We should not be made to choose. We should not be made to think and say and do such things as I have said / as they have done / as they have chosen / as I have thought. We should not

reading on then, shall we end in

the years, the words,

the worries: all for what? a book of beasts?

Snow and nightmare. Thievery. Rilke. I ransacked Rilke in my youth, plundered him as if he were a town and I a hungry, raunchy troop. It was lust, perhaps—not love but pure possession—I no longer know. I have forgotten, yet I labored on him as if he were the body of a woman. I translated. I transposed. I had him write—he wrote—oh how I remember—

What will you do, God, when I croak?

I am your jug (when I am broke?)

I am your ale (when I’ve gone flat?)

Your daily stint, your feathered hat . . .

You won’t mean nuthin after that.

Then I threw in a line like an afterthought in a suitcase—

If you are laughter, I am joke.

And what support for me emerges from all those heaps? Was my prop, my support, my theory? Easy to suppose. Or is this worry simply wordage? Am I postponing the end because endings are my only interest? Occupation is essential. Regarde greed. Inhale hate like hemp. AH! Heavenly bewilderment!

My ear’s the only area of feeling

where your words, so bareass and appealing,

are welcome as a room with window candles.

I’ll slip from your aching feet there

like a pair of super sandals.

Then why did friends feel that I was trying to empty the jails, salve agenbite with inwit, and unconvict the guilty? when there is nothing genuinely German about me.

I WONDER. Did my first book corner them—my friends, my heart’s bare legionnaires, my colleagues—corner them in that conclusion so completely that even now they can’t be frightened out? It’s too late—it’s past all time—to take a broom to the cats.

Your fancy cloak will flutter from your bones.

The look you laid down on my cheek,

the way a head will warm itself upon a pillow,

shall seek me vainly high and low,

until, just as the day-end sun grows weak,

it sinks in some cold lap of lunar stones.

I enjoyed jerking his pants down—that pompous prig, that dandified prude, that outcast heart, that Orphic pen and lonesome penis, that total poet.

So now I’m done. This is the moment of release. I should dedicate and christen my chef-d’oeuvre and float it forth to flags and bands, waterspouts and whistles, cheering throngs, and yet I find I cannot break a bottle on its prow or waste a drop. Why not, for Christ’s sake? Why not?

Certainly I’m sensitive to the quality of my own work. It cannot bring me less than fame. I also know I shall be cursed. For both, my fat wife waits.