Bert Meyers - in A Dybbuks Raincoat Collected Poems

In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat
Mary Burritt Christiansen

Poetry Series
V. B. Price, Series Editor
Also available in the

University of New Mexico Press
Mary Burritt Christiansen
Poetry Series
Poets of the Non-Existent City:
Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era
edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak
Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

edited by Ursula K. Le Guin
Deeply Dug In by R. L. Barth
Amulet Songs: Poems Selected and New

by Lucile Adler
In Company: An Anthology of
New Mexico Poets After 1960
edited by Lee Bartlett, V. B. Price,
and Dianne Edenfield Edwards
Tiempos Lejanos: Poetic Images from the Past

by Nasario García
Refuge of Whirling Light

by Mary Beath
The River Is Wide/ El río es ancho:

Twenty Mexican Poets, a Bilingual Anthology
edited and translated by Marlon L. Fick
A Scar Upon our Voice by Robin Coffee
CrashBoomLove: A Novel in Verse

by Juan Felipe Herrera
Rebirth of Wonder: Poems of the Common Life

by David Johnson
In a
Dybbuk’s
Raincoat
Collected Poems
BERT MEYERS
edited by
Morton Marcus and Daniel Meyers
foreword by Morton Marcus
introduction by Denise Levertov
university of new mexico press

■
albuquerque
2007 by the University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved. Published 2007
Printed in the United States of America
12 11 10 09 08 07 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meyers, Bert, 1928–1979.

In a dybbuk’s raincoat : collected poems / Bert Meyers ;
edited by Morton Marcus and Daniel Meyers ;
foreword by Morton Marcus ;
introduction by Denise Levertov.
p. cm. — (Mary Burritt Christiansen poetry series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8263-3787-0 (alk. paper)
I. Marcus, Morton. II. Meyers, Daniel, 1960– III. Title.
PS3525.E955I53 2007
811’.54—dc22
2006036511
All photos herein are family photos reproduced courtesy

of Daniel Meyers unless otherwise noted.
design and composition: Mina Yamashita

CONTENTS
Foreword by Morton Marcus / xiii
Introduction by Denise Levertov / xvii
COLLECTED POEMS
From Early Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)
Because There’s So Much Speed / 3
In Those Mountains / 4
On the Hill / 5
The Cougar Has Been Shot / 6
Origin / 7
And, Sometimes It Seems / 8
Porcupine / 9
Once, in Autumn / 10
Before I Sleep / 11
The Death of a Lucky Man / 12
We Thank the Heart / 13
On a Summer Night / 14
At Night / 15
Legend / 16
I Took the Wild / 18
Rainy Day / 19
At My Window / 20
In the Alley / 21
My Parents / 22
The Garlic / 23
Picture Framing / 24
October Poem / 25
Evening on the Farm / 26
Now It’s Friday / 27
At Work / 28
A Short Speech to the Hungry / 29
This Morning / 30
viii ■ Contents
From The Dark Birds (Doubleday and Co., 1968)

The Dark Birds / 31
They Who Waste Me / 32
Eichman / 33
Pigeons / 34
Madman Songs / 36
Gulls Have Come Again / 41
Funeral / 42
A Tree Stump at Noon / 43
The Accident / 44
Winter / 45
A Year in a Small Town / 46
Windy Night / 47
Sometimes / 48
Icon / 49
Lullaby / 50
One Morning / 51
The Curse / 52
The King at Evening / 53
The Poet / 54
Apprentice / 56
When She Sleeps / 57
From Any Hill / 58
Picture Framing / 59
Cigarette / 60
Follow the Child / 61
The Family / 62
A Child’s an Apple / 63
Now I Sleep in the Afternoon / 64
The Wanderer / 65
The Drive / 66
In the Yard / 67
Stars Climb Girders of Light / 68
Contents ■ ix
From Sunlight on the Wall (Kayak, 1976)

Foothills / 69
By the Sea / 70
L.A. / 71
G. F. / 72
A. C. / 73
O’Keeffe / 74
Jose / 75
Twilight at the Shop / 76
Next Door / 77
I Can’t Sleep / 78
Watercolor Days / 79
From The Wild Olive Tree

(West Coast Poetry Review, 1979)
Signature / 80
These Days / 81
Some Definitions at Work / 83
Landscapes / 85
Pebble / 88
Old / 89
Eviction / 90
A Citizen / 91
To My Enemies / 93
After the Meal / 94
All Around Me / 95
Pencil Sharpener / 97
Pliers / 98
The Old Engraver / 99
The Gilder / 100
Suburban Dusk / 101
Postcards / 102
The Return / 112
Homecoming / 113
x ■ Contents
Lament / 115
Driving Home at Night with My Children
After Their Grandfather’s Funeral / 116
The Widow / 117
Tree / 118
For W. R. Rodgers / 119
Spleen / 120
With Animals / 121
And Still / 124
Gently, Gently / 125
Daybreak / 127
From The Blue Café—Poems

(Jazz Press and PapaBach Editions, 1982)
Sawdust
This Evening / 129
Another Caterpillar Poem / 130
In Saigon / 131
Retarded Child / 133
August / 134
Sunflowers / 135
The Daughter / 136
The Son / 137
The Poets / 138
Maybe / 139
Images
Images—for Odette / 140
Contents ■ xi
The Blue Café—songs for Anat and Daniel

The Old Café / 145
Unearthly Lady / 147
Without a Chance / 148
It’s Very Nice / 150
Public Places / 151
It’s All Dissolving / 152
They Say / 154
One Tree One Fish / 155
Here’s the Autumn / 157
Unpublished Poems
A Memorie / 158
A Nocturne / 159
A Dawn / 160
Greybird / 161
A Fifty-Year-Old-Woman / 162
Wilshire Bus / 163
Mary, Mary / 164
It’s a Pleasure to Be Sick / 165
She Spoke of Love / 166
Korea / 167
Poem in Summer / 168
Footnote for Today / 170
But We, My Love / 171
To __________ / 172
Marriage Proposal / 173
Sunday Morning / 176
I Dreamed / 177
How I Feel / 178
A Survivor / 179
Someone We Knew / 180
English / 181
Untitled / 182
xii ■ Contents
Always / 183
For Ami / 184
When I Came to Israel / 185
Haiku—Various / 187
Untitled—or, “To Be a Poet” / 190
Untitled / 191
Unpublished Songs
Life Is a God / 192
You and I / 193
I Saw a Poor Young Woman / 195
Once in Los Angeles / 197
I Drive an Old Dodge / 199
College Town Blues / 201
The Mind That Kills / 203
Before the Storm / 205
Atlantis / 207
Selected Prose
Journal—Spring 1969 / 213
Bert Meyers’s Words on Poetry / 238
Images and Notes from Journals 1972–75 / 241
A Short History of Twentieth-Century
American Poetry / 248
Articles on Bert Meyers and His Poetry

“Cello” by Garrett Hongo / 255
“Secrets of a Teacher” by Jack Miles / 260
About the Author / 269

■ xiii ■
Foreword
I have been asked to write a foreword to this vol-

ume, telling how the manuscript weathered its
stormy journey of, at this writing, twenty-eight
years, and how Daniel Meyers and I became its
editors. It is, indeed, a story worth telling, if for
no other reason than to acknowledge the names
of those who rescued the shipwrecked book and
its author from oblivion and are responsible for
bringing it now to the public’s attention.
From the start, it should be understood that I
was neither a close friend of Bert’s nor one of his
many students, just an admiring fellow poet and,
in Bert’s last days, a warm acquaintance. Bert was
a handsome man, with chiseled movie-star good
looks, which, along with a forceful personality,
lent him an undeniable magnetism. Both of us had
books out from Kayak Press, as well as continual
representation in the pages of Kayak Magazine,
and we first met at the house of Kayak’s publisher,
George Hitchcock, in 1975, and a dozen times
thereafter until Bert’s untimely death in 1979 at the
age of fifty-one.
Like so many other poets of the sixties and
seventies, I had been enormously impressed by
Bert’s poems for their briefness and delicacy. They
were built like tiny, precision engines fueled by
xiv ■ Foreword
his unique, mesmerizing images and subtle rhythms. In poem

after poem he showed the world anew, making the reader see it in
fresh ways. As far as I was concerned, his stripping away of rhet-
oric in favor of an at times metaphysical and always socially
engaged poetry, which was expressed almost completely through
images, had gone several steps beyond the much-lauded work of
James Wright.
Therefore, I flatter myself when I say there was mutual rapport
between Bert and me, and I say this not only because our meet-
ings were cordial and filled with intense conversations about the
nature of poetry, but because Bert’s widow Odette corresponded
with me by mail or talked with me by phone concerning Bert’s
work at least several times each year after Bert’s death.
Odette is the real energy behind this book. Her devotion to
Bert and his work was fervent and never-ending. A poet, teacher,
and prose writer herself (Doors to Madame Marie: University of
Washington Press, 1997; and The Enchanted Umbrella: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1988), she never stopped lobbying publishers
and fellow poets on Bert’s behalf, wanting to keep his voice and
vision from fading like Keats’s dryad into the trees.
Bert had chosen a selected poems shortly before his death, and
it was that manuscript that Odette carried like a sacred text into
the future. Many well-known poets and well wishers promised to
boost the volume and get it published. One kept the volume for
seventeen years, continually assuring Odette that he would get
the book into print. But for one reason or another, all efforts came
to nothing.
In 1997, Odette called me in desperation. She had just learned
she had cancer and didn’t know how long she had to live. She
had finally taken Bert’s manuscript back from the poet who had
held it for seventeen years, and she wondered if I knew of anyone
who might want to publish it. By then, I was working with several
Foreword ■ xv
different publishers who were handling my work, and I thought

there was a chance that I could do what others hadn’t. But after
several years of mixed signals and lost manuscripts on the pub-
lishers’ parts, my efforts, like the others’, came to nothing.
In the last year of her life, Odette and I were thinking of pub-
lishing the “Selected” privately, with all work done gratis by a
friend of mine who was a book designer. Before any of that effort
went beyond the preliminary stages, however, Odette died, leaving
copies of the manuscript and attendant papers with me.
Less than a year later I began my association with a press
who had signed to do one of my books. I showed the editor Bert’s
selected poems manuscript and he was so impressed he offered
to do Bert’s “collected” poems. I had all of Bert’s books and could
easily have put together a collected poems, but I thought at this
point I had best get in touch with Bert’s daughter and son, Anat
and Daniel, who I hadn’t seen since they were children. Daniel,
who lived in Paris, was handling his father’s literary estate and was
excited about a substantial portion of his father’s work finally find-
ing its way into print.
Within the month, Daniel and Anat put Bert’s collected poems
on disc, and several months later Daniel came to the United
States, where, rummaging through his mother’s storage facility,
he found his father’s old notebooks, journals, letters, and half-
written poems, some from when Bert was sixteen years old.
Samplings from that material, along with articles written about
Bert, will be found in the back of this volume. They will not only
show what prominent fellow poets thought of Bert’s poetry, but
the journals, letters, and poem fragments will allow the reader to
catch a glimpse of the man and to peek at his mind at work.
That is how this book came to take shape. But its storm-tossed
fate was not yet over. Having struggled to stay afloat in the rough
business conditions of the new century’s early years, the press that
xvi ■ Foreword
had signed to do Bert’s collected poems sunk into bankruptcy and

dragged Bert’s manuscript with it into oblivion.
If you are reading these words now, it means the manuscript
has finally found its way into print. I certainly hope so, not only
for the sake of American literary history, nor for Bert and Odette’s
sake, but for Daniel’s. Daniel’s commitment to seeing this project
through to completion has been unwavering. At times his energy
has had about it an almost biblical aura of the son fulfilling his
parents’ final wishes as a sacred duty. It has been a delight getting
to know him and to work with him. He cannot be praised enough.
Nor can several other people whose aid is responsible for
finally making this volume find print. First are Bert’s old friends,
Professor Maximillian E. Novak and Estelle Gershgoren Novak,
poet and editor, who suggested the manuscript be sent to the UNM
Press. Second is Gene Frumkin, Bert’s friend and fellow poet and
professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, who brought
the manuscript to the Press. And third is Luther Wilson, director of
the Press, who had the taste, good graces, and temerity to publish
the book of a long-dead poet.
My involvement in the project, apart from seeking a publisher
for the manuscript over the years, has been, with Daniel, to win-
now and select from Bert’s work and the critical articles written
about him, and in the end to shape the volume you now hold. It
has been motivated not only by promises and friendship but by
the hope that the prospective reader will discover and be enriched
by the work of one of the most original poets of the last half of the
twentieth century.
Now, Odette, it is done. Rest in peace.
Morton Marcus
Santa Cruz, California, January 2007
■ xvii ■
Introduction
Bert Meyers
Denise Levertov*
B ert Meyers’ death has deprived us of one of the

best poets of our time. I feel strongly the irony
of my making that statement, since I “discovered”
his work only months before his death; and that
discovery need not have been so tardy, for I had
seen his name, seen (but not really read) poems of
his in Kayak and perhaps elsewhere, and even—
some six months before I did at last recognize the
value of his work—had met him. Fortunately I did
enter the world of Bert’s poems before finding out
that he had cancer; so that I have had no need to
wonder whether knowing that he was seriously ill
influenced my response. It was only after I wrote to
tell him I had fallen in love with poem after poem
in The Wild Olive Tree,† the manuscript of which
———————————————————
•
From Light Up the Cave, copyright © 1981 by New
Direction Publishing Corp. Reprinted with permission of
New Direction Publishing Corp.
†
Published in 1979 by West Coast Poetry Review Press,
Reno, Nevada.
xviii ■ Introduction
he had sent me, that he wrote back telling me he had been found
to have lung cancer. (And reading that letter I shuddered to recall
having noticed that he was a heavy smoker.)
Bert Meyers’ work seems all to have been lyrical; he was not
drawn to the epic, narrative, or dramatic modes and eschewed the
hortatory or didactic. For clarity of discourse, I would reserve the
term “major” for poets whose range of genres and also quantity
of work seem equal in breadth to the depth of their poems. But
the term “great” should be applicable to those who produce deep
and exquisite work in fewer modes, or in a single one; though here
too some sense of abundance seems to form part of what “great”
implies. I feel Meyers can be called great because of the extraor-
dinary intensity and perfection of his poems and the consistency
with which he illumined what he experienced, bodying it forth in
images that enable readers to share his vision and thereby extend
the boundaries of their own lives.
The image is unequivocally at the center of his work; indeed, a
sequence of short poems, not posthumously published in the vol-
ume Windowsills,‡ is named simply “Images.” Often there are sin-
gle lines, or brief syntactic units, within longer poems of his, that
seem fully poems in themselves—random examples would be:
Night lifts the moon like a coffee cup

from the skyline’s cluttered shelf,
or
Fog—
sailing for hours
in the same spot;
———————————————————————
‡
Published in 1979 by Common Table, New Haven, Connecticut.
Introduction ■ xix
and the joyful sound

of the invisible sea.
Or this:
All around me, butterflies,

ecstatic hinges,
hunt for the ideal door.
It is apparent that Meyers himself recognized, and cultivated,

this ability to find images that can function autonomously; the
“Images” section of Windowsills begins with a two-line poem, a
discrete image:
Bales of hay—cartons
of sunlight fading in a field.
And the poem “Train” begins and ends with single lines that are
entities separated from the middle stanzas: “Sunlight plays its
flute in the treetops,” says the first one, and “Green keeps changing
itself from green to green,” says the last. But he also knew that the
image was a building block out of which he could construct longer
poems: one of his strengths is the way in which every longer poem
of his is built up of an accumulation of such image blocks, each
of which has such integrity that the whole edifice is dense and
strong. In this way his poems, like the best haiku, are capable of
imparting a sense of his life and values, his emotions and deepest
loyalties, with a minimum of stated opinion. Though an intense
feeling for the beauty and strangeness of the sense-apprehensible
world informs most of his work, he does not ignore the hideous
nor shrink from the ugly terms necessary to depict it:
xx ■ Introduction
And here are also filthy streets,

leprous walls that sunlight
never touched, smeared with crud,
battered like garbage cans . . .
the cracks in a stone
are the landscape of nerves;
the air’s a perpetual fart
and even the shadows wear rags
(from “Paris”)
Though he did not like “engaged” poetry, feeling that it violated

what he believed was the essentially evocative and non-didactic
nature of the art, he at times encompassed historical comment,
e.g., “Arc de Triomphe”:
Nothing but gray seen through the arch

as if triumph were an abyss
into which a nation marches
And in a poem such as “Saigon” (though I believe he decided to pull

it out of The Wild Olive Tree which was in process of publication at
the time of his death) he did make a very direct criticism of the cor-
rupting influence of the United States—the poem’s epigraph is, “In
our own image we created them,” and it describes teenage thugs
in pre-liberation Saigon:
Their smiles are gun belts,

their brains, nuclear clouds;
and they speak a dialect
that sounds like money . . .
Introduction ■ xxi
Around them, the landscape’s

a flag that fell from the sky:
red roads, bloody stripes;
whitened by bones
and stars that explode;
blue, like genocide’s queer smoke.
Again, though a love of the earth and its creatures and things,
and of his friends and family, is the predominating spirit in his
poetry, anger recurs in a poem like “To My Enemies,” and once
more is seen to be, despite his anti-polemical bias, a social criti-
cism:
. . . Maddened by you
for whom the cash register,
with its clerical bells,
is the national church . . .
. . . Your president
is a tsetse fly . . .
In this poem his humor (like James Stephens’ in “A Glass of Beer”)

finds expression in a curse:
May your wife go to paradise

with the garbage man,
your prick hang like a shoelace,
your balls become raisins,
hair grow on the whites of your eyes.
These are the wild arabesques in which a gentle man draws his
rage; a hard man would curse without fantasy.
xxii ■ Introduction
His eye is keen as an animal’s; in “Paris” he sees that

A child carries a long,
thin loaf of bread.
O.K., any of us would have seen that. But he sees more:
Its sides are chipped

like the molding of a gilded frame.
That’s a detailed observation both of the loaf and of its analogue

(he had been for years a frame maker) demonstrating how the
habit of observation can provide metaphors the occasion of need
for which could never have been foreseen. And from the security
of image that this combination of quick gaze and verbal accuracy
established, there arose, in turn, a further kind of image, a taking
off into an analogy that could not have been predicted but which,
“far-fetched” though its reference may be—who could believe, in
advance, that one could leap meaningfully from bread to picture
frames?—is “earned.” It therefore satisfies one’s sense of aesthetic
propriety and enables one to see and feel that baguette, almost to
smell it; and at the same time to feel one’s imagination pulled into
an exotic revelation:
The crust looks warm, dented,

as if the baker were a blacksmith
who hammered and sold the sun’s rays.
That’s the reward of fidelity to the object, of a humble, intense, dis-

interested and unflinching attention.
In a Machado-esque portion of the same “Paris” poem some-
thing similar happens:
Introduction ■ xxiii
In a little square, a man

fills a bottle at a fountain.
The sound of water stops, continues.
A woman leans from a window
to see how the sky feels.
Clouds rub their silver polish over the sun.
Here we have four lines of plain description, “poetic” only in their

simplicity and the clustered associations of “little square,” “foun-
tain,” “the sound of water,” “leans from a window.” Then in line
five a subjective estimation of what the woman is doing makes
poet and reader look up and see the sky she sees—and like her we
experience the visual in empathic tactile terms, becoming, as we
do so, the diaphanous clouds paradoxically engaged in the homely
action of rubbing, and at the same time the sun itself, being rubbed,
its fire a white glare behind the gauze.
Because most of his images are such direct fusions, montages
that synthesize into a new image, he was able to use the word
“like” on occasion with the authority of genuine simile rather than
in imperfectly realized metaphor:
On the horizon, late at night,

a ship glows like the last café
still open
at the end of a boulevard
after the rain.
The difference between such simile and the immediacy of a mon-

tage-image can be clearly seen in these lines:
Passengers board the ship at twilight.

The people who wave from the pier
xxiv ■ Introduction
light matches—they become

a crowd of candles on the shore.
The boat, a huge altar, dissolves in the fog.
The syntactic difference is called for not merely because altars

don’t typically dissolve in fog, don’t even seem to dissolve in fog,
but because the degree to which the boat is felt by the poet to be
an altar—not only visually but because it bears what is sacred to
the people who are watching it, and who themselves have been
for the nonce transformed into votive candles—is intense: this
boat isn’t “like” an altar the way the other boat is “like” a café; it is
one, and at the same time it is still a boat. The simile, on the other
hand, is a device that itself conveys something of the wistful sense
of distance one experiences in looking down that long boulevard
towards the café, its lights (and the street lights, too) reflected in
the wet pavement, an Impressionist painting. . . . It is a mark of
the most profound poetic instinct to comprehend, in the act of
making poems, the degrees of analogy: and so to avoid muffling
the perception of coalescence, which demands metaphor, with the
word “like”; or, on the other hand, failing to note resemblance with
the appropriate figure of speech, simile. It seems obvious enough
so stated, but thousands of poems bear witness to the unacknowl-
edged confusion of all but the most gifted poets regarding this
essential matter. Bert Meyers’ intuition in this, as in other things,
seems to have been faultless.
■ xxvi ■
COLLECTED POEMS
■ 3 ■
From Early Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)
Because There’s So Much Speed
Because there’s so much speed

without any place to go,
and driven, blind as light,
we rush from stone to stone
and bump against the world,
I like the subtle snail:

wrapped in its wooden fog
it crawls across my yard;
and where it goes, it paints
the ground with useless roads.
Day and night, in its world,

leaves fall without a sound;
and flowers become suns
that bugs like little planets
in a green astronomy
go round and round and round.
4 ■ From Early Rain
In Those Mountains
In those mountains, time filled

one bush with castor beans,
another with wild roses . . .
Death was something distant
that made a buzzard stir
its whirlpool in the sky.
By a tree, I found the deer

hunters lost—a flower
of ants in the bullet hole
and a root held its leap.
There sunlight came down

a trail and green nature
reddened at the tip.
Yucca struck at the wind,
turned dull and rusted
in the fall. Lizards
split the rocks, then ran;
snakes passed and left their clothes.
Below, a little town,

like a tumor, began to spread.
From Early Rain ■ 5
On the Hill
Wind—and a mild army

of mustard runs uphill;
this town shakes in a shrub
and children, now and then,

abandoned in their kites,
leave home on a long string
and climb into the sky.
I walk at the wild edge:

behold! a buzzard drills
for the dry oil of death;
the air snaps like a log,
shrill birds like sparks fly out.
The Cougar Has Been Shot
Something of the mountains,

something that wrinkled,
muscle of sunlight in the trees,
crept like a slope at evening
to a stream, washed its paws,
sticky with sunset, death . . .
something of the mountains:
the cougar has been shot.
Good! the weekend hunters say.
When night hunched anonymous,

snarling in the leaves,
who could divide those eyes
from stars that trailed us
branch to branch overhead?
And once, I heard the gullies
raging, underbrush grow furious,
roots, rock, the air, rise up
to join a giant mating . . .
Brought to life by their guns,
the weekend hunters worry:
such mountain breaking, making passion,
in a living thing is dangerous.
Origin
Daily the sea sprayed my town

with gulls . . . it could have murdered me.
I took a shell whose mask of tides
was a refinement of the sea.
The brawny boats went where they pleased;

I traveled in a twisted bone.
That’s how I discovered islands
where hungry shadows quarry stone.
And, Sometimes It Seems
And, sometimes it seems

that: because a man,
being born in a tear
when his mother wept,
never takes off his sweat
or really finds a friend,
already in the cradle
makes his little fist.
But what a brave thing

he is, who has a fountain
at his hips, a brain:
that blossom on the spine!
And, when I look at the earth

and the earth is someone
I love, then it seems:
what a pity man
becomes a melancholy
beast that likes to think.
Porcupine
A little Saint
Sebastian
(body of barbs
that hardly hurt)
and like a Saint
misunderstood,
when he appears
he scares the wood.
We love to catch
an animal;
then, petting it,
insist the beast
should lick our hand.
But porcupines:
they’re very mean
to have such spines.
Once, in Autumn
Once, in autumn, I saw the sun

pause in the wrinkles of a tree
like passion on an old man’s face.
My father, armed with shears, came out
and trimmed the little shrubs to death.
And always, in a wild backyard

my father stepped upon his flesh
(those blind galoshes struck the earth)
and tough as trucks, his hands ran loose
killing the plants they couldn’t name.
A lawn—or passion—if ignored

may rise around a house like fire.
Son, my father said, Fight back
the garden with its big green hips.
I fought a beast of leaves instead.
But, with a scowl, my iron dad
cut down the grass to a proper flame.
He said: Too many flowers. And then
(though with a hose I’d been their stem)
my scowling conscience cut them off.
Before I Sleep
I go to the window
to breathe before I sleep.
I hear a driveway growl,
the valves of darkness leak.
Hills roll in their blankets,

the crickets turn to rain;
and as I close my eyes
I feel the stars take aim.
I’m still a child at night,

who knows the world is round.
Soon, sunrise with its paint
will brighten up this town.
The Death of a Lucky Man
They were seen,

now and then
(by all the cameras)
very happy
under the sun
in Hollywood.
The brute stem

flowered in her soil.
He starred on the wide
screen of her eyes
and found the goddess
without her make-up.
One afternoon
(they’d said: that boy’s
a lucky man!)
he awoke.
His great blood
was wetting the bed.
And, beautiful,
she came to court
dressed in a little grief,
hot from the flame
upon the altar
between her thighs.
We Thank the Heart
It came from nowhere,

the impossible car.
Some of his thin hair
is stuck in the glass.
There’s so much blood

the warm sun walks
like Christ upon it.
A needle’s eye
in his tattered head
is losing his life’s
essential thread;
the crowd kneels down.
A siren blows.
The man tries
to straighten out
his body, like
a suit of clothes.
We see the tailor

in his chest
And we thank the heart,

and nothing else,
that patched his head,
that he smiles at us
and isn’t dead.
On a Summer Night
On a golden boulevard I watch

the women: so many flow past me.
And their hips rock like little ships
that need a mast to go to sea.
Now at the walls the men appear.

Mounted upon a myth, they hunt—
their eyes deep in the high-heeled waves—
that fallen cup of sacrament.
I thought I saw in a passing face

how love to lovers will be good.
Gayly they’ll fish all night to find
that jovial serpent in the blood.
But I go to a familiar door.

And wait until she asks who’s there.
And always, in the dark, she opens
without pleasure—and without despair.
I see myself in a bulging sheet,

no-body to her, although, so near.
I think: You’re a ghost; and flee
before she asks what I’m doing here.
A white cat climbs over that wall

and all the stars are out of place.
Buildings grow in their tall gray robes;
coldly the headlights peel my face.
At Night
At night, when the mouse

is murdered by cheese,
when the tired walls turn away,
when the body can’t stand anymore,
then death parts my hair
and I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die!
The asthma weeps.

The asthma burns in its leaves.
The medicines consult,
aware of their labels,
by the bed.
But death comes:

out of the faucets, the floors,
from the big clock that bleeds
weakening in its springs,
it comes shoveling out my chest.
And I don’t know why
but I know the heart beats
and beats a man to death.
Legend
Lucky Aladdin had

had a lamp that he would rub.
Metal, it showed its love
in sensible delight:
gave him a golden life.
But now, the gods are gone,
and we are on our own.
Bold Rustem beat the deevs;

with heavenly assistance
shook all the gaudy tents
of Asia like a tree
against his majesty.
The lonely, young or old,

who tossed all night in bed,
were heard and comforted.
Not fantasy, but flesh
lay down to share their wish.
Then, as green as money were

the distant fields. And all
who stood upon a hill
and swore they would fulfill
their dreams before they died,
had lightning at their side.
I Took the Wild
An old man
is a bundle of leaves;
I saw one scattered
in the street.
The police came.

They put his pieces,
like stolen jewels,
in a little can.
People felt themselves.
Slowly, someone
nobody saw
slipped a white glove
over his hand.
Before I went,
I closed my eyes
and took the wild
poinsettia that grew
where his mouth had been.
Rainy Day
Outside, nothing moves: only the rain

nailing the house up like a coffin.
Remember, in childhood, when it rained?

Then, the whole world sailed down the alley:
leaves, paper, old shoes, the buildings,

everything like a circus going to sea.
Now, the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys
is closing all the doors . . .
and I think we’re all dead. See how the sky

sits like a tombstone on the roofs.
At My Window
Across the street

nine boys in the weeds scream,
hurling rocks. Blackbirds
are headlines overhead.
One boy looks at the sun.

And I look back at how
I stood, under a tree,
my hands hot with stones.
A squirrel, tail up
and balanced on a bough,
faced me like a question
I couldn’t answer.
Here, on this jewel of earth,

time tears at the green edge.
This pane, thin water,
makes two small islands
of my eyes;
and the sky
always seems to be
the sail of a great ship
that never reaches land.
Below, on the sidewalk,

a neighbor’s little girl,
tall as a yardstick,
her eyes in glasses,
on her bike rides by
singing, Oh lady of Spain,
I adore you . . .
In the Alley
At noon an airplane,
a hard drop of sweat,
rolls down the sky’s
big forehead.
The dry alley

dreams of water—
trampled root.
Fenced-off, the housewife trees
multiply their fruit.
Later, a man
gray as gravel,
comes up the alley.
At a garbage can
an alarm of flies
goes off in his face.
Scared by a wind
that walks through gates,
among the leaves
the fallen man
curls around a wall
like smoke, and disappears . . .
In the yards, the trees

drop loquats, and yellow
ripe round pears.
My Parents
When my mother puts her flowers

in a bowl—amaryllis, rose—
light from a different afternoon
still makes her lonely body glow.
And still my father comes, poor man,

a hard day on his knees from money.
My mother turns to an old piano,
her hands snowbound among the keys.
I know they sleep in the same dream,

while the fat moth spreads its dust.
My parents wear each other’s breath;
their clock’s forgotten how to tell the time.
The Garlic
Rabbi of condiments,
whose breath is a verb,
wearing a thin beard
and a white robe;
you who are pale and small
and shaped like a fist,
a synagogue,
bless our bitterness,
transcend the kitchen
to sweeten death—
our wax in the flame
and our seed in the bread.
Now, my parents pray,

my grandfather sits,
my uncles fill
my mouth with ashes.
Picture Framing
My fingers graze in the fields of wood.
I sand pine, walnut, bass,

and sweat to raise their grain.
Paints, powder and brush,

are the seasons of my trade.
At the end of the day

I drive home
the proud cattle of my hands.
October Poem
October smokes a long cigar

and hangs its leather in the sun.
Metal on metal as the mind
feels the limber oil grow thin.
When I came home, after work,

I saw an old man mow his lawn.
Sweet rain fell from those blades; and death
smelled like a baby in its bed.
Evening on the Farm
Time for a jacket now,

and to put my hands away.
I must learn from the stars

how a field should look.
But one by one, bright children,

the stars rush downstairs
to meet my horses and hay

with an astonished eye.
Now It’s Friday
I came for coffee

to water my deep heart
Now it’s Friday

and my hands still hurt
from Monday Tuesday
But a cup of coffee

is a big brown eye
that looks at anyone
Where is the door

that opens like a hug
When you’re always alone

at night there are the stars
The sky’s a plate of salt
And you wait growing hard

like a loaf of bread
At Work
He said: The sky’s so blue there,

you could bathe your feet in it.
And his emotion rose like dust

behind a passing truck.
He always coughs on his lunch.
His eyes are faded, like his shirt.
He smiles: I was strong then,

as big as a young barn.
What can you do for a man?

Time is an old boss we hate
together. I look at his hands.
Those bent flowers by the wall,

they still live! Even if the wind
should never have put them here.
A Short Speech to the Hungry
Because so many children dream

the full moon is a bowl of milk,
if you forget your hands—
those wonderful roots—
you feel your right mind fail:
unlike the bee stuck to its hod
you see creation in a cloud
and fear the wind that tears
orchard, field and mankind down.
While the celery’s green fountains rust,

you, for whom the earth
has no concern, must think:
we live in our belts
and we have been
like the blind ant who pulls
his daily ton in company;
The smile that ripens for a friend,

the word that strengthens us like bread,
rot in the mouths of hungry men.
When the satisfied say: The wind! The wind!

you will understand who tears
orchard, field and mankind down.
This Morning
We were the rain last night.

Our smell still lingers
in the flower beds.
The white hills rise

like crumpled moons;
a swarm of insects
lights a lawn’s dull face.
We go to see ourselves
in puddles, you and I,
clear fragments of the flood.
■ 31 ■
From The Dark Birds (Doubleday and Co., 1968)
The Dark Birds
The dark birds came,

I didn’t know their name.
They walked in Hebrew on the sand

so I’d understand.
They sang, the sea flowed,

though no one made a road.
I shivered on the shore

when the water closed its door.
Then as I felt the birds return

to me like ashes to an urn,
and sunlight warmed the stones,

fire undressed my bones.
32 ■ From The Dark Birds
They Who Waste Me
When I ask for a hand,

they give me a shovel.
If I complain, they say,
Worms are needles at work
to clothe a corpse for spring.
I sigh. Whoever breathes
has inhaled a neighbor.
From The Dark Birds ■ 33
Eichman
This familiar form

displayed in the glass
is a sample of man
who can live
before he’s born.
Because such creatures

read and write
without compassion,
your little time
and even your teeth
aren’t safe.
You, when you see him,

should be frightened.
He comes from a large family
whose business prospers.
Pigeons
Wherever I go to find
peace or an island
under palms in the afternoon
at midnight to pity my neighborhood
at dawn in the shrubs
to look for a child
I hear them
they fly by
applauding themselves
I see them
they pray as they walk
their eyes are halos
around a pit
they look amazed
Who are these that come

as a cloud to our windows
who rush up like smoke
before the town burns
You will find one

on a mountain
in a carpenter’s shop
at home on the lawn
of an old estate
at the library
in the forehead of paradise
Whoever is mad
can accuse them
thousands were killed in a day
What happens to them

happens to me
when I can’t sleep
they moan and I’m there
and it’s still like that
Madman Songs
People go home
to rest in vaults
curtains soothe their faults
bright windows show their money
I hated home
it caused me pain
cloudy days
and evenings came
I leaned against
the iron rain
Someone held me there was harm

now each word’s an alarm
the man who looks so calm
will turn into a bomb
Woman daughter son
I wake up and put them on
they hide me from the law
My desire’s a blade of grass
I trample as I pass
Fear me what I hate will fall
In summer small cones

of dirt beside a fence
erupt with the weddings
of the ants
a moth staggers from a shrub
People turn their sprinklers on
to watch the water girls
dance on their lawn
I don’t go out
until they’ve all gone in
They might come near
with large damp wings
love and other things
When I don’t sleep

the crickets weep
When I say
My life will pass
they scrape the dark glass
When the wall

begins to fall
where I strain
they file the chain
When I rise I wear

an orange shirt
A green woman
is rinsing her skirt
She imagines me
David’s gone Goliath’s strong

flocks of pebbles bleat
their brittle cries of light
fade where the leaves lie
dry harps near a stream
Jacob warmed a rock

the rock and Jacob dreamed
I’m burning I’m alone
everyone’s a stone
I break my feelings on
I sat on the sidewalk

with my own box of chalk
and all day long I made
the whole world by myself
That’s not the world they said
Then I rose at dawn

I put a label on
it wore me out by noon
All day I swung a brush
to see the buildings bloom
Just painting on a wall

won’t change a man at all
or make the stone turn blue
So I sat down once more
What else could I do
People go home
Twilight’s a glass
through which they pass
The carver calms
his arm and leaves
his passion in the grain
The one who ran
runs back again
We live in pain
The moon’s an aspirin
Gulls Have Come Again
Gulls have come again

to consider another beautiful death of the sun.
People were flowers that grew by the shore;

twilight takes them home,
they fade together at their tables.
In the tall green shops the pulleys of birds

lower the last light,
the eyelid of a shadow shuts the hills,
the sound of the ocean walks over the land.
Nobody wants to die.

Funeral
Surely a dead moth’s

the skull of a tiny horse,
and the moon’s a saint
who pities the sea.
Peace, peace to this child

of rain and light,
and the people who stay
holding candles and lilies,
tasting their tears,

naked in a dream,
over the long drawer
they’ve closed in the earth.
A Tree Stump at Noon
The light drips like oil

from an old machine;
a crow, big as a boot,
flies over the roofs
and begins to scream
at the men who build.
The huge root lies like a head
on a vacant field.
The Accident*
There’s so much blood

the warm sun walks
like Christ upon it.
A needle’s eye
in his tattered head
is losing his life’s thread.
The crowd kneels down.
We see the tailor

in his chest
work overtime.
A siren blows.
The man tries
to straighten out
his body, like
a suit of clothes.
—————————————
* Revised version of “We Thank the Heart,” published in
Early Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)
Winter
The oils of autumn have dried,

branches crack the sky.
The walls of the world
are old, my friend . . .
Eat the wind’s iron apple,

breathe razor blades;
drive home and bless
your photographs.
A Year in a Small Town
Surrounded by flowers,
bees are drowning
in the housepainter’s pot.
Today, I know
I haven’t done as much
for this world as a tree.
Children bring home

stones instead of friends;
the blackbird has a golden eye.
Spring, that young man

is wearing the shirt
I was wounded in.
Windy Night
The sound of the wind

is the sound of a man
alone with himself
in the forest of sleep.
A tree, a mind holding on.
So many dry leaves fall,

then at last the rain.
Sometimes
You see a gray sky,

an infinite sidewalk:
no one’s there and it’s noon.
Silence opens an eye,
now you’re a small cloud
heavier than a moon.
Icon
That burnished antique metal,

worn at the world’s edge,
illuminates an orchard, a field,
and people planting there:
shadows the mind casts
to pose in a breathless valley.
As airplanes punch the town

with invisible fists of sound,
praise these walls before they fall
and those good buttons we push.
Tonight, we want the moon
to be dressed as a nurse.
Lullaby
1963,
Cuban missile crisis
Go to sleep my daughter
go to sleep my son
once this world was water
without anyone
One Morning
I told myself,
A single man’s
like water where
nobody swims.
And I went out.
In gardens, doves
were broken jars
a wind blew through.
Beds of ivy
were spread with webs,
old underwear;
forgotten wives,
moths, or the wrong
figures of men,
lay at the roots.
While sparrows strained

their tiny springs
to live, I heard
how people damned
another day.
Later, I found
some blackberries
under a porch
and leaves as rough
as a cat’s tongue.
The Curse
Because you lie there, curled

between the fingers of
her legs, expecting death,
though her green eyes close,
she smiles, and her face flows
to the edge of the world . . .
Be the cold water that comes

from the tap at dawn,
the sun, spilled on a lawn,
its egg broken in the dew.
Die, slowly, like the snow.
Fall apart in your own glue.
The King at Evening
What a sad face the lizard has.

I walk by in my clothes,
the lizard hides, ashamed.
What a sad face it has.
The day burns out in the grass.
Evening comes, made of silk,

the lizard grins and goes.
I rise, arranging my robes.
The odors of autumn build
sweet bedrooms in the air.
The Poet
They said, Go, rise each day

with her, become
the reliable dough a family needs.
I wouldn’t. I walked away
from the kitchen, the store
she was building in her breast . . .
And everything grows dim
like the little stone
brought home from the shore.
What will I bring

if I come to your house?
A cold wind at the door,
bad dreams to your spouse.
There isn’t a tree

in your backyard;
the lawns are plastic,
the chairs are too hard.
No, I wouldn’t talk.

I’d be full of spite
and I’d strike my head
like a match that won’t light.
Woman, mirror of all my sides,

I pass through you to the window.
When I lay my hand on the grass

forgive me if I call the earth my child.
Always poor, he knows

the crickets will leave him
small jars of money.
He waits, he admires a weed.

His dreams are addressed.
At night by his desk

he becomes a flower;
children are bees in his arms,
a little pain making honey.
Apprentice
Because
I love you
I’ve learned to be
this hammer that runs
all day like a horse
with its hoof in its head.
In the afternoon
my hands
lie down together
for a minute.
When She Sleeps
When she sleeps I rise.

The naked light bulb burns
and makes the moths outside
beat against the screen.
A moth comes out of me.
It flies to the light,
then staggers back in pain
to rest in me again.
She sleeps and holds her peace,
though I’m consumed by this.
From Any Hill
On any hill at night

lovers grow from the height.
A town’s their Christmas tree.
She listens, her limbs are stirred
as he with only his word
opens packages of light.
They go wandering down

to the root of that town,
and day and night they hear
how each was a long shaft,
a hump on the other’s back,
that brought them weeping there.
Picture Framing*
My fingers feed in the fields of wood.
I sand pine, walnut, oak,

and sweat to raise their grain.
Paints, powder, and brush

are the seasons of my trade.
At the end of the day

I drive home
the proud cattle of my hands.
————————————————
* Revised version of “Picture Framing,” published in Early
Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)
Cigarette
Often you light a fuse

to prove you won’t explode.
All the smoke shows
the power that dies in you.
You sigh as you tap

your way to the end.
The hand is the blind child
called to the blackboard.
Follow the Child
Follow the child who feels

green gates of childhood close:
the enchanted eye will find
only what it knows,
and a gray-haired hunter stalks
that forest in his blood.
You too will see the firm

parental towers fall
at the quiet stroke;
the mighty adult crawl
to what it hates; and hear
a long collapsing sky.
Then come those visitors

all wise men abhor—
but others let them in.
His own voice at the door,
the haunted man lies down.
He whitens in a white room.
The Family
The boy will grow and be a man.

He’ll have no father then.
The girl, assuming womanhood,

will burn herself in bed.
The father leaves the house at dawn.

The mother turns her dream-world on.
Still, night brings them all together,

to shriek and shudder.
A Child’s an Apple
Those who are tall look down.

They show their keys,
the dead birds in their hands.
They open and close
volumes of doors.
They smile.
Their teeth are the stones
in the graveyard at noon.
They’re always hungry
and when they love they bite.
Now I Sleep in the Afternoon
We gaze at the beautiful forms,

at the dark hair of delicate dials—
we want to hold and move the world.
Often as we extend our hands,

nothing happens: loose wires hang
from the plaster of our sleeves.
I have dreams in the afternoon

of khaki-colored leaves, and men
who fall, of cities like rain coming down.
The Wanderer
The towns were tables, set

by the road each night.
A woman came to the door.
The builders needed help.
My sandwich was the sun
between two hills at noon.
What I’ve seen is true:

when the starved gull speaks
an old gate opens in the sky
and the fishing boats rise from the sea.
The Drive
Because their bed was calm

and they’d never done
what they read about,
they drove to the hills,
left the car, and climbed
high over the shale
and spread her dress in the dirt.
Soft ceramic quail,

the natives there,
stared from the chaparral
while they groaned
and hurt themselves.
The heat made ants
bubble out of the ground.
The hill was a flower

that evening closed.
They were naked
and very small,
and they put on their clothes.
The car would give them back
their power.
In the Yard
The grasshopper goes for a ride,

its little sprocket spins
over the earth.
The lizard, five inches of stream,
flows under a board.
The leaf runs from the cat.
A moth’s a pharaoh in search
of a tomb full of light,
and a bumblebee explains
to the morning-glories
the joy of being a telephone.
Only the woman knows
what the man’s for.
Stars Climb Girders of Light
Stars climb girders of light.

They arrange themselves
in the usual place,
they quit before dawn,
and nothing’s been done.
Then men come out.

Their helmets fill the sky;
their cities rise and fall
and men descend,
proud carpenters of dew.
Man brief as the storm,

more than five feet of lightning,
twisted and beautiful.
Man made like his roads,
with somewhere to go.
■ 69 ■
From Sunlight on the Wall (Kayak, 1976)
Foothills*
Every morning here,

black-plumed the knightly quail
go riding through the grass.
In the wind, a mild army

of mustard runs uphill.
The yucca toss their spears.
Now and then, a child,

abandoned in its kite,
drifts out into the sky.
At twilight, the foothills

are a pile of rose petals
the color of grapes . . .
There went the sun

in a crumpled hat,
to see the rest of the world.
————————————————
* Revised version of “On the Hill,” published in Early Rain
(Alan Swallow Press, 1960)
70 ■ From Sunlight on the Wall
By the Sea
Across that loud scroll of water

fishermen still sail out
to earn a living,
a boat leaves for Peru . . .
And always, a multitude

unpacks a paradise
of Sundays on the sand
to celebrate the passage of its blood.
From Sunlight on the Wall ■ 71
L.A.
The world’s largest ash-tray,

the latest in concrete,
capital of the absurd;
one huge studio
where people drive
from set to set and everyone’s
from a different planet.
For miles, the palm trees,

exotic janitors,
sweep out the sky at dusk.
The gray air molds.
Geraniums heat the alleys.
Jasmine and gasoline
undress the night.
This is the desert

that lost its mind,
the place that boredom built.
Freeways, condominiums, malls,
where cartons of trash and diamonds
and ideologies
are opened, used, dumped near the sea.
G. F.
He’s a law about to be broken

a man rippling at the edge
He edits news of a material world

while under his tongue intelligent nouns
are preparing their adjectives
for a view of the city without crime
This man encircles himself

his waist is his own embrace
his smile is a private door
I admire him for his agile fat

a mind like an animal’s jaw
his poems that escape from their chains
He awakens to books like birthdays

He tries to grow where he stands
He’s a warm wall his daughter climbs
This man has put his ear

to his heart and kept the secret
At the head of his round table

far from the ancient onion of mother
he settles between his shoulders
to be a calm king of argument
though his castle burns
and his people are alone.
A. C.
He smiles he wants to be wise

He comes on a shrewd donkey of wit
He peddles his innocence
His fist opens when asked
the ambivalent cow of his hand
gives a little
But Christ he gets mad

I want to report
his teeth his cloud his envelope
And there he goes

always an exile
never undressed
with a flute full of leaves
beads growing in his beard
still ready to climb
the soft Himalaya
of hope in his eyes.
O’Keeffe
One morning, Georgia O’Keeffe

cobblestoned the infinite with clouds.
She stared at space. It blushed.
She smiled. Fire and sword,
mountain range and stream—
the vulva’s green silk rippled—
everything burned to its bone
and a black cross grew
from the radiant grave of forms.
Jose
Through with work

his hands waxed and polished
where the big rings shine
a chocolate jacket
apricot shoes
and the dark glasses
to hide the scar
that withered rose stem
love had stitched near his eye
he entered the cheap café
and whistled whistled
the neighborhood’s old king
of fists of mockingbirds
gigolos and finishers
Everyone looked
even the dishwater glowed
Then coffee refilled our cups
darkness the windows
Twilight at the Shop
A whole day at the saw—

when they come for the rubbish,
I throw myself
out with the dust.
We smile and smoke and praise

what’s left of the sun.
Dark trees have bottled its light.
They glow like many beers.
Next Door
The Black man’s horn,

sweet summer,
played;
night blooming jasmine
floated in.
They danced and danced
like a diesel’s
windshield wiper blade,
on a hard floor,
in the saffron rain
that falls from a light,
while their music
slowly seeped
each bitter night
under the skin
of a clean
and quiet town’s
disdain.
I Can’t Sleep
I can’t sleep.
I wish we were young,
in a different house,
in a different town.
I can hear the dog
run away in her dream;
outside, raindrops—
their tender hoofbeats
trapped in the courtyard
of a leaf.
Watercolor Days
Pull up the shade, look outside.

November sent a card to you—
an antique world upon a shelf.
These are the watercolor days,

there’s never been anything else.
Trees that have lost most of their leaves
are sketched and delicate and look
like music written in the air.
A faint blue wash and that’s the sky.

One hill, neither green, nor brown.
Sunlight warms a tired wall’s face.
A few clouds, a few old ladies
with twilight tinted hair . . .
■ 80 ■
From The Wild Olive Tree

(West Coast Poetry Review, )
Signature
I earn a living
and I have a family
but to tell the truth
I’m a wild olive tree
I like cognac
and a proud Jewish song
I live wherever
I don’t belong
I watch the world decay

on every page on every face
it’s a sick man’s clouded eye
that rolls around in space
And my obsession’s
a line I can’t revise
to be a gardener
in paradise
From The Wild Olive Tree ■ 81
These Days
homage to Attilla József
These days, everything’s bad.

The future waits in a button.
No one plans, nobody says:
Three years from now . . .
Evening falls upon a porch;

bloody, black and white,
it opens like the paper.
Someone bursts into flames.
Winter, a grim warehouse,

delivers the wind.
An angry truck rattles by—
the inconsolable self,
strumming its gas pedal,
tuning up for the storm.
Lies! so many lies!

Windows malignant with things.
When at last the nail
strangles the hammer
and even the ant howls.
82 ■ From The Wild Olive Tree
Then rifles, rockets—

“O what a time, what a time!”
And, like an old ideal,

the moon’s been reached.
A few astonished flies
wrinkle the dust on its face.
Be like the rain

that wears a ragged coat
and finds a lamp
in the smallest stone
and sings for nothing
from street to street.
Some Definitions at Work
The hammer lowered its horns

and the rusty nail shrieked
pulled from the place where it lived
The table-saw whined

like a virtuous bee
that knows it will die
in a meadow of dust
The sandpaper sighed

as it killed itself
caressing the sugar pine the ash
The housepainter’s brush

hermaphrodite
with a long stem a vaginal voice
and a spring in its bristle
swayed satisfied with itself on the wall
Glue the woodworker’s sperm

began to boil in the pot
The rags their breath

full of turpentine
demanded their rights
and threatened to burst like the sun
Then the woman

who turned into a mop
disheveled gray
worn out by the floor
and the man

who’d become a broom
his broad shoulder
lost in the dirt
noticed how even a motor

bleeds when it breaks
drops of oil stare from its skin
like the eyes of frightened fish
Landscapes
1 The City
The city grows

from a highway’s stem:
it’s a glittering circuit board,
a crystal that palpitates.
Night’s swept away

like a broken glass.
The day begins.

It prints the parking lots;
doors work like switches;
people are impulses in a system.
But often, a siren occurs—

the awakened man’s incredulous wail.
And the sky, that rotten lung,

bleeds, then blackens;
the windows on the walls
multiply their cells
Still curious, the infected moon

regulates its lens.
2 On the Outskirts
On the outskirts, the factory—

somebody’s chemistry set;
a junkyard, where the town
keeps throwing itself away;
rust clots on the mangled iron;
pain in the sun’s aluminum glare . . .
There’s a hubcap, going blind

in a ditch; the dust,
spreading its cataract;
and a few yellow machines
that die like sunflowers,
dropping their parts in a field.
The hills are a pile of rags

in a pail of dirty thinner;
scrap metal trees crinkle
in the wind’s gray flame;
and the tumbleweeds roll
their barbed wire over the roads . . .
An airplane roars like a sperm

through a crack in the smog’s deep stone.
3 Along the Coast
You stare (propped like a sick man)

from the car’s enchanted bed.
A hill nibbles at a field’s green fork;

an old arthritic fence
hobbles up toward a cloud.
A little factory smoke

grows abstract in the sky.
Only the cows have reached perfection.

Their quiet minds look empty.
The landscape requires them . . .
When the cows eat, the ground,
the shadows, even boulders,
rise and bow to each other.
Far away, the suburbs—

one cube cloning itself, like the stone
at the veterans’ cemetery.
And all along the coast

the sun drives over the sea.
Its windshields glitter in the waves.
Pebble
Fragment
of the first chunk
Irregular moon
Perpetual cloud
The dust’s blind eye
The mite’s
crude planet
Durable friend
between the fingers
Destroyer
of giants
Something that grows
immense in a shoe
The boulder’s crumb
The rock’s
quiet child
The flower’s
pure disciple
Wasteland’s embryo
Despair’s gray seed
Staunch member
in the brotherhood
of water polishers
Wisdom’s jewel
The weed’s
eternal fruit
The raindrop’s tomb
Old
Their children are gone;

almost everyone
they loved and half
of what they understood,
has disappeared.
But the door’s still open,

the porch light’s on;
a little wind at night
and they hear footsteps
when a few leaves fall.
Eviction
Where could he go
from a house hidden by trees,
whose days were pebbles
in a stream of birds,
with his wife, his children,
all the books like bottles of wine
that glow on their shelves?
To a neighborhood
of crypts with windows,
high-rise transistors,
cars brighter than people;
where everyone stares
like a loaded gun
and the grass is sinister . . .
He stood in the yard.

A rose opened its wound,
a spider repaired its net,
an old leaf touched him
like his father’s hand;
and the trucks delivered,
or took away.
A Citizen
The spider I hit,

loose thread on the floor,
clenches its fist.
The cat lies down;
it looks at me
as if through a window.
I’m a coat hanger

twisted by rage.
Everything shrinks from my hands—

that landscape threatened by planes,
a woman’s astonished face.
I served the giant

who ate the villages,
whose arms swept aside
the stars like raindrops
on a windshield;
who broke the sky,
man’s sacred mirror,
and promised peace . . .
I did these things for freedom,

endless as a boulevard
where all the lights are green.
My car won’t start.

Dead leaves follow me—
they’re scribbling my name.
I’m a swastika, the headless man

whose iron limbs grind the world.
I want to change.
Even a wall gets painted again.
To My Enemies
I’m still here, in a skin

thinner than a dybbuk’s raincoat;
strange as the birds who scrounge,
those stubborn pumps
that bring up nothing . . .
Maddened by you
for whom the cash register,
with its clerical bells,
is a national church;
you, whose instant smile
cracks the earth at my feet . . .
May your wife go to paradise

with the garbage man,
your prick hang like a shoelace,
your balls become raisins,
hair grow on the whites of your eyes
and your eyelashes turn
into lawn mowers
that cut from nine to five . . .
Man is a skin disease

that covers the earth.
The stars are antibodies
approaching, your president
is a tsetse-fly . . .
After the Meal
A suburb of coffee cups;

napkins, those crumpled hills;
silverware, freeways
spotted with grease, with flesh . . .
and the ash-tray,

a ghetto full of charred men
with grizzled heads
who wasted their flame;
where every breath
scatters its bones
and small gray mounds
accumulate, then crumble,
like nations
or the knees of elephants.
Like a cleaning plant, steam

comes through a hole in your face.
Your exhaust is the last
wild horse that gallops away.
Smoke waters the flowers

that grow in the lungs.
The cigarette, like your life,
is a piece of chalk
that shrinks as it tries to explain.
All Around Me
All around me, butterflies,

ecstatic hinges,
hunt for the ideal door.
A cicada’s ratchet
tightens a place in the yard.
Everything’s warmed
by a wave from the tree.
A bird trickles like the tap.
And the dog just stands there,

looking down.
Run, sleep, she can’t remember.
It’s hard to be conscious.
From here, I can watch the freeway—

ants on a windowsill.
The skyline doodles, an airplane
seems to float like a fish.
Nearby, a factory smokes.

I’m one of its little ash-trays.
Suddenly, a dinosaur,
or Rome, will rise,
then crumble,
in the cracks
on a ragged wall.
We do marvelous things
without knowing how,
like the chicken whose bronze shit
builds a shrine under its coop.
But, even so,

one gets depressed.
This morning, a field,
a flock of stones
asleep in its mist . . .
This world’s painted
on a glass that has
to break.
I can still
pay the rent
and the roads aren’t lined
with corpses yet.
Pencil Sharpener
It has no arms or legs, this tiny nude; yet grip

it by the waist, then stir its hips: a dry leaf multiplies,
a cold motor starts in the wood.
Revived, still shivering, the pencil sheds itself—
and there’s a butterfly, teeth, the fragments of a
crown.
Pliers
Contour of fish, or a donkey’s intractable

head . . .
Open, the pliers are an eagle over its prey,
closed, any woman you reach for to tighten loose
nuts.
The color of all common tools and, like
mankind, made of steel, yet easy to use.
Though, basically, it’s only a jaw, or a thumb
and forefinger joined by a pin.
The Old Engraver
An old engraver was out of work. He lived alone with his

tools. It was summer. The sky wore jeans and every day the
backyard opened its familiar shop: a worm scrolling along, the
trees elaborating themselves.
But in the street children were grinding each other
between the gears of their parents’ wrath. Should he just walk
around without a point?
So, each morning he printed lots of money; and all the
children went to the candy store and became sweet.
Then, the police appeared. The old engraver was out in
the yard, hanging dollars up to dry with his underwear.
He had to go to jail. And all the children turned into
broken glass until even the mountains, those solitary herds, bled
to death.
The moon, a giant freezer, hummed. It was going to be
used.
The Gilder
The Shop, weakened by dust, was closing its eyes.

The saw stopped like an ambulance. A breeze made of
turpentine still hung around his hands.
Outside, the walls in the alley were gold leaf
fluttering on their frames; clouds, retired housepainters,
relaxed in the sky.
A little cello began to throb in his throat.
Suddenly, he saw the sun overturn like a truckload
of oranges at the end of a street—its light scatter and
roll through the windows on a hill.
What’s that got to do with Wittgenstein, or how we
live? voices shouted in his head.
Nothing . . . nothing at all.
Suburban Dusk
One girl in a red dress leaves the shopping center

with empty hands: and you believe in the future—
you’ve seen a drop of blood flee from the luminous cells
of a corpse.
But the sky slips a coin in the slot between two
buildings. Lights go on. Distorted creatures appear. A
car, like an angry heart, explodes.
And a vast erysipelas spreads over the hills. What
can you do? Each night, the city becomes a butterfly,
trembling it its oil.
Postcards
For Odette
Ocean
There it is: an immense, gray, agitated circle . . .
and all day long the boat goes on

like a cartridge across a turntable,
an old shoe in a storm,
dipping itself in the spume.
***
If the sun shines, the water grinds its glass.
***
When calm, the sea’s so blue

you could paint the sky with it.
Sometimes, it’s a green tablecloth
laid on the wind.
Fog—
sailing for hours
in the same spot;
and the joyful sound

of the invisible sea.
***
On the horizon, late at night,

a ship glows like the last café
still open
at the end of a boulevard
after the rain.
Island.
Dwarfs and hunchbacks

are loading wagons.
Gardens drip in the heat.
Flowers burst from the walls.
An ox appears
like a hillside in an alley.
***
At the grocery store,

chamber pots display their bottoms
from the rafters,
chicks lament among the onions . . .
So poor, a box
of baking soda’s
smaller than a cigarette pack.
***
A group of boys, in double file,

marches down a street.
A young, skinny priest, a scorched twig,
walks behind them, reading Scripture.
Pale girls lean on their windowsills,
framed like the earliest photographs.
***
Passengers board the ship at twilight.

The people who wave from the pier
light matches—they become
a crowd of candles on the shore.
The boat, a huge altar, dissolves in the fog.
Arrival
Two sailboats cross the bay,

as if the wind wore tennis shoes.
***
Villages, like broken pots,

or baskets of apples,
scattered on a mountainside.
***
And the light, so much light!

a harp burning in a glass.
Village
A farmer swings a scythe,

tilting the blade’s sharp edge.
The weeds are waves that fall
on a glistening coastline.
When he stands it up,
the scythe’s a tall, one-legged bird,
whose long bill the farmer cleans.
***
The cemetery’s such a pretty town—

old, quiet, full of mansions.
People, flowers, crows, everyone comes.
***
A market in the street.

Herbs, those quiet housewives,
wearing their modest prints,
were found in the fields at dawn.
Clods of garlic, the kitchen’s diamond,
hang from every stall.
Cheese, like the walls of France;
red peppers with a plastic glow . . .
***
The cook speaks softly, gesturing,

as if she were washing her hands in French.
She loves to look at the sea
when the water ripples
and a gaggle of rowboats
wobbles near the shore.
She talks to the chickens in the garden.
They’re very intelligent, she says . . .
They’d tell us beautiful stories
if they weren’t so busy eating.
***
Frogs croak twenty-one in French all night.
***
In the morning, calves

stare at the world
with their mother’s eyes.
The rabbits quiver—
they know so much
about freedom, death.
***
Inside the moldy church

you’re wrapped in a damp rag.
A Christ, as smooth as soap,
hangs from a cross
near the entrance.
A bland virgin
in a faded blue robe
gestures from a niche.
***
Outdoors, a breeze
makes all the shrubs
look sociable.
White butterflies in a field
are the frayed handkerchiefs of those
who didn’t finish saying good-bye.
Train
Sunlight plays its flute in the treetops.
***
A village where a church,

with one arm raised to the sky,
sinks in a cauldron of tiles . . .
and a castle whose towers rise

like a charred town
from the murky water of its walls.
***
Train station.
Empty platform,
not even a cat.
A flock of bells
crosses the tracks.
***
Green keeps changing itself from green to green.
Paris
City, where every wall’s a canvas

(a torn poster’s an allegorical town)
and time goes around painting the past . . .
Night lifts the moon like a coffee cup
from the skyline’s cluttered shelf.
Each day, spring comes in the middle of fall.
Neighborhoods are history books,
leather-bound and stacked in their centuries.
***
In a little square, a man

fills a bottle at a fountain.
The sound of water stops, continues.
A woman leans from a window
to see how the sky feels.
Clouds rub their silver polish over the sun.
***
And here are also filthy streets,

leprous walls that sunlight
never touched, smeared with crud,
battered like garbage cans . . .
the cracks in a stone
are a landscape of nerves;
the air’s a perpetual fart
and even the shadows wear rags.
***
An old dog, a four-legged

bundle of straw,
leaves the café and goes
to the gutter for a drink.
When he returns, his footprints
are a crooked row
of tiny vases, each one
with four flowers, on the sidewalk.
***
A child carries a long,

thin loaf of bread.
Its sides are chipped
like the molding of a gilded frame.
The crust looks warm, dented,
as if the baker were a blacksmith
who hammered and sold the sun’s rays.
***
Jardin du Luxembourg
Birds, in their brown suits,

hurry home from business.
Clouds lie rumpled in the sky
like napkins after dinner.
A chandelier of rain hangs over the lake.
The queens of France are always here.
Their poignant pride endures
the casual gaze of foreigners,
the pigeons and the years.
Arc de Triomphe
Nothing but gray seen through the arch—

as if triumph were an abyss
into which a nation marches.
14th of July
Fireworks—an empire’s crown

that lasts for a moment.
A tough guy shows a timid girl

how to dance in the street.
Buttes-Chaumont
From this melancholy cliff

the park unrolls,
a thick green mist below . . .
And Paris, like a sea

without its water—
the world’s most delicate
accumulation of debris.
***
Some days are harpsichords

under the chestnut trees.
Nothing lasts, their strings break,
the gold turns gray, a drizzle falls . . .
And then the gold’s restored.
People leave their tables,
birds their narrow benches in the walls.
An old woman sits and bathes
her tired feet that look like marble
in a puddle near the market stalls.
***
Among the antique dealers,

a pigeon on the sidewalk’s
a little baron who struts
through a village of bric-a-brac.
***
It rained and rained in the courtyard

and an old man in a gray coat
sang to empty windows.
The laundry wept for hours.
***
The round slate roofs of grand hotels,

mythical in their scales,
float through the radiant water of the air.
But the buildings of the poor
divide their bread with everyone.
At night, each window’s a glass of wine
the darkness drinks as it passes.
***
Sometimes, a blind violinist
helps us through the street.
You shed a few coins in his cup—
a shop front glitters
like an accordion in the rain.
***
Cars whirl around a monument.

People smile, horns blare,
headlights shine like brass.
The whole square’s a carousel.
Suddenly, you’re a child
who’s had his turn, a stranger;
the others stay, but you go home.
***
Now, from the dawn’s gray chemical,
a café’s a postcard in the distance . . .
a barge strolls through Paris on the Seine . . .

The Return
I thought our house was on a hill

that wore its tenants like a crown.
The sidewalk sparkled in the sun
and all the doorways knew my name.
Broken windows, the grass is brown . . .

only a little gray hunchback
wears the neighborhood like a shawl.
Now, everything’s so old and small.
Homecoming
My father was a tender man

whose blue eyes would overcast
by noon. Every dusk
he floated home
in the soiled wind of his clothes.
I flew to the ceiling in his arms.

The silverware sang
as he came to the table
and the bright room rolled
like a train that climbs
its ladder through the dark.
His hands are cobwebs full of flies,

trembling in his lap.
They’ve locked him up with strangers,
because he drools too much;
and I imagine freeing him.
We’d go to a town that isn’t there,

where everyone he cries for now
(wrapped in the bed’s thick bandage)
would come to shake his hand.
He laughs. He lifts a child and grows.
He drinks and drinks the meadowlark,
he smoothes a stone’s gray hair . . .
But he stinks, he’s a huge bib;

a loose scab, a rotten cornflake,
clings to his lip.
There are mouths so cold

the salmon-colored tongue
leaps without a sound;
lonely ditches where a broken dove
mourns in the rubble of a face.
Men, at the mercy of their parts:

grime in the skull, despair
corroding the rainbows in their wires.
My home was a watercolor

I left in the rain . . .
Tonight, the crickets ring and ring,

nobody answers;
the shadows of men are looking for blood.
Someone has stepped

on the classical face of the moon.
Dawn comes, a gradual

mountain range of ashes.
The mockingbirds, those joyful books

that opened in the sky,
then closed their pages on a branch,
awake and go mad,
chewing the bones of their old songs;
and the flies, such tiny fenders,
batter themselves in the air.
Lament
I looked for you at the cemetery.

You have two addresses
on a metal door in the grass;
but you don’t live at either one.
When I was a child

and sick at night,
you were the moon
above my bed.
Father, father,
I saw you smile
at a sparrow
the way you smiled at me.
What else awakes and knows

it was born, it will die.
The same clouds come and go;
the same bird sings or flies.
Driving Home at Night with My Children

After Their Grandfather’s Funeral
See how the moon follows us?

That’s Grandpa’s face in the sky.
It smiles; so, he’s still the same.
Sleep. The way home’s always
shorter than the way you came.
Shhh . . . The car’s a steel measure

that swallows the road like a tape;
and we’ll all live twice as long
as it takes the snail to go
around the world on its crumpled skate.
The Widow
Leaves gnaw at the porch.

The century, like her family, disappears.
Life is a movie she’s already seen.
Her cheeks are rose petals
in the book of better days.
Wrinkled and powdered and rouged,

bewildered by others,
alone wherever she is,
she opens her purse, she opens a drawer:
it’s twilight—she enters a photograph.
Tree
Thirty years in that yard—

and what a wild,
melancholy mind,
I know you were.
Autumn, the gifts come down.

I still see yours
multiplying, bruised,
there on the ground.
My dear, ironic tree,

what did we do?
Your neglected fruit
has poisoned me.
For W. R. Rodgers
(1909–69)
I knew a candle of a man,

whose voice, meandering in a flame,
could make the shadows on the wall
listen to what he said.
Time flowed from a vein that ran
its blue crack through his pale forehead.
He’s done. You’d need a broom

to arouse him now.
All things burn before they’re dead.
Some men are words that warmed a room.
Spleen
Sometimes, I just hang around

like a dead man’s coat,
or a vacant lot that trembles
when construction crews pass.
I go to a coffee shop
and sit for hours to watch
a window’s silent film—
people, scrawled and erased
on a long, gray page.
Later, when clouds blaze,

then suddenly grow old
and sad, I take a walk.
Evening begins with headlights

and a sound track of birds
that fades from tree to tree.
Behind a garage, a few
strange weeds, taller than men . . .
With Animals
I feel like the elephant

enlightened boulder
held back by a chain
I act like the camel

with its melancholy
sensual eyes
and fastidious lips
I see the dung-colored

crumbling bison
an entire town evicted
even its sofas
falling apart
The young look over the fence
their eyes are maple leaves
after the rain
American lakes
a hundred years ago
Their mothers stare at the ground
their fathers shrink
like the countryside
The moon the oldest streetlight
touches them
with its intangible snow
I envy the tortoise

primordial hand
whose neck is a thumb
measuring time and the grass
I understand the stork

the way it paces
scholar or wandering Jew
whoever waits
for the real world to be born
I want to comfort the ostrich

that mad woman
wearing her grandmother’s clothes
and be like the mountain goats
who lick each other’s forehead
But look at the huge green toad

sanctimonious phlegm
the crocodile hell’s pavement
bats those weird umbrellas
that open only at night
The baboon sulks on a shelf

prehistoric priest
whose rump is a festival
its face a sports car
his eyes glum headlights that glare
There’s that insect

winding itself again
another ant
berserk on its boulevard
10
And somewhere a field mouse

sits by the sea
And Still
Nobody’s honest
nothing matters
That’s why I’m always

adjusting myself
my chemicals
my complaints
And every day

I fly around
in my insect-colored car
The city’s a carcass
streets quiver like meat
In my own voice
I hear a broom
that sighs while it waves
farewell to the past
And still it happens

a few leaves
come around a corner
demonstrate
then disappear
Mozart arrives
in an ice-cream truck
a long war ends
I feel like a streetlight
tall and radiant
my face was made
to shine among the others
Gently, Gently
We, too, began with joy.

Then, sickness came;
then, poverty.
We were poor, so poor,
our children were our only friends.
Gently, gently,
through anger and pain,
love justified itself,
like the nails in the house
during a storm.
Somehow, we created hope,

reliable drum
in the shadow’s wrist;
a tuning fork
on the sidewalk of dreams.
At night, I was the one

who became a cello,
strung with all our roads,
where memory hums
to itself like a tire.
And you, mad as a clarinet

where the street divides;
a city of raindrops in a bush;
the slow honey that drips
from the sky’s old ladle . . .
the reason I’m frightened of death.

I swear by the wings
love spreads at my waist,
that I’ll carry your tune
until my tired strings break.
Daybreak
Birds drip from the trees.

The moon’s a little goat
over there on the hill;
dawn, as blue as her milk,
fills the sky’s tin pail.
The air’s so cold a gas station

glitters in an ice-cube.
The freeway hums like a pipe
when the water’s on.
Streetlights turn off their dew.
The sun climbs down from a roof,

stops by a house and strikes
its long match on a wall,
takes out a ring of brass keys
and opens every door.
■ 128 ■
From The Blue Café—Poems

(Jazz Press and PapaBach Editions, 1982)
Each day the town gets changed;

and I have memories
that never built a thing.
The brand new blocks are lit—

computers without a past.
From The Blue Café—Poems ■ 129
Sawdust
This Evening
The day was beaten,

stomped, smeared on a wall . . .
Now, rows of buildings
close their books; the moon
thumbs through a billion
sad pages; the past,
like an old friend, goes
by with a strange face.
130 ■ From The Blue Café—Poems
Another Caterpillar Poem
for Robert Bly
As I lift the coffee cup I see a caterpillar crawl over

the sheet of airmail stamps.
Its head is a microphone dragging its cord. Used pipe
cleaner, so many little accordions open and close like a
mountain range of exhausted joy.
I pick up the blood-colored sheet and the caterpillar
undulates like smoke at the edge of a field, then rises—
an electrician bewildered by wires, a man whose remote
feet are anxious staples gripping the ground.
Should I speak now about wings and the flower’s
sexual glare?
I think it’s November again. Leaves are the grand-
parents of spring. I don’t mind that I’ve failed at times.
The desperate summer sleeps in the shade. The
sweet legs of the grass have gone away.
I see the earth’s plain face, its wrinkled belly, the
family loaf that rises under the moon.
The caterpillar dreams, dark lightning, on the desk.
In Saigon
In our own image we created them
In Saigon, teen-age men

wear red bandanas
and ten-gallon hats.
Knives, lean mercenaries
glare from their waists.
They spur old half-breed

Hondas through the town.
When a right hand roars
on its handlebar,
people shiver like jewels.
The boys carry cleavers

and, whooping it up,
swing them around their heads.
One’s an American chopper
gliding close to the ground.
If he sees a woman
wearing a bracelet,
or a man with a wristwatch,
he swoops, cuts off an arm,
wipes the gore from his blade
like grease from his chrome,
then ambles on . . .
Their smiles are gun belts,

their brains, nuclear clouds;
and they speak a dialect
that sounds like money,
or the language left on the moon.
Around them, the landscape’s

a flag that fell from the sky;
red roads, bloody stripes;
whitened by bones
and stars that explode;
blue, like genocide’s queer smoke.
Retarded Child
She walks like an old woman

wading in a pool.
Her blond hair pours down her back—
sunlight from a renaissance cloud.
When her father carries her home,

she’s a frail lamp that glistens
under a parchment shade,
a loose wire sparkling in his arm.
August
Suddenly, a mockingbird
spurts from the top
of a telephone pole—
clear water
fills the stagnant air.
And summer, brown and hairy,

hums to itself
around the yard,
like a bee
in a window box.
Sunflowers
No one spoke to the sunflowers,

those antique microphones
in the vacant lot.
So, they hung their heads
and, slowly, fell apart.
The Daughter
She won’t believe she was born without wings.

Why can’t I live in the ceiling?
The heart’s a wagon one pulls, empties and fills,

from door to door . . .
Once, she put some blocks

and a few bricks in a hole
she dug, watered them, and said,
I’m growing a house.
Today, she stuck a green branch in the ground.

Look, I’ve made a fountain!
The porch is her piano.

When I play on the steps,
our neighbors smile.
We’re like the Family of Man.
At bedtime, shadows hang the world

inside a gray museum.
All the pictures grow dim in the sky.
Then, her face wanders on the pillow

like a flashlight in the dark.
The Son
He arranged some rocks in circles on the rug.

These are nests for invisible birds.
The fly’s my friend. How old is it?
Near the beach he sees the fog open a jar of vaseline

headlights fumble with their yellow spoons.
Frightened, he sails away in his mother’s arms.
Tomorrow, he’ll claim he didn’t sleep all night

to make the sky,
I pinned up a blue cloth when I ran out of paint
and I used a dirty quilt for Chicago.
Death drives a man

like a nail into the ground;
his head turns to metal
and shines in the grass . . .
But here, at home,

when the morning washes my window,
time returns in a golden bus.
I want to ride as long as I can.
The Poets
There he sat among them

(his old friends) a walking ash
that knows how to smile.
And he still dreamed of a style
so clear it could wash a face,
or make a dry mouth sing.
But they laughed, having found
themselves more astonishing.
They would drive their minds

prismatic, strange, each wrapped
in his own ecstatic wires,
over a cliff for language,
while he remained to raise
a few birds from a blank page.
Maybe
(for Ami)
We love the sunlight on an old wall’s broken face.

Now and then, we want to lie around all afternoon
in a personal cloud. At night, after a storm, we wake
our children to show them the fragile city of raindrops
in a tree.
We wish that one clear hour could last a year; that
we could buy a dinner with our dreams and stroll out
the door, past reality, down a street where everyone
says, Hello.
We filled the moon and the stars and everything
on earth with our desire; and still, life doesn’t hum like
a hedge in summer.
Well, maybe one by one we’ll announce when it’s time
to dress in our ideal selves; then, celebrate the days that
grow—fresh from the cleaners, the bakery, the pages of
a brand new book.
Those beautiful days, those sensible days, almost
everyone knew just had to come.
Images
Images—for Odette
Bales of hay—cartons
of sunlight fading in a field.
II
Shadows rise like water,

white fences comb their hair.
III
Leaves everywhere—
shreds of a giant eraser;
an oak leaf,
becoming an antique.
IV
Outside, a snowfall’s passed

and painted all the windowsills,
even the curb’s gray putty.
Sunlight in a window—
a flower in a glass.
VI
The highway’s an old

surrealist’s granite hair;
and the sea’s become
a sky full of clouds.
A wind records the waves,
then plays them in the trees.
VII
A flock of crows
dissolves in the mist—
a cigarette’s ash
in a glass of water;
and sunlight
twitching in a puddle.
VIII
Now the night drives up.

Distant buildings
are golden radiators,
the sky’s a black cloud
full of sparks . . .
Sirens, dogs;
and he just stood there,
by the police car,
with those handcuffs on,
staring at the moon.
IX
After the rain

a streetlight hangs
the shadow of trees
like laundry
on a wall.
Hands, twin sisters

to whom everyone’s
a wrinkle
that needs to be smoothed,
a stranger who should be fed.
Hands, those humble wings

that make each day
fly toward its goal;
at rest, still holding
the shape of a tool.
XI
Proletarian aristocrat
whose forehead glows
like imagination’s egg;
when you’re asleep
you look like
the death mask of Keats,
alone with yourself
again—absolute, relieved.
XII
I wish we were two birds

living in a courtyard
near St.-Germain-Des-Prés.
Leaves spread their tablecloths,
trees open their cafés;
all day the sun’s a barrel of beer,
at night the earth’s a woman,
the full moon’s her mirror.
The Blue Café—songs for Anat and Daniel
What we want is simple

a country like a poem
that’s beautiful and true
and makes us feel at home
The Old Café
There’s an old café

open everyday
and all night long
on the boulevard of time
Jeremiah wept there

Plato came to teach
it’s where proud Baudelaire
stroked his boredom’s

endless hair
and Gandhi learned to preach
and everyone
at least just once
saw the wonder in the grime
watching people
all the people
You and I sat there
when we were young
We saw Joan of Arc
talking to her angel
at a nearby table
heard Cain condemning Abel
Marx and Freud
trying to analyze the void
between reality and desire
And I saw beauty

love and passion
in two thousand
years of fashion
always look the same
sitting in the old café
It’s getting late

Come spare an hour
and join a table
where people spread
like petals around a flower
faces bloom like roses
strangers greeting strangers
tourists from the stars
and have a little wine
before it closes
Unearthly Lady
I passed you on the boulevard

I saw you by the sea
I sat near you in a blue café
you were sipping a pale green tea
I thought of a seagull in the air

of a shadow on the grass
of grapes that grow inside the moon
and lightning in a glass
A rainbow fluttered like a flame

on your shoulders in your hands
Your eyes were other planets
strange imaginary lands
But I haven’t seen you lately

though I go out to look each day
and now my little place seems empty
my bed’s a mound of cold white clay
Lady unearthly lady

I wish you hadn’t gone away
Without a Chance
You were born

without a chance
and you don’t stand
a chance tonight
You see eternity

come into sight
as that big shiny car
pulls up to the curb
Oh those are knives

not headlights in the leaves
and something breaks your nerve
and then your knees
The moon looks down

and doesn’t care
when your blood lights up
your pretty hair
You were born

without a chance
and you don’t stand
a chance tonight
Eternity’s as long
as the car
that pulls up to the curb
space opens at your feet
Everything gets blurred

the moon has a dirty face
the stars are broken glass
in a dark and empty street
It’s Very Nice
It’s very nice to sit by a stream

where life’s the water’s brilliant dream
then chop a tree to make a fire
burning the wood and your desire
saying the world’s all rotten
everything should be forgotten
But it’s just bitterness
all the voices that you miss
the ones that gave you happiness
are murmuring in the leaves
Hatred is the battered heart’s disease

People are made to be together
like a jacket and cold weather
like a sister and a brother
When you’re lonely what do you do

you paint the walls black and blue
and cry nobody cares for you
they’re all cracks the wind blows through
saints are selfish love’s a sham
it’s so damned hard who gives a damn
But it’s just bitterness
all the voices that you miss
the ones that gave you happiness
are inside you saying please
Hatred is the battered heart’s disease

People were made to be together
like Cyrano and his feather
like a father and a mother
But hatred is the battered heart’s disease
Public Places
In the small cafés the bars

the public places
you can be alone not lonely
your face is one among the faces
like an apple on an apple tree
You can sit there for an hour

you can sit there for a day
and plan the revolution
or like Shakespeare
write a tragic play
about your love and indecision
or watch the rain come down
and see the buildings float away
But you’re not lonely here

just alone no need to fear
as long as you can pay
Light a cigarette and dream
time is an ocean not a stream
the voices rise and fall like waves
It’s beautiful and sad to be alive
as all the ash-trays turn to graves
It’s All Dissolving
It’s all dissolving

like an aspirin
in a glass of doom
Speak quietly
there’s a microphone
in every tree
and a White House on the moon
They’ve killed today

and put tomorrow
in a cage
and feed it
promises and lies
Sometimes you’re glowing

with a silent rage
and broken bloodshot eyes
The unemployed are hungry
the boss plays in the snow
It’s all dissolving

and there ain’t no place to go
I felt a raindrop burn

I heard bones crumble in a breeze
Chemicals are everywhere
and everything’s diseased
And the funerals drive by

with their headlights on at noon
through cancer’s crazy city
where everyone dies too soon
But when the rich and mighty

were at their banquet
feeling safe and sound
blind Samson had a vision
and pulled the temple down
They Say
They say you’re just

a soft computer
designed by the times
and the only choice you have
is to revise your lines
But don’t you believe it

you’re the magic lightning
the spirit in the air
the one who turns a parking lot
into a county fair
Your imagination
conquers power
you take the stones
they threw at you
and build a tower
You can’t be classified

Your name’s not in
the yellow pages of despair
You’re a bodhisattva in disguise
Your tears are oceans
your mind contains the skies
One Tree One Fish
There’s one tree on a mountain

one fish inside the sea
scientists say
have immortality
unless cruel fate
an accident an enemy
strikes them down
like death strikes you and me
Oh little light Oh little rain

it’s only human to complain
we can’t remain
and it’s so lovely here
Sometimes I sit and wish

I were a tree
or an immortal fish
a ray of sunlight
from a holy cloud
anything but someone
a light bulb life turned on
that burns and then goes out

we can’t remain
A tortoise lives quite long

a star shines on and on
a building lasts for centuries
so does the tune
a shepherd plays
But why a star why a tortoise
why a building or a tune
and not my nights and days

we can’t remain
Here’s the Autumn
Well we’ve reached the autumn

when it’s all run-down
leaves peel like paint
the edge of things get brown
Days are made of paper

thrown out with trash
the sky’s a window
that needs to be washed
Youth’s like sunlight

fading in a pair of jeans
and we’ve become
the century’s exhausted dreams
We’re growing old my dear

our minds are turning gray
The friends we had aren’t here
This world’s a painting
on a wall that flows away
■ 158 ■
Unpublished Poems
A Memorie
How often in the evening:

tense and full of agony,
I entered the place
with one dim lamp shining misted yellow
upon a bright brown table . . .
pulled down the shades,
listened to the voices of my parents from their room . . .
then feeling approaching,
vague warmth and love,
relaxed in a chair
to look at paintings on the wall and dream.
1947
Unpublished Poems ■ 159
A Nocturne
Green moons are blooming in the leavelight . . .

and over the dark, subtle meadows,
white flowers open their shining mouths
to tell waiting eyes it is time to sleep.
1947
160 ■ Unpublished Poems
A Dawn
Without a sound, night slips away,

and day begins spreading across the sky in the East . . .
overhead, a last dim star
drops down to fall asleep in the hair of a tall tree.
1947
Greybird
They screamed, Get out!

and I’ve become a pile
of trash that mumbles
to itself on the sidewalk
while others go toward home.
In a little room
behind my forehead,
people are talking about me.
They’re at a table
and they have yellow voices.
I’m a bell
they’ve buried in the snow.
Sometimes I feel
so vast, the stars
come out upon my skin.
And, each night I hope
to meet a stranger
who’ll be a friend . . .
A man drags a woman to a car;

a drunken streetlight
dribbles in the gutter;
the same fool stares
at the broken glass
in a parking lot,
as if it were the starry sky.
1950
A Fifty-Year-Old Woman
Something’s wrong, the world or she. The skin

has melted on her bones, a mirror shows her firm as
youth. In a girlish skirt, with orange hair, the fifty-year-
old painted woman parades through the neighborhood.
Men look. She thinks that she’s desired.
In the park, pretty women aren’t ignored.
Flowering by a tree, she’ll be picked. But men
can hear her open like a rusty gate and feel her
arms like weeds. On the grass she waits, a gaudy
grave where only derelicts lie down.
Pride, loneliness, the collectors of beauty
and the fear of death, have made her a flaming rag
of flesh that walks from block to block. But there,
sunlight throws tiny jewels in the pavement; and a sky
full of stars smells so good.
1952
Wilshire Bus
These ladies concentrate

on how they look.
No one’s too friendly;
this place is public.
Dressed up like a gift,

delivered by the bus.
Each woman feels
unique, mysterious . . .
but sad to be unwrapped

again, at home—
that cave where everything’s
asleep, assumed, and known.
1952
Mary, Mary
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

young woman, what do you know?
I spread my legs, they come;
when I give myself, they go.

what have you done?
Cut my hair and swaggered around
to be my father’s son.

why do you go to school?
I have a passion for the truth
and I hate a pretty fool.

when will you wed?
When they paint me and dress me up like a doll
and give me a box for a bed.
1953
It’s a Pleasure to Be Sick
You feel that world outside the skin

rising, rising, like a mountain,
to keep you down?
The child in man knows what to do:
lie in bed and dream it through—
it’s pleasure to be sick.
That girl you love, loves another?

Don’t feel guilty, go to mother.
She’ll be glad to have you.
It’s dark and dull, but soft in there,
with only birth and death to fear.
It’s such a pleasure to be sick.
But what of those who do lie down

too long to laugh or call it fun,
and no one can arouse?
They see the whole world wearing black
and, color-blind, they answer back:
it’s a pleasure to be sick.
Most men exult in what they’ve done,

wearing achievement like a sun
that pulls the world to them.
But those who refuse to work for love
(afraid they’ll never earn enough)
have gray haired hearts and cry, Unfair!
and woo the world with their despair.
It’s their pleasure to be sick.
1953
She Spoke of Love
So, she spoke of love

as if no man gave
more than a senseless shove.
And, although it’s true
men often turn aside
when their urgent, crude
desire’s been satisfied—
leaving the woman then—
I know of one, though proud,

as rare and passionate
as all his blinding words—
who, after that wild ride
inside the sensual cloud,
will bloom there, full of birds.
1953
Korea
A country lies in ruins.

No one I know or care to know
has any business there.
While fear, the perfect cop,

patrols our minds like our streets,
we imagine peace.
Peace, when the sunlight falls

aflame in the builder’s steel;
rain on the field, snow on the roof;
and every window welcomes

the calm and passionate
dark face of night.
1953
Poem in Summer
Always, the summer sun that pours

its chemicals into the trees
and takes a shape in fruit we like;
all produce of the thoughtless bees,
the wind—nature’s routine lusts;
are dumped on the indifferent ground.
The celery’s green fountain rusts.
Winter, fall, are permanent.

But in the greenhouse of the mind
the world flowers, or burns, by
other seasons: man’s laboring ways.
Unlike the bee stuck to its hod
man sees the atom in a cloud,
but still, lives in a ritual daze.
The violent rich who stalk the earth

absorb the sun and auction off
all the summer’s golden stream,
leaving us to eat, rebuild and dream.
We dream of feasts, of happy towns,
the green, yet warring earth controlled;
and nothing bought and nothing sold.
The bee that builds, the breathing leaf,

each of nature’s subtle robots
must diet, turn its wheels, and die;
but we could choose the way we live:
against all senseless death unite
the single life to common force
and make our days and nights become
great open warehouses of the sun.
1953
Footnote for Today
They say, the sky that leans

upon the roofs, will turn
to iron and suddenly fall.
They say, the roofs will fall;
or, that someday the sea
will wander into town,
then, fish swim overhead.
Always, when the worn out

flags come down, the poor
walk closer to their goal—
the ways of love and law
are changed each day like clothes:
always then, some see
a total doom before them.
And still, the world remains.

Though we endure the dark
we can’t believe in death,
now seeing the sleeping rise
and human dreams at last
take life. We know tomorrow
will dance upon today.
1953
But We, My Love
To skin-deep lovers, when deep in bed,

love is an island in the head
above the body’s rising tide.
On their own shores they climb all night
and hope for heaven at the dawn.

Such lovers never look upon
the salty creatures of their flesh:
those hairy plants would make them blush.
Made to blend, the world in the heart

while they fit keeps them apart.
There are no lights in that dark place
where the body’s in disgrace.
But, we, my love, behold are fair!

and can be loved for what we are.
Now in each other’s waters come,

washing darkness from this room.
We’ll the sea beast of our love:
that jovial serpent in our blood.
If we, who are so intimate,

need more than love to honor it,
why we can say, our lewd delight
more than our god, makes human life.
1954
To ________________
We smile and sit down far apart;

we, who once had a single heart.
And you, married now, look at me
as if looking were adultery—
fearing this new love’s only true
if all that other love is through.
Memory might dull the polished plans
of matrimony’s pots and pans.
But dear, what could one give, or be,

except a piece of property,
with such a love? Now, if instead,
you can bring to your board and bed
all of the love that’s filled your life,
couldn’t you love me and be his wife?
1954
Marriage Proposal
This was a good home.

My mother’s beautiful
and now and then
my father laughs.
How blue his eyes are!
I had love;
and a long childhood.
I was prince
in this small world.
We were fortunate:
in the yard fruit
always fell, we had
lilies and a great
tree blessed with birds.
At night, we said:
Surely, the stars
like sparks fly up.
Yet wrath damaged the walls,
tore down the roses,
how hate could make
a fist of friendship!
I would say
these oak floors
are still broken
where tears dropped.
But there was music;
the long rain fell
but we were warm.
We were undisciplined,
dramatic natures,
and half my hair,
my raven hair,
is gray to prove it.
I thought, once, I’d never leave.

Yet, today, with you
I forgot my home.
Young woman,
you’ve taken away
my mother, my father,
and you’ve taken away
my home—old house
yellow as a daisy—
that kneels here to mountains.
Be my mother, my home,
oh be a tree to me,
be my wife.
Here, on this jewel of earth,
let’s make each other shine.
Sweat and poetry

nature and a sweet glue
have bound us.
Come, give with me

everything we have,
turn on the turning world.
There is a mystery here,
something that makes the beast
in man cry with joy.
Please, give with me

what we can, Odette;
more lives and loves than ours
have gone out among the stars.
Burning, let’s grow gray together.
October 20, 1957

Sunday Morning
Day dynamites the rock of sleep.

Again, you and I and all
this furniture are still the same.
We stare at the yard through a window

and wonder why the blue jay goes
from the fence to the lemon tree.
1957
I Dreamed
I dreamed of a light that kills;

there wasn’t a sound from man.
A clinic of clouds appeared
where the moon went, dressed as a nurse.
Then, all the dead leaves of the world

marched in their uniforms;
the bloody walls cracked with rage;
a broom at the corner whispered, Peace.
At last, generals and bank vaults

were changed into nails
and you and I became
two hammers with one blow that builds.
1960
How I Feel
I’m the sound of a rusty nail

being pulled from the wall,
a bomb in the street
without instructions . . .
My mirrors are old photographs.
Almost every day

I want to sleep or explode,
because a friend
kept on his shirt when I came;
because men light

small countries like cigars
and inhale their neighbors;
because my children are seeds

I put to bed;
because the cities,
as sure as their walls go up,
will like rain come down.
1961
A Survivor
As he finished smoking
after lunch in Warsaw,
when it was summer
and the warm
street smelled like hay
and women wore thin dresses,
and then
he almost told
someone—
the arms, the legs,
the little children in the ash-tray.
1962
Someone We Knew
after E. A. R.
When she sat down to share the public grass

beside our company that afternoon,
one thought of summer lightning in a glass,
or cold wet grapes that glow upon the moon.
We envied her, whose nerves were silverware

with which she calmly ate us. Girl, who seemed
beyond the good and evil in the air:
someone who couldn’t fail and never dreamed.
And she was satisfied—she told us so;

then she smiled at anyone who didn’t reply.
We felt the sun grow dim, the darkness flow;
the clouds piled up like autos in the sky.
And as we worked and planned to meet again

and couldn’t discover what it was we lacked,
we heard she’d suddenly gone where everyone
must go who has forgotten how to act.
1963
English
My teacher was doctor Thomas Earp,

who tortured books and called it work.
He taught me the rule for perfect theses:
mix Shakespeare’s gold with Luther’s feces.
I’ve traveled far upon my chair,

colleges are everywhere;
met Boswell, Crunk and Samuel C.—
it’s all a question of degree.
I thrive in this Babbitt Shangri-La

(sit down, sit down, don’t stand in awe).
Sometimes, I even use my brain.
My hair’s grown gorgeous from the strain.
I know so much it’s frightening.

I have spent my life deciphering
the latest attitudes toward rhyme
and why an author mentions Time.
Poems are made by those who see

a solar system in a tree;
but only a critic can discern
Heidegger’s ash in a Grecian urn.
1969
Untitled
These are the water-colored days . . .

Trees that have lost most of their leaves
are sketched and delicate and look
like music, written silent in the air.
Clouds build a renaissance at five,
grow old and disappear.
Sit by a window, watch it rain.
1970
Always
Bad weather, like common sense,

tries and tries
to extinguish that butterfly.
1970
For Ami*
Nothing cares about us—

only we and our animals.
Nature just mixes things.
A road will take us somewhere;
or turn and throw us away.
You’ve become a precious stone

whose name sticks in our
throats.
And you left such a big hole,
we walk around, falling in . . .
It’s impossible! Please, Ami,

please don’t drive as you did.
1974
———————————————————————————
•
For his daughter’s boyfriend who died at the age of
twenty-one in an auto accident.
When I Came to Israel
I saw my daughter
when I came to Israel.
She sat between its wars
by a soldier on a hill.
Stones and olive trees

and the bright air all around
...
So many stones! like stars
painted yellow and brown.
Suddenly, my son appeared,

carrying on his back
the soft horizon
like a huge, blue knapsack.
He strode from a field

and lifted me,
the way a young cliff
lifts the gray haired sea.
My little father, he said,

at last you’re here.
The fields, the orchards,
everything seemed so clear.
Then my daughter ran

down down the hillside,
excited like a stream.
She called me; and I cried.
But my wife was like a dove

in the wailing wall.
She lit the moon.
Snow began to fall.
And she laid the snow,

as if at home again,
proudly, under the lights
of Jerusalem.
1978
Haiku—Various
***
I can only laugh
when my daughter spreads her arms
to catch the cold wind
9/23/60
***
So many men, tools

and weeks to pave an alley.
I hear the heavy dust.
9/23/60
***
Not too far from here
as the bird of wisdom flies,
men mean what they say.
9/23/60
***
when the baby calls

the older children also
pretend they’re busy
9/5/60
***
the baby puts out

her arms, when a sudden wind
stops to wipe her face
9/5/60
***
when my daughter cries

I wonder what’s become of
all my childhood friends.
9/5/60
***
I’d like to remind

you, you tired old window you—
a full moon tonight!
9/6/60
***
The father also

smiles as he puts his finger
in the baby’s mouth
12/5/60
***
all night long crickets

break their bottles in the dark;
men also seem to sing.
12/5/60
***
A new poem from

an old friend when I came home.
The rain almost stopped.
12/24/60
***
It makes me angry—
in vacant lots sunflowers
grow taller than men.
9/62
Untitled—or, “To Be a Poet”
I turned to poetry the way a man turns to a woman,

in order to live; the way an animal moans or a
bird sings, to relieve myself of pain and joy.
Words, to me, are sonorous nipples—

each one a lozenge full of memories under the tongue,
a liquid in the throat.
I found Whitman and believed a poet should express

his country; Rilke, and pitied my middle-class self for
a while; Blake and saw politics in every line;
Issa and wished to be so compassionate and humble.
Emily Dickinson taught me to rely on metaphor; Yeats

showed me the value of music in a time of portentous prose.
Ten years as a picture framer and gilder convinced me that even
poems should be beautifully made.
I’ve known waitresses and janitors from whom great

images flowed like traffic on a freeway. I prefer
fairy tales to most literature and I believe that the last stanza of
“Mary had a little lamb” is more profound than The Cantos
or The Waste Land.
Untitled
A little glass, sturdy, plain,

2/3 full of white wax
the color of bed sheets, brides,
bandages or shrouds . . . the
flame writhes from side to side
frantically, sadly . . .
the color of the sun at dusk
sun through the smog . . . it
makes a large black replica
of its ideal self on the inside
of the glass . . . a charred silhouette
shaped like a leaf,
now and then one sees the flame
through this black smudge, like
looking through a window of a
burnt house . . . the melted wax
slowly rises and drowns the wick . . .
■ 192 ■
Unpublished Songs
Life Is a God
Life is a god with many arms

that dances on the ruins
It plays a flute
and butterflies and children
are its tunes
The miseries that role

their boulders
over us
the broken bodies
and the love
that turn to bitter dust
are painted dreams it juggles
the somber worlds are bubbles
But the butterflies and children

are the dancer’s favorite tunes
Unpublished Songs ■ 193
You and I
You and I will live

like tourists
in our neighborhood
and sail the moon each night
across our bed
We’ll have the hills

at breakfast
fresh from the sun’s bright oven
for our bread
We’ll be poor
but very rich
and let the living live
and pity the living dead
Do you see that tree

it’s a big green glass
the year breaks gradually
Winter sweeps the pieces up
Do you see that picket fence

a row of white piano keys
Do you hear the sunlight’s dance
The store-fronts are paintings
and the streets are galleries
194 ■ Unpublished Songs
We’ll be two flowers in the air

without a stem
a copper gong in space
struck by a laughing mandarin
And we won’t work

and we won’t bitch
and we won’t join
the common war
We’ll stroll around instead
We’ll be poor
but very rich
and let the living live
and pity the living dead
I Saw a Poor Young Woman
I saw a poor young woman

against a drugstore wall
foaming at the mouth
about to fall
A crowd began to shout
they laughed they called
her dirty names
then kicked her when she fell
She was a beautiful
but ugly sight
just like the city night
Blood oozed from her mouth
like jam from a broken jar
Someone said she was drunk
Someone said she’s a whore
I thought she was a fallen star
run over by the street
So I bent down
to calm her twitching feet
and wipe away the blood
the spit as thick as glue
And I took her by the hand

the hardest thing to do
past everyone who jeered
to a lousy room
which was her home
and left her there alone
until that time
when the moon sinks
like a magic stone
in the suburban slime
and you just have to bear
the burden of a conscious mind
Once in Los Angeles
I woke up one morning

looked out the window
and saw tomorrow
in the street today
All the people were there
They had a lot to say
they talked and danced
and sang for hours
the office buildings
swayed like flowers
the freeways rose
and went another way
towards paradise
across the sea into the sky
where the red balloon
is president
and ideals never die
Then I heard the sirens
and saw the cops come down
on every woman
man and child
in that enlightened town
But suddenly
a shining saucer
stopped over City Hall
Angels walked upon the air

stretched out their rainbow hands
and stopped that massacre
The cops and cars
just disappeared
people seemed to float
and fly around
and there was paradise
near First and Spring
The angels left without a sound
I Drive an Old Dodge
I drive an old Dodge

and I lead a dumb life
I’m going up to Frisco
to live with my wife
Get along little car

get along and fast
if you don’t get there soon
you’ll run out of gas
I’ve marched in the street

I’ve worked in the shops
spent time in the jail
was beaten by cops

get along and fast
I want a quiet life
before that final blast
I tried the revolution

and I even tried school
now all I can say is
I was a damn fool

get along and fast
if I don’t get there soon
my desire won’t last
The people I knew

have all gotten rich
while I’m still wearing jeans
and digging my ditch

get along and fast
I’m as flat as a flag
taken down from the mast
Now I’ll fold my visions

and pack them in a box
they were just some rain that fell
on a great big pile of rocks

get along and fast
my head’s in the present
but my heart’s in the past
College Town Blues
Switzerland’s O.K.
you know
pretty lakes and lots of snow
but the people
all have clocks for hearts
and cheese for faces
the mountains
look like tooth decay
I’d rather be in Paris

the sunlight’s made of wine
clouds go by
like baby carriages
who cares about the time
the boulevards shine like stars
at night you’re in the sky
But I’m still here

in a college town
suburban armpit U.S.A.
the smog just oozes
over from L.A.
in a place called Maria’s
where the coffee’s
boiled diarrhea
and the people
all look the same
Campbell’s soups
in different sizes
everybody smiles
even the dirt apologizes
it’s neat and clean
But late at night

the gentle wind leaps
like a rapist from a bush
the walls of ivy creak
and all the Ph.D.s
stare at their TVs
gossip drink play cards
but never never scream
The Mind That Kills
The mind that kills

from year to year
the simple things
we used to do
killed whales and buffalo
Indians and Eskimo
And where are all the houses
the vacant lots I knew
The hand that kills

from day to day
likes speed and parking lots
and burns the sky
It builds on every block
a fancy graveyard plot
a condominium
called Town and Country
A world where aerials grow

instead of trees
from plaster cells
programmed with TVs
No love no childhood
nothing’s really true
But where are all the houses
the vacant lots I knew
Now’s the only time

Inhale the present
There’s no place to run
to throw a ball or dream
Drive go buy a gun
and hear the sirens scream
for you for you
so cold and blue
and far away
Before the Storm
I’m tired of all the evil work

the banks the wars
those frightened chains upon the doors
I want to walk around
and wear the sunlight like a shirt
Oh women water the friendly trees

children birds
The years are raindrops

in an angel’s burning hair
voices call us
from a place that isn’t there
I’ll say hello
to people I don’t know
I’ll be an eye
in solitude’s green wall
and watch the mighty
rise and fall
I’m so tired of all the evil work

the banks the wars
those frightened chains upon the doors
Oh women water the friendly trees

children birds
I’ll just walk around

to find the voice I heard
until they hang the moon
in a tyrant’s living room
and turn the sea to plastic
I know I know
dust to dust ashes to ashes
but this earth’s fantastic
Until the storm

I’ll wear the sunlight like a shirt
Atlantis
Come hold my hand

hold my hand
the afternoon
that burned to ashes
in the clouds
was the world
as it passes
doomsday in the sky
we’re growing old

we’re going to die
it’s raining now
I don’t know why
nobody knows
if night will end in day
Come hold my hand

and drown with me
We’ll be two windows
at the bottom of the sea
two different dreams
that are the same
two characters
they call insane
But we’ll be waves

we’ll be ripples
in the temples
of Atlantis
while the nations
war like planets
in a fantasy
Come drown with me

Come drown with me
escape the madness
and ripple through
while the nations
war like planets
in a fantasy
Photo by Elliott Erwitt, Magnum

SELECTED PROSE
■ 213 ■
Journal—Spring 1969
On Sabbatical leave from Pitzer College and

traveling with his wife and children in Europe.
Note: Bracketed material indicates marginalia or
emendations of the author.
[Leaving _____ a landscape . . . burn banana skins]
thick, and wet like gesso . . . thin brown roads

straggling like shoelaces down from the woods . . .
no animals anywhere, perhaps they’re under-

ground . . . an occasional hawk in the air . . .
villages like a few broken boxes dumped on the

earth . . .
now & then a little graveyard, the stones are doors

where nobody lives . . .
dead cars, tractors, everywhere, nothing’s repaired;

things are used, worn-out, discarded . . .
snow falling on small hills and forests in Kansas, a

banana colored light in the air . . .
214 ■ Selected Prose
[The kegs of feed left in the fields during winter, a shipwreck . . . ]
detergent, like flocks of shapeless [nuclear birds/babies] birds,

on the Mississippi . . .
In the dining car, the “silverware” sings at the empty tables . . .
The waiter, one of those tall black men with long legs, short torso,
protruding muscular rump, pants too short, wearing a little
apron, large but delicate hands, curly gray hair fluffed out at the
back of the neck and a lower lip that sticks out expressing, in an
old fashioned way, a sense of good taste and the dignity of his
position ~ like a whiskey ad . . .
New York lit up at night, the buildings shine like gigantic switch-
boards, transistor radios, IBM systems, the rooftops covered
with moving air conditioning vents look like tape recorders, the
sky’s black as bakelite and the half moon tilted like a porcelain
coffee cup . . . during the day automobiles & cabs move like
neat fragments of light through a million wires, people pass like
impulses . . .
When the snow dries in the park some of it remains in patches on

the ground, like a flock of sheep on the animal colored [fawney]
grass . . . the bare trees look like bundles of wire, a landscape of
nerves . . .
Bill Cole’s too suave; James Wright’s too insecure, in spite of all his
talent & knowledge. I think Olga Carlisle’s a typical Russian emi-
grée, capitalizing on her authenticity and her so-called love
of freedom . . .
The sick man, huge, wearing a black coat, hunched on the deck
chair, like a lump of coal in a dish of brown rice . . .
Selected Prose ■ 215
The librarian’s a suspicious little man. If he feels someone’s

watching him, he looks back without turning his head, like a
rabbit moving its large eyeball . . . an intellectual, unlike the
other crew members who look people straight in the face . . .
The boat always seems to be in the middle of an immense, grey,

restless circle; it’s all grey, even the sky, except for moments of
foam and a few white clouds . . . the sea’s color isn’t really grey, or
blue, it’s more like a surgeon’s rubber glove, a thin metallic kind
of synthetic substance glistening, the waves foaming like soap
on its surface . . .
The first day I went on deck the light was so clear I could hardly
see . . . no smog, no buildings, nothing but sunlight, water, air, a
blue sky full of small clouds . . .
Did Hesse get his idea for the magic theater in Steppenwolf from
the optical shows at the beginning of Mann’s Magic Mt.?
The ocean’s slate colored, otherwise it looks like a giant, agitated

quartz . . .
A very strange couple, two men, one a gigantic, grey-haired,

petulant faced German who slouches about in a suit the color of
iron filings, with long underwear showing below his trouser cuffs
when he sits down—the other a black man, also middle aged,
who waddles slightly, smokes a cheap pipe, wears wire rimmed
glasses and talks very loudly about his knowledge of foreign lan-
guages and pipe tobacco—they are photo retouchers and live
in Maine where they have a business in their own home . . . the
black man claims to have studied music in his youth, “not jazz,
but real music—” the German doesn’t respond to children . . .
wife of chemistry teacher, an absolute bitch—self-centered,

proprietress of her little enterprise called family . . .
Vulgar couple—he must be an AC/DC gigolo; she, dressed like an

ancient greek gladiator must be the despised daughter of a rich
alcoholic suicide . . .
____________________________ [this line cut off on Xerox]

believe being here. It’s as if the landscape were a gigantic postcard
standing in the ocean, something in my mind. My sense of time
has dissolved.
The people are short, moody looking; in the fishing village the
children beg, green snot running from their noses, sores on their
legs. One boy has an ear lobe that looks like a moldy lemon peel.
Another, a bright little boy, speaks four languages, asking for
money to buy food in each. The brooms are bundles of straw tied
to branches. The street cleaner walks along, sweeping peanut
shells & cigarette butts into a little dust pan. The store-keeper
has black curly hair, wears glasses . . . the shop has a low roof,*
[* hundreds of chamber pots hang like swollen breasts from the
rafters] chickens cheep behind a crib full of bananas. There are
little boxes of baking soda, no bigger than cigarette packs . . . peo-
ple are too poor to buy things in larger quantities. The streets are
paved with pebbles from the beaches which are arranged in pat-
terns, the pebbles are dark, bluish grey, shaped like almonds and
smooth . . . There are many dwarfs and small hunchbacks among
the workers . . .
The people here cultivate the land in a series of terraces that

extend from the shore to the top of the island, nearly 6–700 above
sea level. The place is rich, green, full of waterfalls and flowing
streams. The houses are painted with great taste and a love of
color ~ yellow, shades of blue, orange, and white. Many homes
have a square tile depicting Christ or the Virgin over the front
door. All kinds of flowers grow everywhere. People build right
into the hillsides; they dry their clothing on the tile roofs of their
homes; they walk in the fields & along the roads carrying small
sickles, wearing gunny sacks over their heads . . . Funchal is clean,
neat, probably because of the tourist trade . . . I saw oxen for the
first time in my life . . . Yes, they are sad animals, so huge and yet
so docile . . . poor little narrow streets where people can hardly
walk anymore because of the cars & buses . . .
We saw the Coast of North Africa, then Gibraltar. A huge rock, its
silhouette like a pregnant woman . . . At night it looks like an ant
hill of lights flickering in the sea . . .
The tall, attractive woman, reddish brown hair, white suit, high
heels . . . always smiling, as if convinced that everyone’s looking
at her, so she’s in a constant state of courteous response . . .
The young, fat little man from Naples . . . visiting his family . . .
he’s been working as an automobile designer in Canada. He
changes his clothes every hour and acts benevolent, like a good
boy who’s made his fortune . . . I’m sure he has a terrible temper
...
Amalfi drive, fantastic view, frightening but absolutely no way

back . . . God praise the driver’s dour skill . . .
Pompeii’s a bore when seen with a guide among a crowd of

tourists . . . One should walk alone through the place on a
sunny day . . . but I’ve seen Vesuvius!
Naples is noisy, full of cards, and, like all cities, thousands of

shops . . . but we had a pleasant time sitting in the galleria
Umberto . . .
Except for the orange groves and the short, powerful looking
people working in them, I don’t like what I’ve seen of Italy . . . it’s
cheap, gaudy, full of noise . . . the young women have thin, rickety
legs . . .
The boat has finally anchored in Cannes . . . Here the

Mediterranean is really blue, like stained glass . . .
France is beautiful! In Italy, the countryside was ancient, the

buildings were falling apart, some without roofs or missing a
wall, the stone was leprous . . . but everything looked like a city
dump . . .
here, in Provence, the air is a transparent gold, like the music

from a harp . . . everything is old, but neat . . .
France is beautiful, like thousands of antique shops surrounded

by fields and rivers . . .
radiant like an old harp with a young girl’s voice . . .
the air is like a new harp, with blue strings and a green voice . . .
Here, in Edmond’s yard, the birds sing and hop around like
Italian businessmen hurrying through the Park . . .
We have fresh milk every morning from the farm next door . . .
Today we saw the _______ . . . they have the same mild eyes as
their mothers . . . The cows are kept in the barn until the weather
gets warm . . . The smell of wine, mixed with hay and shit is
almost staggering at first; then, it becomes bearable and finally ~
though it’s extremely hot and sour ~ almost sweet . . .
The rooster’s arrogant, a bundle of sheer impulse surrounded by

feathers and two dark eyes staring out of its ruffling arrogant rust
...
The rabbits are fat, their grey sides always shivering, soft as felt;
their noses move like separate creatures trying to scurry into a
hole . . . their sides twitch like nervous lead . . .
here, we have food from all over Europe ~ oranges from Spain,
Israel, and Algeria, etc ~ In America such things would be very
expensive and exotic, but here they come next door and are taken
for granted . . .
We saw Domont’s old church, a monument from the 12th Century

. . . a hideous, cold, grey place with a clumsy vaulted interior,
cheap little wooden chairs, the kind that fold and belong with
card tables in a welfare institution . . . A Christ as smooth as soap
hanging from a small cross on one wall, the virgin, a bland little
creature in a faded blue robe gesturing from a niche . . . A few old
women sitting quietly near the altar, some candles burning, little
wax lampposts in a corner . . . Outside, the walls look like rotten
cheese . . .
Daniel says the ocean sometimes looks like a wrinkled tablecloth

. . . I’d say it looks like a huge grey silk cloth on a table of restless
wind . . .
I gave a reading at the University of Aix—not much feeling for the

poems anymore—I sounded like a cello reciting phone numbers
...
We live on the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, in an artist’s apt, a

tiny, cold, disorganized place on the second floor in a courtyard
that must be close to a hundred years old . . . Algerian Jewish
children play hopscotch all day in the courtyard, complacent
little creatures who seem to love rules more than mystery . . .
There’s a cabinet-maker’s shop at the rear of the courtyard . . .
men in blue smocks begin working at 8 AM, the saws hum
like gigantic bees in a meadow of sawdust . . . now & then the
men come out, smoke, talk, load a wagon that looks older than
California and disappear through a passage in the building . . .
They must have large power saws in the cabinet & fixture shop—
when they shut off a saw it sounds like an ambulance coming
to a stop . . .
Perhaps the artist who never gets recognition always dresses like
a young man ~ wearing sport shirt, baggy sweater, work pants, a
corduroy jacket and moccasin style shoes ~ to maintain the hope
he had when young of maturing and being great someday ~ also,
because he feels like a boy when he compares himself to the men
whose work he admires ~ perhaps it’s also poverty, or the need to
look “artistic” ~
Perhaps there’s a relationship between the collages of Schwitters,

or the work of many European non-objective painters, and the
walls of old buildings here . . . the walls are mottled with various
shades of white, black, green, and brown . . . their texture seems
applied with a putty knife . . . they’re full of cracks . . . the window
sash and shutters look like the skeletons of little boats that
have been dredged up from the sea . . . the buildings in richer

neighborhoods have slanted roofs made of slate tile that look like
huge charcoal-colored fish floating in the radiant air . . .
We saw the Jardin de Luxembourg ~ green, a bluish grey sky

overhead, like 18C French painting . . . The French are ruled by
geometry ~ even the wild part of the garden was restrained ~
I didn’t see Rilke’s Carousel . . .
I saw Villon on the Place de la Sorbonne. We were sitting in a café,

when a little man about thirty years old walked by. He was slightly
bow-legged, had delicate but strong hands, wore grey corduroy
pants, a blue wool sport jacket, turtle neck sweater . . . his hair
was cut around his head like a medieval priest’s; he was almost
ugly except for his large, shrewd, intelligent dark eyes and the
dignity of a real individual which appeared obvious from the way
he walked ~ he rolled slightly, almost like a sailor and his lips were
firm though full ~ he seemed arrogant, gay yet serious, small but
tough . . .
At dusk the sky, full of clouds and chimney smoke, becomes a soft
grey ~ it looks as if the slate roofs were slowly melting away in the
air, becoming doves . . .
An old man, tall, wearing a huge blue overcoat which, dampened

& frizzled by the rain, looked like steel wool ~ he stands below in
the courtyard and sings a monotonous melancholy song ~ no one
looks from the windows, no one throws any money down, and he
goes away . . .
Black music:
1) the body stripped of illusions, the unashamed yet
intelligent voice of desire
2) One speaking for many
Western music:
1) the desire to be rid of the body while the body yearns
for self-expression
2) many becoming one
man arrested ~ a ragged yet intense fellow, growing bald

perhaps from illness, poverty, insists on going back in a café
after being thrown out because of an argument, short stocky
plainclothesman in blue raincoat yanks him back and with the
aid of another cop handcuffs the fellow, the fellow kicks the cop
in the leg, people gather, police call for a wagon . . .
prostitutes on the Place de la Republique ~ one greets another:

Alors! T’as éteé baisée?
An old woman wearing a long grey ragged coat and a dirty apron,
her leg skinny as twigs, a toothless mouth, dancing like the grand-
daughter of death with a proud young worker in the street . . .
Railroad station at St. Denis ~ looking at the wheels of a train

which keeps going back and forth along one track . . . few simple
forms modified and intelligently assembled become something
complex ~ the parts of a machine, the human body, etc ~ so much
can be done with a circle, a line, a square . . .
The children saw a gypsy washing her feet in the gutter after the
rain . . .
The little birch in Edmond’s yard ~ I must see if it’s shed its
bandages now that it’s spring, or if it’s become all white . . .
The sky’s as blue as Frenchman’s smock, the trees in the square

have silhouettes shaped like a technical illustration of the heart,
they glow like a cathedral’s windows . . . So many delicate fresh
light green leaves, no wonder the French naïf painters are so
precise when painting a tree . . .
Perhaps the non-objective painter wants his work to be admired

for its beauty, the way it equals those acts of nature that seem to
express emotion in purely spontaneous designs . . . He resents the
pleasure people show at seeing his early representational work
because he feels they’re really moved by the subject, not by him . . .
But the non-objective painting is also an object that represents a
subject, which is the artist—but only the artist, because only the
artist knows what his materials mean to him . . .
Here one can sit for hours at a sidewalk café, drink one glass of
beer, wine, coffee, hot chocolat or tea, and not be bothered by
anything but the noise of traffic or a sudden shower . . . and one
can do this on any block in Paris . . .
The classic French woman has firm features with a full, open
forehead, a frank appearance with a calm, practical kind of
affection and gentleness, unlike Italian women, who conduct an
opera when they speak, French women combine the precision of
chamber music with the joy of a song in their gestures . . .
The French like to eat & drink, but sensibly . . . they drink
small cups of coffee, one of which is enough for the occasion,
they often water their wine . . . but they love sugar and treat
themselves to sweets everyday . . . When they are babies they

lie placidly bundled up in chrome-plated dark blue buggies,
staring at the air above them; and, as adults, they can sit for hours
at a café, sipping one glass of beer while staring through the
passersby, dreaming, waiting . . .
The fascist youth are __________ by the respect they receive for
being ordinary . . . this they have in common with the average
leftist . . . But while the leftist wants to destroy present authority
and replace it with something which seems more humane, the
fascist wants to strengthen & preserve existing law and order . . .
the fascist youth yearns for the gov’t to be his father and the
policeman his uncle so he can freely express his anger at being
unimportant by attacking those he suspects of being better
than himself . . . He knows the artist, the saint, the Jew, the now
articulate Negro, black, the young women, even children, are all
his superiors in some subtle, undefinable way . . . the way, after
all, has something to do with intelligence and morality, the right
to condemn society as it is
March 1969
Work experience since 18:
picture framing 10 yrs
housepainting 2 yrs
ditchdigging 1/2 yr
janitor 1 1/2 yr
warehouseman 3 yrs
College teacher 2 yrs
Printing 1 yr
sheet metal worker 1/2 yr
A Bestiary at the Jardin des Plantes—Paris
The camel has melancholy sensual eyes and curly hair . . . a fallen
aristocrat chewing his apathy with pleasure . . .
The Elephant is a landscape of fog in which one wrinkled boulder

moves, trying to talk . . .
The wooly sheep whose horns look like a kerchief tied upside
down . . . she’s overweight and panting in the heat, her whole
body’s a big, heavy heart . . .
The stork paces like a philosopher or the wandering Jew . . .
The ostrich is a mad woman dressed in her grandmother’s clothes . . .
The little mountain goats lick each other’s foreheads . . .
The yak is an abandoned truck . . .
The Vultures scowl like retired generals . . .
The eagle is a mad believer in the beauty of death . . .
The doves in the trees are the voices of people who have turned to
smoke . . .
The bison palpitate . . . I know them, the way their beautiful

brown hair rots in patches, my country falling apart . . . but the
young ones have brighter eyes than their mothers do . . . the old
bison withdraw like a mountain chain disappearing into a small
iron door . . .
The antelope browsing in the grass are four legged sparrows . . .
The tiger strides from one end of the cage to other, right up to the
walls, and never looks at anything . . .
The male baboon, one has a face like a sportscar, the other who
looks like a prehistoric priest has a rump that resembles a festival
on Jupiter or an impressionist’s palette . . . they both have heavy
brows and dark angry eyes that glare like burnt-out headlights . . .
The spider when struck becomes a skeleton’s fist . . .
Black man in metro tunnel, nervous, walking near the wall and
striking it with his fist ~ he must be American!
Dobzinsky has a marvelous library of poetry ~ he shows me the

work of a great Romanian, a Czech whose poems are better, he
says, than Holub’s, an Hungarian, poets I’ve never heard of . . . We
live all alone in America, receiving mail now & then from the rest
of the world ~
Young Americans playing their folk songs on the steps of the

Sacre Coeur . . . long hair, leather jackets, a banjo and a guitar . . .
the French people look at them and pass by . . . a gendarme
politely tells them to be quiet ~
Four people on a bench in a little park near the Gard du Nord

. . . something out of Villon’s world . . . two women, one huge
and sprawling, showing her panties and powerful thighs, her
breasts are immense and sagging, almost toothless . . . her ankles
embrace a tree trunk while her lover, a tough guy, tattooed and
muscular, kisses her neck . . . she looks at the sky and laughs . . .
the other two are thin, almost boney, dressed in black, shabby,
red-eyed, _______ and muttering to themselves ~
Then, they were quiet,

almost asleep,
and he spread over her
like the darkness outside
that rests upon the street
when all the cars are gone
and lights shine here and there
like memories . . .
We met an American woman in the house ~ blonde, pale, clear

complexion, slender and attractive ~ yet she had that shrill, tense
voice, like a banjo string about to snap, a suppressed hysteria
that Frenchmen have described when talking about American
women ~ she’s a chemist for some big business in Rhode Island,
in Europe for the first time in her life ~ very excited, happy . . .
she loves France, Switzerland even more ~ She works very hard
as a chemist (only has a B.S.) and would like to teach, but doesn’t
want to go back to being a student ~ It was pleasant talking to her
while we ate lunch ~
Palermo, Sicily ~ ancient, _____ streets, then long thoroughfares

where gigantic housing projects made of poured concrete that’s
already beginning to crack rise twenty stories in the warm, faded
air . . . below them, hovels blossom near the curbs, tiny houses
made of rock, abandoned sheet metal, old boards, flowers
flourishing all around them . . . so many shops, cars, so much
dust and noise . . . In the old buildings near the ancient part of the
town one sees pale, dark eyed, black haired girls wearing black
dresses leaning on their windowsills, gazing at the street . . .
A group of little boys comes down a hill with a priest all in black
behind them . . . tonight, we watched Sicilians boarding the ship
~ old men & women, young people, children, kissed each other
goodbye ~ they kept waving, whistling, calling out to each other
long after they were on deck ~ it grew dark and as the boat began
to sail away from the pier people on shore lit matches and moved
toward the water’s edge, holding the little flames until they went
out ~ those on the boat continued calling, waving, until the boat
was out at sea . . .
Old friends have become clichés.

A lives in an abandoned store, has grown a beard and begun to
paint immense non-objective things . . . he has a black poodle
and drives a classic MG . . . the vocabulary of Zen provides him
with consolation for the discrepancy between his daily life and
his youthful ideals . . . he works 40 hrs. a week for a pornographic
magazine and visits his children twice a month . . . his son, a tall,
slender, shy, gentle, sixteen year old has talent as a musician . . .
A begs him to play the violin and while he does, obediently, A
looks out the window as if he were listening critically, but one
can see the struggle in his neck as he tries not to gaze with pain
and pleasure at the boy . . . A has stomach ulcers and a slipped
disc . . . he smokes Sano pipe tobacco, not to irritate his ulcers
with nicotine, and every twenty minutes he squats to stretch
his spine . . . he wears an iron medallion on a leather thong
around his neck and mod clothing, colors that match his dark
complexion and black hair . . . he walks with a slight stoop, as if
his waist were frozen . . . He believes that LSD helps one achieve
illumination, “quickly,” he says with enthusiasm. “Not like
Buddha had to do it.”
G also uses drugs, but he prefers marijuana because it takes his

troubled mind by the hand, like an invisible girl, and leads him
into the quiet cave of himself . . . he’s become almost obese,
smokes a pipe or a cigar constantly, takes off his shoes which
reveals his twisted toes and lies back like an intelligent walrus
on the sofa to doze . . . G recently got into trouble with the
authorities where he teaches for reading Lenore Kandel’s Love
poems in public . . . now, his troubles are dignified because they
are the result of external circumstances, the establishment,
etc . . . He moves about like Orson Wells, talking loudly, almost
shouting, lecturing, angrily expressing his opinions on poetry,
Zen, the failure of socialism and all idealistic causes . . . he has
high blood pressure, heart murmurs, and weak circulation that
makes his hands occasionally numb . . . his appearance, unlike A,
is disorderly, but his likes & dislikes, his personal style, are more
or less correct for the times . . .
___ has left his wife and children . . . he’s bought property near
the beach and hopes to make enough profit to supplement his
income, he has so many debts and responsibilities now that he’s
left his family . . . he lives chaotically, taking drugs, going to wild
rock parties where he dances like a teenager for hours . . . he’s
found that he prefers boys to women, probably because he was a
virgin who married an older woman and now young men restore
his adolescence; lately, he’s decided to become a professional
model, which he’s been told he’ll do well at because of his height
and grey hair . . . He works with great care at his scholarship,
while doing everything he can to advance his literary career,
by traveling all over the country ~ and even Europe ~ to meet
writers, acquire contacts, and arrange for readings of his work . . .
he dresses like a boy of 30 yrs ago, wearing jeans, sandals, a sport
shirt with the sleeves rolled up . . . Often, he has sores around
his mouth and looks exhausted, yet at other times he shows up

with suntan, bearing himself like a steel worker’s vigorous son
who’s ready to conquer the world of letters and neon-lights . . . he
insists on being exactly as he pleases and, for that reason, may
never live at all, in spite of his enormous energy, intelligence, and
terrifying honesty . . . he too, like A & G, is desperate to be young . . .
Whitman is an American male transcendental Mme. Bovary, a

voyeur into the unconscious life of America ~ Why do we love
him so? Because he glorifies our materialism and justifies our
imperialism and because he tells us everything will be alright.
If I were capable of making a film I’d do a companion to Brecht’s

“Little Old Lady” ~ it would be about my father, an old man
confined to a convalescent home, imprisoned, forced to live
among strangers, his memories and all the sources of his life
going out one by one like streetlights in his brain, the world
fading like a family album before his eyes . . . Then, one day in
summer, his son comes and takes him out and brings him to a
little, rambling, old fashioned village, no bigger than a city block
. . . and there are all his friends and fellow workers, all the people
he has loved and been happy with, and even himself as a child, a
boy, a young and hopeful man . . . everyone greets him, even the
dogs, the sun is shining, Sullivan County 50 yrs ago can be seen in
the distance . . . he laughs, he cries, he shakes everybody’s hand,
he smiles again the way he did before his mouth froze like an
empty ditch in his thin, old face . . .
The little station ringing its bells a mile away, a few sheep floating
home at midnight . . . floating over the town at night
The spider who lives in the rosebush becomes a bud, then

whitens and dies, like my mother . . .
Pencil Shavings: a beggar’s crown, a birthday cap for fairies, the

wings of a butterfly who was born in a mound of sawdust.
My father looks like a walking scab, a staggering bib covered

with slobber, breakfast, lunch . . . his hand shakes like a spastic
counting money, like a mad old spider stumbling in its web . . .
Mozart ~ an angel enjoying his impeccably orchestrated

melodious bones . . .
Ginestier concentrates on how poets relate to machinery through

mythology. This only shows how clever Ginestier is and how poets
have failed to deal with machines directly.
To hell with reality. I prefer, when I walk through a door, to believe

I’ve walked through a wall . . .
Your cities crystallize they expand

—saliva in the mouth of darkness
consuming themselves
Hide, the stars are bacteria
Girls laugh dogs bark the cars

scream, strangled by curves . . .
birds those books that open in the air

and close their pages in a tree
awake and go mad—
chewing the bones of their old songs.
Flies rush, glittering, ________ everywhere.
Towns, little galaxies in the hills

the stars, little towns in the sky
the railroad tracks a ladder
leading to the towns the stars
at dawn they disappear like dew
twilight shatters the mirror of day

where we see ourselves in the others
the broken glass of our day
shines on everywhere in the dark
The desert lies below

like a huge leaf
dry river beds are its veins
a city’s little lights, all
arranged in patterns, rows,
like a circuit box . . .
I believe black people are often considered more beautiful

than white people because they can be seen better, especially
during the day time or whenever the light shines on them . . . but
white people have their own peculiar beauty when they come,
suddenly, out of the dark, like the moon, a streetlight, ghosts . . .
One could make something of this purely visual fact. A black
woman once told her grandson that God made white people that
way so they could be caught when stealing from others at night . . .
I suppose a white person would say the reverse is true, blaming it
on Satan . . .
Still, the music of black people lacks what I would call soul. It has
the vigor of physical and social reality and is, therefore, superior
in some ways to western classical music, as the best folk music
often is. Yet I, personally, feel the older I get that I want something
~ I don’t know what ~ more satisfying than an expression of
humanity at its most ordinary moments.
An interesting aspect of _________ poetic revolutions is the
paradox that lies in their reliance on prose to set them free of the
past while, at the same time, they seem to be rebelling against the
rational character of prose.
Longfellow’s poetry, for example, wasn’t really influenced by his

work in translation, because he knew the languages from which
he did most of his translating and believed in making a strict
English equivalent of the original ~ Whitman, on the other hand,
was influenced not only by Emerson’s prose style but also by the
bible, and works of eastern religion, which were translated in
a semi-ecstatic prose . . . today, also, American poets are being
influenced by poetry in translation. But the translations are
prose by comparison with the originals . . . therefore, the poets
can concentrate on only one aspect of poetry, the metaphor—or,
as in the case of the projective verse poets, they try to create
imaginative effects by typographical emotion . . .
Just as critics and cultured people select the literature that will
continue to be read, the common people select the songs they
will continue to sing . . . the difference is that the first group
makes its choice according to standards that seem more complex
than the latter’s; while the latter, if the truth were really told,
decides entirely according to its sense of reality and pleasure . . .
Why do the critics insist on trying to understand Marvell’s death

of Faun through religion & philosophy? Isn’t it because the text of
the poem doesn’t supply them with sufficient knowledge of the
occasion ~ or reason ~ for which it was written? Do his satires
arouse such speculation, once one is familiar with their historical

background? Perhaps, if one were to place M’s lyric poems within
another a context other than the usual intellectual, a context such
as Appleton house, one could speculate more less imaginatively
& more sympathetically with concerning the origin of their
composition. Poems are not the result of a logical reaction to life;
nor are they prose that rhymes. Writing of this sort is only read by
scholars and students, not by people seeking for a recreation of
that expressi experience . . .
Poetry & Prose ~ esp. the novel ~ differ from each other in one
essential way ~ the novel forces you to live someone else’s life as
if it were your own; while the lyric poem allows you to re-live with
great intensity the essence, not the events, of your own life.
I float alone in my car

powerful at peace
the day a shattered mirror
lies like the galaxy
below, as I descend
from a hill . . . Now
only the mind, that _______
computer exists . . .
Irony: a defensive gesture which suggests deep feeling but

actually conceals an ambivalence, a lack of compassion, perhaps
even hatred . . .
People believed the story teller because of his dramatic narrative

skill ~ he aroused their imagination ~ now, because of TV &
movies, people prefer to see a story and let the form do all the
work. What will become of people?
The apples of France

are small and wrinkled
like little grandmothers
But bite into one
The apples of America

are huge they shine
like movie stars
like plastic
bite one and taste
America
and birds those books

thumbed by the wind
And the television set

Ganglia dangling its picture tube
on the floor resembles
a man who has lost his head
I carried her an armful

of loose twigs
wrapped in yellow dress / like sunlight
her long blond hair
like a breeze full of sparks
from the wrong wire
her eyes were wet leaves
like the eyes of animals
she couldn’t talk
The desire to be TV images, not human beings limited by their

bodies, gravity, time, etc ~ free, full of endless power & sensations
~ to be miraculous objects in an electronic paradise, conscious

currents of delighted energy [conscious currents delighted by
gratified energy] ~ We have replaced heaven and all our myths
with the world of TV images . . .
B. Singer & P. Roth appeal to Jews because they portray the Jewish
people as being ordinary human beings, not the chosen people
one finds in Rabbi Nachman, Peretz, or Sholem Aleichem, or
even Agnon. So, if the Jews have really become Gentiles, then
why exterminate them? Such writers are part of the trend toward
assimilation, which is inspired by physical fear and spiritual
fatigue.
Sometimes I think that a longing for the ineffable ~ all the

delicate rhetoric and exquisite gesturing that accompany as
revelation of desire for the radiance hidden behind the garish
wall of daily life ~ is really a glorification of moral weakness and
an unconscious expression of shame for one’s concealed lust
The paintbrush
has a vaginal voice
I feel its thirst
the spring in its bristle
an angel enjoying its bones
Poetry gives pleasure, but the pleasure it gives isn’t merely

aesthetic. The method is aesthetic, but the real pleasure lies in the
truth which the poetry expresses. Therefore, the ultimate pleasure
of poetry is moral, not entertaining, and is not to be confused
with its method.
The mystery which always intrigues man is his bestial origin, how
he would behave if liberated from social restraint.
the two principal forms of fascination this takes with the average
mind are sex and murder.
The superior mind, however, concerns itself with the miracle of

how life could produce in each generation a few people capable
of trying to be human.
I love a style that’s like

a razor blade
rippling at the edge
A Candidate’s Spleen
The English Professor Speaks to the Doctoral Candidate
I heard a haughty critic crow,

if only you knew what I know.
He raised an academic quill:
read Murray Krieger and then you will.
Baudelaire despises the fad / or long poems & praises the short
poem. He criticizes the use of drugs, saying they are of no help to
either the businessman or the Artist.
Bert Meyers’s Words on Poetry
(contains two paragraphs of “Bert on Poetry”)
My favorite poets are Issa, Blake, Baudelaire, and Emily

Dickinson; but I prefer folk songs and fairy tales to literature.
I worked for more than fifteen years at various kinds of manual

labor and during that time I met many men and women who
could see and speak as poetically as those who are glorified by the
printing press and the universities.
I don’t argue anymore about taste. I have my own standards,

which I feel are right. Yet I’m sure they’ll change, as they have in
the past.
But who knows what poetry is? I think we do, when we see it, with
the same instinct as when we spot a beautiful face in the street,
no matter what country we’re in.
Now, I’d say poetry’s the right combination of music, rhythm,

beauty, ambiguity and truth in words; and that great poetry is
something people can read or listen to for hundreds of years,
because it tells them how it feels to be alive in a way they never
grow tired of.
To me, the most profound lines of poetry are from the nursery
rhyme
Why does the lamb love Mary so?

Mary loves the lamb, you know.
***
(Bert on poetry ________ & translation)
I worked for more than fifteen years at various kinds of manual

labor and during that time I met many men and women who
could see and speak poetically as those who are glorified by the
printing press and the university.
I don’t argue any more about taste.
I think the most important influence on recent American poetry

has been the model provided by foreign poetry in translation.
Since imagery is the only aspect of poetry that can be translated,
a kind of prose poem—or prosm, as Ponge called it—has been the
logical result.
One difference between poetry and prose used to be that in poetry

the right hand margin was never arbitrary. The prose poem was
invented by French poets who wished to be free of this convention
at times, because traditional forms couldn’t wouldn’t yield to the
pressure of what they had to say. Yet, if one reads the prose poems
of Bertrand, Baudelaire, or Rimbaud in the original, one sees that
this form is no more arbitrary than the traditional poem.
Many people in America are writing what looks like poetry. They
imitate the appearance rely learn from translations usually made
by people who can’t read the originals; so, we have a body of work
a literature something that resembles poetry typographically,
either the conventional poem or the prose poem only in
typographically appearance.
Often, they have important things to say, but they don’t want
to be restricted by form. Yet why should any one for whom life
is both difficult and wonderful read such their work more than
once?
Perhaps we’re entering a new era; one in which the old standards
are becoming extinct. Disposable art, disposable lives, etc. Or, a
great poet in English will soon take the best of the present and the
past and give us what we’re waiting for.
But who knows what poetry is? I think we do, when we see it, with
the same instinct as when we spot a beautiful face in the street,
no matter what country we’re in. Great is that combination of
words
My own belief is that poetry’s the right combination
people can read or listen to for centuries because it tells them

how it feels to be alive in a way they never grow tired of.
Images and Notes from Journals 1972–75
The Hebrew alphabet—

a radiant row of tortured angels
Swaying in a window covered with rain.
1975
We were so poor
and lonely,
we thought it rained
only on our house . . .
1974
When it rains and the windows

are grey, weeping like grandparents,
and the bright world’s gone away,
Suddenly, you tell me
everything depends on the number three.
Then, we talk until the moon strikes one.
1973
The street reflects the stars . . .
the quiet street

dark water
full of stars . . .
1973
A parking lot’s a set

of watercolors in a tray.
One by one, the colors
grow wheels and disappear.
The headlights begin to glow.
1974
And some pass, the twisted, lame,

whose eyes are ash-trays, chamber pots,
mistakes made by the great machine.
A man so thin, he could travel

in an envelope;
a lady whose face is a wad of gum.
1974
We, too, wrote our names

in blood and sweat
on the walls of our time.
1974
A lost dog in this world,

trying to cross the freeway.
1974
Everson Reading—he read an hour long poem about his sex life,
comparing its ups and downs, etc, with the course of a powerful
river through the American landscape ~ a bi-centennial event
~ the metaphysical fascism of ecological lust orchestrated by a
Hollywood director who read Hopkins and Jeffers . . . (religion,
alliteration & rhythm)
What shit!
1976
A face, a whole neighborhood,

Can disappear like trash . . .
Since my father died,

my mother floats away
on her sofa, over the past,
seven floors above the ground . . .
1972
I tried lots of women

cards liquor and pool
now all I can say is
I was a damn fool
I’ve been in the factory

I’ve worked in the shops . . .
I’m as glum as a flag . . .
taken down from the mast
1976
Wm Stafford—the northwest’s Robert Frost, St. Francis of the

suburbs, the good, gentile troubled boy scout of American Verse,
a poet of wrinkled distances, of tame frontiers . . . the frontier at
the fingertips, behind the forehead, under the slippered footstep
. . . sly, plain as milk, homogenized, not very nourishing . . .
1974
I knew a lady
who looked like a seagull
You think that’s funny
It’s not
they took her away
twisting her head
flapping her arms
but the marvelous gulls
go where they please
1974
The pebble’s a rigid little blob which, according to the fly, will
never be small or disappear . . . It’s absolutely ignorant and needs
children, for example, to teach it how to live ~ to build, to surf, to
lie around and glow when desire lands upon it . . . Sometimes, it
smells like rain smeared on an iron plum’s pit . . . helpless thing in
the hand that wants to throw it away . . .
1976
Sometimes, I think Yeats rang a silver bell in a church made of

ashes. Any one who reads “Lapus Lazuli” without realizing what
a sinister snake hides in that garden of rhetoric, is still hypnotized
by that sonorous mastery of rhythm and vowels. People, when
they can’t find another reason, praise Pound for his “ear.” But who
ever honored a man for being a radar station? I think Yeats also
needs to be criticized for all his vulgar platitudes, although he,
more than other modern English poets, could make abstractions
seem more real than our daily lives. Yet, his poems on women
or old age are banal, for the way they portray sex as a kind of
celestial gasoline and never deal with love.
1973
Invisible wells hopping around,

ecstatic power lines . . .
1974
Osborne looked at the book I was reading and asked what it was.
Blake, I said, Have you read him? He giggled, then smirked and
sat down at the table across from me, dipping a tea bag in a cup
of hot water . . . Blake’s alive, again in Sta. Monica, he whispered
. . . He twisted his neck and squirmed around in his stomach and
back, like a long sack that something was struggling to get out
of . . .
1974
They howled confessed

discovered their breath
and explored their depths
they scrounged among
translations for images
creative tourists
they filled their palms
with animals with ghosts
with American Indians
then they got tired
and came home
to praise their drunks
their cities their medio critics
soon they’ll wallow
in patriotism
1974
The desire for roots—

a romantic, parasitic
relationship
with those who produce
and had traditions
will lead us to fascism . . .
1974
There’s an ideal world portrayed at ease on a tapestry, but look at

the back, the other side in the dark against the wall . . . a slum of
loose ends, tangled in despair, like the rose garden’s roots . . . And
the “perfect” man, carved in his flesh, born in his shoes; but you
know a mad cell in his marble is xeroxing itself and that a dark
alley full of bays smells like a fish in the shadows of his brain . . .
1974
Concrete poetry ~ intelligent people who can do anything well

with their brains: engineers, physicists, advertising artists,
typographers, etc. . . . but nothing well enough to be considered
significant or necessary . . . they need an outlet for personal
expression, their energy, intelligence, but they lack the moral or
visionary concerns that contribute to a real artist’s need to create
~ they don’t know to convey the experience of love, hate, fear,
etc, in an imaginative and convincing way . . . So, they choose
the media of abstract art: painting, concrete poetry . . . because
art is the only medium in a state of chaos without commonly
accepted laws, rules, etc ~ an open form in which they can assert
authority without having to earn it . . .
1974
dog’s after birth ~ smells like wet leather mixed with liver, cold
metal, and a damp dirty wash-rag . . .
1972
Man who was handsome, approaching 45, looks at a young lady

in a coffee shop ~ she’s reading a book while eating a hamburger,
stops now & then & puts a finger to her mouth, astonished, as
if she’d just learned something horrible . . . man’s vague sexual
urge vanishes in a feeling of tenderness ~ he thinks of how his
daughter will be at that age . . .
1972
These young people from wealthy families are peculiar ~ they ask
such questions or stare so dumbly when someone simply talks
about life, you’d think they were born as little photographs which
hung on their parents’ walls and grew there until they reached life
size . . . then, someone pushed a button and they stepped down
from their frames and marched off to college . . .
1973
A Short History of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Sent as a letter to his good friend Sac Van Bercovitch, Professor
Emeritus in American Literature at Harvard, in the early 1970s
Dear Saki,
Around 1912 modern poetry began with the imagists ~ [Ezra]

Pound, H. D., etc. Imagist poems were short, prosaic in diction,
and free verse in form. Their style became formalized in Arthur
Waley’s translations from the Chinese, which were begun after
1916. The various styles in Pound’s Personae (1912–1918?) reflect
a desire for models other than those found in the English
language. The first great wave of translations from “modern”
French poetry probably began in the latter half of the 19C with
Swinburne and [Arthur] Symons—[Charles] Baudelaire, [Paul]
Verlaine, [T.] Gautier, etc. Translations of Rimbaud and [Andre]
Breton, as well as [Paul] Eluard, [Henri] Michaux, [Luis] Aragon,
etc, began to appear during the 2nd World War. Generally
speaking, the tone of American poetry between 1918 and 1950,
let’s say, was determined by [T. S.] Eliot and the New Critics,
ie, metaphysical, well-made, ironic, etc. Examples, aside from
major poets, would be [Alan] Tate, [John Crowe] Ransom, [Karl]
Shapiro, [Robert] Lowell, etc. After the 2nd World War poetry,
like painting, became more international in style. American
poems (some, that is) began looking for models outside the
English tradition. Surrealism offered the best way of restoring
the unconscious, the irrational image, a contemporary sense of
reality, free verse, etc, to an honorable role in making poems. This
process occurred in other countries, eg, Turkey, China, Korea,
Japan, Spain, Latin America, earlier than in the U.S. Except for
Dylan Thomas, David Gascoygne, Edith Sitwell, etc, English
poets haven’t been influenced by surrealism. In Germany, since

1945, poets are using a neo-surrealist style, combined with the
expressionism that characterized their poetry and their painting
around 1910–1918. In the U.S. since 1950 American poetry has
developed in two principal directions—(1) the prosaic, rational
American voice dependent on erratic speech rhythms, influenced
by Pound and [William Carlos] Williams (2) the surrealist-like
metaphorical release of the unconscious using rhythms that
resemble those of translated poems. The latter style tries to avoid
all the traditional devices of prosody, such as alliteration, rhyme,
and the “meaning” that lies in vowel-consonant relationships
and in the play of speech rhythm vs. meter. Instead, the meaning
comes from the image, the most easily translatable part of a
poem. Such poems tend to all sound alike, and could have been
written anywhere. In this way they are “international” like non-
objective painting, junk sculpture, and electronic music. In the
1960s Robert Bly began a magazine in which he criticized the
establishment, and advocated the poetry (in translation) of such
men as [Juan Ramon] Jiménez, [Gottfried] Benn, [René] Char,
[Pablo] Neruda, etc, as more rewarding models for American
poets. He also reviewed and criticized the work of new American
poets, such as W. S. Merwin, James Dickey, Louis Simpson, John
Logan, James Wright, etc. Bly’s criticism consisted chiefly in
attacking their tendency toward using abstraction, traditional
forms, and their fear of the unconscious. Also, he deplored their
harsh attitude toward women, their lack of reference to animals,
and their assumption that man is a “superior” being apart from
the rest of nature. With the exception of Dickey each of these
poets has broken away from the style Bly criticized and begun to
write poems that resemble what I earlier called the international
style. Both groups of post war American poets show a social
consciousness, unlike their predecessors who dealt with the more
conventional subject matter of poetry in an ironic tone. Those

influenced by Pound and Williams, such as [Robert] Creeley, Leroi
Jones, Charles Olson, [Louis] Zukovsky, etc, criticize their culture
and its relationship to the world, as do the neo-surrealists who
follow Bly’s criticism. The neo-surrealists, however, seem to be
concerned with a “deeper” sense of international reality than
the Pound-Williams group, which expresses a more aggressive
nationalism—ie, a more “American” vocabulary, and a rejection of
foreign models. One could, perhaps, polarize characterize the two
groups as being expressive of the old struggle between Classic
(Pound-Williams, etc.) and Romantic (Bly, etc.). Actually, though,
the neo-surrealists reveal a sense of being—of the irrational,
the fearsome, the darkness, etc—that one finds throughout pre-
first World War poetry and pre-2nd World War poetry in Europe.
Indians re-appear, for example, in the poetry of Simpson and
Wright in a way no one since Whitman used them. Now, however,
the Indians represent what is uncorrupt and suppressed in the
American character. Animals are identified with a “personified,”
something unusual in English language poetry since Ruskin and
Eliot. The Beat poets, such as Ginsberg and Corso, have been
influenced by surrealism, but mainly by the surrealist tendency
toward “convulsion,” excitement, the uninhibited or automatic
flow of imagery usually released by drugs, ecstasy, hallucination,
etc. Their revelations usually assert a private religious experience
which claims cosmic significant, whereas the poets directly or
indirectly associated with Bly maintain a quieter tone, a less
compelling rhythm, and a more subtle use of imagery.
Love,
Bert
Articles on Bert Meyers
and His Poetry
■ 255 ■
“Cello” by Garrett Hongo*
I n school at Pomona College in Southern

California I took on extra courses my sophomore
year to fulfill some requirements. I wanted the lux-
ury the following term to study with Bert Meyers, a
poet I’d heard about who taught at Pitzer College,
an affiliated school in the same town. You could
cross-register, and the course would count for my
graduation. Other students I’d admired had studied
with him, and they’d written poems that impressed
me. I had to find out about this poet. I wanted to
study with Bert Meyers.
I’d seen him around the combined campuses.
He was a Jew. The story was, Meyers himself had
never gone to college but had been admitted to a
graduate school in literature on the strength of his
poetry. He’d been hired, then, without completing
the Ph.D. He was a poet. His face was sharp like an
axblade’s, his hair silvery and wiry and full of curls,
ruffled like the surface of a lagoon just before a big
rain. It rode up against one side of his head and
seemed to crest there and hold itself like the high
face of a large wave, poised just before crashing.
—————————————————————————
*
From Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii by Garrett Hongo.
Copyright © 1995 by Garrett Hongo, used by permission of
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
256 ■ Articles on Bert Meyers and His Poetry
He had eyes like a dromedary and smoked long brown unfiltered

cigarettes that came in a red cardboard box. But it was his voice,
a deep and resonant baritone rising to tenor, that summoned
everyone when he spoke. It seemed to me that he did not actually
speak, but was softly bowing, with the velvet cords in his throat,
the strings of a tiny Cremona cello that was embedded there. His
sentences came slowly, lavishly, with music and deliberation as
if they were scored. At a public lecture, I heard him talk about
“Baud’laire,” and it seemed as if he were speaking of a beautiful,
sickened forest, restored to life by energetic rains. He talked about
Aimé Césaire of Martinique, about the Caribbean and the poetry
of “Négritude,” and his words sparked fresh thoughts through
my mind concerning my own native land. A visiting poet from
the Midwest, decked out in a varicolored Mexican poncho, once
teased him about the largeness of his eyes, and Meyers said, “Fuck
you” out loud and flipped the arrogant visitor the bird. I decided
this Meyers guy was for me. I took his class the next term.
It met in the evening, and I arrived a little late for the first ses-
sion. The poet nodded to me to take the only seat available, which
was next to him in the small seminar room. There were less than a
dozen others in the class, all scruffy and long-haired, pseudo-hip-
pie types of the middle to upper class.
I noticed Meyers had brought his own thermos of coffee to
class, a big blue-and-silver stainless-steel thing like the one my
father carried to work on the night shift. The poet sipped while the
little workshop of student poets talked.
A man with long blond hair and a puckered face that gathered
down to a ginger beard introduced the topic of Walt Whitman and
his homosexuality. A woman with long, braided brown hair, smell-
ing of patchouli oil, cited some critics and a discussion she’d been
involved in at a writers’ conference in Vermont that past summer.
I felt awe at how complicated their acquaintanceship with the
Articles on Bert Meyers and His Poetry ■ 257
subject was, how socialized. I’d barely begun to read poetry, let
alone discuss it with adults in a public place.
The poet said “That’s bullshit,” then proceeded to provide
us with an extended critique of this particular journalistic and
decidedly unliterary approach to the discussion of Whitman. He
said that Whitman was a poet who may have been gay, who may
not have been gay, but what was important about him was that
he had this feeling for humankind, for the wounded lying in the
Union hospitals, for the workers and builders and teamsters and
for women that compelled him to write a strange, prosaic, but
chant-like non-metric verse, slightly imitative of what he thought
Indian vedic scripture was like, slightly imitative of what he
thought Native American storytelling and ceremonial chant were
like, and taking off on what he’d vaguely heard about as vers libre
from the French; borrowing certain common American religious
ideas; joining all of them to what he felt was the elite fashion of
literary transcendentalism; and from that, he, Walt Whitman, a
newspaperman and profound sentimentalist, had accomplished
the building, along with Emily Dickinson, a spinster, of what had
come to us as our American poetry. Homosexuality was not the
issue, nor was heterosexuality. It was poetry that was the issue and
he, Meyers, would not allow our discussions to be turned over
to whatever fashionable or scholarly controversies had arisen to
divert attention away from what was important. Poetry was poetry,
he said, and although gay rights and women’s rights and minority
rights were important, it was poetic content and poetic style and
poetic tradition which we would emphasize, and not the social
controversies, not the debunking and not the dismissing. Unlike
my usual literature professors who cultivated a studied mildness,
Bert Meyers had passion, he had opinions, and he was not afraid
to state them. He had an attitude, and he felt confident in exposing
us to it. And that attitude had the music of eloquence.
There were some student poems handed out and read. Meyers
said critiques would begin the following week. He ended the class
session by reading aloud some translations from postwar Polish
poetry—poems commemorating the work of rebuilding the coun-
try and its culture in the aftermath of World War II. He read from
a pamphlet—an issue of a literary magazine. No books were yet
available, he said. When he was finished, he tucked the pamphlet
into his outer coat pocket, reassembled his coffee thermos, and
started for the door. He asked if I’d walk with him, as I’d said noth-
ing during class and it puzzled him.
We left the building through a glass door. His wife and teen-
age son and daughter were there to meet him. They were walking
the family dog, a black Labrador, and invited me to trail along. We
trudged back through a foggy night, across asphalt tennis courts,
azalea-lined walks, and under olive trees through one college’s
campus and then another. I found myself walking beside the poet,
who’d produced a pipe and was having trouble keeping it lit. He’d
stop from time to time, relighting the tobacco, and I’d stop with
him to keep him company.
“I know why you’re so pissed off,” Meyers said, sucking on the
stem of his pipe. Sprinklers hissed on a lawn somewhere nearby.
His wife and children and dog were up ahead of us. I was stunned,
fixed to the sidewalk in my sturdy tennis shoes. He stared at me.
“Your parents were in those Camps,” he said, and a puff of
smoke swirled around the dark blade of his face.
He said he’d been a kid in high school in Los Angeles. It was
World War II, a few months after Pearl Harbor. He was a gym-
nast at Marshall High. There were lots of Japanese American kids
in his school. He’d grown up with them. He’d gone to the pic-
nics in MacArthur Park, where the Nisei would bring their kids
every weekend and share food—rice balls and fish cakes and
sweet pieces of marinated meat—he’d run around, he was a kid
and could ask anyone, a Jewish kid with his Jewish parents, Sephar-
dic Jews from Spain via Brooklyn, and he’d grown up with them,
playing baseball, stealing hubcaps, trying to get dates, when, all
of a sudden, one morning, all the Japanese American kids were
gone! Just gone. He couldn’t believe it. Our government had
taken all of them, rounded them up like cattle and marched
them off into trains and shipped them away to God-knows-
where, to Kingdom Come, to concentration camps in the desert.
His schoolmates were stunned, but everyone seemed to accept it
after a while. His father Manuel raged about it at home. It was a
crummy deal.
But Meyers knew about it. He could tell me. He could look into
my eyes and see into the history I was not myself ready to address,
to live by. He knew part of my story, the part no one else knew or
seemed to want to know, and he said he would help me with it. He
was telling me that. I followed him.
“Secrets of a Teacher” by Jack Miles*†
On April 29, I happened upon a notice on an outdoor bulletin board

announcing that poets Garrett Hongo and Maurya Simon would
read that afternoon at Pitzer College. I admire the work of both.
Though I had other work to do, I decided to seize the moment.
As it turned out, that afternoon Hongo and Simon were reading
not their own work, but poetry by their late teacher, Bert Meyers. I
had never read Meyers, but his work, as they recited it, was better
than good: rhymes that fell as delicately on the ear as a petal on
water; images of a perfection so hard and poignant that the breath
caught, the muscles froze. Hongo and Simon read Meyers with an
affectionate fierceness. Their grief that he was gone seemed close
to the surface. His picture stood beside them on a simple tripod as
a reminder.
As a prelude to their reading, Hongo read a memoir of his
first steps toward Meyers and, equally important, Meyers’ first
steps toward him. Meyers’ poetry seminar “met in the even-
ing, and I arrived a little late for the first session. . . . The poet
nodded to me to take the only seat available, which was next to
him in the small seminar room. There were fewer than a dozen
others in the class . . .
—————————————————————————
*
Copyright, 1994, Los Angeles Times. [May 29, 1994.] Reprinted with
permission.
†
The material from Hongo’s essay quoted here came from an earlier version
of “Cello” that Hongo gave to Jack Miles after the reading. Hongo revised
the essay into its final form and later published it as part of his memoir,
Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii, in 1995.
“A man with long, blond hair and a puckered face that gath-
ered down to a ginger beard introduced the topic of Walt Whitman
and his homosexuality. A woman with long, braided brown hair,
smelling of patchouli oil, cited some critics and some discussion
she’d been involved in at a writers’ conference in Vermont that past
summer. I felt awe at how complicated their acquaintance with
the subject was, how socialized. I’d barely begun to read poetry, let
alone discuss it with adults in a public place.”
But Meyers was notably less impressed than Hongo—at the
time a scholarship boy from South-Central Los Angeles—with
the socialization being shown off. Of homosexuality as the key to
Whitman, he said:
“‘That’s {crap},’ then proceeded to provide us with an extended
critique of that particular, journalistic and decidedly unliterary
approach to the discussion of Whitman. He said that Whitman
was a poet who may have been gay, who may not have been
gay, who might have been multi-sexual or asexual or non-sexual
in whatever physical way, but what was important about him
was that he had this feeling for humankind, for the wounded
dying in the Union hospitals, for the workers and builders and
Teamsters and for women that compelled him to write a strange,
prosaic but chant-like non-metric verse, slightly imitative of
what he thought Indian Vedic scripture was like, slightly imita-
tive of what he thought Native American storytelling and ceremo-
nial chant was like, and taking off on what he’d vaguely heard
about as vers libre from the French; borrowing certain common
American religious ideas; joining all of them to what he felt was
the elite fashion of literary Transcendentalism; and, from that,
he, a newspaperman and profound sentimentalist, had accom-
plished the building, with Emily Dickinson, of what had come to
us as our American poetry. Homosexuality was not the issue, nor
was heterosexuality.”
Whew! Bert Meyers was formidably learned, but the rumor that
he was a college dropout was true. He had taught himself to write,
won admission to graduate school on the strength of his poetry
alone, dropped out before completing his doctorate and found
work at Pitzer at first only as a kind of substitute teacher. Soon
enough, the college recognized that he was a brilliant teacher as
well as a gifted poet; but when told he had been awarded tenure,
Meyers asked, “Why?”
Hongo obviously cherished the memory of that first torrential
disquisition, but the learning stood in service to something that
he cherished more: “Bert had an attitude, as is said in the ghetto,
and it pleased me he felt confident in exposing us to it. And that
attitude had the music of eloquence.”
As that first class ended, Meyers asked his new student to walk
him home, “as I’d said nothing during class and it puzzled him.”
“We trudged back through a foggy night, across asphalt ten-
nis courts, azalea-lined walks, and under olive trees through one
college’s campus and then another {Claremont is home to five}.
The poet produced a pipe and was having trouble keeping it lit.
He’d stop from time to time, relighting the tobacco, and I’d stop
with him to keep him company, to stay in the aura of his regard.
“‘I know why you’re so pissed off,’ he said, sucking on the stem
of his pipe. Sprinklers hissed on a lawn somewhere nearby. His wife
and children and dog were up ahead of us. I was stunned, fixed to
the sidewalk in my sturdy tennis shoes. He caught my eye.
“‘Your parents were in those camps,’ he said, and a puff of
smoke swirled around the dark blade of his face.
“He said he’d been a kid in high school in Los Angeles. It was
World War II, a few months after Pearl Harbor. He was a gymnast
at Belmont High. There were lots of Japanese American kids in
his school. He’d grown up with them . . . playing baseball, stealing
hubcaps, trying to get dates, when, all of a sudden, one morning,
all the Japanese American kids were gone! Just gone. He couldn’t
believe it. Our government had taken all of them, rounded them
up like cattle and marched them off into trains and shipped them
away to God-knows-where, to Kingdom Come, to concentration
camps in the desert. His schoolmates were stunned, but everyone
seemed to accept it after a while. His father raged about it at home.
He felt it was a crummy deal.
“Bert knew about it. He could tell me. He could look into my
eyes and see into the history I was not myself ready to address, to
bring up, to live by, and he told me it was all right. He knew part
of my story, the part no one else knew or seemed to want to know,
and he would help me with it. He was telling me that.”
Bert Meyers, a Sephardic Jew whose parents had come to Los
Angeles from Spain via Brooklyn, knew why Garrett Hongo was
pissed off at a time in Hongo’s life when Hongo himself did not
know. Yes, Hongo’s parents had been in the camps. This was to
be one of Hongo’s subjects, among those that would win him the
Lamont prize in 1987, but he didn’t know it yet. How did Meyers
know it? He couldn’t, in fact, have had more than a hunch, but
such hunches only come to teachers who are watching their stu-
dents’ every move, thinking about them with intelligence and love,
and willing to push them to the brink to open their eyes. That kind
of teacher tends also to be the kind who insists, with the aggres-
sive edge that Meyers brought to his discussion of Whitman, that
“it doesn’t matter” whether you are gay or straight, or Asian or
Caucasian, or name your polar pair.
Why does it work this way? Because only those who believe
that group identity is secondary acquire the habit of attending to
the individual as primary. Not all Japanese American writers are
called to write about ethnic identity. With the wrong Japanese
American student, Meyers’ “I know why you’re pissed off” could
have been a clumsy and perhaps a crippling mistake. Meyers took
a chance, then, but he was the kind who watches closely enough to
know when and with whom to take such a chance. In the individual
identity of this Japanese American student, there was indeed some
specifically Japanese American literary work to be done. If Meyers
had not believed that his own Jewishness, his own group identity,
was as finally irrelevant, however undeniable, as Whitman’s homo-
sexuality, he would have been blinded to his own individual iden-
tity, not to speak of Hongo’s. Fortunately, it was not Meyers’ way (it
has become, unfortunately, too often the American way) to elevate
the group above the individual.
Poetry proceeds by a heightening of the precision and clarity
of ordinary perception. Meyers, to judge from what was said about
him at the memorial service, brought some of this precision to his
perception of people. Those who know he loved them know also
that he knew them, or so it seemed as they spoke. Meyers’ person-
ality is remembered as hot and prickly rather than warm and fuzzy.
Simon recalls him saying to her once, in a burst, “Be on guard!”
But vigilance was evidently just another variety of attention in an
exceptionally attentive man.
It is now common for teachers of writing, poetry included, to
say with becoming modesty that they merely teach the craft, the
part that can be taught. The craft counts, of course. Meyers, the
college dropout, was a frame maker by trade, proud of the fineness
of his work, and as careful about words as about wood. But nothing
was clearer from Hongo’s story than that Meyers also taught things
that allegedly can’t be taught.
One of Meyers’ poems is “Apprentice”:
Because
I love you
I’ve learned to be
this hammer that runs
all day like a horse

with its hoof in its head.
In the afternoon
my hands
lie down together
for a minute.
Meyers taught his students to prepare for the obsessive-

ness that all artists must endure, “like a horse with its hoof in
its head.” He taught them how to recognize the exceptional, as
Whitman was exceptional, and honor it. He showed them how,
for love, to tell a stranger that you know his secret. This is what the
very greatest literature does: It tells you a secret you didn’t know
you were keeping.
Meyers’ body of work is small; but small as it is, it deserves to
be reissued and brought to a new audience. Al Wachtel, a Pitzer
colleague, calls Meyers “an imagist born out of time,” referring
to a post-Romantic movement in French and English poetry that
sought, rather than exalt emotion, to displace it from where the
reader might expect it to some unexpected place. Imagist poems
are often easy on first reading, deceptively casual, like haikus; they
become deep or difficult, paradoxically, only on repeated read-
ing. Meyers, who knew that his unbreakable tobacco habit would
eventually kill him, displaced his despair from the cigarette, where
it was expected, to the teacher’s stump of chalk, where it wasn’t:
Smoke waters the flowers

that grow in the lungs.
The cigarette, like your life,
is a piece of chalk
that shrinks as it tries to explain.
The imagist part of Meyers’ spirit may be the part that Maurya
Simon has taken away. There was no more intense moment in
the memorial service than her reading of Meyers’ dry-eyed “The
Poets,” a poem apparently written near the end of his life:
There he sat among them

(his old friends) a walking ash
that knows how to smile.
And he still dreamed of a style
so clear it could wash a face,
or make a dry mouth sing.
But they laughed, having found
themselves more astonishing.
They would drive their minds

prismatic, strange, each wrapped
in his own ecstatic wires,
over a cliff for language,
while he remained to raise
a few birds from a blank page.
As she read him, one believed it possible.

Any stranger happening on this memorial reading would have
guessed, as I did, that Meyers had just recently died. And been
wrong: He died fully 15 years ago. American memories are said
to be short, student memories shortest of all. Teach what can’t be
taught, though, and your students will remember you forever.
■ 269 ■
About the Author
B ert Meyers was born in Los Angeles on

March 20, 1928. Months before graduating
from high school, he decided to drop out and
become a poet. Over the next eighteen years, he
worked first at a number of manual labor jobs,
including janitor, carpenter’s apprentice, and
worker at an airplane factory, and then became
a master picture-framer and gilder. Although
he had never taken undergraduate classes,
in 1964 he was admitted to the Claremont
Graduate School on the basis of his poetic
achievements. By 1967, he had completed all
work for a Ph.D. in English literature and was
hired to teach poetry workshops and literature
at Pitzer College. Over the years he published
his poems in many journals and in five books.
In 1979, shortly before his death at the age of
fifty-one, Meyers assembled a slim volume
of those poems he considered his best work.
For twenty years, his widow, Odette Meyers,
attempted to get the manuscript published, but
finally turned to Bert’s friend, Morton Marcus,
for help. After Odette passed away, Marcus and
Meyers’s son, Daniel, searched through Bert’s
private papers and enlarged and restructured
the collection in order to provide a sense of
Bert Meyers as a man as well as the poet. The
result is In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat.

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In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat

Mary Burritt Christiansen

V. B. Price, Series Editor

Also available in the

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

Deeply Dug In by R. L. Barth

Amulet Songs: Poems Selected and New

Tiempos Lejanos: Poetic Images from the Past

Refuge of Whirling Light

The River Is Wide/ El río es ancho:

A Scar Upon our Voice by Robin Coffee

CrashBoomLove: A Novel in Verse

Rebirth of Wonder: Poems of the Common Life

Morton Marcus and Daniel Meyers

foreword by Morton Marcus

introduction by Denise Levertov

university of new mexico press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meyers, Bert, 1928–1979.

All photos herein are family photos reproduced courtesy

design and composition: Mina Yamashita

From The Dark Birds (Doubleday and Co., 1968)

From Sunlight on the Wall (Kayak, 1976)

From The Wild Olive Tree

From The Blue Café—Poems

The Blue Café—songs for Anat and Daniel

Articles on Bert Meyers and His Poetry

About the Author / 269

I have been asked to write a foreword to this vol-

his unique, mesmerizing images and subtle rhythms. In poem

different publishers who were handling my work, and I thought

had signed to do Bert’s collected poems sunk into bankruptcy and

B ert Meyers’ death has deprived us of one of the

Night lifts the moon like a coffee cup

and the joyful sound

All around me, butterﬂies,

It is apparent that Meyers himself recognized, and cultivated,

And here are also ﬁlthy streets,

Though he did not like “engaged” poetry, feeling that it violated

Nothing but gray seen through the arch

And in a poem such as “Saigon” (though I believe he decided to pull

Their smiles are gun belts,

Around them, the landscape’s

In this poem his humor (like James Stephens’ in “A Glass of Beer”)

May your wife go to paradise

His eye is keen as an animal’s; in “Paris” he sees that

O.K., any of us would have seen that. But he sees more:

Its sides are chipped

That’s a detailed observation both of the loaf and of its analogue

The crust looks warm, dented,

That’s the reward of ﬁdelity to the object, of a humble, intense, dis-

In a little square, a man

Here we have four lines of plain description, “poetic” only in their

On the horizon, late at night,

The difference between such simile and the immediacy of a mon-

Passengers board the ship at twilight.

light matches—they become

The syntactic difference is called for not merely because altars

From Early Rain (Alan Swallow Press, 1960)

Because There’s So Much Speed

Because there’s so much speed

I like the subtle snail:

Day and night, in its world,