[I want to zero-in on what he looked like, for posterity if nothing else, there was more]
I want to zero-in on what he looked like, for posterity if nothing else, there was more
than a little bit of Nicholson in Chinatown, the hairline but not the toughness, not the hetero
gaze through half-closed eyes or the nasty gash on the nose that Nicholson wore through
most of the movie though toward the end Mikel did have lesions on his nose and ear and neck
and temple, definitely some Neil Young, the mouth, the lowering of the chin and looking out
from behind the hair that fell over his eyes when he was very young, getting called a faggot
by the football boys, art class, we drew together, what I took for romantic interest was interest,
actual interest, and later when he was full-on dying he made complicated arrangements for me
to inherit his car to replace the piece of shit Oldsmobile I was driving, in the end his friend sold
his car in San Francisco and sent me a check to put toward a used Chevy Nova, maroon, scarred
but it ran ok, now and then he’d say I’m Suck Owens and these here boys are my Fuckaroos
and sing Tiger by the Tail, but more often in his upstairs room on Locust Court he’d play the piece
of shit guitar, always such a light touch, sing helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless, you know
that song, mattress on the floor, I didn’t mind, alarm clock on the windowsill, the wind-up kind.
[He said it bummed him out his dick didn’t work anymore]
He said it bummed him out his dick didn’t work anymore.
But it was never about dick for us. Was it. Though for a while
it was all about dick for him. San Francisco dick. Far far away
from his brutal fireman father. And me. He could finally do what
he wanted with his dick and other people’s dicks. And dress as I
Love Lucy. And write a serial featuring Dyke Van Dick. And refer
to himself when not wearing dress and wig as an existential cowboy.
“The charismatic impresario of all we did” Alan said of him. But that
wasn’t how it was for us. We did not waste our charisma on each other.
Did not dress for each other. Or did I dress for him a little bit. Did
I perform for him. I knew no other way. The last time I saw him.
Before he lost his mind and filled with ocean. Died. He said Di
your body changed. I’d just given birth to a ten pound baby. Jesus
Christ. What do you want from me. What did you ever want from me.
[Death does not exist in poetry. A line may fade into the silence past its breaking]
Death does not exist in poetry. A line may fade into the silence past its breaking
but that is not death. No choking sounds in poems, no smell of blood. I can describe
the sounds, the smells, but description is in fact a hiding place. There is no nobility
in description. Is there nobility in poems? Let’s hope not. Nobility is another place
to hide. “Through all these myriad felt and mostly scorned and disreputable realities"
Alan wrote in a poem. I hope it is OK that I have quoted you, Alan. It is a poem
about love’s nuance but maybe Alan would agree there is no love in poems. There is
no love in a mushroom, in a handmade wedding dress. No death in a funeral hankie
embroidered with the words “Try not to use it.” I looked at a worm and I thought
it was an angel. I looked at an angel and thought it was a storm. What is wrong
with the mind is what is wrong with the poem. It is difficult to get the news
boy to be a news boy. He keeps turning into a girl carrying a fish in a cloth delivery
bag to her grandmother who is really a wolf dressed as a grandmother singing a line
from Ulysses: “So stood they there both awhile in wanhope, sorrowing one with other.”
[I saw a little movie of a person stroking a small bird with two Q-tips, one held between]
I saw a little movie of a person stroking a small bird with two Q-tips, one held between
the forefinger and thumb of each hand. It tipped back its head to receive the minor
tenderness, which to the bird must have felt like being touched by a god. For a moment
I knew what it would be to feel at the mercy of love, small-scale, the kind shown but not
spoken of. I was afraid to touch you. I was afraid of the lesions you’d described to me
over the phone, their locations and the measurement, in centimeters, of each. Jesus-marks,
you called them. All so I would be prepared and unafraid or less afraid but still I was afraid
of dying like you were dying. When I first arrived I looked so long into your eyes you
shivered and ordered me to look away. You were imperious in your dying and yet courtly
about my fear, you understood, as if I were a child afraid of lightning storms, which I am,
having at age ten been struck. Out of the blue you said that once you were dead I’d never
be able to listen to Blue again, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, not just the song but the whole album.
It was a minor curse you lay across my shoulders like a fur dyed blue, and so I listen now
in defiance of you. In the listening the pronouns shift. We are listening. There is no death.
[The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do]
The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do
without. To have, as my mother says, a wish in one hand
and shit in another. That was in answer to I wish I had
an instamatic camera and a father. Wish in one hand, she
said, shit in another. She still says it. When she tells me
she wishes I were there to have some of her bean soup
she answers herself. Wish in one hand, she says, shit in another.
Poverty, like a sonnet, is a good teacher. The kind that raps your
knuckles with a ruler but not the kind that throws a dictionary
across the room and hits you in the brain with all the words
that ever were. Boxed fathers buried deep are still fathers,
teacher says. Do without the. Without and. Without hot
dogs in your baked beans. A sonnet is a mother. Every word
a silver dollar. Shit in one hand, she says. Wish in another.
