I’ve got to smile. you’re a real romantic, looking for me in that index file in the library in Elgin. Let’s see? where would I come in? just before Bunin, Ivan, The Gentleman from San Francisco? no? well. or Bulosan, Carlos? America is in the Heart.

America is in the balls. America is in the factories. America is in the streets, hustling shines and newspapers, climbing down through skylights to the mother-blossom of the safes. I am the toilet paper wiped against America.

waiting on birth always wants to make me cry, it’s so sad, like the gliders coming across the hill and ripping through the strings of gas-inflated balloons fingering the freak sky. farfetched? yes, that’s what I mean. maybe by now it’s all over, and over into the good. [* * *]

Jeffers, of course, laid it down in blocks of cement and he did not lie, and he lived it too. I guess we owe the curse of Carmel’s artist colony to him, I just as we owe the curse of Taos to Lawrence. The freaks and the ants and the pretenders always love to swallow the shadows of the great dead, walk their gardens, stare at their ground, but it does not work—it makes them less instead of more. There are no crutches. nothing is free. I will never forget the finks in the Village cafes with their berets and goats and sandals and happy and ugly faces. I got out, fast.—I’ve got to go out and pay some god damn bills before they shut things off, rip things out. It’s a small court in front with highrise apartments rising, rising on either side, walls of swimming pool darkness and $125 apts. with wall to wall fucking, and we linger out in the grass, remembering the sun, and to the north is Sunset Blvd. (the cheaper section) and the observatory on the brownpurple mountain, and the radio is off, and the blue Cad. drives off with its dead man, and an old woman with a red coat walks by. the girl-child is asleep on the big bed in the bedroom. Marina Louise Bukowski. what awaits this little wench? poverty? a father of 60, drunk with dim eyes when she is 15? or a photo of a man who died in 1966? no, it’s one day at a time, and my life too and her life too and all our lives, Van Gogh hanging from the walls like a necktie, Brahms’ skull 5 feet under rattling and rolling to the fucking of 2 gophers.

all right then, I now give you the gift of a little

s i l e n c e

[To Douglas Blazek]

February 28, 1965