Essential Bukowski: Poetry. Abel Debritto
man who had once been young and
said to have genius; but
that’s the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world had failed us
both.
this thing upon me is not death
but it’s as real,
and as landlords full of maggots
pound for rent
I eat walnuts in the sheath
of my privacy
and listen for more important
drummers;
it’s as real, it’s as real
as the broken-boned sparrow
cat-mouthed to utter
more than mere
and miserable argument;
between my toes I stare
at clouds, at seas of gaunt
sepulcher . . .
and scratch my back
and form a vowel
as all my lovely women
(wives and lovers)
break like engines
into some steam of sorrow
to be blown into eclipse;
bone is bone
but this thing upon me
as I tear the window shades
and walk caged rugs,
this thing upon me
like a flower and a feast,
believe me
is not death and is not
glory
and like Quixote’s windmills
makes a foe
turned by the heavens
against one man;
. . . this thing upon me,
great god,
this thing upon me
crawling like a snake,
terrifying my love of commonness,
some call Art
some call poetry;
it’s not death
but dying will solve its power
and as my gray hands
drop a last desperate pen
in some cheap room
they will find me there
and never know
my name
my meaning
nor the treasure
of my escape.
in the slow Mexican air I watched the bull die
and they cut off his ear, and his great head held
no more terror than a rock.
driving back the next day we stopped at the Mission
and watched the golden red and blue flowers pulling
like tigers in the wind.
set this to metric: the bull, and the fort of Christ:
the matador on his knees, the dead bull his baby;
and the priest staring from the window
like a caged bear.
you may argue in the marketplace and pull at your
doubts with silken strings: I will only tell you
this: I have lived in both their temples,
believing all and nothing—perhaps, now, they will
die in mine.
the state of world affairs from a 3rd floor window
I am watching a girl dressed in a
light green sweater, blue shorts, long black stockings;
there is a necklace of some sort
but her breasts are small, poor thing,
and she watches her nails
as her dirty white dog sniffs the grass
in erratic circles;
a pigeon is there too, circling,
half dead with a tick of a brain
and I am upstairs in my underwear,
3 day beard, pouring a beer and waiting
for something literary or symphonic to happen;
but they keep circling, circling, and a thin old man
in his last winter rolls by pushed by a girl
in a Catholic school dress;
somewhere there are the Alps, and ships
are now crossing the sea;
there are piles and piles of H- and A-bombs,
enough to blow up fifty worlds and Mars thrown in,
but they keep circling,
the girl shifts buttocks,
and the Hollywood Hills stand there, stand there
full of drunks and insane people and
much kissing in automobiles,
but it’s no good: che sarà, sarà: her dirty white dog simply will not shit, and with a last look at her nails she, with much whirling of buttocks walks to her downstairs court trailed by her constipated dog (simply not worried), leaving me looking at a most unsymphonic pigeon. well, from the looks of things, relax: the bombs will never go off.
swans die in the spring too
and there it floated
dead on a Sunday
sideways
circling in current
and I walked to the rotunda
and overhead
gods in chariots
dogs, women
circled,
and death
ran down my throat
like a mouse,
and I heard the people coming
with their picnic bags
and