The People Look Like Flowers At Last Read online

the police helicopter keeps circling over the yard

  “what do they want?” I ask her.

  “they’re probably looking for you,” she says.

  this is not as far-fetched as you might think:

  I went into a bar one night with some friends

  and the owner came out from around the bar

  and asked to speak to me.

  “I don’t know if we can serve you or not,

  you must promise to be good,

  you created quite a fuss the last time you

  were here.”

  I promised him to be good and that night

  I drank under a great deal of strain.

  anyhow, the helicopter keeps circling

  and it is one o’clock in the afternoon

  but the night before it had circled and circled

  shining its beam into the backyard

  and into the crapper.

  it had circled for 45 minutes, then

  had left.

  now it is back.

  “what the hell?” I say,

  “they want you,” she says,

  “this is ridiculous,” I say.

  I walk into the backyard.

  there’s nothing out there:

  walnut trees, bamboo stalks, a discarded

  sofa and grass 3 feet high.

  I stand out there and watch the helicopter

  circling, circling.

  it finally leaves.

  I come back in.

  “I feel like John Dillinger,” I say.

  “you look like John Dillinger,” she says.

  I walk to the mirror.

  it’s true:

  I look like John Dillinger,

  but no woman in a red dress could ever

  finger me. I’m

  too smart.

  ah

  flamingo pain,

  burnt fingers trying to

  light the last of this

  joint

  in a place described

  by terrified ladies

  with money in their purses

  as a “rat hole.”

  “you can spit on the floor here,”

  I tell them.

  but no, from

  a safe

  distance, it appears

  they’d rather discuss

  my poetry.

  of course

  according to the latest scientific

  study

  it takes 325 years for the last

  brain cell

  to pop.

  now I realize that

  most of the girls

  I met in bars

  and brought home with me

  were lying about

  their

  age.

  the dream, the dream

  there is always some new Carmen just around

  some corner

  somewhere

  but then the Carmens never seem to

  last;

  the Carmens hardly last any time at

  all.

  I see this in the eyes of men

  everywhere—

  men sitting at lunch counters

  men driving buses

  men giving political speeches

  men pulling teeth

  men in tiger cages

  men I see everywhere…

  the man I see while I shave

  looks back at me through slit-eyes

  his Carmen also gone—

  that man (me) is now

  thinking about what that

  razor might really

  do, the thought is always

  there—

  but the game keeps us

  going: there is always some new Carmen

  waiting

  somewhere

  just around some

  corner.

  note on the tigress

  first, a terrible argument.

  next, we made love.

  now, at last, I lay peacefully

  on her large bed

  which is

  spread with a field of gracious flowers,

  my head and belly down,

  head sideways,

  sprayed by shaded light

  as she bathes quietly in the

  other room.

  it is all beyond me

  as are most things.

  I listen to classical music on a small radio.

  she bathes.

  I hear the splashing of water.

  poem for my daughter

  I spoon it

  in: strained chicken noodle dinner

  junior prunes

  junior fruit dessert.

  spoon it in and

  for Christ’s sake

  don’t blame the

  child

  don’t blame the

  govt.

  don’t blame the bosses or the

  working classes—

  spoon it down

  into that little mouth

  like melted

  wax.

  a friend phones:

  “whatya gonna do now, Hank?”

  “what the hell ya mean, what am I gonna

  do?”

  “I mean ya got responsibility now, ya gotta bring the

  kid up

  right.”

  I feed her instead:

  spoon it in!

  may she achieve

  a place in Beverly Hills

  with never any need for unemployment compensation

  and never have to sell to the highest

  bidder.

  and never fall in love with a soldier or a killer of any

  kind.

  and may she

  appreciate Beethoven and Jelly Roll Morton and

  beautiful dresses.

  she’s got a real

  chance:

  there was once the

  Theoric Fund and now there’s the

  Great Society.

  “are ya still gonna play the horses? are ya still gonna

  drink? are ya still gonna—?”

  “yes.”

  she is a waving flower in the wind and the dead center of

  my heart—

  now she sleeps beautifully like a

  boat on the Nile.

  maybe some day she will

  bury me.

  that would be nice

  if it weren’t a

  responsibility.

  sheets

  those sheets you’ve got there,

  said the old dame

  in the housewares dept.,

  are for a double bed.

  do you have a double bed or a

  single bed?

  well, you see, I answered,

  my bed is an unusual bed, it’s

  kind of a single-and-a-

  half.

  describe your bed, she said.

  what?

  describe your

  bed.

  I’d rather not, I said.

  well, said the old dame, I want you to

  know the sheets you’ve got there are

  for a double bed, and if you’ve got a single

  bed, it’s against the state

  law.

  what? I asked. say that

  again.

  I said, it’s against the state

  law.

  you mean? I asked.

  I mean, you can’t bring these sheets back

  after you’ve opened the

  package.

  all right, I said, give me a couple of

  singles.

  she treated
me then with comfortable

  disdain. I believe the old dame had been in

  sheets all her

  life. I think they should put young girls

  in the sheets dept.

  after all, sheets don’t make me think of sleep

  at all

  but something else

  entirely. especially crisp white new

  sheets.

  they ought to put old dames like her in

  dog food. or garden supplies. and

  when she gave me the singles I knew she knew I slept

  alone. like she

  did.

  three

  while most people

  converse it all away

  I

  write it down.

  sick leave

  there I am flat on my belly, Hem is dead, Shake is dead,

  the fish I have caught and eaten and shitted are dead

  and the doc is ramming a glass tube up my ass,

  a glass tube with a little light on the end of it,

  and I am hoping for a medical excuse

  for 2 more days of sick leave

  and the doc plays right along: “ya got some beauts there,

  you oughta be cut…” well, the White Russians used to

  cut a hole in a man and take hold of the end of the intestine

  and nail it to a tree and then force the man to

  run around and around the tree.

  he pulls the glass tube out of my ass

  and part of me along with it

  he has a face like a walnut and when his nurse

  bends over (which is often)

  her butt is like a big soft pillow or

  powdered doughnut, no blood, just clouds,

  and I say, “Doc, add a day to the excuse,

  I can feel the pain all the way down to my nuts…”

  “sure,” he says, “sure, I know a lot of boys

  from the Post Office, all nice boys.”

  at home I screw the cap off the bottle

  and have the first good one; it rained while he rammed me:

  the rain sits glittering in the screen

  like sugar flies eating dreams,

  and I split the Racing Form with my thumb,

  then call my bookie,

  “…give me 2 across on Indian Blood,

  5 win on Lady Fanfare, 5 place on The Rage.”

  I hang up and think softly of Kafka

  sleeping under the paws of gophers

  as the lady across the hall sings to her canary.

  love has clicked off and on

  like a cigarette lighter

  and now her love is a

  bird.

  it gets like that when not much happens

  and you play on a small stage,

  and I pin my medical exemption to

  the front of one of my old paintings

  rub some salve up my ass

  and pour another drink.

  my father

  my father liked rules and doing things

  the hard way.

  he spoke of responsibilities and laws

  and things that just had to be done correctly.

  a man must work, a man must eat.

  a man must own property and mow his lawn.

  I turned out to be a drunkard and wanderer

  and his hard-packed letters followed me everywhere.

  I watched the pigeons in the rain in

  New Orleans while his letters said,

  get going, make something of yourself!

  how hard the world tries and how hard

  everything has been for me.

  my father is old and gray now and when

  I walk into his house he complains

  about the mud I track in. he

  is proud of his house and garden and

  he sits back and waits. but I

  am horrified as he speaks to me:

  he has never thought of death! he does

  not think of dying! as he talks, his

  mouth is a round hole; he leans back content

  upon his pillows. when I leave he says,

  come again, come again.

  how many times and why?

  who is my father? did he ever

  play a mandolin or swim the icy waters?

  I know my father: he is dead. there is dead

  mud and there is a tree branch. the tree

  branch works easily in the wind and

  between the leaves you see glimpses of the sun.

  it’s quiet. it’s real. it’s warm.

  and the mud on the floor is my father’s heart

  and his brain.

  the old woman

  she lived in the last old house

  on the block—

  you know the kind: vine-covered, dark, quiet.

  her neighbors were gone—

  nothing but high-rise apartments everywhere.

  you’d see her two or three times a week

  pushing her little shopping cart on its two wheels;

  then she’d come back with stuff in bags,

  go into the house, and that was

  it. she never spoke to anybody.

  it was last week about 3:30 p.m.

  that her house began sliding off its foundation.

  it was a very slow slide

  and you got the idea that the house was just stepping

  forward to take a walk down the street—

  except some of the lumber began to snap—

  it sounded like rifle shots, and the house moaned just a

  little—a dark green moan.

  somebody called the fire dept.

  and men were running around shutting off the gas

  and shouting at each other

  and telling the crowd to keep back

  and along came one of those television trucks

  and they filmed the house

  sagging toward the street.

  then the front door opened and the little old

  lady came out.

  they put the camera on her and a woman ran up with a

  mike.

  “how long have you been living in your house?”

  “55 years.”

  “do you have insurance?”

  “no.”

  “what will you do

  now?”

  “go back to Ireland,” she said.

  then she walked away and left them all just standing

  there.

  what made you lose your inspiration?

  Norman is drizzling off into a self-pleased

  imbecility as he sits on my couch and

  giggles, pulls at his

  diseased beard

  and talks about his girlfriend Katrinka,

  Eugene Debs, F. Scott Fitzgerald and

  LSD.

  a bad writer, almost unpublished, this

  gives him strength as

  he sits there and tells me

  that my own writing has gone way down

  from volcanic burst to cigarette-lighter

  flash.

  I give him something to drink and

  he gets down on the floor and

  begins talking into my tape machine.

  I light a cigar and

  listen.

  “I want to be the Number One Writer of Our

  Time. I want to walk down the street and hear people

  say, ‘hey, look, there goes Norman!’ I want people to

>   like my poems, I want people to go mad over my

  poems…”

  I decide that this is probably an honest tape

  but a bad one

  and I no longer

  listen.

  about 30 minutes and 3 beer cans later

  the tape runs its little tail

  out. Norman straightens his tie,

  gets off his knees and sits

  down.

  “Jack M. says he’s gotta make 8 grand this year or he’s

  finished.”

  I try another

  cigar.

  “I’m having luncheon with Ray

  Bradbury, Tuesday.”

  I don’t answer.

  “Jesus!”

  he suddenly leaps up, runs into my bathroom and

  begins vomiting. it continues for some

  time.

  “I feel better,” he says

  coming back

  in.

  “have another drink,” I say.

  “I’ll drive you to your class in

  the morning.”

  “fine,” he says, skimming off the top of a beer.

  then he looks at me and asks,

  “where have you been published

  lately?”

  I wave my outstretched

  palms and shrug.

  “Jesus, tough! what made you lose your

  inspiration?”

  “drink. people. marriage. people.

  marriage again. a child. drink.

  people. jobs. no jobs. drink and

  people.”

  “my professor would like you to talk to

  his class. he won the Lamont Poetry Prize and he

  digs you.”

  “tell your professor to go to hell. tell him

  I’m finished.”

  “you’re touchy.”

  “no, I’m just a flash in the

  pan.”

  we drink and drink. soon he is asleep

  on the couch, 250 pounds of him rattling the ceiling

  with his poetry.

  I go into the bedroom and set the clock for his

  10 o’clock English class. the drink goes down

  better now, but climbing into bed

  I think, where do these bastards come from and