Portrait with One Eye is about a friend
of mine I grew up with through late adolescence
when we were both starting to try to write poems.
It originates with a very bad experience
he had in the early '60s.
He used up all the money he had, which wasn't all that much,
really, to buy a bus ticket from Iowa to Mexico City on his way
to join a revolution, which even then was going on in Nicaragua,
and didn't have enough money to take him all the way
but figured he could make it the rest of the way on his own.
But there was a stopover in Kansas City on the way,
and he started drinking with the wrong person, who volunteered
to take him around to show him the house where
Charlie Parker's mother lived.
And, being a great jazz fan, he had to go.
And the next thing he knew was the next morning
in a charity ward of a local hospital where he woke up
with his skull fractured in seven places, his jaw broken,
and an eye stomped out, and his bus ticket
missing so that he couldn't get to the revolution.
Then, when the police asked for an accounting of the episode,
they asked, among other things, what his occupation was,
and he replied, lyric poet.
This was so exceptional, even for someone in the charity
ward, that it made a part of a feature story
in the Kansas City Star the next day, which
I was sent a clipping of, otherwise I
might not have believed the story,
even when I saw the eye missing.
I might have thought it happened some other way, because he was
a great and pathological liar.
[LAUGHTER]
But everything that happens in the poem
is a reference to something in his legendary life,
and if you knew him as well as I did, then I wouldn't
have to explain, you see.
The poem is not meant to be obscure,
but quite the contrary, but there
are only a few people who would see how easy it is,
unfortunately.
He fell into the habit thereafter
of telephoning me fairly often, say once
a month, once every six weeks, from some point
in this hemisphere always.
He never called from farther away than the Yucatan.
Usually to complain about the way I was living my life.
The first sentence often would be,
Don, you're screwing up your life.
And the call would often be late at night
and would always be collect, and I didn't always
like paying to be chewed out, but I did every time.
[LAUGHTER]
So that's some of the background for this poem.
Portrait with One Eye.
They robbed you of your ticket to the revolution.
Oh, and then they stomped you good.
But nothing stops you.
You've identified yourself to the police as, quote, "lyric
poet."
What else with fractured jaw?
Orpheus, imperishable liar, your life's a poem still,
broken I ams and all.
Jazz, jails, the complete works.
And one blue silver line beyond the Antilles
vanishing, all fragments.
You, who could scream across the square in Cuernavaca
at a friend you hadn't seen for years, the one word, bitch,
and turn away.
That's style.
[LAUGHTER]
Or this, your other voice, this whisper
along the wires at night, like a dry wind, like conscience,
always collect.