August 1959

Boy.

And dog.

In the shade
of the one
back-yard tree.

Dog Days.
Magnificent boredom
sends you
to chemistry set
even after the sulfur's all burnt.
Sends you to magnifying glass
even after the backyard has been explored,
catalogued and claimed for the King of Spain.
Sends you to the pillars and big bronze doors
of Public Library
and a deep brown chair
where they have cold air
and Lovecraft
and Poe
and poor Dog can't go.

“You never knocked.”

“You never invited me in.”

“You could have knocked.”

You could have invited me in.”

That night on the Titanic
the officers behaved impeccably.
Had one of them been a fuckup,
the ship might have lived.

“Which would you like to hear first,
the what or the why?”

“I’d really rather near neither.”

Jimmy Carter was ridiculed
for appearing in a sweater
and telling us to turn down theheat.

Public relations is understanding
that he simply wore a dorky sweater.

And people forget how adventurous
John Kennedy’s haircut was for the times.

She was upset
that people could be so trivial,
and stamped her foot
through three
incarnations.

“She hates being from America so much
she can only blurt out
her strongest feelings in Italian.”

“How American
to re-make yourself that way.”

They had never been lovers
but because she had
criticized him so viciously
there was a whole zone in his mind
dedicated to her.

How You Work The Room


If you have a difference, kid, throw it at ‘em --
like mystic forebears from White Russia,
like a line of starched Bostonians
stretching back before the age of steam.

Makes you worth your hire.  Keeps the contagion off ‘em,
dontcha see.  The really slick among us make
their difference from being the same.  Humble -- don’t let
the universities put ‘em up in style -- stay
in profs’ houses and do the ever-loving dishes.

Almost all the rubes want to hear
the muse’s voice through your throat alone.
Then put the fourth piece on the frame
and hang you on the wall.

They want everything about you
but the one real thing you know:
that inspiration comes to anyone who asks.

How many unfinished conversations
littered his life!  He picked them up
like bottles and built them into a house.
We could see him moving inside it
when the sun was strong.

If I were responsible for
choosing the location
of the Stargate
and the entrance to Hell
I would put them
in Cincinnati where
no one would think to look.
And if they did look there
ridicule from the locals
would make them stop.

People pulling weeds
in front of a church
before the service
gave him the idea
for his next book.

At first it felt good
to have a routine for his days.

That achievement
is disappointment
he learned very young.
To see why this is so
took the rest of the century.

Some people are lucky enough
to know a Master.
Some are unlucky enough
to know two.