Just then, a tinkling, and the flock of black and gray aristocratic goats rounded the wall of the corral with the little leprechaun of a blue-eyed milkman, in patched faded dungarees, rope sandals, and sombrero; he looked happy and pleasant; let us come into corral; new world; his world. Goats at home in bare, neat yard, drank out of water pails; black and white spotted kid. Two goats butted; one rising on hillock as if strung up from neck, poised, hung, butting down on other; playing.
Goats butting again; milkman whirled, dropping stone in dead center, breaking up struggle; clucked and shooshed goats into shack: “their little house.” We followed him in;.
It Will Come. If I Work.
His big, pleasant, ugly black-clad wife, very broad-beamed, came out. Said she also milked goats; described frisky games of little kid with hand motions. Moon brightening through clouds as we left, clear-cut pine tree jagged against sky. Man happy, own world, out of earth; brother kept three cows on hill beyond railroad station. Left feeling good day; light yellow-green eyes of goats.
Then, grubbing over supper, with the badly begun poem like an albatross round the neck of the day, nothing else.
The domesticated wilderness of pine, maple and oak rolled to a halt and stuck in the frame of the train window like a bad picture.
The feeling one must get up earlier and earlier to get ahead of the day, which by one o’clock is determined.
Pray to yourself for the guts to make the summer work. One sale: that would help. Work for that.
There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation, except that circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear.
Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn’t sleep and why I couldn’t read and why I couldn’t eat and why everything everyone did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.
At the altar the coffin loomed in its snow pallor of flowers – the black shadow of something that wasn’t there.
Lifting the pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by my eyes. Words, dimly familiar, but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.
What I decided to do in the end was lie in bed as long as I wanted to and then go to Central Park and spend the day lying in the grass, the longest grass I could find in that bald, duck-ponded wilderness.
I am at Smith because I wanted it and worked for it. I am going to be a Guest Editor on Mlle in June because I wanted it and worked for it. I am being published in Harper’s because I wanted it and worked for it. Luckily I could translate wish to reality by the work.
So these posed sheets, before they thin to nothing, Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld, A world we lose by merely waking up.
Actually, it wasn’t the idea of Buddy sleeping with somebody that bothered me. I mean I’d read about all sorts of people sleeping with each other, and if it had been any other boy I would merely have asked him the most interesting details, and maybe gone out and slept with somebody myself just to even things up, and then thought no more about it.
Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person? –.
I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with.
Modern innovations in Benidorm have not disturbed the rhythm of native customs.
Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil. If it were death I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious. There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but enter Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side. 30 September 1962.