Don Thompson has been writing about the San Joaquin Valley for over fifty years, including a dozen or so books and chapbooks. For more info and links to publishers, visit his website at www.don-e-thompson.com.
Just Another Long Goodbye
(Raymond Chandler)
There’s no easy out for discontent
at the office. Nothing helps,
not a bottle stashed in your desk,
not even girls from the typing pool
willing to help you slip out of your skin
for an hour in the afternoon.
Solitary drives up the coast and back down
only leave you where you began.
A dead end.
And writing? No help either
because the noir’s inside you,
not in LA,
and all the wisecracks, the cynical asides
never amused the demons that much.
Hollywood’s just another oil company:
nothing to choose between an intractable plot
and a ledger that refuses to balance
when it’s always you
failing to make them come out right.
Studio execs keep the hooch on hand
(an unwritten codicil)
as you scribble in your closet.
And Marlowe’s there in a dark corner
sneering at you.
So you’d better go home to La Jolla, Ray,
and lay your throbbing head once more
on Cissy’s lap,
calm at last—a weaned child,
except for the whiskey at bedtime.
Shopping at Guarantee Shoe Center
(Seamus Heaney)
Brando in sandals and then scuffed boots
as an introspective Zapata,
who went barefoot most of his life;
Fred Astaire’s scuffed brogues
with metal taps, dinged and nicked
like worn out Kantian philosophers;
crepe-soled brothel creepers,
geriatric Birkenstocks
and the has-been rocker’s brogans;
those bankrupt penny loafers
in the dust of my closet,
crouched in despair, abandoned
for Spanish leather driving moccasins:
Shoes of all kinds, but none
compare with the hand-stitched high-tops
Seamus Heaney wore
at that post-reading grad student party in ’72:
Shamrock green with yellow scroll work,
glistening leprechaun footgear
that no one mentioned—
those timid poets
blathering loud nonsense over their beer mugs
as if they were outré.
And no one got close enough to Heaney
to risk stepping on his toes.