She had a suitcase, terrific tresses. The White Rain Girl.

White Rain, guaranteed not to dull or dry your hair.

Compact as a firecracker on Independence Day.

Star material. Honey Parker in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

Cast by Cagney in Short Cut to Hell. Then Hefner

as Miss July 1959. Being stalked made her screams

in Attack of the Giant Leeches highly authentic.

She grew gothic, monstrous, chaste. Withdrew

behind locked doors, Benedict Canyon, was not home.

Was home. That was the worst of it.

Her fan mail cobwebbed, crammed in the box

said her neighbour who scaled the wall at last,

Hello? Hello, found Miss July.

Reporters went crazy for the word mummified.

Dead possibly a year. Swallows swooped

through roof-rents in her dilapidated mansion.

White rain. Playmate with no one to play with.

Recluse. Mummy. Victim of giant leeches.

Miss July.

Saturday night in Amherst –

wild night, wild night –

crazed flies strike

the lantern – my fingers buzz,

shadow the wall

pale tiny pipes.

I crack the centrefold

dare to wonder if dear Mr. Higginson

is viewing the same picture –

my digits

tickle the computer keys –

press send – soon O

soon, dear Mr. Higginson

shall plump my heart’s deep moss.

​

Soon I’ll haul the pizza-in-a-basket I ordered

up by rope, in through my window

double cheese –

wild pie, wild pie –

I’ll eat it all myself, a hunger untitled

bundled and slant, my top four buttons

out of seventy-eight unhooked –

a scathing expanse of collarbone.

Still no Keats, though close –

his doctor. The doctor of Keats

plans to study my head.

To have the same medic (though not

the same ailment)

is something.

The first time I did not

meet Keats, he scribbled an address

(not mine) on one of my letters.

To Keats it was simply

scrap paper. To have the same

publisher as Keats

is something.

The second time I did not meet

Keats he was dying though sent

his opinion of my poems –

it should not take twenty lines

to describe the grass

(in so many words).

                         The dying,

I reckon, do not have that kind

of time. The grass, I suppose

must be grass and be

quick about it.

Because Keats was dying I wished

him well at the wishing well

near Swordy Well. Had he not been

dying I might have written

quizzing him on the nesting habits

of his nightingale and must

everything be so Grecian and

to me it matters, the weave

and awn of grass, it matters.

Paper! But now too trouble-tethered

to scribble one stanza. Waited for a southern

wind just as Walton advised, still

nothing. The angle wrong.

Words are trout in nighttime, deep-pooled,

hearing yet biting not.

The finest canker flies, stone flies or moor flies

fail to lure them to the surface.

Trout seek lusty lives

far from my perusing pencil. And I

an honest poet, incomplete, swarmed

by silent blue. I do not ask so very much –

only to send forth a rallying cry –

A fish, a fish!

A poem, a poem!