To Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey
Were you guys lucky, too, to caddy, the light
on freshly-sprinkled fairway delicate and bright as eye of an
Indiana owl
or glitter of fish flickering in the Shedd Aquarium of the
imagination,
the tough but tender touch of leather socks covering the cobra-
headed clubs, the crack
of brassie on golf ball like whip of mule skinner filling all Death
Valley;
or to anoint oneself in grease and oil, sweating
beneath the belly of a car or truck in the pit in Shimskis' Garage
in Homewood;
or to find felicity at Marshall Field's as a stockboy numb and
dazed by rawboned, adolescent lust, stumbling about
beneath a pyramid of boxes past models cooly on parade
among the customers all day, filling immaculate brassieres
with flesh like fortune cookies and in silken Oriental half-slips
as I sweat like Sydney Greenstreet examining the statue of the
Maltese Falcon in his hotel suite;
and to fight, like a goddamn fool, in Navy alleys behind
black-and-tan saloon in Minneapolis, my iron ring, its
longhorns, slashing, can open up a cheek;
and to sweat out a basketball game of one-on-one, the comments
cryptic and intense as a fragment by Archilochos;
and to pitch papers onto porches on a bike route as if your arm
were Bobby Feller's blazing corncobs at a knot-hole in Des
Moines;
to cut the uncut hair of graves beneath an R. Crumb "Keep on
Truckin'" sun large as a lemon drop, and to hawk cufflinks
made by Swank as well as cashmere sweaters from the
Shetland Isles, to scrub as if they had the London Plague of
Robert Greene dying in a bed of straw in Cheapside Gran
Canyons filled with dirty dishes in the Phi Gam kitchen in
Bloomington, to tool around behind wheel of Checker taxi as
if it were a chariot in a race in Babylon, to tote the 85¢ YWCA
Blueplate Special to the widows of the ghosts of pioneers, to
mix drink behind the bar as if concocting cocktails for Long
John silver and Blind Pew or Bathhouse John and wee,
shrewd Hinky Dink, to create a 100 half-moons in a night by
manipulating the control box in this elevator roomy as a
shoebox purchased by Paul Powell here in a hotel with its 50
bags full of the fleas of Illinois—
this great, unique chance to hear the language where it lives.
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