The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills Read Online Free PDF

a woman in green
    all rump and breast and dizziness running
    across the street.
    she was as sexy as a
    green and drunken antelope and
    when she got to the curbing she
    tripped and fell
    down and
    sat in the gutter and
    I sat there in my car
    looking at her and
    oddly
    I felt most impassive as if
    nothing had happened and
    I sat there looking at this
    green creature until
    a moving van 60 feet long came
    to a stop and
    helped the
    lady
    up.
    a young man in white overalls
    flushed red and the girl was built
    all around all around and
    stupid with falling and stupid with life and
    swaying on the tower stilts of her
    heels
    she stood there rubbing her
    white knees and
    the young man kept talking to
    her
    he was big dumb blond pink and lonely
    but then
    the woman asked him
    where the nearest bar was and
    he grinned and pointed down the street and
    gave it
    up
    he got back into the truck and
    60 feet full of
    furniture and blanket and stove
    pulled on down the street
    and the green antelope
    crossed the street
    toward the bar
    wobbling and shaking
    shaking and wobbling
    everything and
    we sat transfixed and
    watching
    until
    in the backed-up traffic
    behind me
    a man of strength
    honked
    and I put the thing in drive
    slowing for the big dip
    by the market
    that could tear your car in
    half
    and they all followed me
    slowing for the dip
    too:
    18 cars full of men thinking of
    what could have been—
    about the one who
    got away and
    it was about sunset and
    heavy traffic and heavy
    life.
     

the screw-game
     
     
    one of the terrible things is
    really
    being in bed
    night after night
    with a woman you no longer
    want to screw.
     
 
    they get old, they don’t look very good
    anymore—they even tend to
    snore, lose
    spirit.
     
 
    so, in bed, you turn sometimes,
    your foot touches hers—
    god, awful!—
    and the night is out there
    beyond the curtains
    sealing you together
    in the
    tomb.
     
 
    and in the morning you go to the
    bathroom, pass in the hall, talk,
    say odd things; eggs fry, motors
    start.
     
 
    but sitting across
    you have 2 strangers
    jamming toast into mouths
    burning the sullen head and gut with
    coffee.
    in 10 million places in America
    it is the same—
    stale lives propped against each
    other
    and no place to
    go.
     
 
    you get in the car
    and you drive to work
    and there are more strangers there, most of them
    wives and husbands of somebody
    else, and besides the guillotine of work, they
    flirt and joke and pinch, sometimes tend to
    work off a quick screw somewhere—
    they can’t do it at home—
    and then
    the drive back home
    waiting for Christmas or Labor Day or
    Sunday or
    something.
     

a night of Mozart
     
     
    They slit his pockets and shot him in his car,
    eighteen hundred dollars split four ways,
    and I used to see him at the track
    watching the tote
    and going the last-flick bullrush toward the window;
    he never took a drink
    and he never took a woman home with him,
    and he never spoke to anyone,
    and I never spoke to anyone either
    except to order a drink
    or if a hustler had good legs and ass
    to let her know
    over a scotch and water
    that later would be o.k.;
    what I am getting at is
    that this guy was a pro,
    it was a business with him,
    he didn’t come out to holler and get drunk
    and get fucked—
    he came out to make it, which is better
    than punching another man’s timeclock;
    when I saw him bullrushing the $50 window
    late in the year
    I knew he was making it much better than I;
    the board had showed a lot of false flashes,
    some nut with a roll was dropping in one or two grand
    at the last minute, but this guy was just that,
    a nut with money, and we finally had to go through
    the routine of finding out what he was betting
    and flushing the horse out
    before we got our bets down; this made one sweaty
    late bullrush…anyhow, the quiet one didn’t
    worry about this and always laid his bet a little ahead
    of time and walked off; he kept getting better,
    his clothes looked