A Poem A Day #12

WHY FLOWERS CHANGE COLOUR

These fresh beauties (we can prove)
Once were virgins sick of love,
Turn'd to flowers. Still in some
Colours go and colours come.

- Robert Herrick



Robert Herrick, noted Royalist and vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire, was the earthiest and easily the most accessible of Ben Jonson's many 17th century followers.  His lines have been a staple of the wooing repertory for nearly 400 years, and his poems, though laden with the allusions and archetypal figurations expected of poets of the time, are still vibrant in their language and directly communicative to the modern reader.  Any collection of Herrick's work is sure to be boldly romantic, possibly lusty, and probably quite funny.

Here's one of his best and most well-known (and most anthologized) works.




DELIGHT IN DISORDER

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction :
An erring lace which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly :
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat :
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility :
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

- Robert Herrick








Legal notice:
Some may feel that the inclusion of works not in the public domain is a violation of the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. I obviously do not agree, but I will gladly defer to the wishes of the rightsholder, and if anyone wishes for a post of their work or work for which they own the intellectual rights to be taken down, they may ask for its removal and it will be so. I claim no ownership and have no rights as to the works I will be posting, save for any that were written by me.

A Poem A Day #11

"Do not go naked into that good night..."

Today's poem is a humorous and thoughtful piece from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, legendary owner of the City Lights bookstore and one of the leaders of the Beats.

I've always been kind of ambivalent about the Beat movement.  To me their work seems inextricable from its place and time, and generally more concerned with the revolutionary fervor of the writer than with the technical achievement and quality of the finished works.  Which is all well and good in the author's mouth, spoken with relish at a reading or performance, but on paper, alone, seems empty and pretentious.

But, in its defense, empty pretentiousness can be an awful lot of fun, and I am totally in favor of it.  I often engage in the practice myself.  I just want to acknowledge its presence, and for things to be called what they are.

So here's one that I think knows what it is, and revels in it.






UNDERWEAR

I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something
we all have to deal with
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind
You have seen the underwear ads
for men and women
so alike but so different
Women’s underwear holds things up
Men’s underwear holds things down
Underwear is one thing
men and women have in common
Underwear is all we have between us
You have seen the three-color pictures
with crotches encircled
to show the areas of extra strength
and three-way stretch
promising full freedom of action
Don’t be deceived
It’s all based on the two-party system
which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice
the way things are set up
America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night
Underwear controls everything in the end
Take foundation garments for instance
They are really fascist forms
of underground government
making people believe
something but the truth
telling you what you can or can’t do
Did you ever try to get around a girdle
Perhaps Non-Violent Action
is the only answer
Did Gandhi wear a girdle?
Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?
Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?
And that spot she was always rubbing—
Was it really in her underwear?
Modern anglosaxon ladies
must have huge guilt complexes
always washing and washing and washing
Out damned spot
Underwear with spots very suspicious
Underwear with bulges very shocking
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom
Someone has escaped his Underwear
May be naked somewhere
Help!
But don’t worry
Everybody’s still hung up in it
There won’t be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults
in the geological sense—
strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!
If I were you I’d keep aside
an oversize pair of winter underwear
Do not go naked into that good night
And in the meantime
keep calm and warm and dry
No use stirring ourselves up prematurely
‘over Nothing’
Move forward with dignity
hand in vest
Don’t get emotional
And death shall have no dominion
There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy
Don’t shout

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti






Tomorrow: the Way-Back Machine.




Legal notice:
Some may feel that the inclusion of works not in the public domain is a violation of the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. I obviously do not agree, but I will gladly defer to the wishes of the rightsholder, and if anyone wishes for a post of their work or work for which they own the intellectual rights to be taken down, they may ask for its removal and it will be so. I claim no ownership and have no rights as to the works I will be posting, save for any that were written by me.

A Poem A Day #10

Every writer I know has a favorite Theodore Roethke poem.  One that they know well, that they've studied and poked at and that has crept into a corner of their own style.  Most have several.  His poems are accessible, beautiful, direct, subversive, and indelible, so influential they have become a part of nearly everything since.

This is my favorite Roethke, at the moment (these things are known to change).  It's not as elegant or technically perfect as "The Waking;" not as rich and laden with image as "Root Cellar;" not as lucidly moving and somber as "Elegy for Jane;" but I love it for its voice, and for its humor.  Think of it as another scene in the world of yesterday's poem, taking place across town.




THE GERANIUM

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine--
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!--
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--
And that was scary--
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

- Theodore Roethke







Tomorrow we'll get out of noir-world for a while, go somewhere with colors.




Legal notice:
Some may feel that the inclusion of works not in the public domain is a violation of the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. I obviously do not agree, but I will gladly defer to the wishes of the rightsholder, and if anyone wishes for a post of their work or work for which they own the intellectual rights to be taken down, they may ask for its removal and it will be so. I claim no ownership and have no rights as to the works I will be posting, save for any that were written by me.

A Poem A Day #9

Today's poem is an atmospheric, secretive piece by Henri Coulette.  His work calls to mind Columbus poet Will Dockery for me, as both of their work seems to exist in a shrouded other-world: for Dockery it is Shadowville, which we'll address in another column; for Coulette it is the smoky noir Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler, full of spies and madams and detectives and liars, people with secrets hanging out in scuzzy hotel rooms and putting out cigarettes in empty bottles of cheap beer.  He only published two books, and nearly every copy of the second was accidentally pulped and destroyed by the printer.  He lived in L.A. all his life, and worked in the publicity department at RKO before he became a professor (he is often credited with being the one that saved all the publicity stills from Citizen Kane, which otherwise would have been discarded).

This poem, from his first book "War of the Secret Agents and other poems," is so deep in Coulette's dark alternate world that you can see Philip Marlowe sitting by himself down at the other end of the bar, with his hat pushed back on his head, looking at his drink, thinking.  But it's the voice of the poem's speaker that's most interesting.  The character is drawn in a few nasty strokes, just a few lines from inside his head, and yet there's a sense of who he is, and where he's going, and how bad things will be when he gets there.






AT THE TELEPHONE CLUB

We sit, crookbacked, at the bar,
each of us with his own telephone,
all of us with the same itch.
The tight-assed operator
in the opera stockings
--the only one worth having--
hovers, wisely, out of reach.
She has got all our numbers.

My phone rings: it's the matron
with lost eyes and a horse jaw.
I get rid of her: I have
an ugliness within me,
whole as I am not, a kind
of sleeping cancer.  Who needs more?
I listen to the broken
English of an Amsterdam

blonde, seduced in her twelfth year--
it was summer!-- by a man
in a Silver Cloud, but I
can have her now for the price
of a taxi ride.  I can
have her in a Murphy bed,
while the roaches on the sink
stiffen their fine antennae.

I would, I would, dear lady,
but I have a plane to catch,
one piloted by a sly
Tibetan.  I have a date
with some porters in the snow.
I buy her a Grasshopper,
and slip out into the night.
How cold the stars are, how clear!

- Henri Coulette










Legal notice:
Some may feel that the inclusion of works not in the public domain is a violation of the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. I obviously do not agree, but I will gladly defer to the wishes of the rightsholder, and if anyone wishes for a post of their work or work for which they own the intellectual rights to be taken down, they may ask for its removal and it will be so. I claim no ownership and have no rights as to the works I will be posting, save for any that were written by me.

A Poem A Day #8

Here are a couple from one of my favorite books of poetry, a slim paperback volume published in 1966 by Scholastic, compiled by Dunning, Lueders and Smith, called "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle... And Other Modern Verse."  It contains some of the sharpest and most luminous short poems of the middle 20th century, by almost all of the midcentury imagist masters, and is geared toward young people getting into poetry.  It is one of the most fun, startling and perfect introductions to modern poetry one could have, and it's still in print: http://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Watermelon-Pickle-Stephen-Dunning/dp/0688412319

My copy is a beat up fourth edition from '68.  The pages are warped and orange, the cover dog-eared and stained and shredded around the edges.  The name "Vilma Salaveria" is written in crabbed cursive all down the inside cover, in different inks and pencils, and over to one side the name "M. Jane Collins" signed in an adult's practiced hand, and the first page has ".50" marked in the top right corner.  It's clearly been around.  Several poems have words circled in pencil or a underlined in pen.  I love books like this.  There's more input than just that of the editor or collector; there are other hands, unknown, that have something to say, that pass on part of their experience with this book; that show me what they were into when they read it whenever ago.

These two poems are pretty representative of the book's contents.  The first, by Beatrice Janosco, was the linchpin of my understanding of metaphor, and a perfect example of a poem that throws two shadows.




THE GARDEN HOSE


In the gray evening
I see a long green serpent
With its tail in the dahlias.

It lies in loops across the grass
And drinks softly at the faucet.

I can hear it swallow.

—Beatrice Janosco





The second is a gorgeous list poem by Elizabeth Coatsworth, which in its meditations gains a rolling, sure-footed rhythm and a broad expanse of visual power, expressed in the lightest and most graceful of ways.




SWIFT THINGS ARE BEAUTIFUL

Swift things are beautiful:
Swallows and deer,
And lightning that falls
Bright-veined and clear,
Rivers and meteors,
Wind in the wheat,
The strong-withered horse,
The runner's sure feet.

And slow things are beautiful:
The closing of day,
The pause of the wave
That curves downward to spray,
The ember that crumbles,
The opening flower,
And the ox that moves on
In the quiet of power.

- Elizabeth Coatsworth






So, that's a week so far.  How is this working?  Let me know if you folks are reading this, and if it's doing anything for you.  More tomorrow.




Legal notice:
Some may feel that the inclusion of works not in the public domain is a violation of the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. I obviously do not agree, but I will gladly defer to the wishes of the rightsholder, and if anyone wishes for a post of their work or work for which they own the intellectual rights to be taken down, they may ask for its removal and it will be so. I claim no ownership and have no rights as to the works I will be posting, save for any that were written by me.

A Poem A Day #7

That's enough of this seriousness.  Let's have a silly poem.

One of my all-time favorites will be making an appearance here today, and there are so many ways to appreciate it.  It first appeared in lines from the great comic strip "Pogo," and appeared in several collections of Pogo strips and Pogo merchandise in its present form.  It was also recorded in song form on the excellent album "Songs of the Pogo" by Walt Kelly and Norman Monath.  They Might Be Giants did a fine cover of it.  Seek it out in any of these forms and you'll find some other treats worthy of your attention as well.

I have little to say about the poem itself; it's a moment of crystallized genius.  The final couplet has been a front-runner for my personal motto for years.




LINES UPON A TRANQUIL BROW

Have ever, while pondering the ways of the morn,
Thought to save just a little bit, just a drop in the horn,
To pour in the evening or late afternoon
Or during the night when we're shining the moon?
Have you ever cried out, while counting the snow,
Or watching the tomtit warble hello...
"Break out the cigars, this life is for squirrels;
We're off to the drugstore to whistle at girls."
?

- Walt Kelly




Tomorrow: serious business.



Legal notice:
Some may feel that the inclusion of works not in the public domain is a violation of the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. I obviously do not agree, but I will gladly defer to the wishes of the rightsholder, and if anyone wishes for a post of their work or work for which they own the intellectual rights to be taken down, they may ask for its removal and it will be so. I claim no ownership and have no rights as to the works I will be posting, save for any that were written by me.

A Poem A Day #6

Today there are a couple new things.  This is the first column to feature a woman.  It's also the first column to feature "new" works, in that they are from the last couple of years.  Also, this is the first column to feature a poet that isn't canon, that is to say, that those outside certain communities will not have heard of.  These are good things.

I'll be using two poems by Chelsea Bullock today.  Chelsea is a young fashionista and writer and lives in Oregon with her husband.  She was in a couple of creative writing classes I took at CSU, and these two poems really stuck with me after the class was over.  They both also saw publication in the CSU Arden.

The first is an exercise in sound and image, and also stars everybody's favorite CSU professor, Dr. David Schwimmer, who is also a fine guitarist and collector of folk songs.  I don't know if anyone has pointed this poem's existence out to Dr. Schwimmer, but someone should.  This is one to read out loud, and have the pleasure of making the sounds yourself.




GEOLOGY 1121

flint, jasper, jet
coquina, chalk, micrite
diorite, gypsum, and scoria,
volcanos, shards of mineral and rock --

he says, "there's no mystery in how it formed!"

swears at the whiteboard marker then
heaves it toward his pet granite by the door
hikes up his antique Levis--
sighs at his steel box of gems

- Chelsea Bullock





The next is another vignette, this time chilling as well as lovely.  It takes on one of the hardest of forms, the pantoum, a form created by the devil for inducing cranial hemorrhaging in writing students.  It's a rotating repetition form, where the entire line is repeated, such that if the first stanza is ABCD, the next must be BEDF, and the next must be EGFH, and so on, the second and fourth lines of the previous stanza becoming the first and third of the next.  And the last stanza must feature the return of the A-C from the first, completing the circle.  "Firestuffs" is only three stanzas, the shortest form in which all the principles of the form are at work.  It's a fine example, and the swinging of the axe is of a piece with the form, the repetition making a steady, gently rocking pace that gains tension as it progresses, until the chill of the last turnaround descends and there us just the sound of the axe in the hollow air.




FIRESTUFFS

The axe's dull weight scared me--
Its blunt might no matter of reckoning.
You swung rapidly, with force,
Almost every cut splintery clean.

Its blunt might no matter of reckoning,
The wood gave every time,
Almost every cut splintery clean.
Log met dirt, hollowing the air around it.

The wood gave every time.
You swung rapidly, with force and
Log met dirt, hollowing the air around it.
The axe's dull weight scared me.

- Chelsea Bullock





I'll let the poet have the final word, from a 2007 interview:

How do you know when a poem is finished?
"A ray of sunlight warms my face, and then a bluebird comes and lands on my right shoulder."









Legal notice:
Some may feel that the inclusion of works not in the public domain is a violation of the fair-use doctrine of US copyright law. I obviously do not agree, but I will gladly defer to the wishes of the rightsholder, and if anyone wishes for a post of their work or work for which they own the intellectual rights to be taken down, they may ask for its removal and it will be so. I claim no ownership and have no rights as to the works I will be posting, save for any that were written by me.

A Poem A Day #5

On Mondays this column will feature several very short poems. Today we'll start this series with a sampler of the ultimate in short poetry, the haiku.

The word "haiku" is a relatively new invention which came into vogue in the 20th century. Before that it was known as "hokku," which means "starting verse." Originally the hokku was the first part of a two-part stanza called the haikai (it is by combining these two words that modern critics coined the term "haiku"), which means "unusual" or "offbeat." Haikai was a social activity, similar to some drinking songs or the hoedown at the end of "Who's Line Is It Anyway?," in which the participants each improvise a verse of a collective poem. The resulting haikai-no-renga poems were often hilarious and scatological, and the style was a popular alternative to the austere formality of the waka/tanka poems of the Court nobility, or the powerful Shoguns. Around the end of the 17th century, Basho and his followers began to take the hokku section on its own, and turned it into something entirely its own, which retained some of the wit and surprise of the haikai poems, but took on a new sensitivity and gravity.

Everyone knows the haiku form, which in its traditional form is a single poem of 17 syllables, typically divided into three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. Additionally, strict tradition demands that the poem be on the subject of nature and contains a seasonal reference word, or kigo, to establish a context in the time of year. This could be the actual name of a season, or something more subtle, like a mention of birds' nests to indicate late spring/early summer. And, almost uniquely among poetic forms, traditional haiku is impervious to revision. The poem is to be written at the moment of inspiration, without conscious filtering, and once committed to paper is indelible, not to be changed.

These are fairly stringent requirements by the standards of modern poetry, and there are many things on the internet and off that ignore some or all of the rules and call themselves haiku. I will not disagree, but I will note that there is another relatively new word that was created specifically to address this new breed of poems that do not contain 17 syllables, or present kigo, or address a subject other than nature, or use the first person. The word is "senryu," and it generally connotes more comic verse, but traditionalists will apply it to anything that doesn't meet the above criteria.

I'll devote this column to a selection of traditional period haiku (or rather, hokku) poems. Future columns will address other traditional zen forms, as well as senryu, tanka and others. Attention will also be paid to Western short forms and short poems. But for now, here are some haiku. Keep in mind that translators of Japanese verse often ignore the 17 syllable rule in pursuit of representing the image in a way that is as sharp and beautiful in English as in the original form.




Green willows
paint eyebrows on the face
of the cliff

- Arakida Moritake (1472-1549), trans. Cheryl Crowley



What a beautiful moon! It casts
the shadow of pine boughs upon the mats.

- Takarai Kikaku (1661-1707), trans. Asatoro Miyamori



Under the rainclouds
The plum blossoms seem like stars
Despite the daylight

- Uejima Onitsura (1661-1738), trans. Cheryl Crowley



Even after waking
From the dream
I'll see the colors of irises.

- Ogawa Shushiki (1669-1725), trans. Alex Kerr



The evening breezes -
The water splashes against
A blue heron's shins.

- Yosa Buson (1716-1783), trans. Donald Keene



Under cherry trees
there are
no strangers

- Kobayashi Issa (1763-1867), trans. Lucien Stryk



The tree cut,
dawn breaks early
at my little window.

- Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), trans. Janine Beichman




Tomorrow, something modern.

A Poem A Day #4

As promised, today I have a poem from the star of yesterday's piece, Charles Baudelaire.

This also presents an opportunity to examine an angle that has always interested me, and that I'll come back to whenever possible: translation. Baudelaire wrote primarily in French, as is the case with this poem, and whenever we read his work in English, we're actually reading a kind of de-facto collaboration, or in some cases we're actually reading the work of another poet, the translator. Here, for reference, is Baudelaire's original pseudo-sonnet, in French:


LE REVENANT

Comme les anges à l'oeil fauve,
Je reviendrai dans ton alcôve
Et vers toi glisserai sans bruit
Avec les ombres de la nuit;

Et je te donnerai, ma brune,
Des baisers froids comme la lune
Et des caresses de serpent
Autour d'une fosse rampant.

Quand viendra le matin livide,
Tu trouveras ma place vide,
Où jusqu'au soir il fera froid.

Comme d'autres par la tendresse,
Sur ta vie et sur ta jeunesse,
Moi, je veux régner par l'effroi.

— Charles Baudelaire



I know a piddling amount of French, but I could hardly claim to be able to make proper sense of his complex, poetic phrasing, certainly not enough to be able to read it as a poem and not a strenuous exercise. So we'll start with two translations from 1952 and 1954, respectively, that seem to be fairly literal, in a basic match-the-word sense. They seem closest to the actual French of those I found, with a few notable changes. Personally I prefer the first, by Roy Campbell, for its dedication to the meter and rhyme of the original and the form, and I believe the juxtaposition of the last lines in Aggeler's translation was ill-advised, and takes away the power of the last line. Campbell's is not without it's oddities, however ('brown delight,' anyone?).


THE GHOST

Like angels fierce and tawny-eyed,
Back to your chamber I will glide,
And noiselessly into your sight
Steal with the shadows of the night.

And I will bring you, brown delight,
Kisses as cold as lunar night
And the caresses of a snake
Revolving in a grave. At break

Of morning in its livid hue,
You'd find I had bequeathed to you
An empty place as cold as stone.

Others by tenderness and ruth
Would reign over your life and youth,
But I would rule by fear alone.

- trans. by Roy Campbell




THE GHOST

Like angels with wild beast's eyes
I shall return to your bedroom
And silently glide toward you
With the shadows of the night;

And, dark beauty, I shall give you
Kisses cold as the moon
And the caresses of a snake
That crawls around a grave.

When the livid morning comes,
You'll find my place empty,
And it will be cold there till night.

I wish to hold sway over
Your life and youth by fear,
As others do by tenderness.

- trans. by William Aggeler



But there's another style of translation, where the translating poet allows his or her own personality a freer reign over the writing, and the original work is thus transformed somehow by the will of the translator into a kind of collaborative poem, one poet's vision seen through the haze of another's. The following two translations are this kind of thing. The first is still similar in shape and rhythm to the original, but the translator demonstrates a much more colorful and idiosyncratic approach to choosing words and phrases (a grave becomes a cistern, 'phantom-wise,' etc). The second is even more of a break from the original. The four stanzas become two claustrophobic blocks of text, and the language is more urgent and ominous. It increases the effect of the poem quite nicely, but how much of that is Baudelaire, and how much is the translator?


THE REVENANT

Like angels with bright savage eyes
I will come treading phantom-wise
Hither where thou art wont to sleep,
Amid the shadows hollow and deep.

And I will give thee, my dark one,
Kisses as icy as the moon,
Caresses as of snakes that crawl
In circles round a cistern's wall.

When morning shows its livid face
There will be no-one in my place,
And a strange cold will settle here

Others, not knowing what thou art,
May think to reign upon thy heart
With tenderness; I trust to fear.

- trans. by George Dillon



THE GHOST

Like angels that have monster eyes,
Over your bedside I shall rise,
Gliding towards you silently
Across night's black immensity.
O darksome beauty, you shall swoon
At kisses colder than the moon
And fondlings like a snake's who coils
Sinuous round the grave he soils.

When livid morning breaks apace,
You shall find but an empty place,
Cold until night, and bleak, and drear:
As others do by tenderness,
So would I rule your youthfulness
By harsh immensities of fear.

- trans. by Jacques LeClercq




That's quite a bit of Baudelaire for one weekend. Tomorrow, something else.

A Poem A Day #3

Since it's Saturday, and I've got some time, a couple little departures.

First: I'm not tagging anyone on these anymore. It takes almost as long to go through the list and pick out people than it does to type the article. Plus, I don't want to pollute everybody's profile with one of these every day, until your entire wall is just a bunch of my notes. That's just uncalled for. So, I'll just post it, and hope that those who are interested will find it on their own, now that they know where to look.

Second: the poem today is a fairly long one, but it's a well-built machine and generates a fantastic return on your investment for reading it. Our poet is Richard Brautigan, better known as a novelist, but I prefer his poems for their linguisic brutality and lissome wit. He was of the more journalistic imagist school, relying for effect on pure images, and letting the connotations and meanings be inferred from the resulting mental tableau, a style of which yesterday's poet Robert Bly sternly disapproved (to his loss, perhaps).

The following poem is an extended play on this style, each image a vignette-style mini-poem within the whole. There's very little in the way of meaty poeticisms, the language is plain and unobtrusive, and the entire success or failure of the pieces, and of the whole, rely on the absurdity, humor, or poignancy of the vignettes. It succeeds for me, but perhaps I am tricked, so amused by the idea of taking already absurd, hippy-dippy situations and anachronistically inserting Charles Baudelaire that I miss that there is no poetic endoskeleton under the absurdity. What do you think? Is it a cosmic joke or just cosmic? Is Robert Bly right?




THE GALILEE HITCH-HIKER

The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
Part 1

Baudelaire was
driving a Model A
across Galilee.
He picked up a
hitch-hiker named
Jesus who had
been standing among
a school of fish,
feeding them
pieces of bread.
"Where are you
going?" asked
Jesus, getting
into the front
seat.
"Anywhere, anywhere
out of this world!"
shouted
Baudelaire.
"I'll go with you
as far as
Golgotha,"
said Jesus.
"I have a
concession
at the carnival
there, and I
must not be
late."


The American Hotel
Part 2

Baudelaire was sitting
in a doorway with a wino
on San Fransisco's skid row.
The wino was a million
years old and could remember
dinosaurs.
Baudelaire and the wino
were drinking Petri Muscatel.
"One must always be drunk,"
said Baudelaire.
"I live in the American Hotel,"
said the wino. "And I can
remember dinosaurs."
"Be you drunken ceaselessly,"
said Baudelaire.


1939
Part 3

Baudelaire used to come
to our house and watch
me grind coffee.
That was in 1939
and we lived in the slums
of Tacoma.
My mother would put
the coffee beans in the grinder.
I was a child
and would turn the handle,
pretending that it was
a hurdy-gurdy,
and Baudelaire would pretend
that he was a monkey,
hopping up and down
and holding out
a tin cup.


The Flowerburgers
Part 4

Baudelaire opened
up a hamburger stand
in San Fransisco,
but he put flowers
between the buns.
People would come in
and say, "Give me a
hamburger with plenty
of onions on it."
Baudelaire would give
them a flowerburger
instead and the people
would say, "What kind
of a hamburger stand
is this?"


The Hour of Eternity
Part 5

"The Chinese
read the time
in the eyes
of cats,"
said Baudelaire
and went into
a jewelry store
on Market Street.
He came out
a few moments
later carrying
a twenty-one
jewel Siamese
cat that he
wore on the
end of a
golden chain.


Salvador Dali
Part 6

"Are you
or aren't you
going to eat
your soup,
you bloody odd
cloud merchant?"
Jeanne Duval
shouted,
hitting Baudelaire
on the back
as he sat
daydreaming
out the window.
Baudelaire was
startled.
Then he laughed
like hell,
waving his spoon
in the air
like a wand
changing the room
into a painting
by Salvador
Dali, changing
the room
into a painting
by Van Gogh.


A Baseball Game
Part 7

Baudelaire went
to a baseball game
and bought a hot dog
and lit up a pipe
of opium.
The New York Yankees
were playing
the Detroit Tigers.
In the fourth inning
an angel committed
suicide by jumping
off a low cloud.
The angel landed
on second base,
causing the
whole infield
to crack like
a huge mirror.
The game was
called on
account of
fear.


Insane Asylum
Part 8

Baudelaire went
to the insane asylum
disguised as a
psychiatrist.
He stayed there
for two months
and when he left,
the insane asylum
loved him so much
that it followed
him all over
California,
and Baudelaire
laughed when the
insane asylum
rubbed itself
up against his
leg like a
strange cat.


My Insect Funeral
Part 9

When I was a child
I had a graveyard
where I buried insects
and dead birds under
a rose tree.
I would bury the insects
in tin foil and match boxes.
I would bury the birds
in pieces of red cloth.
It was all very sad
and I would cry
as I scooped the dirt
into their small graves
with a spoon.
Baudelaire would come
and join in
my insect funerals,
saying little prayers
the size of
dead birds.


San Fransisco
February 1958

-Richard Brautigan





Tomorrow there might be Baudelaire himself.