George Bowering

This sudden snow:

            immediately

the prairie is!

Those houses are:

            dark

under roofs of snow –

That hill up to the cloud is:

            markt

            by snow creeks down to town –

This footpath is:

            a bare line

across white field –

            This woman appears

            thru drift of snow:

a red coat.

I walkt to the back of the house in the

yard near the garage & saw him in a

white shirt playing ping pong with a patient

or friend or someone else who lived in the

house & there he was.

I sat at the table where we were reading

aloud together & heard him from behind where

he was crying aloud & wearing his pink

leather number on the west coast & I

must tell you he is a star.

Maybe Holofernes.

He tried to grow a mustache & took his

vacation in a classy hotel in bermuda where

he sat & drank bourbon with ice, a poet

taking his own kind of holiday, hooray.

Judy lookt as if she wanted to be him

or be with him or kill him.

I think that all the time he was listening

to the ice in the glass his ear was thinking

ping

pong

ping

pong

pingngngngng

One time he placed a bottle of Pinch on the

coat hook on the back of the door in our

clothes closet & we opened & closed the door

for two months before we found the bottle

of Pinch & it should have fallen off many

times so we drank it & later I bought him

a bottle of Pinch in August because the night

before we had been drinking bourbon on his

credit card in the bar where he goes to

drink his own way, the poet.

There he was, on the tape, all over the

country, making personal appearances, Captain

Poetry, listening to the voice of the four

horsemen in the children’s fiery

chamber of verse.

I’m going to write a poem about life & death, I said, but mostly about death. But you are always doing that, said D, your last poem was about death. The poem before that one was about death. In fact if you looked at all your writing, especially the poems, you would find pretty near nothing but death. A lot of the time you seem to be laughing about it, but that doesnt fool anyone.

Yes, but this time I am going to make it a real poem about life but mainly death, I’ll grant you that. None of that lacy Rilke death, none of that ho ho Vonnegut death. I mean real death or I should say real thinking about death. For instance? asked D. Well, for instance, take the way you feel like how awful it would be when you cant put an arm around a perfect waist, & there is that swelling out of hip upon which it is natural to rest an arm. How wonderful, and how terrible not to be able to look forward to that ever again.

You see? said D, you announce that you are going to say something straight about death, and there you are talking about life, as far as I can see. That’s just my point, I said. Death will be horrible because it won’t have anything of life in it, no matter how many fancypants graduate students have told me that you can’t really submerge yourself in life unless you are fully conscious of your death. They have all been reading Albert Camus lately, & they are so much wiser than I am.

I suppose you are using all of the things I have been saying as part of your poem, said D. Of course, I said. You are to this poem as a swelling out of lovely hip is to an arm that has snaked around a dear waist.

Just then I realized that I had made D up in my imagination, & now there was no D at all, & I had to forget about writing another poem about life & death, but especially about death, especially about death from a straight point of view, because M came into the room while I was typing & had a persistent gripe about C, & no matter how interrupted I managed to make myself look on the chair in front of the keyboard, M just kept on & on till the poem had followed D to some place we will never find the way to.