I always wonder what they think the niggers are doing while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists, are containing Russia and defining and re-defining and re-aligning China,
Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.
The work has been going forward with the greatest difficulty, chiefly because I cannot concentrate. I have no feeling about whether what I am writing is good or bad, and the whole business is totally without excitement and pleasure for me. And I am sure I know the reason. It’s that I can’t stand leaving unresolved my situation with Pat. I hear from her fairly frequently, asking when I plan to come back, and she knows that I am supposed to appear at the poetry reading in the middle of January. It is not mainly loneliness I feel, though I feel it; but I have been lonely before. It is quite frankly the feeling that nothing is really settled between us, and that in the mean time I worry about how things are going to work out. This has made my work more difficult than it has ever been before.
– From a letter to his parents dated November 9, 1955, Rome.
Hardly enough for me that the pail of water Alive with the wrinkling light Brings clearness home and whiter Than mind conceives the walls mature to white, Or that the washed tomatoes whose name is given To love fulfill their bowl And the Roman sea is woven Together by threading fish and made most whole.
Kids once carried tin soldiers in their pockets as charms against being afraid, but how trust soldiers these days not to load up, aim, blast the pants off your legs?
I have a key-chain zebra I bought at the Thanksgiving fair. How do I know she won't kick, or bite at my crotch? Because she's been murdered, machine-gunned: she's dead.
Also, she's a she: even so crudely carved, you can tell by the sway of her belly a foal's inside her. Even murdered mothers don't hurt people, do they?
And how know she's murdered? Isn't everything murdered? Some dictator's thugs, some rebels, some poachers; some drought, world-drought, world-rot, pollution, extinction.
In prologue let me plainly say I shall not ever come to that discretion where I do not rage to think I grow decrepit, bursten-bellied, bald and toothless, thick of hearing, tremulous of leg, dry and rough-barked as a hemlock slab, the soft rot setting in and all my wheezy dreams the tunnelling
Somehow your letter was no surprise (and I think you knew that it was no surprise or you would have tried to break the news more gently); somehow I think we understand what the other is going to say long before we say it—a proof of love and, I think, a protection against misunderstanding. So I've been expecting this letter for five weeks now—and I still don't know how to answer it.
Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you—Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price I paid, the oath I signed to write poetry.
I think that someday you'll enter Bohemia—not for me (I'm not worth the price, no human being is), but for poetry—to see the windows and maybe blast a few yourself through the rocks of hell. I'll be there waiting for you, my arms open to receive you.
But let's have these letters go on, whether it be days, years, or never before I see you. We can still love each other although we cannot see each other. We will be no farther apart when I'm in Berkeley than we were when I was in Minneapolis. And we can continue to love each other, by letter, from alien worlds.
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