[* * *] all drab, drab, and it’s that kind of day, drizzle, damnation, the plants heave and puff in air that has no air, the plants sweat and the screens crawl with the one or 2 stupid lost flies of summer, who have somehow failed to find a spider, who have somehow failed to die, my 12 weeks old daughter wails in the other room; her cries cut through all my poems, all my writing, but she is a sweetie, they have not gotten to her yet, she is all eyes and skin, she bends, she bubbles…she wails. now the old woman comes in with the kid and she sits in a chair at my elbow, as I type and she has the kid and the radio plays In the Clock Store, badly, and I’d like to say., Listen, don’t you realize that I AM WRITING TO BLAZEK! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU TWO BROADS? (do you hear the cuckoo? she asks. do you hear the alarm clock? she asks.) well, kid, there has always been something, some woman screaming for a bottle of wine or the landlord at the door for his rent or the police with a passkey or God’s left-handed angel stealing my cigarettes from the dresser. well, this will be a lousy letter. sometimes I stand a better chance. Sometimes she is busy with something important—like reading a New Yorker in the other room.

I remember one, this one was a looker, I was drunk all the time and how I made it I’ll never know, or I will, the horses were going very well this year and a half, I could do no wrong: I didn’t know what I was doing, just one long run of luck (good) and I drank it drank it and kept going to bed with this woman with all that body, and I remember one night I drank so much (I had been hitting it at the track all day) that I fell off the couch and I was down there on the floor and I saw these LEGS smooth cool nylon magic filled down into those spikes, my god, magic, and that placid face looking down at me and she was smoking and I saw the earrings and I could feel the rug on my neck and the whole world swirling around: buildings full of janitors, jails full of quiet men held in a web, alleys of murder, swans asleep on lakes and I looked up at her from the floor and I said: I’M A GENIUS AND I’M THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD WHO KNOWS IT!

Blazek, she looked at me for maybe 20 seconds and then she said YOU DAMN FOOL, GET UP FROM THE FLOOR!