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Showing posts from November, 2012

Jack Gilbert Dead

I heard about this on a poetry listserv from one his close friends.  It doesn't seem to have hit the mainstream media yet. This is a fairly recent article  by John Penner celebrating the collected poems. It's a sad damned day for me. BERKELEY — In a spacious, humane skilled- nursing  home, a man sits with his elderly neighbors arrayed in their wheelchairs as  Louis Armstrong  and  Ella Fitzgerald  sing. Several guests arrive to see the man, and after the last note of "Cheek to Cheek," one of them takes up a microphone and reads a poem. The reader, startled by a resident's pained moans of distress, stumbles over a word or two of "Looking at Pittsburgh From Paris." He finishes, and the man brightens in his chair and points at his heart, mouthing to a visitor holding his arm, "Me?" Yes, Jack Gilbert. That's yours. The poet is 87 and small in his wheelchair, mostly unable to talk, his brain diminished by disease. He is dying. But as

Poem Draft

Eggs from Anywhere The codicil to my third will (the official one) reads: One, don't give nothing to anybody. Take the money in cash and throw it under the mud-packed wheels of your car in the bumfuckingest place you can find. If you can find a place that was on reality TV, cool. Two, don't eat the nachos from Chili's or the eggs from anywhere; they are related in that ingestion might kill a weak woman or a tweaker man. I wish the birds would not twitter in my ear when I make decisions. It's fucked up enough in here. I wish for you, number three, the magic number, that all the days of your life you will find roses in the tassels of your horse's mane billowing out into better metaphor and a landslide of clean fill that temblors down the back roads of the choked creeks that yield orange rocks, no fish but the pretty stones stained with runoff and the greasy pizza pieces left over by a million students who sit on the banks