Beerspit Night and Cursing (24 page)

as eagle-light or owl-light falls upon a mouse,

the last important light he will see here upon earth,

and

I tried

to explain this to a ballet dancer outside the Biltmore

the other night as I smoked one of his cigarettes

but he was queer, which I didn’t hold against him,

but he did not understand what I was trying to say,

which I did not hold against him, and that was all

I held against him

that night

or any other, and I went in and watched him kick and dance but the music and the ladies held my charcoal heart, and I’m sorry I borrowed his goddamned cigarette which was perfumed
and made me cough; but to go on, and since Mrs. Po Li has no idea what “the terror of a mouse reaches dormitory levels” signifies here
OR
on the West Coast of Africa, I will tell her that

dor’ mi-to-ri, n., (L.
dormitorium
) is a

place, a room or a building

to sleep in

and that mice sleep in all these places

and that I have lived in a lot of these places and that they and I the mice and I

may sometimes dream, and that all our dreams may not be

either pleasant

or wet; and now…
READY
? ah!

let’s put them together:

IN BIRD-LIGHT

THE TERROR OF A MOUSE REACHES DORMITORY LEVELS…

simple, isn’t it? I’m sure Gertrude would have understood although I doubt she would have approved.

And to answer another question:
IF WE ARE NOT GOING TO EVALUATE OUR OWN SELVES’ WORTH

WHO IN HELL IS GOING TO DO IT

WHILST WE WALK ON THE EARTH
?

The critics, my dear, and the neighbors and the police and the press and all the ugly things that hem us in, but really—too
many
of us think we are genuii and are ready to admit it (I am thinking especially of C. Major and one or 2 others); so
MANY
men think they can make better
LOVE
and better
POETRY
than their brothers…but this fkn can’t be helped: it is a thing nature put in us to keep us going, but we’ve got to step aside from nature now and then and see the spider sucking the fly, we have to see that there is a web for us too, and if we can begin to see this…instead of
ACCEPTING
nature, which has been the formula for centuries…we must say we are larger than nature because we know it is there. The first things are very hard to say because they have never been said before. But nature can be tamed like a tiger to do our will instead of the way we have been tasting it. I will even say that eventually the human race will call the day of its own death gladly, and nature in a way is God, and God in a way has been cruel, trying to prove something with a set of toys.

But getting back. If Pound has “a map of love poetry in his head & knows immediately where a love poem stands in
relation to the race of love poetry” I’d say that the man has read too much and loved too little, and that his maps

like the ones he went over with Muss

have been changed, and the world is harder to fool now

and I see Rommel now directing his tanks

and
Muss
from the pulpit bragging under the shadow of

Adolph,

and I don’t like the way they got Muss and his whore, who was she, Carlotta somebody? the Italians are good winners and poor losers, they are loud and laugh too much and will fart their dinner right in your face, and you can see how far they have come from Rome, it is another person entirely, only the Teutons have never changed, I will never change and as I fall drunk over this typewriter I will laugh I will know the secret has god damn been given us, somehow, and as the years go on and I die out the window and the young men grow, it will not matter.

And I can see Rommel now directing his tanks, and so they
hung Ben from his heels
and his whore from her heels, and there was probably many an asshole in the crowd who jerked off with joy, for the first time seeing the body of a woman he was never man enough to possess, dead, wrong or right, they were both greater than the crowd, greater than an all beloved nature that had brought them to a fix.

they hung Ben from his heels like an old shark weighed out of slime, but Ez has his castle now

we bunked him up on weenies and beans

and a red shirt like the nigger wore and we let him have his mistress from the street, but he’s in his castle now, and Art’s winging it down the halls of his mind, a pretty good mind, but really not much better than mine who nobody’s heard of

but that’s all right
because that’s the way history works

and I may be wrong, but it seems to me when I look at the wallpaper n hear the sounds would be whirling when I smoke a simple cigarette, perhaps they enjoyed Ezra too early and they have gutted me up to wait through granite.

WE HAVE WAITED THROUGH GRANITE
.

But Ezra can and is real enough

to still be punched when he gets too fat or too mad in the bird-light of his life, the hoarded seasons, the withered Jews, the love of Mr. Po Li’ and a thousand critics afraid to scratch his fame.

…well, Shed, I have lit your little rocks. Good stuff. Didn’t think they would burn…Can still smell good fullness.

I love you,

Charles

BUKOWSKI

L.A., sometime March nineteensixtyone

Ho, Shed:

On the visit thing, I think not. And, of course, would warn you far far early. It is, I think, that I am very tired. Instead of all the driving, I need to flatten out a little and simply stare at the ceiling. It is a matter of survival. There’s little or no sense in coming up there if I am dead, and I can often times feel the dying and I just know sense whatthe hellwat thru some divine law that if I corner myself or cross one more line just one more I am finished. I have just about reached the edge lately. I do not want to be a hard bark in the middle of a desert. I want to see out with eyes. And I need the fill-in gap badly. Good to be invited. you are the one person in the world who comes across through space to me. perhaps later. I get 4 day periods off throughout the year, I can come up at a time when the edge is not so close. If I can keep this job. and they have almost accepted me like an oddity, like a drinking fountain or an elevator, they have found a name and a place for me, and I let them have it that way…whatever front they draw, so that I may walk off in peace.

Ginsburg, of course, may have a formulated concept of strength tasted through the dirt and blood of centuries, but it seems unfortunate to me, that more and more his poetry seems to lack lack realness

which seems to be his central concept

and it is a shame that one has a concept in mind and not in

action;

ACTION
:…meaning and being the poem.

Fer[linghetti] runs off beautifully at times letting the words take him running but it seems that in each of his poems he stops the running and throws in something practical which exposes him as quite not pure, and I say pure not as Bartok or Bach but as something that should be

without interference.

Webb is a tough good man who is learning slowly very slowly the ways of rocks and error, but the best thing about Webb is that he began at an age when most men forget. A man is always dangerous and strong when he begins late at things that tickle most young men who have nothing else to do. Webb is capable of growth, and growing. In an age of insignificant editors I find him a very good one mistaken, of course, raw, a simple beginning, but he seems to be slowly cracking through. I will take one Webb for a dozen Shermans because Sherman is only fame-happy and bubbling in his milk (as is your beloved Major) while Webb is prodding through his backbone other sounds not his through pain and experience and error

maybe you get good laugh. I met a young man who speaks seven languages who said “I can personally introduce you to a man who knew Ezra Pound 32 years ago.”

…sure, sure, I’m afraid Gib would be too aloof…I can imagine him coming home and wondering if I stole one of his cookies. Jesus, he’s just by gd getting over the Ernie thing. Let just let him rest in peace. Besides, I’m an old man…Gib wd take me out behind the nearest pine tree and whip my ass. And prob all we would have done is talk about my boy Jeffers. And damn you, Shed, I tol’ you to read
Tamar, Roan Stallion
and tother poems and you
HAVE NOT DONE IT
!!!

HOW CAN YOU DRAW JUDGEMENT UPON A PERSON IF YOU
HAVE NOT READ HIS WORK
? Don’t let Pound make you think that there was only
ONE
…there were and are 3 or 4, and you are only blind if you do not
INVESTIGATE
!!!

And yet, by god, you sit there stroking paint upon canvas as if you have it all figured…Gal, sometimes you get me to steaming, sometimes you need somebody to
TALK TO YOU
!

what the hell is this?

…oh, you needn’t
PRESUME
I’d be on your side.

there’s no other side I cd take.

Gib’s all right

but his roots only go down

as far as he bends to tie his shoes.

Now I’m gona get rot drunk. Something—private—has interrupted my day—but now I’m going to fill up again.

sure love, why not?

lost pen again,

Buk

[
postcard dated by SM 3 April 1961
]

Deah Shed,

Howja ever make out with kaja? I imagine a lot of literary hair-pulling, and I know from experience that you can outcuss the gal. Women poets,
garrh!
Your H.D. prolly best of lot. Christina Rossetti, now dead long, very strong. Bettern most men at it, living or dead, and was fine looking woman too. Kay Boyle once very beautiful, well-worked prose style, but as poet-essa loses out. Better in novel or short story, but getting tiresome…Look now, her still wailing over dead Vienna, dead Europe. Repetitive. One subject gal. You gotta get these women organized, Shed. They’s runnin in all directions getting nowhere.
Elizabeth Bartlett
sees the most print and is the worst
of the lot. Carson McCullers wrote some brilliant novels and then disappeared. Easy on kaja now. She’s just a child, I’d imagine.

Bukowski the
CHARLES
…

Buk

Los Angeles, Calif. April 3, 1961

Deah Sheri:

I am told your lad Wang now claims he is a communist and a black supremacist; Wang’s trouble is that he wants to make a sound and be heard irregardless of the cost…he made some kind of statement in the
Golden Gater
, a state college newspaper. Why in the hell a college newspaper should bother to announce the new-found so-called principles of Mr. Shift-with-winds Wang. With one wing communist and one wing black-supremacist he hopes to fly to fame, just as rubbing against Pound like a dog against the legs of the master he hoped some of it would rub off on Mr. Wang. Meanwhile he tries to make up his mind whether he is a homosexual or not…but on or off…not or no or yes…he dedicates each of his poems to somebody, somebody in power.

Why are they so hungry?

Your lad Jory writes…where is Sheri? she has vanished completely. It is evident you did not send him a copy of
A & P
, or he wd have your address. I did not give him your location as I figure you are too busy with the brush and the herbs and treegod. Sheri, you must not
dump
people like you do, like so much slag. I feel for poor Ernie, you built him so high, so very high, popping cookies and love into him, bloating him with joy, and then something went wrong—a premise somewhere was crossed, a Martinelli set of nerves jumped in the moonlight, and all the sketches you made of the lad while he pretended to sleep, all the preening and primping and fattening of his soft soul, and then—
BANG
!!!—you let him go, all the way back, and he will never be the same. You are too cruel and you should not be cruel to children. I am tough and I can see, I see out of my
own eyes, and you cannot destroy me because you cannot mould me. I will destroy myself. But you must be kinder to children and dogs and half-poets and old men. I guess because Ez booted you you have to boot back but you are wrong wrong you can live without Ez and you can live

without booting; it is different to sack them and throw them in the sea while they sleep, that is another matter. It is true that the consciousness finally can’t take an intrusion that first appeared to be holy and then suddenly shows signs of rot, but all things can be handled without the hot and sterilized knife. My Engoilish professor from Louisiana…he started blurring up my windshield with all manner and matter of personal crap, and though he is getting to be a fairly well-known poet, and he tried to pop a lot of cookies into my mouth by telling me I was one of the 2 living poets today writing anything worthwhile…and as my goil friend said—
HOOS THE OTHER BASTARD
?—I had to cut the strings on him, but I did it gently and he was man enough to take the hint, and he went way up on my scale when I saw this, and I think there’s a chance for him, and when I see one of his poems now…I can sense the gentleness and explorative understanding working, and instead of having the bitter taste, I am for him as a man and a person and I hope he understands that all the confessional crap was a mistake. I didn’t want to see the birthmark on his left shoulder. I went through all that with Jory. There is a manner of saying a thing. You can say anything as long as you keep the light on it like a goddamned leaf but when you start getting chummy and measuring lengths of cock and placements in literary journals it’s time to halt.

well, tough mama, I am coming off a good one, I am sitting here sweating like a pig about to be murdered, sucking on a beer, looking for cigarettes, thinking my god my god my god I’m still alive…