Читать книгу On Love - Charles Bukowski - Страница 7

mine

She lays like a lump.

I can feel the great empty mountain

of her head

but she is alive. She yawns and

scratches her nose and

pulls up the covers.

Soon I will kiss her goodnight

and we will sleep.

And far away is Scotland

and under the ground the

gophers run.

I hear engines in the night

and through the sky a white

hand whirls:

goodnight, dear, goodnight.

layover

Making love in the sun, in the morning sun

in a hotel room

above the alley

where poor men poke for bottles;

making love in the sun

making love by a carpet redder than our blood,

making love while the boys sell headlines

and Cadillacs,

making love by a photograph of Paris

and an open pack of Chesterfields,

making love while other men—poor

fools—

work.

That moment—to this . . .

may be years in the way they measure,

but it’s only one sentence back in my mind—

there are so many days

when living stops and pulls up and sits

and waits like a train on the rails.

I pass the hotel at 8

and at 5; there are cats in the alleys

and bottles and bums,

and I look up at the window and think,

I no longer know where you are,

and I walk on and wonder where

the living goes

when it stops.

the day I kicked a bankroll out the window

and, I said, you can take your rich aunts and uncles

and grandfathers and fathers

and all their lousy oil

and their seven lakes

and their wild turkey

and buffalo

and the whole state of Texas,

meaning, your crow-blasts

and your Saturday night boardwalks,

and your 2-bit library

and your crooked councilmen

and your pansy artists—

you can take all these

and your weekly newspaper

and your famous tornadoes

and your filthy floods

and all your yowling cats

and your subscription to Life,

and shove them, baby,

shove them.

I can handle a pick and ax again (I think)

and I can pick up

25 bucks for a 4-rounder (maybe);

sure, I’m 38

but a little dye can pinch the gray

out of my hair;

and I can still write a poem (sometimes),

don’t forget that, and even if

they don’t pay off,

it’s better than waiting for death and oil,

and shooting wild turkey,

and waiting for the world

to begin.

all right, bum, she said,

get out.

what? I said.

get out. you’ve thrown your

last tantrum.

I’m tired of your damned tantrums:

you’re always acting like a

character

in an O’Neill play.

but I’m different, baby,

I can’t help

it.

you’re different, all right!

God, how different!

don’t slam

the door

when you leave.

but, baby, I love your

money!

you never once said

you loved me!

what do you want

a liar or a

lover?

you’re neither! out, bum,

out!

. . . but baby!

go back to O’Neill!

I went to the door,

softly closed it and walked away,

thinking: all they want

is a wooden Indian

to say yes and no

and stand over the fire and

not raise too much hell;

but you’re getting to be

an old man, kiddo:

next time play it closer

to the

vest.

I taste the ashes of your death

the blossoms shake

sudden water

down my sleeve,

sudden water

cool and clean

as snow—

as the stem-sharp

swords

go in

against your breast

and the sweet wild

rocks

leap over

and

lock us in.

love is a piece of paper torn to bits

all the beer was poisoned and the capt. went down

and the mate and the cook

and we had nobody to grab sail

and the N.wester ripped the sheets like toenails

and we pitched like crazy

the bull tearing its sides

and all the time in the corner

some punk had a drunken slut (my wife)

and was pumping away

like nothing was happening

and the cat kept looking at me

and crawling in the pantry

amongst the clanking dishes

with flowers and vines painted on them

until I couldn’t stand it anymore

and took the thing

and heaved it

over

the side.

to the whore who took my poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the

poem,

stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,

but jezus:

12 poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have

my

paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling:

are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?

why didn’t you take my money? they usually do

from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.

next time take my left arm or a fifty

but not my poems:

I’m not Shakespeare

but sometimes simply

there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise;

there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards

down to the last bomb,

but as God said,

crossing his legs,

I see where I have made plenty of poets

but not so very much

poetry.

shoes

shoes in the closet like Easter lilies,

my shoes alone right now,

and other shoes with other shoes

like dogs walking avenues,

and smoke alone is not enough

and I got a letter from a woman in a hospital,

love, she says, love,

more poems,

but I do not write,

I do not understand myself,

she sends me photographs of the hospital

taken from the air,

but I remember her on other nights,

not dying,

shoes with spikes like daggers

sitting next to mine,

how these strong nights

can lie to the hills,

how these nights become quite finally

my shoes in the closet

flown by overcoats and awkward shirts,

and I look into the hole the door leaves

and the walls, and I do not

write.

a real thing, a good woman

they are always writing about the bulls, the bullfighters,

those who have never seen them,

and as I break the webs of the spiders reaching for my wine

the umhum of bombers, gd.dmn hum breaking the solace,

and I must write a letter to my priest about some 3rd. st. whore

who keeps calling me up at 3 in the morning;

up the old stairs, ass full of splinters,

thinking of pocket-book poets and the priest,

and I’m over the typewriter like a washing machine,

and look look the bulls are still dying

and they are razing them raising them

like wheat in the fields,

and the sun’s black as ink, black ink that is,

and my wife says Brock, for Christ’s sake,

the typewriter all night,

how can I sleep? and I crawl into bed and

kiss her hair sorry sorry sorry

sometimes I get excited I don’t know why

friend of mine said he was going to write about

Manolete . . .

who’s that? nobody, kid, somebody dead

like Chopin or our old mailman or a dog,

go to sleep, go to sleep,

and I kiss her and rub her head,

a good woman,

and soon she sleeps and I wait

for morning.

one night stand

the latest hardware dangling upon my pillow catches

window lamplight through the mist of alcohol.

I was the whelp of a prude who whipped me when

the wind shook blades of grass the eye could see

move and

you were a

convent girl watching the nuns shake loose

the Las Cruces sand from God’s robes.

you are

yesterday’s

bouquet so sadly

raided. I kiss your poor

breasts as my hands reach for love

in this cheap Hollywood apartment smelling of

bread and gas and misery.

we move through remembered routes

the same old steps smooth with hundreds of

feet, 50 loves, 20 years.

and we are granted a very small summer, and

then it’s

winter again

and you are moving across the floor

some heavy awkward thing

and the toilet flushes, a dog barks

a car door slams . . .

it’s gotten inescapably away, everything,

it seems, and I light a cigarette and

await the oldest curse

of all.

the mischief of expiration

I am, at best, the delicate thought of a delicate hand

that quenches for the mixing rope, and when

beneath the love of flowers I am still,

as the spider drinks the greening hour—

strike gray bells of drinking,

let a frog say

a voice is dead,

let the beasts from the pantry

and the days that have hated this,

the contrary wives of unblinking grief,

plains of small surrender

between Mexicali and Tampa;

hens gone, cigarettes smoked, loaves sliced,

and lest this be taken for wry sorrow:

put the spider in wine,

tap the thin skull sides that held poor lightning,

make it less than a treacherous kiss,

put me down for dancing

you much more dead,

I am a dish for your ashes,

I am a fist for your air.

the most immense thing about beauty

is finding it gone.

love is a form of selfishness

pither, the eustachian tube and the green bugdead ivy

and the way we walked tonight

with the sky climbing on our ears and in our pockets

while we talked of things that didn’t matter

and the streetcar rocked and howled its color

which we didn’t notice except as a thing beside the eve

as we mentioned sex through palsies,

pither, the red fire, pither the eustachian tube!

gone are the days, gone is the green bugdead ivy

and the words we said tonight that didn’t matter;

X 12, Cardinal and Gold

GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD!

your eyes are gold

your hair is gold

your love is gold

your grave is gold

and the streets go past like people walking

and the bells ring like bells ringing;

your hands are gold and your voice is gold

and all the children walking

and the trees growing and the idiots selling papers

34256780000 oh while you are

eustachian tube

red fire

greenbugdead

ivy

cardinal and gold

and the words we said tonight

are going away

over the trees

down by the streetcar

and I have closed the book

with the red red lion

down by the gates of gold.

for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough

I pick up the skirt,

I pick up the sparkling beads

in black,

this thing that moved once

around flesh,

and I call God a liar,

I say anything that moved

like that

or knew

my name

could never die

in the common verity of dying,

and I pick

up her lovely

dress,

all her loveliness gone,

and I speak

to all the gods,

Jewish gods, Christ-gods,

chips of blinking things,

idols, pills, bread,

fathoms, risks,

knowledgeable surrender,

rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad

without a chance,

hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,

I lean upon this,

I lean on all of this

and I know:

her dress upon my arm:

but

they will not

give her back to me.

for Jane

225 days under grass

and you know more than I.

they have long taken your blood,

you are a dry stick in a basket.

is this how it works?

in this room

the hours of love

still make shadows.

when you left

you took almost

everything.

I kneel in the nights

before tigers

that will not let me be.

what you were

will not happen again.

the tigers have found me

and I do not care.

notice

the swans drown in bilge water,

take down the signs,

test the poisons,

barricade the cow

from the bull,

the peony from the sun,

take the lavender kisses from my night,

put the symphonies out on the streets

like beggars,

get the nails ready,

flog the backs of the saints,

stun frogs and mice for the cat of the soul,

burn the enthralling paintings,

piss on the dawn,

my love

is dead.

my real love in Athens

and I remember the knife,

the way you touch a rose

and come away with blood

and how you touch love the same way,

and how when you want to come onto the freeway

the trucks rail you on the inner lane

moonlight and roaring

running down your bravery,

making you touch the brakes

and small pictures come to your mind:

pictures of Christ hung there

or Hiroshima,

or your last wife

frying an egg.

the way you touch a rose

is the way you lean against the coffin-sides

of the dead,

the way you touch a rose

and see the dead whirling back

underneath your fingernails;

the knife

Gettysburg, the Bulge, Flanders,

Attila, Muss—

what can I make of history

when it narrows down

to the three o’clock shadow

under a leaf?

and if the mind grows harrowed

and the rose bites

like a dog,

they say

we have love . . .

but what can I make of love

when we are all born

at a different time and place

and only meet

through a trick of centuries

and a chance three steps

to the left?

you mean

a love I have not met

is less than a selfishness

I call near?

can I say now

with rose-blood upon the edge of mind,

can I say now as the planets whirl

and they shoot tons of force into the end of space

to make Columbus look like an idiot-child,

can I say now

that because I have screamed into a night

and they have not heard,

can I say now

that I remember the knife

and I sit in a cool room

and rub my fingers to the whistle of the clock

and calmly think of

Ajax and sputum

and railroad hens across the golden rails,

and my real love is in Athens

600

A or B,

as outside my window

pigeons stumble as they fly

and through a door

that outwaits an empty room,

roses can’t get

in or out,

or love or moths or lightning—

I would neither break upon sighing

or smile; could nothings

like moths and men

exist like orange sunlight upon paper

divided by nine?

Athens is now many miles

and one death away,

and the tables are dirty as hell

and the sheets and the dishes,

but I’m laughing: that’s not real;

but it is, divided by nine

or one hundred:

clean laundry is love

that does not scratch itself

and sigh.

sleeping woman

I sit up in bed at night and listen to you

snore

I met you in a bus station

and now I wonder at your back

sick white and stained with

children’s freckles

as the lamp divests the unsolvable

sorrow of the world

upon your sleep.

I cannot see your feet

but I must guess that they are

most charming feet.

who do you belong to?

are you real?

I think of flowers, animals, birds

they all seem more than good

and so clearly

real.

yet you cannot help being a

woman. we are each selected to be

something. the spider, the cook.

the elephant. it is as if we were each

a painting and hung on some

gallery wall.

—and now the painting turns

upon its back, and over a curving elbow

I can see ½ a mouth, one eye and

almost a nose.

the rest of you is hidden

out of sight

but I know that you are a

contemporary, a modern living

work

perhaps not immortal

but we have

loved.

please continue to

snore.

a party here—machineguns, tanks, an army fighting against men on rooftops

if love could go on like tarpaper

or even as far as meaning goes

but it won’t work

can’t work

there are too many snot-heads

too many women who hide their legs

except for special bedrooms

there are too many flies on the

ceiling and it’s been a hot

Summer

and the riots in Los Angeles

have been over for a week

and they burned buildings and killed policemen and

whitemen and

I am a whiteman and I guess I did not get particularly

excited because I am a whiteman and I am poor

and I pay for being poor

because I do as few handstands for somebody else as

possible

and so I’m poor because I choose it and I guess it’s

not as uncomfortable that

way

and so I ignored the riots

because I figured both the black and the white

wanted many things that did not interest

me

plus having a woman here who gets very excited about

discrimination the Bomb segregation

you know you know

I let her go on until finally the talk

wearies me

for I don’t care too much for the

standard answer

or the lonely addled creatures who like to join a

CAUSE simply because a cause lifts them out of their

dribbling

imbecility into a stream of

action. me, I like time to think, think, think . . .

but it was a party here, really, machineguns, tanks,

the army fighting against men on rooftops . . .

the same thing we accused Russia of doing. well, it’s

a lousy game, and I don’t know what to do, except

if it’s like a friend of mine said I said one night when

I was drunk: “Don’t ever kill anybody, even if it seems

like the last or the only thing to do.”

laugh. all right. it might make you happy

that I even have a stream of remorse when I kill a

fly. an ant. a flea. yet I go on. I kill them and

go on.

god, love is more strange than numerals more strange

than

grass on fire more strange than the dead body of a child

drowned in the bottom of a tub, we know so

little, we know so much, we don’t know

enough.

anyhow, we go through our movements, bowel,

sometimes

sexual, sometimes heavenly, sometimes bastardly, or

sometimes we walk through a museum to see what is

left of us or it, the sad strictured palsy of glassed

and frozen and sterile madhouse background

enough to make you want to walk out into the sun again

and look around, but in the park and on the streets

the dead keep on moving through as if they were already

in a museum. maybe love is sex. maybe love is a bowl of

mush. maybe love is a radio shut off.

anyway, it was a party.

a week ago.

today I went to the track with roses in my eyes. dollars in

my

pocket. headlines in the alley. it’s over a hundred miles by

train,

one way. a party of drunks coming back, broke again, the

dream

shot again, bodies wobbling; yakking in the barcar and I’m

in there

too, drinking, scribbling what’s left of hope in the dim light,

the

barman was a Negro and I was white. bad fix. we made

it.

no party.

the rich newspapers keep talking about “The Negro

Revolution” and

“The Breakdown of the Negro Family.” the train hit town,

finally,

and I got rid of the 2 homosexuals who were buying me

drinks, and I

went to piss and make a phonecall and as I came through

the

entranceway to the Men’s crapper here were 2 Negroes at a

shoeshine

stand shining the shoes of whitemen and the whitemen let

them do

it.

I walked down to a Mexican bar

and had a few whiskeys and when I left the barmaid gave

me a

little slip of paper with her name, address and phone

number upon