What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

lid to the great jar
    opens
    and out tumbles a
    Christ child.
    I throw it to my cat
    who bats it about in the
    air
    but he soon tires of
    the lack of
    response.
    it is near the end of
    February in a
    so far
    banal year.
    not a damn good war
    in sight anywhere.
    I light an Italian cigar,
    it’s slim, tastes bitter.
    I inhale the space between
    continents,
    stretch my legs.
    it’s moments like
    this—you can feel it
    happening—that you grow
    transformed
    partly into something
    else strange and
    unnameable—
    so when death comes
    it can only take
    part of
    you.
    I exhale a perfect
    smoke ring
    as a soprano sings to me
    through the radio.
    each night counts for something
    or else we’d all
    go mad.

an afternoon in February
    many of the paperboys here in L.A.
    are starting to grow
    beards.
    this makes them look suspiciously like bad
    poets.
    a paper container in front of me
    says:
    Martin Van Buren was the 8th president
    of the U.S. from 1837 to 1841,
    as I spill coffee on my new
    dictionary.
    the phone rings.
    it is a woman who wants to talk to me.
    can’t they forget me?
    am I that good?
    the lady downstairs borrows a vacuum cleaner
    from the manager and cackles her thanks.
    her thanks drift up to me here
    and disappear as two pigeons arrive
    and sit on the roof in the
    wind. vacuum is spelled very strangely,
    I think, as I watch the 2 pigeons on the roof.
    they sit motionless in the wind, just a few small
    feathers on their bodies
    lifting and falling.
    the phone rings again.
    â€œI have just about gotten over it,
    I have just about gotten over
    you.”
    â€œthank you,” I say and
    hang up.
    it is 2 in the afternoon
    I have finished my coffee and had a smoke
    and now the coffee water is boiling
    again. there is an original painting by
    Eric Heckel
    on my north wall
    but there is neither joy nor sorrow here now
    only the paperboys
    trying to grow beards
    the pigeons in the wind
    and the faint sound of the vacuum cleaner.

crickets
    sound of doom like an approaching
    cyclone
    the woman across the way
    keeps scolding and
    screaming
    she’s screaming at her child
    now she’s clearing her
    throat
    I lean forward
    to get a book of matches to
    light my
    cigarette
    then she screams again
    she’s beating her child
    the child screams
    then it’s quiet
    all I can hear are the
    crickets
    droning
    planet earth: where
    Christ came
    and
    never experienced
    sex with a
    woman or a
    man.

the angel who pushed his wheelchair
    long ago he edited a little magazine
    it was up in San Francisco
    during the beat era
    during the reading-poetry-with-jazz experiments
    and I remember him because he never returned my manuscripts
    even though I wrote him many letters,
    humble letters, sane letters, and, at last, violent letters;
    I’m told he jumped off a roof
    because a woman wouldn’t love him.
    no matter. when I saw him again
    he was in a wheelchair and carried a wine bottle to piss in;
    he wrote very delicate poetry
    that I, naturally, couldn’t understand;
    he autographed his book for me
    (which he said I wouldn’t like)
    and once at a party I threatened to punch him and
    I was drunk and he wept and
    I took pity and instead hit the next poet who walked by
    on the head with his piss bottle; so,
    we had an understanding after all.
    Â 
    he had this very thin and intense woman
    pushing him about, she was his arms and legs and
    maybe for a while
    his heart.
    it was almost commonplace
    at poetry readings where he was scheduled to read
    to see her swiftly rolling him in,
    sometimes stopping by me, saying,
    â€œI don’t see how we are going to get him up on the stage!”
    sometimes she did. often she did.
    then she began writing poetry, I didn’t see much of it,
    but, somehow, I was glad for her.
    then she injured her neck while doing her yoga
    and she went on disability, and again I was glad for her,
    all the poets wanted to get disability insurance
    it was better than