Trout Fishing in America (15 page)

 

It's not quite cold enough
to go borrow some firewood
from the neighbors.

 

 

I am desolate in dimension
circling the sky
          like a rainy bird,

 

wet from toe to crown
wet from bill to wing.

 

I feel like a drowned king
at the pomegranate circus.

 

I vowed last year
that I wouldn't go again
but here I sit in my usual seat,
   dripping and clapping

 

as the pomegranates go by
in their metallic costumes.

 

          
December 25, 1966

 

 

Alas, they get
their bottles
from a small
neighborhood store.
The old Russian
sells them port
and passes no moral
judgment.    They go
and sit under
the green bushes
that grow along
the wooden stairs.
They could almost
be exotic flowers,
they drink so
quietly.

 

 

Oh, pretty girl, you have trapped
yourself in the wrong body.    Twenty
extra pounds hang like a lumpy
tapestry on your perfect mammal nature.

 

Three months ago you were like a
deer staring at the first winter snow.

 

Now Aphrodite thumbs her nose at you
and tells stories behind your back.

 

 

for Emmett

 

Death is a beautiful car parked only
to be stolen on a street lined with trees
whose branches are like the intestines
   of an emerald.

 

You hotwire death, get in, and drive away
like a flag made from a thousand burning
   funeral parlors.

 

You have stolen death because you're bored.
There's nothing good playing at the movies
   in San Francisco.

 

You joyride around for a while listening
to the radio, and then abandon death, walk
away, and leave death for the police
   to find.

 

I lift the toilet seat

as if it were the nest of a bird

and I see cat tracks

all around the edge of the bowl.

 

 

Every time we say good-bye
I see it as an extension of
   the Hindenburg:
that great 1937 airship exploding
in medieval flames like a burning castle
   above New Jersey.
When you leave the house, the
shadow of the Hindenburg enters
   to take your place.

 

 

There is a woman
on the Klamath River
who has five
hundred children
in the basement,
stuffed like
hornets into
a mud nest.
Great Sparrow
is their father.
Once a day
he pulls a
red wagon between
them and
that's all
they know.

 

 

It's so nice

to wake up in the morning

all alone

and not have to tell somebody

you love them

when you don't love them

any more.

 

I walked across the park to the fever monument.

It was in the center of a glass square surrounded

by red flowers and fountains.   The monument

was in the shape of a sea horse and the plaque read

We got hot and died.

 

I don't care how God-damn smart
these guys are:   I'm bored.

 

It's been raining like hell all day long
and there's nothing to do.

 

Written January 24, 1967 while poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology.

 

 

Her face grips at her mouth
like a leaf to a tree
or a tire to a highway
or a spoon to a bowl of soup.

 

She just can't let go

with a smile,

the poor dear.

 

No matter what happens

her face is always a maple tree

Highway 101

tomato.

 

 

You've got
some “Star-Spangled”

nails

in your coffin, kid.
That's what
they've done for you,

son.

 

 

I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea.

 

 

Adrenalin Mother,
with your dress of comets
and shoes of swift bird wings
and shadow of jumping fish,
thank you for touching,
understanding and loving my life.
Without you, I am dead.

 

 

The wheel:   it's a thing like pears

rotting under a tree in August.

O golden wilderness!

The bees travel in covered wagons

and the Indians hide in the heat.

 

 

For Marcia

I want your hair
to cover me with maps
of new places,

 

so everywhere I go
will be as beautiful
as your hair.

 

 

The Chinese smoke opium
in their bathrooms.
They all get in the bathroom
and lock the door.
The old people sit in the tub
and the children sit
on the floor.

 

 

Driving through
hot brushy country
in the late autumn,
I saw a hawk
crucified on a
barbed-wire fence.

 

I guess as a kind
of advertisement
to other hawks,
saying from the pages
of a leading women's

magazine,

 

“She's beautiful,
but burn all the maps
to your body.
I'm not here
of my own choosing.”

 

 

At 1:03 in the morning a fart
smells like a marriage between
an avocado and a fish head.

 

I have to get out of bed
to write this down without

my glasses on.

 

 

I am the sawmill
abandoned even by the ghosts
in the middle of a pasture.

Opera!
   Opera!

The horses won't go near
my God-damn thing.
They stay over by the creek.

 

 

Every time I see him, I think:
Gee, am I glad he's not

my old man.

 

 

A trout-colored wind blows
through my eyes, through my fingers,
and I remember how the trout
used to hide from the dinosaurs
when they came to drink at the river.
The trout hid in subways, castles
and automobiles.   They waited patiently
for the dinosaurs to go away.

 

 

When I was six years old
I played Chinese checkers

with a woman

who was ninety-three years old.
She lived by herself
in an apartment down the hall

from ours.

We played Chinese checkers
every Monday and Thursday nights.
While we played she usually talked
about her husband
who had been dead for seventy years,
and we drank tea and ate cookies

and cheated.

 

 

For M

 

The sweet juices of your mouth
are like castles bathed in honey.
I've never had it done so gently before.
You have put a circle of castles
around my penis and you swirl them
like sunlight on the wings of birds.

 

 

We are a coast people
There is nothing but ocean out beyond us.
—Jack Spicer

 

I sit here dreaming
long thoughts of California

 

at the end of a November day
below a cloudy twilight

near the Pacific

 

listening to The Mamas and The Papas

THEY'RE GREAT

 

singing a song about breaking
somebody's heart and digging it!

 

I think I'll get up
and dance around the room.

 

Here I go!

 

 

With his hat on
he's about five inches taller
than a taxicab.

 

 

2
A.M.
is the best time
to climb the silver stairs
of Ketchikan and go up into the trees
and the dark prowling deer.

 

When my wife gets out of bed
to feed the baby at 2
A.M.
, she turns
on all the lights in Ketchikan
and people start banging on the doors
and swearing at one another.

 

That's the best time
to climb the silver stairs
of Ketchikan and go up into the trees
and the dark prowling deer.

 

 

January 26, 1967
at 3:15 in the afternoon

 

Sitting here in Los Angeles
parked on a rundown residential

back street,

staring up at the word

HOLLYWOOD

written on some lonely mountains,
I'm listening very carefully
to rock and roll radio

(Lovin' Spoonful)
(Jefferson Airplane)

while people are slowly
putting out their garbage cans.

 

 

For Marcia

 

Your necklace is leaking
and blue light drips
from your beads to cover
your beautiful breasts
with a clear African dawn.

 

 

A piece of green pepper

fell

off the wooden salad bowl:

so what?

 

 

Magic is the color of the thing you wear
with a dragon for a button
and a lion for a lamp
with a carrot for a collar
and a salmon for a zipper.

 

Hey! You're turning me on: baby.
That's the way it's going down.

 

   WOW!

 

 

Saturday, August 25, 1888.   5:20
P.M.
is the name of a photograph of two
old women in a front yard, beside
a white house.   One of the women is
sitting in a chair with a dog in her
lap.   The other woman is looking at
some flowers.   Perhaps the women are
happy, but then it is Saturday, August
25, 1888.   5:21
P.M.
, and all over.

 

 

The moon like:
mischievous bacon
crisps its desire

 

(while)

 

I harbor myself
toward two eggs
over easy.