Golden State

I To see my father lying in pink velvet, a rosary twined around his hands, rouged, lipsticked, his skin marble ... My mother said, “He looks the way he did thirty years ago, the day we got married,— I’m glad I went; I was afraid: now I can remember him like that ...” Ruth, your last girlfriend, who wouldn’t sleep with you or marry, because you wanted her to pay half the expenses, and “His drinking almost drove me crazy—” Ruth once saw you staring into a mirror, in your ubiquitous kerchief and cowboy hat, say: “Why can’t I look like a cowboy?” You left a bag of money; and were the unhappiest man I have ever known well. II It’s in many ways a relief to have you dead. I have more money. Bakersfield is easier: life isn’t so nude, now that I no longer have to face you each evening: mother is progressing beautifully in therapy, I can almost convince myself a good analyst would have saved you: for I need to believe, as always, that your pervasive sense of disappointment proceeded from trivial desires: but I fear that beneath the wish to be a movie star, cowboy, empire builder, all those cheap desires, lay radical disaffection from the very possibilities of human life ... Your wishes were too simple: or too complex. III I find it difficult to imagine you in bed, making love to a woman ... By common consensus, you were a good lover: and yet, mother once said: “Marriage would be better if it weren’t mixed up with sex ...” Just after the divorce,—when I was about five,—I slept all night with you in a motel, and again and again you begged me to beg her to come back ... I said nothing; but she went back several times, again and again you would go on a binge, there would be another woman, mother would leave ... You always said, “Your mother is the only woman I’ve ever loved.” IV Oh Shank, don’t turn into the lies of mere, neat poetry ... I’ve been reading Jung, and he says that we can never get to the bottom of what is, or was ... But why things were as they were obsesses; I know that you the necessity to contend with you your helplessness before yourself, —has been at the center of how I think my life ... And yet your voice, raw, demanding, dissatisfied, saying over the telephone: “How are all those bastards at Harvard?” remains, challenging: beyond all the patterns and paradigms I use to silence and stop it. V I dreamed I had my wish: —I seemed to see the conditions of my life, upon a luminous stage: how I could change, how I could not: the root of necessity, and choice. The stage was labelled “Insight”. The actors there had no faces, I cannot remember the patterns of their actions, but simply by watching, I knew that beneath my feet the fixed stars governing my life had begun to fall, and melt ... —Then your face appeared, laughing at the simplicity of my wish. VI Almost every day I take out the letter you wrote me in Paris. ... Why? It was written the year before you married Shirley; Myrtle, your girlfriend, was an ally of mine because she “took care of you,” but you always made it clear she was too dumpy and crude to marry ... In some ways “elegant,” with a pencil-thin, neatly clipped moustache, chiselled, Roman nose, you were a millionaire and always pretended you couldn’t afford to go to Europe ... When I was a child, you didn’t seem to care if I existed. Bakersfield, Calif July 9, 1961 Dear Pinon, Sorry I haven’t wrote to you sooner but glad to hear that you are well and enjoying Paris. I got your fathers day wire in the hospital where I put in about twelve days but I am very well now. I quit the ciggeretts but went through ten days of hell quitting and my back had been giving me hell. It had been very hot here but the last few days has been very nice. Emily just got out of the hospital yesterday. She had her feet worked on. I guess she will tell you about it. Glad to hear you are learning some French. We are just about through with potatoes. Crop was very good but no price at all which made it a poor year. Cattle are cheap too. It look like a bad year for all farmer’s. I don’t know anything else to tell you. Take care of your self and enjoy it. Maybe you will never have another chance for another trip. I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to go, so if you run into a extra special gal between 28 & 35 send her over here to me as all I know over here don’t amount to mutch. Well I guess I’ll close now as I am going over to see Emily. Hoping to hear from you right away. This address is 4019 Eton St. be sure and get it straight. Myrtle would like to know how much that watch amounts to. Let us know Will close now and write soon. Love ‘Shank’ P.S. Excuse this writing as its about 30 years since I wrote a letter. VII How can I say this? I think my psychiatrist likes me: he knows the most terrible things I’ve done, every stupidity, inadequacy, awkwardness, ignorance, the mad girl I screwed because she once again and again teased and rejected me, and whose psychic incompetence I grimly greeted as an occasion for revenge; he greets my voice with an interest, and regard, and affection, which seem to signal I’m worth love; —you finally forgave me for being your son, and in the nasty shambles of your life, in which you had less and less occasion for pride, you were proud of me, the first Bidart who ever got a B.A.; Harvard, despite your distrust, was the crown;—but the way you eyed me: the bewilderment, unease: the somehow always tentative, suspended judgment ... —however much you tried (and, clearly, you did try) you could not remake your taste, and like me: could not remake yourself, to give me the grace needed to look in a mirror, as I often can now, with some equanimity ... VIII When did I begin to substitute insight, for prayer? ... —You believed in neither: but said, “My life is over,” after you had married Shirley, twenty-five years younger, with three small children, the youngest six months old; she was unfaithful within two months, the marriage was simply annulled ... A diabetic, you didn’t take your insulin when you drank, and almost managed to die many times ... You punished Ruth when she went to Los Angeles for a weekend, by beginning to drink; she would return home either to find you in the hospital, or in a coma on the floor ... The exacerbation of this seeming necessity for connection—; you and mother taught me there’s little that’s redemptive or useful in natural affections ... I must unlearn; I must believe you were merely a man with a character, and a past—; you wore them, unexamined, like a nimbus of furies round your greying, awesome head ... IX What should I have done? In 1963, you wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars from me, so that we could buy cattle together, under the name “Bidart and Son,”— most of your money was tied up in the increasingly noxious “Bidart Brothers,” run by your brother, Johnny ... I said no, that I wanted to use the money for graduate school; but I thought if you went on a binge, and as had happened before, simply threw it away ... The Bidarts agreed you were not to be trusted; you accepted my answer, with an air of inevitability I was shocked at ... I didn’t want to see your self-disgust; —somehow, your self-congratulation had eroded more deeply, much more deeply, than even I had wished,— but for years, how I had wished! ... I have a friend who says that he has never felt a conflict between something deeply wished or desired, and what he thought was “moral” ... Father, such innocence surely is a kind of Eden—; but, somehow, I can’t regret that we are banished from that company—; in the awareness, the history of our contradictions and violence, insofar as I am “moral” at all, is the beginning of my moral being. X When I began this poem, to see myself as a piece of history, having a past which shapes, and informs, and thus inevitably limits— at first this seemed sufficient, the beginning of freedom ... The way to approach freedom was to acknowledge necessity:— I sensed I had to become not merely a speaker, the “eye,” but a character ... And you had to become a character: with a past, with a set of internal contradictions and necessities which if I could once define, would at least begin to release us from each other ... But, of course, no such knowledge is possible;— as I touch your photographs, they stare back at me with the dazzling, impenetrable, glitter of mere life ... You stand smiling, at the end of the twenties, in a suit, and hat, cane and spats, with a collie at your feet, happy to be handsome, dashing, elegant:— and though I cannot connect this image with the end of your life, with the defensive gnarled would-be cowboy,— you seem happy at that fact, happy to be surprising; unknowable; unpossessable ... You say it’s what you always understood by freedom. 1968-69.