Poem of the Week, by Kenneth Rexroth
“Live every day like it’s your last because someday you’re going to be right.”
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky, my name not yours. My religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.”
“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”
“Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Vietcong ever called me nigger.”
Last night I woke up in the middle of the night to the news that Muhammad Ali had died. He was a hero to me, as he was to so many others. Not because he was a boxer (I’m not a fan of boxing; Ali suffered from Parkinson’s for over thirty years) but because he was only and ever himself; he stood up for what he believed in and he never backed down. Ali was tough as hell, and so is this poem.
The Bad Old Days
– Kenneth Rexroth
The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
my father died and my aunt
took me to Chicago to live.
The first thing I did was to take
a streetcar to the stockyards.
In the winter afternoon,
gritty and fetid, I walked
through the filthy snow, through the
squalid streets, looking shyly
into the people’s faces,
those who were home in the daytime.
Debauched and exhausted faces,
starved and looted brains, faces
like the faces in the senile
and insane wards of charity
hospitals. Predatory
faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,
under the green gas lamps, and the
sputtering purple arc lamps,
the faces of the men coming
home from work, some still alive with
the last pulse of hope or courage,
some sly and bitter, some smart and
silly, most of them already
broken and empty, no life,
only blinding tiredness, worse
than any tired animal.
The sour smells of a thousand
suppers of fried potatoes and
fried cabbage bled into the street.
I was giddy and sick, and out
of my misery I felt rising
a terrible anger and out
of the anger, an absolute vow.
Today the evil is clean
and prosperous, but it is
everywhere, you don’t have to
take a streetcar to find it,
and it is the same evil.
And the misery, and the
anger, and the vow are the same.
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Every morning, soon as I wake up, I make a list of things to do that day. As the day goes on, things get crossed off, until night comes, at which point I turn into a pumpkin and can do no more. Whatever wasn’t done on that day’s list goes onto tomorrow’s list. Once in a great while –like once a year or so– the end of the afternoon approaches and it looks as if everything on the list might actually get crossed off. This is a terrifying thought –what would happen if there were nothing left on the list?– so I quickly add a couple more things. To leave this world without having done it all, I guess that’s the only thing that feels right to me. So you can see why I love this poem.
I wrote this poem seventeen years ago, after watching one of my daughters standing on a stool at the kitchen sink. A few things have changed in those years: that daughter and her brother and sister have grown up, I’m happy with blonde hair and I’d settle for an eight-minute mile. But everything else still holds. My bargain with the planets remains the same.
I never paid much attention to tattoos until my children and their friends, and then my own friends, started getting them. For me, it’s been a natural progression from disinterest + a tinge of sadness (that beautiful skin, forever altered) to mild interest + resignation (that beautiful skin, forever altered) to deep interest (what’s the story behind that tattoo? + admiration (it’s an art form, with the body as medium) = these days, tattoos are among the first things I notice when out wandering the streets and beach. This poem, by one of my favorite poets, makes me think about them in a different way, in an everything-we-can’t-see-but-know-is-there kind of way. All the unknown stories walking around out there.
eft. Clem was born to the streets and it was not possible to keep him inside all the time. He was a street cat, a warrior, scourge of the feline neighborhood. One day I returned home to find him lying on the front lawn, near death, one eye gouged half-out, deep wounds in his tail and sides that took him weeks both in the hospital and at home to recover from. He loved running water and sometimes I let the kitchen faucet trickle just to watch him crouch in the sink, batting at it. His nickname was shui mao, which translates as water cat. He loved tall boxes just barely big enough to contain him, from which he would stare out, sure that no one could see him. When he was nine he developed diabetes. It was twice-daily insulin shots from then on, none of which slowed him down much. He died at 17, having finally become an old, slow cat. Clem was magnificent. I still miss him.
Alison McGhee 