the Notebook: Collected Poems
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by Gary Snyder
...only the very poor, or eccentric, can surround themselves with shapes of elegance (soon to be demolished) in which they are forced by poverty to move with leisurely grace. We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet, to one side, and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all.
--LEW WELCH
I
We're on our way
man
out of town
go hitching down
that highway ninety-nine
Too cold and rainy to go out on the Sound
Sitting in Ferndale drinking coffee
Baxter in black, been to a funeral
Raymond in Bellingham--Helena Hotel--
Can't go to Mexico with that weak heart
Well you boys can go south. I stay here.
Fix up a shack--get a part-time job--
(he disappeared later
maybe found in the river)
In Ferndale & Bellingham
Went out on trailcrews
Glacier and Marblemount
There we part.
tiny men with moustaches
driving ox-teams
deep in the cedar groves
wet brush, tin paints, snoose
Split-shake roof barns
over berryfields
white birch chickencoop
Put up in Dick Meigs cabin
out behind the house--
Coffeecan, PA tin, rags, dirty cups,
Kindling fell behind the stove
miceshit
old magazines
winter's coming in the mountains
shut down the show
the punks go back to school
& the rest hit the road
strawberries picked, shakeblanks split
fires all out and the packstrings brought
down to the valleys
set to graze
Gray wharves and hacksaw gothic homes
Shingle mills and stump farms
overgrown.
II
Fifty drunk Indians
Sleep in the bus station
Stawberry pickers speaking Kwakiutl
turn at Burlington for Skagit
& Ross Dam
under appletrees by the river
banks of junkd cars
B. C. drivers give hitch-hikers rides
"The sheriff's posse stood in double rows
flogged the naked Wobblies down
with stalks of Devil's Club
& run them out of town"
While shingle-weavers lost their fingers
in the tricky feed and take
of double saws.
Dried, shrimp
smoked, salmon
--before the war old indian came
&sold us hard-smoked chinook
From his truck-bed model T
Lake City,
waste of trees & topsoil, beast, herb,
edible roots, Indian field-farms & white men
dances washed, leached, burnt out
Minds blunt, ug! talk twisted
A night of the long poem
and the mined guitar . . .
"Forming the new society
within the shell of the old"
mess of tincan camps and littered roads
The Highway passes straight through
every town
At Matsons washing blujeans
hills and saltwater
ack, the woodsmoke in my brain
High Olympics -- can't go there again
East Marginal Way the hitch-hike zone
Boeing down across Duwamish slough
& angle out
& on.
Night rain wet concrete headlights
blind
Salt air/ Bulk Cargo/ Steam cycle
AIR REDUCTION
eating peanuts I don't give a damn
if anybody ever stops I'll walk
to San Francisco what the hell
"that's where you're going?
"why you got that pack?
Well man I just don't feel right
Without something on my back
& this character in milkman overalls
"I have to come out here
every once in a while, there's a guy
blows me here"
way out of town.
Stayed in Olympia with Dick Meigs
-- this was a different year & he had moved --
sleep on a cot in the back yard
half the night watch falling stars
These guys got babies now
drink beer, come back from wars
"I'd like to save up all my money
get a big new car, go down to Reno
& latch onto one of those rich girls --
I'd fix their little ass" -- nineteen yr old
N. Dakota boy fixing to get married next month
To Centralia in a purple ford.
carstruct dead doe
by the Skookumchuck river
Fat man in a Chevrolet
wants to go back to L.A.
"too damnd poor now"
Airbrakes on the log trucks hiss and whine
Stand in the dark by the stoplight.
big fat cars tool by
Drink coffee, drink more coffee
brush teeth back of Shell
hot shoes
stay on the rightside of that yellow line
Marys Corner, turn for Mt. Ranier
-- once caught a ride at night for Portland here
Five Mexicans, ask me "chip in on the gas"
I never was more broke & down.
got fired that day bu the USA
(the District Ranger up at Packwood
thought the wobblies had been dead for
forty years
but the FBI smelled treason
-- my red beard)
That Waco Texas boy
took A. G. & me through miles of snow
had a chest of logger gear
at the home of an Indian girl
in Kelso, hadn't seen since Fifty-four
Toledo, Castle Rock, free way
four lane
no stoplights & no crossings, only cars
& people walking, old hitch-hikers
break the law. How do I know.
the state cop
told me so.
Come a dozen times into
Portland
on the bum or
hasty lover
late at night
III
dust kicking up behind the trucks -- night rides--
who waits in the coffee shop
night highway 99
Sokei-an met an old man on the banks of the
Columbia river growing potatoes & living all alone,
Sokei-an asked him the reason why he lived there,
he said
Boy, no one ever asked me the reason why.
I like to be alone.
I am an old man.
I have forgotten how to speak human words.
All night freezing
in the back of a truck
dawn at Smith river
battering on in loggers pickups
prunes for lunch
The next right, Siuslaw.
Portland sawdust down town
Buttermilk corner, all you want for a nickel
(now a dime)
--Sujata gave Gautama
buttermilk,
(No doubt! says Sokei-an, that's all it was
plain buttermilk)
rim of mountains. pulp bark chewd snag
papermill
tugboom in the river
--used to lean on bridgerails
dreaming up eruptions and quakes--
Slept under Juniper in the Siskiyou
a sleeping bag, a foot of snow
black rolled umbrella
ice slick asphalt
Caught a ride the only car come by
at seven in the morning
chewing froze salami
Riding with a passed-out LA whore
glove compartment full of booze,
the driver a rider, nobody cowboy,
sometime hood,
Like me picked up to drive,
& drive the blues away.
we drank to Portland
& we treated that girl good.
I split my ladt two bucks with him in town
went out to Carol & Billy's in the woods.
--foggy morning in Newport
housetrailers
under the fir.
An old book on Japan at the Goodwill
unfurld umbrella in the sailing snow
sat back in black wood
barber college
chair, a shave
On Second Street in Portland
what elegance. What a life.
bust my belly with a quart of
buttermilk
& five dry heels of French bread
from the market cheap
clean shaved, dry feet.
We're on our way
man
out of town
Go hitching down that
highway ninety-nine.
IV
to be continued
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by Grant Morrison
and who is this
Pure
fail?
Lo;
in the sagas of old time,
legend of Scald,
of bard, of druid,
cometh he not
in greed, like
Spring?
O,
thou Water that art Air,
in whom all complex is
Resolved!
Oh, yes!
Fill the churches with dirty thoughts!
introduce honesty to the White House
Write letters in dead languages--
to people you've never met!
Paint filthy words on the
foreheads of children!
Burn your credit cards
and wear high heels!
Asylum doors stand Open!
fill the suburbs with murder and rape!
Divine Madness!
Let there be ecstasy, ecstasy in the streets!
Laugh and the World
laughs with you!
Next
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by Grant Morrison
Not born. Shit into existence.
Tumor abortion baby.
Sick excretion.
Mommy Mommy
I'm not an animal an animal. Infected skin.
The realm of the skin is my delight a
country of Pestilence
garden of dis-ease. Sweating poison. Tears of pus.
I only want to touch you. Hold me in your arms and tell
But I rise from the plague pit - spectre of filth.
The father, the sin and the wholly gross.
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by Michael Ondaatje
Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feathers
like a burst cottonball,
continuing while I drove over them.
I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.
Next
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by Michael Ondaatje
A girl whom I've not spoken to
or shared coffee with for several years
writes of an old scar.
On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,
the size of a leech.
I gave it to her
brandishing a new Italian penknife.
Look, I said turning,
and blood spat onto her shirt.
My wife has scars like spread raindrops
on knees and ankles,
she talks of broken greenhouse panes
and yet, apart from imagining red feet,
(a nymph out of Chagall)
I bring little to that scene.
We remember the time around scars,
they freeze irrelevant emotions
and divide us from present friends.
I remember this girl's face,
the widening rise of surprise.
And would she
moving with lover or husband
conceal or flaunt it,
or keep it at her wrist
a mysterious watch.
And this scar I then remember
is medallion of no emotion.
I would meet you now
and I would wish this scar
to have been given with
all the love
that never occurred between us.
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by Leonard Cohen
As I lay in my loved-soaked bed
two angels came to kiss my head.
I grabbed one's gown
and wrestled her down
to be my girl in death town.
She will not fly.
She's promised to die.
O what a clever corpse am I!