Book of Sketches (17 page)

 

at this window — Plastic
tiny oldtime locomotive, —
— Bronx prrt’ers
saying Japan —
Plastic bags of
dull samesize marbles —
Sad goggles with garter
holders & canvas —
Play money $25,000 bills
— ray guns — rubber
guns — big

 

pearl handle champ
guns — rubber cigars —
rings with monkey
on face — Italian
tenor singin somewhere —
Rubber Knives — (black
handle silver blade)
Solar Commando Gun
with Darts —
Handcuffs of little
tin & boy
policemen with

 

captain badge &
whistle — Sad
plastic flesh pale
lil doll falling back
naked in a brown
paper box with
a tiny mouth
harmonica “Robin”
— Fishing hooks,
“You land the big
ones every time with
Ole’s Genuine

 

Fishing hooks fashioned
by experts of
Finest tempered
steel, specially imported”
— Plastic
lil Space Ship, &
imitation lead Space
men — Jump ropes
with red wood
grips —

 

Expensive Nin toy
dish set — cups
& saucers, spoons,
with sad lil yellow
designs braided on —
Tiny pushdown
tops priced in
black 19¢
& shows lil boy
kneeling in toy
colors in lost
void —

 

Volga Inn Music
Ez tu p a va
tez - tomata
- tomata —
Ami topy oll
mayay —
Ena oo ee
Peñooti ma
ya govin
Oora pey

 

(Meanwhile night in
its October form soft
as Indian silk
slink in the door
dark, glitters of
New York night be
saddening & showing
where leaves do
jiggle & bloss bluff
on boughs’ come Autumn
“dominant” doom
— King Size
first in Sales!
First in Quality!
First in Good Taste,
— there’s yr iron
bars of the park
shine shadowing on
the cobbles of
the oldworld tired
street — There’s
the halo lamp
making seen the
goldhair backnapes
of Jacky O Hara’s
bestlastfirst
doll — Minnie
Gallagher —

 

& that sensation
in the pricking gut,
of winter, rivers,
ships, aye ye
green city &
grand land onrolling
it —
Hail Hail the
Gang’s all Here,
in Polka, bruits
in the juke —
oonyateez tey
ayetez with
muddy boots’ been
done

 

 

4 PM the men
are all roaring like
the EL in clink
bonk glass brassfoot
barrail ’where ya
goin’ excitement —
October’s in the
air, is the Indian
Summer sun of door
— 2 executive
salesmen who been
workin all day
long come in

 

young, welldressed,
justsuits, puffing
cigars, glad to
have the day done
& the drink comin
in, side by side
march in smiling
but there’s no
room at the roaring
(Shit!) crowded
bar so they stand
2 deep from it
waiting & smiling
& talking —

 

Men do love bars &
good bars shd. be
loved — It’s full
of businessmen,
workmen, Finn
MacCools of Time
— beoveralled
oldgray topers dirty
& beerswiggin glad
— nameless truck
busdrivers with
flashlites slung
from hips — old
beatfaced beerswallowers
sadly upraising

 

purple lips to happy
drinking ceilings —
Bartenders are fast,
courteous, interested in
their work as well
as clientele — Dublin
at 4 30 PM when
the work is done,
but this is great
NY, great 3rd
Avenue, free lunch,
smells of Moody
St exhaust river
lunch in road
of frime by-
smashing

 

the door, guitarplaying
long sideburned heroes
smell out there
on wood doorsteps
of afternoon drowse
— but it’s N.Y.,
towers rise beyond,
voices crash
mangle to talk
& chew the
gossip till Earwicker
drops his load —
Ah Jack Fitzgerald
Mighty
Murphy where are
you? — semi bald
blue shirt tattered
shovellers in broken
end dungarees
fisting glasses of
glisterglass foam
top brownafternoon
beer — The El
smashes by as
man in homburg
in vest but coatless
executive changes
from right to
left foot on ye
brass rail —

 

Colored man in
hat, dignified, young,
paper underarm,
says goodbye leaning
over men at bar
warm & paternal
— elevator operator
around the corner —
& wasnt this
where they say
Novak the real
estater who used
to stay up late
a-nights linefaced
to become right

 

& rich
in his little white
worm cellule of
the night typing
up reports & letting
wife & kids go mad
at home at ll
PM — ambitious,
worried, in a little
office of the Island
right on the street
undignified but open
to all business &
in infancy any
business can be
small as

 

ambition’s big —
pushing how many
daisies now? &
never made his million,
never had a drink
with So Long GeeGee
& I Love You Too
in this Late afternoon
beer room of
men excited
shifting stools &
footbottom rail
scuffle heel
soles —

 

Never called Old
Glasses over & offered
his rim red nose
a drink — never
laught & let the
fly his nose use
as a landing mark
— but ulcerated
in the middle of
the night to be
rich & get his
family the best
— so the best
American sod’s
his blanket now,
made in upper
mills of Hudson
Bay Moonface
Sassenach &
carted down by
housepainters in
white coveralls
(silent) to rim
the roam of his
once formed
flesh, & let
worms ram —

 

Rim!
So have another
beer, topers —
Bloody mugglers! Lovers!

Crazy Old
Homehouse of
the Sea
& Drowse Afternoon

 

At 28th St
& East River
— the great
seagoable hull

 

of iron is mossed,
in green at the forever
water line — The anchor’s
unrusted, gray, white
bars, balls — unused
— Ah the
wood sides & hall
windows & Navy
contests inside —
the dormitory row
of it! — the
madhouse barnacled
paint fleckchip’t
gull shadowed
bulk huge of it!
the pissing shovel
scupper — voices
in the helm, ghosts
of Billy Budd, old
EastSide dreams,
the blue Navy
flag — the
side doors & open
Dawiovts
Handel French
joywindows of
winter it!
— preliminary
worrying draft &
study of it!
Something sad, Whitmanian
& Navy-like —
gulls — that same
afternoon hotdrowse
of gulls & slapwater
dream I noticed
in 1951 getting sea
papers & 1942
too — the Melvillean
youth dreaming in
sea pants, at
his clerical dockside
work — with night
to come — the
Turkish bath madnight
& cunts

in parks — The
house where all
the sad eyed
Okie sailorboys
in T Shirts
madly sleep
— The long
dream eternity and
afternoon madhouse
solemnity of it!
— the long planks
& Colonial windows
on the actual water
of the living
(When the H bomb
finally hit NY
one afternoon the
first living act I
saw was a man
surreptitiously pissing
while lying on his
side)

 

Some doctor is talking
to us about the guy
who broke his leg
clean in half —
we’ve just seen
him hobbling around
with a curious limp,
some old guy not
Neal — “He’ll
walk alright in a
few months but
come 55 & 60 &
it’ll reappear &
be pronounced —
the
nerve
is

 

affected when you
snap yr leg clean
in half like that!”
— I think of
Neal & the hobble
he’ll have at 55

 

 

October in the
wash hung court —
wash pieces flip & kick
in the cool breeze,
on the radio’s the
excited World Series
voice & the name
Ally Reynolds
(secretly smiling Indian
padding back to
dugout) —
airplane drone above
in the buzzing world
afternoon of Lower
East Side — someone
whistling — hone buzz
hum of Vibratos Manhattoes
in Million
blowers humming in
the Void Wait Time
— kids battering, yelling
— a little red wagon
hung from a hook —
a moan, nameless
speetz
,
the rack of
French blinds being

 

pulled — October in the
Poolhall, the clack of
a sodapop box no
balls click
till
big
dense swarmnight —
all this so well &
good — Somewhere a
motor straining —
nylons waving — a
crazy inside-deep
high thin Porto Rican
monkey rapid
woman chat blattering
“Yera mera quien
te tse que seta . . .”
Too independent to go
be begging at
anybody’s ports
for more than a
month

 

Plucking at
Her ha! — harpstring
To whom rapture
means
rupture

 

Applied for job at
Jersey Central — offered
ground switchman
job, stand in cold
winter lining
switches & sending
kicked or humped
cars rolling down
various tracks — bleak
— healthy —
$100 every half —
4, 5 days a
week — Plenty kicks
with Mardou, plenty
jazz, wood for

 

fireplace & dig the
big NY this winter —
Spectral Ole
Jersey Central is
like the SP
at 3rd & Townsend,
right on water where
rail meets river —
sea actually —
now I have coffee
in JCRR lunchroom
& remember 1951
Xmas the Harding
at Am Pres Lines
Pier — etc. —

 

A barge graveyard
outside J Central
yards — NY Skyline
of Wall St high &
serene in pristine
October afternoon —
October sits
golden on the
iron old wood &
white gulled
rivers — The
Statue of Liberty her
weatherbeaten green
beak close looming
over sunk barges,
pier, masts, in
spokeless blue —

 

ferns ghost swiftly
in the channel —
excursion lowboats —
This old barge teeters
at angle, abandoned
coverless stove, stovepipe
still in, still a lot
of dry dust coal,
table, colorlost
chair — the barge’s
bottom is sunken
mosquito hive &
tenement of beams
bird limed &
boards flowing in
tarn, the tenement
of gulls!
unspeakable hidden
home, they all
flap flocked when
they heard me
crank up the board
plank — Big
iron black bits
still solid in barge
deck — The broken
barge deckhouse is
like shacks under
Denver viaduct last
summer — instead of
weeds, tarns of
green bilge slime
& one old soaked
mattress of gray

 

— chick gug gug
Keree Keree of
some crane motor
nearby, insistent calls
of tugs — I saw
shrouds freighters
standing in the Bay
— harbor — The
S of L, her back,
her torch upheld
to a smoky uncaring
strife torn waterfront
striking Brooklyn —
Barnacled gulled
piers standing in
low water as the
old piles of

 

ancient Princeton
Blvd Lost Generation
roadhouses with river
porch dancefloors &
oldtime lamps with
tassels & beer of
yore — October’s
little falling white
puffs from giant
weedfields —
Jerseyward the
gloomy men in rubbage,
the smoke of
old switch pots,
industrial & sometree
horizons in the
October Gold —

 

I’ll live on the
West Waterfront,
— be Wolfe
— on a day like
this exactly 12 years
ago I grabbed
her golden cunt the
moment she jumpt
into the car in
Manchester Conn. —
I was 19, horny,
October Gold was
on the hill then
too — Oil
in a map trance
slowly passes,
pockmarkt shit

 

with it — a
ruined submerged
bedspring like the
dump in Lowell
a giant 20 foot
plank moves over
like a long dead
snake waiting
for the sea —
— warm sun,
peaceful distant
smokes maybe of
hospital boiler rooms
— nameless faroff
yowls of trains —
Swaying newbarge
orangepainted
— the great ships
fatbottomed crooked
stern strange at
the foot of Manhattan
bulk
walls — the mystery
of their world going
hulls slightly slanted
& tied up at the
doorsteps of Time
& the World City
— Good God
the great ocean
one way sparkling
wine white to dry
red Spain sunrise
to come —

 

& all the green
harvestland t’other
way, to other San
Joses — other yards —
blam! be-krplam!
the running slack
sk-c-l-to-clank
of a cut being
rammed or braked
& I saw the yard
brakeman riding head
high in mid air
over emptyreefer
lines — The
rusty playwheels
of the railroad all
waiting for me Ah