Selected Poems. James Tate

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      to understand when one

      who represented the desperate

      shrunken state came toward

      me, bisecting the whole mass

      of concrete into triangles;

      and handed me a package.

      I carried it with me for

      the rest of my life, never

      opening it, telling no one.

The Last Days of April

      Through the ceiling comes

      the rain to cool my lover

      and me. The lime carpeting

      darkens, and when we cross

      to retrieve our glasses

      of gin from the mantle, our

      feet sink as into drifts

      of leaves. We have a deep

      thirst, for it is the end

      of April, and we know that

      a great heat is coming soon

      to deaden these passions.

Uncle

      Homer was a ventriloquist;

      so drunk, one day he projected his voice

      so far it just

      kept going and going (still is).

      Joe Ray insisted

      Homer was afraid of work, but he’s

      had 130 jobs or more

      just recently, he didn’t think in terms

      of careers.

      The family never

      cared for Homer

      even after

      he ginned himself into a wall

      and died balling

      with a deaf-mute in an empty Kansas City hall.

      Joe Ray insisted

      Homer would have made a fine dentist

      had he kept his mouth shut; that is,

      had he lived. Still is

      heard about the house

      jiggling glasses,

      his devoted astral voice coming back.

How the Friends Met

      So what do you do? What

      can you do? Leave the room

      altogether? Crazy.

      Your eyes are the wallpaper;

      makes it tough, doesn’t it?

      Peel them away. You call

      that pain? It’s not. It’s insane.

      You make it. Keep going.

      Confront a lightpole. Smoke

      a mythopoeic

      cigarette forever.

      Mark a spot with your

      mysterious shoe; scratch

      Hate in the sidewalk.

      A man will come along

      and there will be reason

      enough to knife him. Sure

      enough, there comes along

      a worse-than-Bogart….

      There you are, smoking

      the lightpole. The spot

      you marked appears between

      your eyes, and then becomes

      a sidewalk, and the man

      walks right up the sidewalk

      into your room, looks at

      the wallpaper, and laughs.

      So what do you do? What

      can you do? Kick him out?

      Hell, no. You charge him rent.

Tragedy Comes to the Bad Lands

      Amnesic goatherds tromboning

      on the summit, the lazy

      necklaces of their own breath

      evanesce into the worst

      blizzard since Theodore

      Roosevelt and the Marquis

      de Mores blessed Medora, North

      Dakota with their rugged

      presence. Look! I implore, who’s

      sashaying across the Bad

      Lands now—it’s trepid riding

      Tate (gone loco in the

      cabeza) out of his little

      civilized element—Oh!

      It’s bound to end in tears.

Aunt Edna

      Aunt Edna of the hills

      comes down to give

      her sisters chills;

      she wears the same

      rags she wore

      seven years ago,

      she smells

      the same, she tells

      the same hell-

      is-here stories.

      She hates flowers,

      she СКАЧАТЬ