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Collected Poetry

    (rd king dot net)
poetry and digital art

In California

  Sitting at the Bar 


These old bricks in this old barroom
don't look steady to me.  Even the metal
reinforcing plates that hold the trusses
to the old brick building next door
seem more like a courtesy to drunken men
and building inspectors kind enough
to allow these walls a token gesture
to continue their mute history.  From this
stool at the bar I can still feel the dirt
hidden for a century beneath the wooden
      floorboards
still moist from booze and spittle and
long-bad pipes.  So as the band begins
and once again the chalky mortar is put
to the test, I realize that I enjoy this
every time it happens.

A young kid dressed like somebody
who dressed like the early Elvis
has started to dance in a mean,
moody way.  His partner
is a thin-waisted girl with big hips.
She spins and jerks like the rest
of his life.  So a crowd moves in
to watch and to drink and to dance
their awkward, heathen dance.
Some of the men are already drunk.
The air is hot and the music is loud
and twangy.

Against the cigarette machine I pressed
letting the women rub past me, smiling,
on their way to the john.  I knew I would
not be drunk until I left to meet the air
outside.  So I bought another beer and watched
people drink.  Smoke after smoke I watched
people smoke.  She might have been forty
but she was dressed like a little girl.

She danced and she danced a crazy dance
with young men and old men and with
the well-built negro who otherwise
kept to himself at the bar.  In a pleated
brown dress that came down to her knees
she danced that crazy dance; in white
cotton socks turned down to the ankle straps
on her round-toed shoes she moved
her crazy feet—and still I was not sure.
The cut of her hair and the collar
on her blouse made her look as if
an important part of her was not there:
was this some local goddess I should meet
or a week-long member of a halfway house
nearby.  When she danced she move her
      chest
in an alarming way.  Her small breasts
fluttered in her cotton dress.  Those green,
green eyes rolled across a chalk-white face.
She must have been forty but I saw
a little girl dancing her way through
a hot, hot night in a dirty, little gold-town
bar.  All of the men were drunk
and some of the women were pretty.




 
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