If I can save five dollars I'm going to buy a beer
and read this all backwards in front of people who don't exactly care
whether it means anything, so long as it hurts
me to read it and confess everything.
I was in love for a while a week or so ago with someone
who's name I can't mention out of decency. I had her on the floor,
got the old rug burn on the knee and she came, out of impossible
frustration, then kicked my ass the hell out.
Now she writes me little notes explaining that she misses me.
Mother doesn't have a cunt, at least I hope not,
and none of my brothers have read any of my books.
It's not like they don't care but what they want to know is how straight I shoot
and whether I can drive. Whether I can make it up the hill on one
fucked up leg and one pretty good one.
A hundred and fifty pushups at my age, in a single day,
No harder than tossing a sinker on top of a load of ties,
the way grandfather and the uncles did, before they got crushed
under logs and blew their brains out in the schoolhouse kitchen.
I used to look at the tittie calendar they left behind,
and I wore their hats, old felt Lancasters, faded and soft
the hats of men who lived alone and didn't waste anything.
Who could sleep on a slanted board with firewood pillows,
and drink from the rusty pump.
Walking horizontally across the city with a girl I think about entering
we talk about money and jobs and who knows what
while geese fly over. They're a wave over town, a string pressing west
toward the river, toward secret flyways, entering the delta country,
so loud though at that height we can barely make them out,
swift as ice that falls down an icy face, plunging to the sea.
Their voice is one voice, echoing all around between the pin oaks,
the sycamores, the paving. I wouldn't mind taking her into mystery
and her voice is a jewel. When she hugs me in front of her place
I admire the way it feels. Close up her breasts have their own voice,
calling at my chest, telling me a secret. My arms around her waist
nearly close her in, she smiles and goes away and I smile
then I go away but even now two hours later
when I recall the geese going over
there's a little blood running in my cock, a little something wild.
There's a war going on, George Bush is insane, we haven't got a chance,
not a prayer, and I feel bad for the volunteer army
though as a civilian I have no idea what it's like. Only that they don't belong
among the camel snakes and the bombs going off
keeping their appointments at Samarra, riding old horses
like on a television show, firing at will, shooting blind,
coming home under cover of the night in steel crates,
blown all to shit, wrapped in tarps, hidden,
all the blood sponged away
"when I died," said Jarrell, they washed out the turret
"with a steamhose," and that was half a century ago
"in the belly of the State my wet fur froze."
She's small and dark-haired and I easily imagine
that her small cunt is a coil of thick hair and a sea-smell
where I could swim and indulge myself.
I like to make the girls feel good, never a thought about my own
culmination, I find infinite patience in the way
her lips open up and tug at my finger.
With nothing but a froe and and adze and some old shirts
I could lay up all summer splitting antiques out of a tree
that I laid in the ferns, eating the green apples that roll
down the hill to me, the nuts in my right pants pocket,
rolling my balls around in a friendly way as I explore
and listen to the temper of the balls-out freight
passing through midtown like thunder, five blocks away
what about her pleasant behind, where she bends
to fetch her purse up, then asks if she can walk
with me under the loose geese that will never
in this life be able to alight without
risking the gunfire of a troubled and constipated population.
In the morning I shall squat under a tree to shit and a mosquito
shall zero in on me, easily finding a way through my hide
or my bald spot, legs like spindles, like threads.
my fanstasy world