Look See

Collage 1 for Charley

Charles Plymell Let it Roll

Collage by Ginger Eades

Stacked Plymell Books Psychedelic View

Friends on Film

The Charles Plymell Video Show

Zap's First Printer (Charles Plymell) on Robert Crumb

The Plymell Zap

Curled in Character 

by Charles Plymell

My favorite reality chamber in the 40s and 50s was to cradle myself in the big overstuffed armchair with a stack of comics on the floor and some beside me in the chair a smorgasbord of preferences that would satisfy a reading orgy should I decide to shift quickly from Mary Jane and Sniffles, the first "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" (or dust she sniffed), to Prune Face, The Submariner, Scarecrow--or the old standbys--Captain Marvel, Batman and his Robin, et. al. I might have just traded for some more esoteric ones, "The Thing," a Luftwaffe pilot who went down in the swamp and turned into a swamp monster trying always to resolve his identity, Or "He-She," who turned sideways to foil the police with its sex. One side was a man, one a woman; the first hermaphrodite androgynous transvestite character, who, I'm sure could enjoy great popularity now.

The classics would be shuffled to the bottom of the pile; I would put my classic education off as long as possible; however, they were still better to get into than reading the stilted, pretentious English of James Fenimore Cooper. Oh yeah, and there were ones I never could get the plot, like Little Orphan Annie and Prince Valiant--they were also towards the bottom of the stack. I'd read Bugs Bunny first, or other Disney characters. It wasn't until much later in my scholarly pursuits that I found a couple of references to the metaphysical aspect of Disney by none other than Ezra Pound, who thought Disney was one the greatest metaphysician of the 20th century, who brought us a personified natural world...pretty heavy stuff indeed!

The smell of colored ink and newsprint was an aroma that lured me into the page. As important to me as the stories, were the characters, who were not remote, and certain frames I had to go back to and curl up with a while, dwell on, until I absorbed the full action and context. In this aesthetic, the comics seemed more like movies to me than a textual stories. I would imagine getting the characters into a story line would be the most difficult aspect of cartooning. Our linear-literary consciousness culture always wants "the story". There is something also about cartoons that to me had an affinity to old radio shows, which may be just a generational personal feeling rather than an aesthetic, implicit in the art form. Sometimes I would trade for a little fat book made to flip the pages and make the characters move, which is the basis of filmed cartoons. I have regrettably not yet seen any of Crumb's film work by or about him.

Among other delights, it was the creation of characters that grabbed me into Crumb's work. Theorizing, in hindsight, those I selected to keep on the top of the pile would have the necessary values that belong to the art; be profane, carnival, or vulgar in the artistic sense. Crumb filled those criteria. His good invention of character, most often himself, and the marvelous idiolects that was not afraid of controversial dialog also set a fearless tone that could go back in traditional literature to Chaucer. He was in the generation of cartoonists with a message, and his characters brought a larger "character' to the form, a whiff of genius, compared to the piddling, politico-socio-culture engineering that steers our categories today: feminist, multicultural, new age, and all that which sadly seems to complicate our national character in divisiveness, convolution, complexity and more control. Ironically, most older comics were pretty one-dimensional, or highly skilled in converting any message into acceptable story lines. Obviously Dick Tracy was not a Dick for nothing and was no doubt one of J. Edgar's favorites, tucked in among his confiscated erotic reading material. Comics like American Heroes had the simplest story lines though others like Batman and Robin, simple in their ethos, good over bad, had a particular subliminal psychological undertone that has something to do with their lasting popularity.

Crumb is also literary, evidenced in all his work, even in his secondary scholarly creations like his masterful work on Kafka. He certainly should be taken seriously as one of the masters in all cartoon history, not just "underground", (if that designation has not outlived its usage). I remember two comics I bought in a trunk in Kansas at an auction in town ready to be cleared for a lake and dam, incidentally, where Bill Burroughs now goes trap shooting. One was The Katzenjammer Kids, and the other was Andy Gump. They had cardboard covers and the format was almost square, printed on newsprint, with introductions written by famous people such as Mayor LaGuardia and Enrico Caruso.

There has always been a sustained audience for Comics, and there is a surprisingly large audience for "underground comics", which I'll talk about later, but the quality of consciousness in underground comix contains a certain realism that still has to be disguised in the mainstream. Think how many high school kids would stay in school if they had these cartoons for their curricula, instead of the most deadly boring sanctified officialgovernmental socio-soft-Fascism that cleverly and constantly engineers our brains and controls our movements to become economic and cultural slaves to their empires. I haven't followed the New York mainstream press stories and the recent controversy over Crumb's work, but I'm sure it exemplifies what I'm talking about. As our society swells, it divides, and that division is engineered into the mainstream from diversity. In the "doublethinktank," these actions have the counter-effect of creating more identification and control. The boomers and their babes have to have these markers to know the good guys from the bad guys; freedom of speech is too simple for them (or too complex).

One could stand back and watch it happen from a distance; certainly other countries have a different perspective of this country, but I'm still foolish enough to hope that all the cartoonists and their audiences will continue to enjoy freedom, liberty, justice, sex and deprivation as is tradition. But as we see in today's politics, depicting these historical themes is interpreted as causing the vulgarity it displays. There's no tolerance for exaggerating fat asses in our society, so if the Organization of Fat Asses can make the government engineer them into a non-discriminatory categorical squeeze in the control box, everything will be right. Oh Yeah.

I think the first strip of Crumb's I saw was in an underground newspaper from the upper Midwest. There were some poets from Cleveland associated with the poet, d. a. levy, who had come to the San Francisco scene during the mid Haight-Ashbury and who had given me a paper. I had a larger press in the Mission District at the time. I liked the posters in the head shops that were thriving in the Haight. I didn't care for the religious and flower-power drawings in the Oracle, so I put out a couple of issues of a newspaper I called The Last Times in which i lifted Crumb's strip from the Midwest underground paper. There was a need for more newspapers that the street kids could hawk, so someone was there buying all I could print, which was only a paltry 500 or so copies. I never made any money on them. There is only one person I know who has copies of the papers. I assumed most of them were tossed. I thought they were more exciting than the Oracle, but what did I know. Anyway, poster art was going to dominate the paper scene for a while.

I was into the literary and later the music scene at the time Crumb came to San Francisco and I had kept an old pre-war Multilith and offset camera from the Mission shop. We were having nude parties at the Post Street address from the Gough Street scene which had disolved. We had complimentary tickets to the Janis Joplin and Big Brother concert, but we were too stoned to get there, though it was only a few blocks. Lots of people dropped by, someone talked about a new group he was involved with called "Pink Floyd". Billy Jharmark of the Batman Gallery, who later gave me his 52 MGTD Classic, and his friend, Bob Branaman who was living in the backseat of his '49 Chevy were still on the scene. Even Huncke visited us at that pad, and we associated him with the disappearance of an IBM Selectric, bless his heart. There was junk on the street and pot in the cupboard.

Bob Branaman was a "finder"; he eventually turned up everyone who was anyone. It was a business deal, or as close as one could come to it that brought Don Donahue to the door. It was supposed to be 5,000 copies, but that's a stretch. I'll tell you why. But first--! loved the drawings Don laid out on the desk. I felt like I was curled up again in that chair and knew that these drawings were important artworks, so I wanted to be identified as the printer, and thus put my name on the bottom of the back cover.

It is amazing just much the printing technologies have change just from the Sixties, and of course, we had pre-war equipment, that wasn't really capable of a printing job like Zap Comix. I would have to make the Multilith dance and sing; I took on the job. After all, I was arrested for forgery and uttering when I knew Branaman in the Wichita County Jail. But it was the lack of technology which caused most of the waste in run of what was supposed to be 5,000 copies...my guess is around 1,500 copies. My wife, Pam says less. I don't think my printers scruples would allow too much of a rip-off, but most everyone was on acid or pot and was so excited to see the finished copy, and since there was little money and barter involved, I don't know who counted.

Prior to that meeting, I had been attending parties at Don Allen's, the West Coast editor for Grove, I was trying to get both him and Ferlinghetti to publish Crumb and was also working toward getting Keep on Trucking drawing off Crumb. The literary publishers seemed uninterested at the time, even though I was later paid well ($300 plus) a piece for a couple of poems that were illustrated in Evergreen Review by artists I never knew; I tried to introduce publishers to Crumb, but they had other interests (or tastes).

I explained to Don Donahue that I really needed a chain delivery on the press, which only had a small chute for 500 sheets, and a spray attachment to powder the paper so the colors wouldn't offset on the next sheet. We pulled out small stacks from the chute as I squirted each of the sheets with powder from a turkey baster. The chain-delivery, incidentally was invented by a printer in San Francisco as a Rube Goldberg devise to grip the sheets of paper and stack them in a receding pile (funny how the Multilith Company didn't think of it). Anyway, the chute delivery had to have two little chrome wheels that ran along the edge of coated cover stock (which in itself was stressing the press's capability). An the images, which by now I had gone over with Don, sending him back to Crumb to make separate color overlays (continuous tone was out of the question). Which maxed out the 10xl 5 format of the press. In other words there was no margin for the wheels to carry, that didn't contain an image. I solved that problem by soaking cotton pads in the water solution and attaching them to the wheels' fixtures with a rubber band.

Mind you, all the sheets of cover stock had to be run through the press four times, for each color, including the black. And registration had to be perfect, so I ran some trial pages with black only, first as a template for all the other colors because I wanted to put on the black last to cover any gap in the registration. In addition, the Multi had to be fine-tuned constantly to hold its register. Even at that, every 10 or so copies the lines would jump out of register a little. This was characteristic for most all machines at the time. I also had to compensate for slight differences in the stock trim, because Don bought it at surplus odd lot paper dealer, and it may have been cut cross-grained or absorbed humidity before the next run. The technical problems were endless. The format remained the same for many years in the Comix trade, but it was in a sense arbitrary, because it was the maximum size for a Multilith 1250.

I liked the newsprint, because it was like the old 1917, 1920 editions I mentioned earlier. I forget whose idea it was, probably mine to put the inside on cheap newsprint, which had been used also in some very fine little press poetry books I had from France. But the newsprint was no picnic to run, either, usually newsprint was made for a web press that took it in rolls. It didn't cut out and run as well as #20 bond or book stock. Anyway we completed the job and went to Crumb's apt. for a party. We got high and drank and ate cake. I especially remember his overstuffed armchairs and his old Philco radios. Anyway, the collector's item, "printed by Charles Plymell" is well worth its price; I'm pretty sure the original count was short. The last time I saw one was one I had given a friend's kid who lived on the Bowery. He used to take it down to the Bat Cave in the city and watch its value climb.

Its was with some gallows humor that I traded the press to Don, and told him that he could learn printing as well. The darkness compounded when I saw the chaotic struggle of old wiring and mattresses and paper all over the place in his ghetto warehouse. I told him he could expect some waste. He fought it to its end in Great Balls of Fire. It took courage for me to enter the premises, and knowing all the complications that vex an experienced printer, I looked with sympathy at that chaotic scene, but he excelled in chaos. It serve him well. A true Man of the Comix.

It was many years later, while living in Cherry Valley that S. Clay send word of a Comix show in the city. I hadn't seen Crumb since the first Zap, nor S. Clay, since I printed his first folio on Grist's press when I was working at the Campbell's Pork & Bean factory in Lawrence, KS. The plan to go to this show began the strange comixesque episode in Cherry Valley with a local character straight out of a 60's cartoon, a 70's comic fan, mechanic, dreamer, "Dangerous Dan" his friend, Ray, Mike, myself and Melodie. Ray had an old four-door Caddy with a Bat signal painted on the back. (he went in for a revival fad at the time. )

The line at the gallery was several blocks long. I caught a glimpse of Spain who got us in, but it was packed so much I couldn't get to S. Clay. Crumb came out and was talking to Ginsberg. I tried for a photo but the camera lens was all wet from sweat and humidity in the gallery. I gave it to Melodie who tried to get some shots. I groveled my way through to Crumb to say hello and talked to Ginsberg for a while. People started asking me for my autograph and took pictures I've never seen. Ginsberg turned to me and gestured to the packed gallery and said "See what you started."

The rest of the evening was trying to press in to see S. Clay, but we had to leave. On the way home we were stopped by New Jersey troopers who demanded Ray, in his baseball cap get out of the car; he handed them a temporary license, which made the trooper say "What's this, your kindergarten report card?' One by one we filed out of the car while they searched the trunk. They were sure they had something...but WHAT? Finally, I, an old white bearded man wearing a handkerchief around my head, got out and told the troopers that I was from a small village which didn't have many resources and Ray was they only Limo driver I could find. They sensed the paper work would be too much on this scene, so they just told us to keep on going..out of New Jersey. There was a lot more to that cartoon, but it will have to wait. It does seem though, that reality takes on a special nearness when it is near a comic event. In science, It would be called a cosmic event.

I hear that Crumb got some heat from the multicultural fems about ladies with the big butts and the likes. He has chosen to live in France. I think that's a good idea. The best way to really see this country crumble, if it isn't in a cartoon, may be from far away.

---

Charles Plymell on Elliott Coleman

Elliott Coleman with Charles Plymell

I was working on the San Francisco docks when a couple of students came to visit and urged me to come to the Writing Seminars. I had dropped out after Freshman year of high school and after roaming in the West, went to a university for a few years not working toward a degree, but mainly to keep out of jail. Tuition was nominal and work was plenty, and gas was 15 cents a gallon in New Mexico, so everything was easy in the ’50s. There was still a future that even fools could hold. By the ’60s, I had influenced and been influenced by the Beat Generation when Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassidy moved into my flat in San Francisco. I experimented with all the legal hallucinogens and watch the Hippies come and go. 

The Beats wrote introductions to my work and I was well published by the noted publications of the day. I had put it all behind me by the time I quit my job on the docks and came to the Seminars;  I was linked to labels, but essentially an outlaw or outcast to any movement. My main influences in life had been rounders when I traveled the Western states with my sister who worked for madams, and I worked various jobs while grooving with jazz hipsters of the ’50s from Kansas City to Lost Angeles. Route 66 was my commute and I read Loren Eiseley who grew up on the plains as I did, and the hip poets, Patchen, cummings and mad Ez and surrealist Hart Crane from Ohio. I never associated poetry with universities then. Bennies, Boo and Bebop were my style.

So I wasn’t the typical, young graduate entering the Seminars. From my life experiences, I knew when I met a great man. I sensed that Mr. Coleman wanted to know what I was about, and I wanted to know what he and his scene was about. Simple as that! But probably more lay inherently deep in the marrow of the institution of Hopkins. He was of the old school, the last of the moderns, by that I mean he could have held his own with all the names in literature in all the old canons of the academe. His work was not easily classified in the surrealism/metaphysics of the day and remained almost intentionally obscure. 

For he was a spirit, a light, for not only the privileged, for he made no such distinctions; yet, those upon whom his presence was cast sensed they were privileged. He was traditionally generous as well, making sure to bring our family a Thanksgiving turkey we shared with another writer family in the student ghettos. His spirit would have been immediately noted among the elite or the tramp. He would illuminate any hobo camp or faculty meeting. His generosity and demeanor reminded me of another writer friend of his age with whom I had a similar relationship, William Burroughs. He was gracious and therefore hard to “get at.” We tried. The ornery students tried to get “one up on him” in the Seminar room, but he always put us in our place, even if he did show signs of desiring his afternoon cocktail a bit early. He was mischievous too and delighted in having me dine with him and the other movers and shakers in the faculty room, waiting for me to say something off color, or maybe tell a joke he could slap his knee and laugh at.

I got the distinct impression he was wise enough with words to name his child “the Writing Seminars” — not creative this or that. He did know words and any writing is creative unless one is a scribe. (Or typist! Ha! He would have loved the fiasco I was in when Kerouac met Capote.) In that respect, he was ahead of them all. He loved good writing and produced students who became known in journalism; political satire; short stories, etc. The genre didn’t matter. His purpose was to make the adolescent writers grow up. His method seemed mostly to let them go at each other, but as grown ups. One dared not fall below that line. On that he had a tight hold and the punishment for overstepping that was one’s own awareness of one’s own regression that he would signal by retort or expression. Punishment indeed. The old methods that endeared him were pretty much decimated as new writing industry took over. It seemed a time in history that all things began to change for the surging population: the factory farm, agribusiness slaughter houses, futures, fame, writers like Snooky visiting campuses for the same honorarium as a Nobel Laureate! He would have slapped his knee over that!  There was an all too familiar analogy emerging in the “departments.” It was no longer operated by its founder with the help of one secretary. It would become an industry. There would be no need for an Elliott Coleman.

I heard the omen from parents on graduation day standing behind me. They complained there were no big monetary rewards awaiting their kids after shelling out big bucks. The government stepped in just in time. It would change the field forever creating its own audience to recycle itself. There would be more yield but the spirit would be sucked dry. Let me use an analogy that destroyed the plains, the cowboy, the  fields of  the dry land prairie rancher and small farmer and his gods of wind and rain. ”… the elemental gist of unwalled winds…” (Hart Crane) to curse or pray to and make up his person.  The kids I knew from those fields now park their Cessnas (bought with our tax money) behind their houses and their John Deeres in front. Their families had enough acreage that the government subsidized them with tens of thousands, yes,  hundreds of thousands to let their land lie fallow. There was too much poetry, er…wheat. 

They used our tax money to ride around in Cadillacs (not Subarus) to enjoy their fallow acreage of poetry…er, wheat.  When subsidized,  they started using our tax money to put in irrigation wells which created more wheat…er, more poets. By doing so they sucked the great Ogallala Aquifer dry. (The great spirit water of life and poetry.)  Then they paid with our tax money for places (programs) to store the wheat until it could reach the market or speculators, or rats, or whatever. Anyway there are parts of the analogy that would correspond to giving poets money to make more poetry, storage (programs), a fallow audience, a moldy poetry. An analogy works as good as its parts. Elliott knew this. It is not the simple comparisons they teach kids  in our mis-education system. The language is gone, literature is gone. Poetry is gone. Elliott Coleman is gone! Ha! Sorry, Elliott, I so need you sitting in that chair at the head of the table to let me become aware of where I am wrong!

This essay is part of

A Fortnightly Review

of work by and about Elliott Coleman.

For More Info, visit  Beats In Kansas: The Beat Generation in the Heartland

The Charles Plymell MySpace FanSite is HERE

Eight Poems by Charles Plymell

CHARLES PLYMELL

---

November 3, 1998 Dark Afternoon
November,
and the clouds are heavy metal
rolling oe'r the vacant bricks of Utica
where Ray lies in his death throes
at the Faxton Cancer Hospital.
It's not a happy sight, a
finality about the rooms and service
his roommate's exposed privates
both he and Ray seem far away.
In and out of sensed reality
I fear to say, eyes like animals in cages
Ray's eyes sometimes intense
screaming "I want to die"
not in a philosophical mode
but the growl used for prison guards
rattling his bones against the
iron bars of New Jersey.
Squirts of daylight on the sidewalk
like used rubber gloves thrown
among the slimy Autumn leaves
Study the sight, oh latter night Beats.
Another is passing into the night
like T.V. tonight Jimmy Smit
on NYPD the line of fictive reality
unto death, what to do with life's purpose?
If it's to understand life (loved the old comedies)
from those eyes just make ourselves over
Ray watched the old realities in black and white
He pulls on the bed rails : "I want to die."
His eyebrows move and he briefly conducts
a conversation he can't partake in
or a Katchaturian concert or a poem.
He leans back, eyes glazed, goes elsewhere
further than shooting up decades ago
the history gone like our rides for Terpin hydrate
finding village drugstores while the world went on.
What history can a human have.The history gone
the religions, the politics, the last fiction...not that
there's just never enough to go around.
Don't tell me his spirit has to hitch a ride
'round about midnight'
to make a visitation when the sky
rolled back its spheres to let the gold sun
wail like a sax over the stage of East hill
for an original hipbeatster camping at
the Committee on Poetry farm
where he said he used to talk more shit
than the radio which he didn't own.

---

Neal Cassady

An ego pressed onward
Like a tight skirt in the night

Popeye and Olive Oyl
Swaggering down the street
Jumping parking meters
doing exercise gyrations
Expectations surrounded him
in crowds and beach boy cronies
Tarot card sharks and wood shooters
The Fastest Gun in the West.
I showed him pictures
Of Butch and the wild bunch
"Neal, Was he your father?"
That worried orphaned-look
I'll not forget.
He lived fast, his beds, death rows
to blow genius away, like The Doors,
A race over rails from time's windowpane
sun hot on the Mexican landscape--the
Railroad tracks chromed with cocaine.

---

Madonna's "Love Like a Virgin"

(in the manner of Arnaut)

Some will say "appalling"
to "Love Like a Virgin" (a true simile)
a bra falling
No shy peeress in white lace, she.
All classes meet
in her song of love
the woman of the street
turns swoon of royal dove
to roll, to rub the stage
of delight and desire
the ballerina's paraphrase
lips, hips and sexual fire.
Great challenge and threat
to all pretentious fools
worker, professional, bureaucrat,
who loose their tools
when facing this talent
that sulks and erupts
to such embellishment
the strut bust lusts.

---

Was Poe Afraid?

On these same old brick streets of
Baltimore tonight--was Poe afraid?
Of all night rusting sign patent verse;
new neon juice from foggy tavern door.
Afraid of the florescent eyes of dogs,
the raven's reflection, the rats scat
through sawdust in Hollins Market,
the smell of rot and burlap thick as fur.
Afraid of roaches, disease, of poverty,
loud poverty boom-box crackle crack whip
poor ponies pulling carts full of greens
up Greene Street - overloaded with greed.
Afraid of the thick fast sky over
Cross Street's cloud draped rummage day
crimson cloak, threaded from the hill
down to the curling dark water bay.
Black statues swirling great pleated sheets
when street lights go dim, losing the stars,
Like partygoers streaming to their last car...
some on twilight's slightly twisted cane.
Afraid of the beer, the drugs, the vault
of shoreline's fractal ragged fault
floating in a dream grave afraid to yell
disciples repeating smug versions of hell.
The whirl of a wash, a tangled thread
sets and alarm that turns to dread
makes the vision flow instead to
creation and how such grace is fed.

---

Pathos in the Towns

Technology, ironically
has tortured them again.
Babies crucified without brains
from toxins
that provide
the wealth and power
for the empire of world order
once again unstable. Squeaking
through this last abstract dream
muffler and broken tailpipe
or nightmare vacuum cleaner
deleting the particles?
Its tentacles
again too long
sucking free
citizenry, again the slave
no matter what alliance.
All creatures big and small
dying, some species gone
the air ancient
chemical warfare,
sulfur dioxide
evaporates the greed and avarice.
No pure dawn since Sappho.
Water giving up mutations.
The internal combustion engine
sounds through the night
eight cylinders heard eight miles
poverty is loud, the last requiem of wounded earth.

---

Going Home

For the Kanza (in the manner of Rihaku)

Great Mountains formed the eastern slope,
Shallow rivers stretch their ancient beds;
Here a new stream must separate our trail,
To forget a thousand miles of dead commerce,
And wrap our minds to a floating white cloud.
While the sunset washes the unrevealed eye,
We bow and clasp our hearts to the distance
That every living creature knows we left.

---

From Ancient Lands (Vernal Equinox Dream)

Washington, D.C. 1984

They walked the sunrise, soul-burned travelers,
wearing hats tilted like Autumn's landscaped hills.
Rough faced sailors, eyes laden like water rills
scanned the horizon till shorelined stars unfurled.
New wind in the air for those waft on the seas,
new smell of earth dug away to align the leys.
And they came forever wandering, as if set free
from cracks and rifts and vortices, as when some
great stone moves from its natural mortises; they
sailed the wind, a front of chaotic charges ignited,
careless in radiance of patterns of heaven unsighted.
(At 5:30 a.m. I awoke from a dream of Vernal Equinox
like a farmer called early for spring plowing, or a
driver with an early start knowing the aching miles
that stretch across the long heart of the prairie).
In the early days my father left his coffee pot
on the stove in his sod house, and he drove
cattle down to Galveston town, and he saw the
lights beckoning on the port side of the bow,
heading for Italy, brought back a color picture
of the Isle of Capri, and when he returned the
next year, the coffee pot was in the same place.
And the picture for years was the only decor in
the farmhouse room under angry rolling cyclones,
with their terrible pitched-moan to stillness,
silent as trowels through the loess and grass.
Blowing dust through cracks of doors and windows,
sculpted the still waves day and night. The house
took in the wind of the wolves' howl, the song
of the coyote, and the long train whistle dragging
the reptile's whispering scream of time; the pioneer's
pitch of desperation, first loud then soft, and
then distant into the stars where cowboys herded
the dark clouds out of the sky, where sailors lined
the beads like stars while the bodies of wanderers
happily grew again from the earth's bed with gentle flag
and stay; the blossom'd buds in May blew like many
visitors who come when the new wind comes that
keeps me half awake half dreaming... so very many.
My father rode down through the equinox in a perfect
visioned dream as if he had never been away. I
wanted to show him the nation's capital, but he
was here on other business; he wanted to find his
merchant marine papers, why, I don't know, maybe
to show passage through eternity and beyond,
like a journey pulling toward yet another shore.
'Look at the beautiful masonry,' I said to him, 'look at
the Merchant Marine Building with its exquisite work
of brick and tile, and bronze doors, and frontispieces.'
We went down to a little section of the city by the sea.
'Oh,' I said to him, 'this is just like Italy.' The marble
and the little streets and the glassworks and the women
who walked there, the women he joked with, and the sailors,
and the bricklayers, and the carpenters, and the threshers
from Kansas long ago, drifters passed in the street
recognized in memory, composite in chirality, patient
in formality; they, the lined-faced, the rough-hewn
people who walked the narrow streets by outdoor cafes.
He knew where to go, not up to the marbled entrance
but down a side street low, near a building, where,
in the dust of the sea bottom, beneath a small cupola
stood a woman by a counter of endless floating files.
'Draw me a picture of the last scene you remember
as a mariner,' she said. He drew a picture of himself
sitting on a bed, his sailor's hat cocked to one
side, a coffee cup on the table. He asked her jokingly,
'how do you want me, ma'am, hobbled and ironed?' She
helped him look. 'How far back?' He didn't know.
Down in the sea dust of a bottom drawer they found
his papers waterstained brown. He pulled them out
and waved and yelled as if he had found passage
toward the wild fix of stars, or Isle of Capri.

---

NOT A REGULAR KANSAS SERMON     

  For my mother in the hospital

Your grandmother married out of

the Trail of Tears.

You were born to a trail of fears,

a soddy, your brother dead.

Now you mistake me for him.

Then came the dust storms.

You put wet wash rags

over our faces so we could breathe.

Many women went mad, “God’s Wrath”

in the storms, miles from anywhere.

It took strength, courage and prayer.

You shot jackrabbits to feed five kids

and even fed hoboes from the tracks.

You gathered cactus for us to eat.

(I saw some at a gourmet market in D.C.)

I’ve yet to see snow ice cream

or mayonnaise & sugar sandwiches.

I did see fry bread recently

at Harbor Place in Baltimore. . . .

---