—Tangiers, 1931
He said:
Below our life, all is water.
I was an ugly baby, an abnormal child
writing a 2-page story at the age of two.
I was blue, soft at the corners of the mouth.
When I was eight I wrote an opera.
But there’s got to be a base.
Flip a coin. Heads: run off to Paris.
Become a writer. Tails: do myself in.
The parrot looks at me suspiciously
whenever I type.
He spoke wistfully of the time of his father—
when they kept tame gazelles in the room.
Drank thick dark coffee
on the bougainvillea-inflamed terrace.
There is no greater crime
than the excitement of envy,
said Lao Tsu.
There are no tourists anymore.
The proper length of time
to stay in a hotel is one night,
the proper length of time
to stay in a city is one day.
Stay in a different quarter each time.
Always walk fast.
Here I shall live
until the eucalyptus leaves learn to fall
in a city whiter than Jesus’s soul.
Voices. Something is singing at night.
I’m going away to death’s black arms.
Below our life, all is water.
There’s got to be a base.
The radio, like a terminal moraine.
Aloneness. The veil. This is the base.
How fast is the beating heart?
Here, nothing, no Petrushka. No base.
No thoughts, only tones.
The call of the muzzeim.
And the sheltering sky.
5/5/94
John Martin from Black Sparrow Books was reading me some Paul Bowles under moonlight. Probably at Lee Perron's place in Healdsburg. I had penciled in Jeffrey Miller in my notes. At first, I though I had conflated Miller and Martin, but I think not. John must've reprinted some of Jeffrey Miller's books as he had bought the rights to Paul Bowles' work. There was also another Jeffrey Miller, a Monte Rio poet whom Pat Nolan had published his book, and every year on the anniversary of his death, we would sit beneath a redwood tree and read Jeffrey's poems aloud. I remember Lee Perron saying to me, no not that Jeffrey Miller.
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