
of the Society of Poetic Politicians.
The poem never did matter.
Ain't no way I'm going to win a contest.
Contests are for hustlers, not for poets.
I couldn't hustle an ice cube off an Eskimo.
Suzanne is right. I could never write
a poem as good as Eloise can. Suzanne
knows -- I don't count enough to even read.
Tu Fu died in oblivion and shame.
Tu Fu never won a contest either.
I won't insult him with post mortem praise.
Where were we when he needed an audience.
Tu Fu knew what I found out --
a poet that leaves his poems to unborn children
is planting dandelions on his grave.
Pissing on your grave won't make the roses grow.
For all the difference the poem will make
it is better to dig an honest trench.
I've got no time for contests.
I've got to program some idiot's accounts payable.
I've got to earn my minimum daily requirements,
beans and rice and some wilted broccoli.
Piss on poetry.
There's more meaning in a bowl of alphabet soup.
There's more nutrition in a gulp of Pepsi.
Words are the piranhas of the heart.
The Saigon cemetery is a busy place.
Most of the dead get there the hard way,
carried on foot in a cheap wooden box
and planted in the brown sludge
of tropical mud and monsoon rain.
The rich ride in on the fancy hearse
pulled by the prancing white horses.
It looks like a nobleman's carriage
left over from the French Revolution.
The coffin makers need a lot of lumber.
Adults use more wood and take less skill.
But the tiny coffins are harder work
and there are more of them-
800 coffins a week for the children of Saigon.
No one counts the children anywhere else.
No one counts the children who have left
no one behind able to pay for the coffin.
The coffin maker has sad eyes and a hard mouth.
All his children were killed a long time ago.
They killed his wife and they killed his mother,
his father and his brothers.
He makes each coffin like a jewel box.
He does it to eat and he never cries.
He doesn't know why he eats,
there is no good reason to keep it up-
he'll never have another child
but he knows exactly why he never cries.
He would like to live long enough
to hear the reason, or any reason at all.
He would like to live long enough
to see the children take their revenge.
He dreams at night of sleeping under mud.
He eats his white rice, the dead vegies
and the number ten nouc mam
while the black evening rain
washes blood from the sky
and Agent Orange down the Delta.
The mud swallows children
and complains of indigestion.
The children sleep beneath the mud
waiting for a dry season-
the patient seeds of human nightmares.
Not a flower and not a tree,
not a fruit and not a weed
will tap their hungry roots
into the savage dreams
of these empty hearts.
The heart of stone beats slow.
The sky is ripe lemons bursting.
The storm licks its tongue through the mountain's fur.
The rain stalks across a summer lawn of fir and pine.
The sun mints gold on the hems of cloud.
Add S to a word and it cuts two ways.
It all comes down to a twig lying in the dust.
For a moment of your time
and an infinity of my mine
the cardiovascular pulse of the mountain
flutters to the beat of the hummingbird's heart
and that twig is all there is of clocks and rulers,
the only moment that ever ticked,
the sum total of every thought
flashing through the neuronal web of stars,
all there ever was of galactic clusters,
the history of bipedal brains,
this poem --
and you
reading this page,
closing this book,
putting it all back on the shelf
and walking out the door.
Monday, 27 Jan 92
I tell the class, be specific in your poems.
Describe what is in front of your nose.
Tell me about the smells, coffee brewing and onions frying.
Tell me about the temperature and if your butt hurts.
Let us say that music is playing --
tell me what it is, Mozart maybe, and not just any old Mozart
but Mozart's Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments.
All day the radio has played nothing but Mozart.
Happy birthday, Wolfgang, I think
and drag my tired ass into the truck, fire it up
and on the radio the man is saying that the last piece
they are playing today in celebration of Mozart
is the Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments, Kochel 361.
Serenades and serendipity -- that's the poet's life.
The man says that the Serenade was performed
only once during all of Mozart's life.
There's no artist like a dead artist, I think
when I think that I've probably heard the Serenade
maybe a hundred times, maybe more, maybe five or six versions
and it here it comes floating electric through the air --
I have heard more Mozart than Mozart heard.
He probably didn't need to hear it more than once.
I do.
60 pound dumbbells, 15 reps, 3 sets, my shoulder vibrates
in a scream of exhaustion and I rack the weights,
collapse onto the bench, gasp for breath
and I know that old men in good shape
are pressing roses between the pages
of poetry that everyone will soon forget.
A guy walks through the gym to the back room.
He is in serious need of pumping iron
and is carrying a load of tripods, lights and cameras.
He is followed by the trashy but aging blond
with the gorgeous ass outlined in see through mesh
and the seam that runs from her swollen clitoris,
down her vulva and up the crack of her ass.
7000 pounds of iron pause in mid-air
and 37 sets of dilated eyes mark her triumphal progress.
She is followed by the cute blond in the oversized
sweatshirt revealing nothing about
her perky breasts and tight little fanny,
carrying an armload of make-up
and a no nonsense approach to boiling testosterone.
Then comes the model,
Asian mixed with French, maybe Filipino,
a painful sway of black hair
brushing against a number ten ass.
She is wearing a look-but-don't-lust jacket
that every male hormone in the gym
is screaming to burn that jacket down to ash
and she is carrying an armload of trashy lingerie,
agonizingly skimpy camisoles,
butt thongs with postagestamp beaver patches,
filmy nighties and spray on leotards.
My pectorals give out forever.
"Don't go in the back," the guy next to me says.
"They're shooting skimpy underwear."
"I don't want to see it," I swear.
"There is already too much in life that I can't have."
"Yeah," he grins, "like going into the Porsche dealership."
"You got it," I say, "with expensive dreams
and an empty wallet."
The trashy but aging blond gives me a smile
but the model doesn't notice a single, desperate soul.
I unhinge my bike, fold my towel, slip on my sweatshirt
and get out before the shoot begins.
I don't go to the beach in the summer
and I stay the hell out of Baskin-Robbins.
Hard muscles and a dying pecker --
old age is not for sissies.
I stare without a word
at the cluttered breakfast dishes,
not hearing the conversational
white noise that glues
the husks of our lives together.
When I said that eternity
could be replaced with the metaphor
of what was printed on the backside
of the very last calendar
the student asked if he could
use that image and I said,
"Don't use it. Steal it."
Poetry cannot keep me from empty plates.
The table is covered with
white butcher's paper.
Words cannot save me.
With a purple crayon I write,
"Between heaven and earth
the lone, black gull,"
and sign it --
Tu Fu.
His watch quit breathing at 7:13 p.m.
but Randolph John Webber keeps it up
for another 11 hours and 37 minutes.
If he knows that both his legs
have long since been tagged and bagged
to him it is just another morphine dream
in a carousel of a thousand dreams.
The clerk has put in a twenty hour day
and a clerical error in the scheduling
of flights results in a delay
of over four hours in Randy's
arrival at the triage in Pleiku.
His final dream is of a girl named
Cindy, a broken shoe lace on his
worn out sneakers and the urgent
need to wax his Mustang convertible.
The burned out clerk skips his dinner
in favor of three frosty beers,
consults his Seiko diving watch
and calls it an early night.
The Mustang convertible rusts into
a junk yard burial waiting for its wax.
Randy's brother Charlie inherits a pair of
sneakers with one broken shoe lace.
The sun throws a shadow from Washington's
monument the way a child points
a finger at something on a wall.
In the summer, around 6:50 a.m.,
the shadow points to Randolph Webber's
name etched into a granite wall.
Cindy marries three times
and can't remember love.
Her first born son grows a scraggly beard
and cannot recall his father's smile.
I dial in, pop an ephedra and surf through the net-chatter looking for one bright thought. I swallow half a cup of caffeine just so I can focus on the icons. Right away I get pissed off.
xelibrium@aol.com, a bozo from the alt.messianic dialogue of the fundamentally braindead writes: "You want me to leave you a message saying im here because you think we havent been contacted by aliens because we nuked japan?
"lemme ask you something, what do you think would've happened if we hadn't nuked them???
"we'd have a lot of good dead americans right now, probably alot of us would not have even been born. Me for instance, so if you want me to denounce the nuking of japan, i will NOT.
"if it wasnt for the fact that we made their assholes glow, I wouldnt be alive right now."
Now here is a sparkling intellect, I think. He pisses me off for no other reason than the casual assassination of grammar. I hit the respond button and beat the keyboard into submission.
"If nuking Japan brought us the birth of such great intellects as yours, and resulted in even more bandwidth clutter with such deep thinking as this, then we not only should not have nuked the Japanese, we should have surrendered to them.
"xelibrium, you don't have the intellectual horsepower to clutter up the bandwidth with your mental litter. So go away. You must have better things to do like pulling the wings off of butterflies, burning crosses in un-American lawns, bombing federal buildings and ethnically cleansing small Balkan states.
"cordially, Michael Andrews poetphil@interserv.com
I hit the send button and skate on. I most definitely got my curmudgeon hormones cooking today. I growl at the mouse and spin down the menu until I bump into pmcginley@aol.com: "It seems like the world has two major groups of people: psychonauts - those who strive to fulfill the self, and socionauts, those to strive to fulfill society's expectations of them
"Psychedelics are the tools of psychonauts while nicotine appears to be an addiction of the socionauts.
"I'd be interested in seeing 2 nations, one comprised of psychonauts the other of addicts. Who would win?
I punch the respond button. I'm way beyond out of control now. My teeth are grinding, the sweat beads are ski jumping off my nose.
Don't talk to me about addicts.
"You might add alcohol to the drugs of choice for socionauts. Of the many lessons learned in Nam, you could say that armies run on alcohol. In the case of alcohol and armies, it is more a matter of society imposing expectations on other societies.
"An army is, after all, the ultimate sales force.
"Psychonauts would lose every time. Only a sociopath has time in life for trivial competitions.
"Michael Andrews poetphil@interserv.com
I send it out and skate right into the dialogue about the morality of informing people how to build a bomb.
ludwig@tunanet.com writes: "you are still as responsible when you give people information as when you give them a loaded gun or a bag of drugs.
Some other guy answers: "You are not giving anyone information on the net unless you e-mail it to the individual directly. You are making information available.
Then comes wpenrose@interaccess.com: "Splitting semantic hairs doesn't change the fact that if you didn't pass the information, or the gun, or the drugs, the (still hypothetical) incident wouldn't have happened. If that isn't moral responsibility, tell me what is.
"Or, if you think it is perfectly OK to distribute these things because you're not responsible for what people do with them, then you have you on one side and the law, most citizens, and history on the other. Good luck.
I can't let this slide by, hit respond, and start pounding keys. My fingertips are burning. In the reflection on the monitor I see drool frothing down my chin. Got to lay of the coffee and ephedra.
"Dear wpenrose: Law is social coercion and rarely has anything to do with moral responsibility.
"Most citizens are the same idiots that voted in Reagan and Gingrich, not to mention Hitler.
"History is a creative art form that is especially irrelevant to those who do not read it. But still, it does seem that culture would have been permanently arrested in the neolithic if it were not for the free dissemination of information.
"If children make bombs from information that is available from many more sources other than just the Internet, then society and the parents of those children have failed in their responsibilities.
"If society and parents fail to educate the children then the children should be given to more responsible parents and society should be adjusted.
"If only Newt Gingrich and the Serbian army are allowed to have bombs, then who will they cleanse next?
"Finally, if we dictate moral responsibility, and legislate away the exercise of thought, then we guarantee a society of infantile egotists who are unable to make moral decisions, and who are too intellectually incompetent to solve social dilemmas let alone act as an informed electorate.
"I do not want to live in a society of mind police and information cops.
"I do want to live in a society where everyone knows how to build a bomb and no one chooses to do so, where anyone can use cocaine for free and no one is dumb enough to do it.
"Michael Andrews poetphil@interserv.com
I pry my clinched fingers off the mouse. The keyboard is sticky with effluvia.
I punch it to send, hang up and swallow some ginko biloba. Maybe I need a hit of gotu kola. Screw it, I need another hit of coffee.
Empty minds make me tired.
See you on the net.
We are all wired, whether we know it or not.
The lonely hearts of the Milky Way.
I was born standing flat on both feet.
I do not mean to imply that I have a life.
I am a born wage slave and a beast of burden.
I left my knee prints at the feet of the glass cathedrals of commerce.
One day I ate steamed vegetables for lunch. That afternoon I was old.
This year love is an unfunded mandate.
I am the single burnt neuron in the network.
It is better to live life than to celebrate it.
I never sold a dream for a dollar.
They/god/it/life killed every dream in my jungle.
Profit is the shovel that digs my grave.
Employment is the lumber of my coffin.
There is no greater waste of a human mind.
I am an economic cog now.
I work. I consume. I let basketball stars tell me what to think.
I expect a gold watch and a cremation at public expense.
I paid my taxes.
I never would have guessed that life could be so short.
Flo and I eat chocolate mousse
and sip our decaf coffees.
The day is clear blue and a little cool.
Love is the tickle of a light breeze.
We hold hands to the car.
On the tiny grass hill
there is a single dandelion,
a perfect planet of white fuzz
swaying on its stem
above the dark green grass --
waiting for the wind.
whose eyes are the bluest of skies
composing histories told in clouds,
whose hair is a black jaguar
prowling the darkest nights.
That is the way it is with me -- dark.
It's 5 in the morning.
I am more alone than I have ever
dreamed that life could be.
Flo is asleep, dreaming some other night.
I put on my Nikes and a flannel shirt
scratch the cats and sneak out the back door.
I go down to the beach, pass
the old men scratching their whiskers by the bait shop.
There is a sign in a window for a beauty contest,
the best body in South Bay,
and once, long ago, it might cross my
mind to enter that contest.
But I am between everything.
Between sleep and awake.
Between night and day.
Between fat and in-shape.
Between old and young.
So I let it go.
The night is black but the city is bright.
The sky is indigo blue and the street lamps
by the pier are summer squash yellow.
There are jaguars roaming the streets.
They are the dreams of beautiful girls.
They are the dreams of men that are between.
The tide is low.
The surf is flat and sleepy.
On the end of the pier are all the fishermen
bobbing poles up and down
talking in whispers as though
they were afraid to wake the jaguars.
There is not a fish in sight.
I walk back to my favorite bench.
It's right over the surf line, facing north
beside the telescope that costs a dime
and you can see right around the horizon
to some other world
where dreams are the way things are
and jaguars curl up on your lap and purr.
Some guy is sitting on my bench.
So I stand way back, waiting,
and watch the night sink into the sand.
I don't want to talk with anyone.
We are both out here because we want to be alone
and that's the way it ought to go.
When he pedals away on his bike I sit down
like I was sitting in a warm pool of ink
dark like your hair, and blue like your eyes
and when I think about the way
you are always standing on the edge
of a cliff of laughter
it makes the sun come up a little higher.
An old man is criss-crossing the sand.
He has a metal detector.
It looks like he is sweeping the beach for mines
taking some danger out of the night.
But I guess he is only looking for watches,
false teeth, fallen stars and maybe a dime
to put into that telescope.
A cop drives up, headlights poking holes in the dawn,
two false suns, and he drinks his coffee
then drives off looking for trouble,
apples to steal, evil to root out.
I guess he'll find trouble all right.
If there were no cops there would be no crime.
The birds come with the dawn.
Down on the sand there are pipers and grebes and gulls.
They are all fishing for crabs.
A pigeon struts by my bench fishing for french fries.
The sky is going from ink to steel.
The clouds are lead and silver.
A big white gull lands on the lamp above me -- squawk squawk squawk.
"How's it going, bud," I ask, and he gives me the One Big Eye.
He decides that it's okay for me to be here.
And it is.
The runners are out on the beach.
They run up to the pier just below where I am sitting
touch the pylons and turn back north toward Manhattan Beach.
Some are fast and some are fat. Some are old and some are slow.
But they are all out there, trying.
The lights of the city are gone now.
I can see the tankers out to sea.
You could call it day, but it's colder than the dark.
The jaguars are prowling back to their caves.
So I think about your smile, white and bright and I get a little warmer.
I like it when you tease me back
and I groan like I was getting a flu shot
when I can't get my back scratched
but your eyes are on fire with black jaguars
and I know that you will eat this world
alive.
I can see that you are as full of life as kittens and hawks
and some in-between men.
I can see all the hearts that you will break
and all the men you will love
and all the times you will cry
and all the songs you will sing
and all the roads you will walk
and all the fears that you will beat
and all the dreams that you will chase.
Some dreams you will catch, huge jaguars
you will scratch between the ears,
and some dreams will fade into the daylight
like jaguars prowling away in the dawn,
but some dreams are killed
so that dead, stupid men can stretch
their hides out on an empty wall.
Never trade a dream for a dollar.
A little boy has come. He walks down to the surf below me.
He takes off his running shoes, rolls up his pants
waits for the wave to swallow his toes, chases it back out to sea,
plunges his hand into the soft wet sand,
pulls out a crab all wiggles and legs and claws,
runs up the beach before the next wave,
puts the crab into his shoe
and turns to chase the next wave back.
The street lamps blink out. The sky is a salmon
in the east swimming through the clouds.
The old man gives up. I don't think he found a single dime,
not enough for even one short peek through the telescope.
Another old man has come to fish in the surf.
He has a wool lumberjack coat on and a big floppy hat.
There is a jaguar at his feet.
Two lifeguards drive up in a truck as yellow as a summer squash.
They unload a rowboat, push it into the surf and row out to sea.
I like to think that they are heading for Bali
where the girls are all as beautiful as you,
or that they are rowing over the horizon to that other world
that they saw through the telescope
where the jaguars lick your nose.
It looks like my day is starting now.
There are too many people; surfers on their bellyboards
runners and fishermen and evil hunters and stupid cops.
There is not a jaguar in sight.
People are to dreams what cooks are to stew.
But I had to write this poem for you, because
this summer you are fifteen going on life
and I am fifty, going on old.
Every beautiful girl should have at least one decent poem
written for her by one decent poet
at least one time in her life.
So this poem is for you even though I know that you like poems that rhyme.
I don't write rhymers in my life right now.
Someday, I might though.
When I do, I'll give it to you.
So this turns out to be a poem for you when you turn, let's say, forty.
When you know that the world is sometimes sad, sometimes mysterious
and sometimes beautiful and that there are men as full of danger
as a swimming pool full of sharks.
Those kind of men that hunt other people's jaguars.
Those kind of men that hate other people's dreams.
I see in the morning paper that some of these kind of men
want to build and test more neutron bombs,
build B-2 bombers and litter the stars
with the machines of war.
It makes me tired. It makes me sad.
Some men want to kill all the black jaguars
that ever prowled the night and when
I think of all the dreams they want to kill
I cry.
My dream is this;
one day when you are, let's say, forty
and you are as wise as you are beautiful
and I am a mean old man who is fast with the cane
you will find this poem in a bunch of old junk
and you will remember me.
I guess I would like to be remembered by you as much as anyone.
And if you don't let them kill your jaguars
I will try not to let them kill mine.
