Ode to an All-American Boyhood

To Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey Were you guys lucky, too, to caddy, the light on freshly-sprinkled fairway delicate and bright as eye of an Indiana owl or glitter of fish flickering in the Shedd Aquarium of the imagination, the tough but tender touch of leather socks covering the cobra- headed clubs, the crack of brassie on golf ball like whip of mule skinner filling all Death Valley; or to anoint oneself in grease and oil, sweating beneath the belly of a car or truck in the pit in Shimskis' Garage in Homewood; or to find felicity at Marshall Field's as a stockboy numb and dazed by rawboned, adolescent lust, stumbling about beneath a pyramid of boxes past models cooly on parade among the customers all day, filling immaculate brassieres with flesh like fortune cookies and in silken Oriental half-slips as I sweat like Sydney Greenstreet examining the statue of the Maltese Falcon in his hotel suite; and to fight, like a goddamn fool, in Navy alleys behind black-and-tan saloon in Minneapolis, my iron ring, its longhorns, slashing, can open up a cheek; and to sweat out a basketball game of one-on-one, the comments cryptic and intense as a fragment by Archilochos; and to pitch papers onto porches on a bike route as if your arm were Bobby Feller's blazing corncobs at a knot-hole in Des Moines; to cut the uncut hair of graves beneath an R. Crumb "Keep on Truckin'" sun large as a lemon drop, and to hawk cufflinks made by Swank as well as cashmere sweaters from the Shetland Isles, to scrub as if they had the London Plague of Robert Greene dying in a bed of straw in Cheapside Gran Canyons filled with dirty dishes in the Phi Gam kitchen in Bloomington, to tool around behind wheel of Checker taxi as if it were a chariot in a race in Babylon, to tote the 85¢ YWCA Blueplate Special to the widows of the ghosts of pioneers, to mix drink behind the bar as if concocting cocktails for Long John Silver and Blind Pew or Bathhouse John and wee, shrewd Hinky Dink, to create a 100 half-moons in a night by manipulating the control box in this elevator roomy as a shoebox purchased by Paul Powell here in a hotel with its 50 bags full of the fleas of Illinois— this great, unique chance to hear the language where it lives.