“As We Are So Wonderfully Done with Each Other”**
BY KENNETH PATCHEN

As we are so wonderfully done with each other  
We can walk into our separate sleep
On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies

O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one
Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers  
My hands are hallowed where they touched over your
       soft curving.

It is good to be weary from that brilliant work  
It is being God to feel your breathing under me

A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . .  
Don’t let anyone in to wake us.

Every December I reread Kenneth Patchen
His poems are like Christmas lights
On impoverished streets
I remember buying a signed edition
In a Las Vegas bookshop
I think it should have cost more
But so should roses and sunsets
My heart goes out to Kenneth Patchen
His broken back and silent anguish
His poems mused me into meditation
Fused me into the flowering of forever
How many of his poems
Were like gifts we opened at Christmas
When as children we could receive
Why is it every time I read Patchen
I’m awash in grief and gratitude
It’s like the resurrection of something
Comfort has lost in us an avowal
About our duality and ambivalence
How we love and hate
How we end our wars with tears of joy

While I'm reading a poem about it on the previous page
the girls come over to visit their boyfriends and dance
in high shoes and perfume. Their legs are strong and their voices
      high.
And the guys get high and hard thinking about what the girls are
      like behind their eyes.

That says more about me than reality. And it's exactly four lines.
Ken Patchen would say his angel smells sweet and sassy.
I feel the bony fingers of mine who has been working to stay
      alive.

Enough small poetry. One must conceive of a project -
say a poem about a bridge–or stop writing
and instead walk over the bridge at sunset and see the city in a
      nuclear war
the clocks, the Watchtower and the docks gone and no smoke.

I still exist but I'm late for my job. I'm dressed well
in honor of true love and Spring which both outlast the
      holocaust.
The manager cans me with the cold hard eyes of one who
      accepts the rules entirely.

Goodbye to the rows of dead metal desks and goodbye
to those who can take it longer than I.

The guys downstairs do not read poetry and very little prose.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money does
      not occupy their minds.
The *** pistils of the mountain daisy is no concern of theirs
and the man upstairs who plays the horn is less than a curiosity
      but makes more noise.

When I feel like this nothing matters and this is good -
get warm with wine, turn out the lights and turn up the radio -
if only there were a woman who liked the down and out life too.

In the end someone sticks a gun in my face in the South Bronx.
How I got among the fire escapes in the sooty alley I cannot say
but it is one of my earliest memories. Perhaps it is my
      grandmother holding my hand
or one of the clowns. I say Drop that ******* gun and he blows me
      away.

"It was upset and
            will remain upset"

Happier times, newness, of birds.
Spring is the sound of
Frosty the snow man, who gave us,
Kenneth Patchen is the image of, who gave us,
Neighborhoods gave us,
Will gave us: "I'm working on it"
Disbelief gave us: subsidization.
Indie gave us: UIW and New Yorker articles,
All the time, mind is cold, is cold. Burr.
Queen-joke,
Joke-Queen,
And irrespective of ghost or iron or sets or hallucinations,
Yes, you, they agree: our freedom is New Abraham, the elders want our knowledge.