Constantine P. Cavafy publishes "Waiting for the Barbarians" and W.B. Yeats publishes "In the Seven Woods" in 1904.  Louis Zukofsky, Cecil Day-Lewis and Pablo Neruda are all born in 1904.



My brother in the front seat.  I have no idea where we are going.  Could it be the end of July of 1965?
Apparently we've stoppped at a Dairy Queen.
Who is doing the driving?
It never seemed like I got to ride shot gun when my brother was around.
   
There are questions I end up asking myself, more than is either wise or necessary, which I suspect is the sign of an interesting picture.  Possibly the same could be true of a good poem.

Bianca called and read me a poem over the phone.  Mark Doty's "Crepe de Chine."  Later at the Library I looked for him.  And then for the poet Jack Spicer. 

"On the last day of July 1965, Spicer collapsed in the elevator of his building on his way home, drunk... He had his dinner in his hand: a chicken sandwich.  When the elevator doors rolled open, another tenant saw his befouled body, oozing with excrement and vomit, and ran to the landlady who called the police.  Ambulance sirens roared up and down Van Ness Avenue all the way to San Francisco General in the Mission.  In the confusion Spicer remained unidentified.  In the poverty ward of General, Spicer lived on, in deep coma... the alcoholic condition separated his mind from his vocal cords."  [Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian.  Wesleyan, 1998].

A new collection of Spicer's poems has just come out, titled with the last words he was able to utter in a rare moment of clarity before he died, shortly after his friends found him at General and got him moved out of the poverty ward: 

"My vocabulary did this to me.  Your love will let you go on."

I look back over this last year, where we've been and then where we are all going.  I think about what words can do to you, and the struggle it would be, being separated from them.  Or from the past.  Or from family.  I think about being found on my way home, with my dinner in my hand.  I think about Mark Doty's poem, being a drag queen and looking at a window display of perfume bottles: Shalimar, Evening in Paris, White Shoulders.

I used to think about being a poet, a long time ago, but I didn't want to end up marginalized.  More marginalzied, that is, than I imagined I would be, doing whatever kind of writing I was writing or thought I was going to write.  It was all so difficult though, for a while there.  Now, of course, it doesn't seem like it would be so bad, the life of a poet.  If you didn't die drunk.  I mean, after all, who knows where anybody is going?