Jay to Bee. Janet Frame
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A marksman without comparison
was our midnight cowboy Harrison.
With his weapon uptight
he’d shoot all night
at Eunice Golden’s garrison.
Though the women desired to gorge
at the smithy of Andrew St. George
there wasn’t a doubt
his furnace was out
and he had no tools in his forge.
Though I’m painter rather than pieman
this menu is tempting, said Simon.
Balls cantaloupe,
crème de cunt soup
Crocket’s casseroled hymen.
A writer named Basil the Gloom
kept waiting and waiting for doom.
When it came, ‘It’s a boy!’
he cried with joy.
‘Now who’s been fucking whom?’
6. Baltimore November
From the factory to you untouched by human hand.
A frightened young tailor of Boston
whose needle had melted the frost in
a lady’s French seam
cried, This is extreme,
It’s haystacks that needles get lost in!
The lady who lay with the tailor
had read Roth and Norman Mailer
but could not catch on
where the needle had gone
while the tailor grew paler and paler.
This experience is bewitching,
My needle keeps poking and pitching,
I’d never have sewn
such a seam on my own
and how happily I am stitching!
At last as the light was growing
there dispersed the ‘cloud of unknowing’,
the dawn it is coming
the lady said humming,
I too said the tailor still sewing!
7. Baltimore November
Dear Bill,
Another letter from my supply, just to say hello as if you were not absent and to try to make news of no news except it may snow tonight and outside I hear the sound of dogs that sound like wolves and a wind snarling around the house. I’m up in my small room where I’ve moved everything as I’ve decided to work here instead of in the basement. The room looks out over the small backyard with a garden as big as a cemetery plot, and beyond that an alley, then a school with its high encircling fence of concrete topped with pieces of broken glass. Beside the house is another alley and across from that another school, similarly forbidding, with a high wire fence which, of course, the children manage to climb to play in the yard as they have nowhere else to play. The lights are bright in the alley and cast a white glare on the pavement as if snow had been falling.
Did you know that Edgar Allan Poe who lived in Baltimore collapsed in the street and was taken dying to one of the big hospitals, and that one of his stories about a howling dog is based on a legend of howling wolves from one of the Baltimore Cemeteries?
I have just written to May Sarton saying a few words about her book; hoping that I didn’t sound false, because I’m inclined to be so self-conscious about everything I say (less about what I write) that my words seem to turn to oatmeal and dust. I sent her a cat, and I’m sending you one too, though I didn’t know I would until I began this letter. It’s a beautiful cat.
The dogs howl again. In the daytime I never see them but at night they howl especially when the wind is whining and snarling.
It feels like a prison here. I find the day passes without my doing much work yet I cannot account for the hours. John Money usually goes off to his work at half-past eight and has been coming home at a quarter past one in the morning and though I need not stay up, I do, because there’s a heavy iron bar I put against the door and I have to be awake to remove it. I miss the outside world of MacDowell! Theoretically, I have all day and evening to work without interruption, entirely on my own; and yet the hours go by remote from me without my making any impression on them: it is most curious.
Some time during the day I play the pornograph, usually in the morning as soon as John M has gone to work, and then around six-thirty in the evening. One evening I read a medical journal in which Daudet, Heine, De Maupassant were diagnosed as having had syphilis (sp?) and the extracts from Daudet’s Diary and the Goncourt Journal were nightmarish. In his last days De Maupassant had a terrible sense that his thoughts were escaping from his head and abandoning him and he used to wander about the hospital where he was confined asking if anyone had seen his thoughts. And then he felt that his face was escaping from him, and his smile and frown—Have you seen my smile?
These are fit topics for Basil the Gloom . . .
Enough for now, on this grim note. Another instalment tomorrow. First, extempore,
A psychologist named John Money
once combed his tool with honey
when it erected
the bees objected
but the beekeeper thought it funny.
Goodnight.
THURSDAY.
Nice to get your letter today, Bill. I’ll hold off posting this for a few days otherwise you won’t know whether you’re going or coming with all my hellos. You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve just sold three dozen deformed foetuses as Christmas hampers; and all I did was lift the iron bar from the door, unchain the chain, unlock the inner door, open it, unlock the outer door, and, foetuses in hand announce, Lovely Christmas hampers, lovely deformed foetuses seventy-five cents apiece. Truly, I didn’t know there was such a market for them; they went like hot cakes, and here I am having earned as much or twice as much as I get for a poem. On the other hand the Peedauntals are terribly slack. No-one in Baltimore is interested. I’m thinking maybe of Rental Peedauntals, though the drycleaning and wet-cleaning costs would be astronomous (anonymous and astronomical as they are always cleaned in secret).
Alas there is no record of the Schubert Sonata in B flat major but the music is here! I’ve managed by picking out a few chords