The day Bukowski died
I was a real working dancer.
But on a stage in low rent strip joint
in the tenderloin was where they found me.
All of the girls and me young enough
so the utter sadness of the place couldn't touch us.
We were like so many romantics
digging for life where real artists went.
In the dark,
before dark could overcome. Soaked in scotch
before it could leave its mark upon our faces.
Where it was unbleached
wild and savory.
We where angles. Full of levity
when such heaviness was passed down to us
from other sad people.
We where just carrying it then.
Not fully absorbing or ingesting it then,
Not living it yet. Just enough poison

to get us through the door.
Just enough innocence to elevate us from the floor.
I was a Bukowski girl, pre-damaged, pre- broken.
And he was dying of leukemia, not liver failure
not lung cancer.

I was 21
In an old and dignified cabaret hall, near the ocean, not the skid row
where streets are lined with donut /Chinese food eateries.
Me on stage, Buk in a hospital bed
...like Dylan visiting Guthrie.
The spot light shone on my back

and i heard the crowd flooding the stage,
ambient and excited chatter. The air only pools smoke,
mold spores from legendary curtains.
Glasses, stars twinkling in the center of it.
I'm drunk too. Forgotten all the expensive choreography.
I belonged to something like surviving a crash.
I was procured, plucked, exploited, juiced.
My pale figure, ribs showing.
The end of a relationship was near.
Buk was almost gone
and ill only ever know him by shelving him,
singing him, recognizing him
from that dangerous place of human suffering,
that mirror, that red glowing exit in the corner.

The music played. I was paid to play
a genuine woman of debauchery.
A genuine lost soul.
But you're never lost
in art.
Your'e never lost in youth.
You've yet to decend in the midst of either.

Just light, and drunk, and spinning.
I moved into whatever needed to come next.
I was a 20th. century term, LIVE.
Just expression,
surrounded by people taking it in for themselves.
Putting their faces on mine, vice versa.
Art becoming the world and
I was moving it around,
just for a moment.
Never analyzing it,
not in this poem.

The wake of our century's Whitman
rocks us. Ripped poetry
from the grasps of academics.
Me and Buk and all my friends,
saved by poems.
Spoken for.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. . .

Past fifty, and all the rosebuds gathered
that will bloom for me.
Tied in bunches and hung from rafters
to dry, they keep their creamy pink
and delicate perfume. Only the leaves
are brittle, tending to dust.

My back aches as I tend the autumn garden.
A sentinel crow watches from the top
of a lone pine. Now and again he makes
an observation, a throaty "uh-oh,"
like an amiable warning. It is gathering time.

Time to carry home
the last of the flowering year:
For healing, coltsfoot, feverfew and comfrey;
of thyme, (which fair and tender girls
must not let young men steal)
enough to season winter;
here's lovage yet-- but little rue;
sage for longevity, and rosemary,
queen of clear memory, both in abundance.

That sentinel must have croaked all-clear,
for now there are a dozen on the lawn--
a murder of crows, wise eyes and heavy beaks
intent as surgeons, probing the earth. One
turns an eye to me as if to comment,
thinks better of it, rows himself into the trees.
The others follow, but they don't go far.
After I'm gone, they'll be here.

The house is quiet now, my darlings gone,
forgiven for the
ways they tore my body
and my heart. As night wind rises, I'll take down
my mother's book of poems and read aloud
to the accompaniment of rain's steel drums
and autumn's wild bassoons. I'll go to bed
and leave the door unlatched. We'll see
what the October wind blows in.

I tried to tell you about the barbed wire man
and how as a kid I was frightened of that starved
hound of his, the snarl and bite of wire round
the shack that he called home. You never listen
when I am like this. You invent ways to compare me
to a mandolin, your callused fingertips wanting to strum,
to pluck my body like a string. I shake you off.

The wire of my body is being stripped from the inside
out. The lining of my spine heaves with nerves
that are taut and frayed. I tell you I am afraid.
You never believe me. Instead, your nails move back
and forth across the frets of my wrist. You play
chords on my arm, croon "Don't be afraid, hush."

You sink into me on your couch and run me through
the lush green forests of childhood. You rehearse
me on your guitar, eyes half-closed against the bright
summer moon. I study your arms as you play,
mesmerized by the clawed fingers, the rusty
glint of hair. There is a river we cross and we pull one
another along through a crooked wire fence.
We arrive skin on skin and only slightly torn.
The wire man sleeps. We replace him with this.

We were embarrassed by what
you wanted to do. You made us
promise, strong hands now weak,
wringing the deed out of us.

We drank, laughed self-consciously
that summer afternoon, hot as the red
peppers you considered fertilizing,
in a mad fit of immortality.

Instead, your ashes, sifted fine
to feel, were nervously placed
and stirred in two gallons of paint.
Bone white that matched no chip.

You on the shed. Two coats cover
the tears of our craziness.