Six days of clouds since I returned from Montana, a state of mind out West. A bleak afternoon in the granary killing flies and wasps. Sitting on a @3zafu@1 watching flies. Two days ago a sandhill crane flew over so low I could see an eyeball clearly cocked toward my singular own. As I drink I miss more flies. I am searching out the ecstatic life with flyswatter and wineglass in hand, the sky above an inverted steel sink. I am looking for weeping which is a superior form of rest. Can't there be dry weeping? Nope. Dry weeping is like dry fucking which most of us remember as unsatisfying. Wet fucking is another story but not the object here, though decidedly more interesting than weeping. I would frankly like to throw myself around and have some real passion. Some wet passion! to be sure. At nineteen in 1957 on Grove Street in NY I could weep about art, Hart Crane, my empty stomach, homesickness for pheasants and goldenrod, Yesenin's suicide, a red-haired girl with an improbable butt, my dad planting the garden alone. It was a year in which I wrung out pillowcases at dawn. But this is the flip side of the record, a log of the search for weeping. I've been dry for a decade and it isn't panning out. Like a Hollywood producer I sit by a pool and hatch inane plots against the weeping imagination, spinning wheels, treading water, beating the mental bishop, flogging the mental clam, pulling the mental wire like a cub scout in a lonely pup tent. I'm told I laugh too much. I laugh deeply at Johnny Carson monologues, at my poetry, at health food & politics, at the tragic poetry of others, at the weedy garden, at my dog hitting the electric fence, at women freeing themselves when I am in bondage, at the thought of my death. In fact I'm tickled pink with life. I actually have a trick to weep but it's cheating. I used it once when I was very drunk. I thought of the deaths of my wife and daughters. I threw myself to the floor weeping. I wept horribly and shook, gnashed my teeth. I must die before them. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A BOOK OF AIRS: SONG 12. A RENUNCIATION by THOMAS CAMPION CHRIST IN FLANDERS by LUCY WHITMELL EPITAPH by KENNETH SLADE ALLING FROM AN EXCAVATION ON THE WARRIOR RIVER by ESTHER BARRETT ARGO IN REMEMBRANCE by ADRA CAROLINE BATCHELDER RUINED CHURCH by F. W. BATESON |