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To Leo
(Fragment of a long poem)
by Jesse Glass
53 years old here & already feeling
the tug of the dark attractor at 3:30 a.m.: No one awake
for miles of blinking lights at empty.
intersections. You told me to work; to heed the authentic
squealing of the real, the swine
running for the cliff. Leo, the penultimate
truth stripped like an old motel mattress
down to its stains. 53 years old here in Japan
and you four years in the ground.
Who heeds you these days
my lop-headed Virgil
except your widow & your grown daughter, maybe
cracking those remaindered book spines & saying
“he was a type-writer ribbon salesman &
a one-time drunk, but he was a good man, & a real fine
poet”–A fine, roaring, sweating the armpits out glowing with the exertion of trying to bring it, out of the well of the hell that was palpably there in the seminar rooms sweetened
by pipes of dons long gone & memorialized in badly done oils framed where they lounged away the hours of the Depression, the 40's, the Angry Young‘50's the hippie ‘60's, & now the “disco decade”–O
the irony of it, Leo, that they
with their uppity educations could lead the sheep
while you were the wolf from the bar room telling
the young ones crowding near that they too could learn
to fail & fall & cut the lip and contuse the words on the flesh and weep the words into the pay phone & sweat and retch the poems out and weep and nuzzle the poems in the paid arms of desperate love & mutter the poems under the reeking breath like a curse while the others looked down & away as you maneuvered your bulk like an evil spirit into their presence
the reek from your armpits another person in the room.
Obsequious & arrogant in turn, but most like a lobster, I thought,
grabbing what you needed with manic pincers & shoveling into your gullet
quarter-sandwiches, cold chicken (grease & all), brie on fancy cracker after cracker
& how you enjoyed contemplating the fact that you, the man from the street
had somehow found the genius they lacked, like someone who says looka here! looka here!
& you look & he takes a sliver of glass from under his tongue
& smirking, unzips his guts into his arms while the on-lookers applaud–A freak, a man-
monster on stage noodling an air guitar, while the dons spoke glibly of pickled Donnes
& Vaughns & Gaia Nature, you trotted out old avatars: boy-genius Stephen Crane
Max Bodenheim “moidered ta death” in a slum
& Tambimutu who sexed the young poitresses,
& paid you in left-over lunch meat to watch. Then, at put up or shut up time (as you put it):
You mugged & harr harred & slurred the words across the pages
of your confession to eternity, one fat conductor’s hand beating time
to the lax lines of your gift. The stars rained down their spears
& you wailed by the ginny waters many a night with Dylan Thomas & Delmore Schwartz,
my mendicant Virgil. & Now (in all confidence) you’re begging for just ten years more to write
your genius down, by God! You’re starving,
got bone cancer maybe, but it’s you–Poet, prematurely gray.
The world’s given you fever pain, but it’s you, gesturing to the innocents of the seminars,
the little buddies of the Am. Lit. dons (now moving uneasily in their blue clouds of pipe smoke,
trying to make sense of your backward-skuttling dance. “What an odd seduction,” they think, bending forward on the leather couch to watch.) And I shook your hand, my Virgil, and took away your death. You not-yet-a-Bopple
displaying the sickness in your flesh beneath the very noses of the pampered profs
& holding your rough palms out in amazement as the books were thumbed
& pronounced real stones turned to loaves!
Your poems seem ever-telescoping avenues of woe
set in perpetual winter; a grimy black & white
newsreel of mommies & daddies endlessly leaving
& little boy you running behind wailing wait! Wait for Leo!
All the false bravado of a grown man dragging out
old letters, torn maps, ticket stubs., and weeping
“Fuck ‘em.” How much self-hate can you pound into a shiv
for the mugging of literature?
A dream: I’m 100 stories up & wondering how I will get down.
Then I see you, Leo, perched like an ox on a far window ledge. Your pants are around
your ankles and there are mosses and fungii sprouting from your spindly old man legs
as you lean, staring down, an advertisement for self-aggrandizing shame. “Don’t look at me!”
[you cry,
But look to the east!” and there I see the rivets in the nape of a colossal Head. Just as the
sinews in the neck strain and the Face is about to show its terrible forehead of brass, & purse
its iron lips, you, my Virgil, tumble toward the sirens below. “This is how you do it,” you shout
clicking your heels as you fall!
“Look, ‘son’, take care of your old man!” you’d written in 1993, & I did, even
sending you a $100.00 bill for a suit you said you needed for a reading in a Connecticut cornfield
& took with barely a thanks. But that $100.00–why, man-- that was what buddies do, right?
It’s as good as in the bank for hard times, like you said. & I had ‘em in Milwaukee & you knew it, Leo. “Take your wife and kid to dinner on me,” you said when that $100.00 bill first arrived
in the mail, along with your good note, back when
nobody cared for this humble correspondent, that’s for sure!
The drink turned bad on Jerry & Gordon too,
sitting shin to shin in Axel’s with Saturday night fight television
egg-candling their skulls. They bloated, turned reckless & mean
under the hammer blows of Jack Black & Wild Turkey, woke up with scars,
spitting bits of teeth, & jaws wired shut after a night of telling everyone
what they could have done instead of would do. I couldn’t stop them
from disowning their promise for the ease of a Miller or a Bud.
But oh how they were going to rumble their way into the history books!
You should have heard them when our rooms were full of party girls!
You of all people would have understood.
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