Years ago I wrote something about how
death would come to me, not with a bang,
but a whimper. Not fireworks, but fading
embers. Something soft, silent, penetrative.
Not necessarily kind or proud, but quite
permanent notwithstanding. I included
everyone in my ruminations, categorically
suggesting that we all would, no will, likely
die of some soft-bodied disease, slowly,
something simmering in our blood
and tissue through forty years of being
thrown into the world, something finally
making its last-minute entrance
from the frozen, bitter wings. Well. Such
pessimism at the time was merely a play
as it turned out, fancy wordplay that I
thought might allow me to gain a certain
foothold in the literary precincts of Poetry
magazine. But the years have brought to me
a sense of the essential, the certain
knowledge that nothing of the sort was ever
going to come to pass. So you just keep
dancing to your own internal juke box,
and singing along with the greatest hits
of your misspent youth and middle age.
Sometimes, if the light was right, and the
planets rose and set with their customary
aplomb, you sometimes could find me
with a 35-mm. camera hanging around my
neck, walking up and down the streets
of our city, looking for the decisive
moments that would propel me
into a special issue of Aperture magazine.
Once, behind the Morris (yes, the banking
Morrises) Performing Arts Center — every
town from here to East Orange, New Jersey
seems to be backed up with one — looking
for something interesting, recalling, strange
as it may seem to normal people,
the Samuel Barber opera, Moses und Aron.
At least, I think it was an opera. Of course,
that got me to thinking about Cynthia,
and whatever became of her. She was
the one who lent me a library copy
of the music, which blew the top of my head
off — the first of many such accidents.
How she still might have rescued herself
from her, for want of a better word, her
demons. She became, however, more
and more simpatico with them, inviting
them in to dine, drink, smoke, sleep. I didn’t
know where she ended up exactly, only
vague traces whose pursuance usually led
down a rabbit hole far too extensive
to navigate in a single lifetime. Each of us
had anticipated our own dread exploits,
but both of us ended up finally,
not as contenders, but as bums.
Oh my God, you might be saying,
how long is he going to keep this up?
When I was sixteen, that would have been
1963, and not going to prep school,
Gertrude Stein hadn’t been dead that long.
Hemingway had committed suicide a few
short years before, LeRoi Jones’ Preface
to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note had,
coincidentally, just come out. And I myself
had begun to recite novenas to Our Lady
of the Flowers. How things change, you
might say, how some things, some very
important things, seemed to be being
smoothed over in a completely unexpected
(and unacceptable) way. I went to hear Ken
Kesey read at a “literary festival” at one
of the colleges in town. He looked so
refined and clean-cut. Ginsberg, too, pacing
the stage in Washington Hall, wearing
a three-piece gray pinstripe suit,
for God’s sake. I didn’t recognize him
at first. I wouldn’t have recognized myself
in that kind of a get-up. No beard, no hair,
no wind, no rain. The shock
of non-recognition paralyzed me
momentarily. I didn’t know where to go.
Mine was, as usual, the ticket that wouldn’t
explode, that seldom renewed itself, so that
when one wallowed on sofas in the dark,
listening to all twelve minutes of Nashville
Skyline, being brushed against by long-
haired boys in the dark, as illegal drugs
passed from hand to hand, and God knows
what else did too, things that you remember
exquisitely in sumptuous detail,
but sort of kept to yourself, like a filled
inside straight you wouldn’t play because
the thrill of merely holding it was too much
to bear, like the thought that you may never
pass through that place again or hold such
cards again, and the truth of the poetry
became much too dangerous to invest in.
So you can roll your shoulders
for the wandering strays, follow them
to their rooms and pretend to be someone
you are not, someone like Gregory Corso,
poet-bum (for the uninitiated) or tell them
what they want to hear; namely, that you
could be Casanova, that you once were fresh
and clean, that you’ve taken Jean Genet
as a patron saint, sometimes play the role
of Henry Miller, or a host of other Olympia
Press cuties and beauties, real or imagined.
What it comes down to is nothing more
or less than understanding that you can live
your life, such as it is — or may become —
in a cheap, dirty, rat- and insect-infested
apartment on the Left Bank, or take your
chances in the abstract construct
of a passionate, disordered landscape
in a hellish, scheming world.
Mike Amato is an Indianapolis-based poet and visual artist. Previous publications include University of Windsor Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, Wisconsin Review, Chiron Review. He is the author of the chapbook, Love Was Made for Movie Screens. During the 1980’s, he edited and published the poetry journal, No Exit.
