HAROLD BRODKEY
367
him, except his mouth, which is slightedly fetid. And it is
cleanliness
that lurks at the fork of his legs.
His drunken mother comes and goes in him. He has a readi–
ness for visits from phantoms. His body is slowed by air, by reality
in a long flinch of suffocation. His head persists in its swiftness, its
eyeliddedness and sight. His fretful and combative love for things
present in the moment is pitted by a civilized, drunken hatred for the
same things.
His packed eyes shift or hold a topic less
educatedly
than when 1
last saw him and more personally, more maddenedly - drunkenly.
He is an optical and ethical and careless device offame, self-blazing,
.a light local and perhaps inevitably brief.
"I will live forever."
"Forever in common usage means until one's death, don't you
think?"
"I'm an
American
poet-I don't have to think."
He means to correct my style ... to make his dominant. The
pitch of his voice is set by the mannerisms for his style of The Retort.
He and 1 compete. We show off for one another. 1 am more
famous uptown than he is.
"You work by other methods," 1 said.
He ignored that.
Sneakers and sweater, brown, straight hair, bare throat, 'in–
telligent' and a weird look of youth. Naked ankles. Fingery, taut
hands.
He doesn't mind it that the first person pronoun is boundless.
His life is autobiography in an ironic tone.
He wrote me when 1 was in college:
In
nry
dreams it is often Cleve–
land,
uncan~
Lake Erie. I see myself walking by Lake Eery. It is not what
you say it is. It is NOT 'intellect pretending to be physical presence in some sort
oj model oj the day'
1 had written him that it was.
It is me, the cocksucker,
walking by Lake Eery. Art teaches a person how to see his own dreams. You
saidyou jeelyourjace
as
a watery nothing. Well, tant pis ifyou want. I am as
beautiful as ever. I AM everything possible- this very serious. I am a living
God.
He was younger then.
I'll say that for me the governing mode of his poetry is the child
bliss in offering the captured creature, the poem.
It
wasn't a cat's
long-backed swagger of capture: success in capture was sweet for
him. He was drawn to sweetness in art although no one ever pointed
it out. When seriousness was at too continuous a pitch, he pushed
clear from it as a child might push his mother's hands from him.
