CHRISTMAS MATTERS: FOR CHARLES BUKOWSKI
By Robert Peters
The kitchen plumbing
is stopped. The toilet
is plugged too. The garage
trouble: 3 pounds of spoiled
mexican shrimp dumped in,
shells and veins.
I sit in my living room
thinking of my christmas visit
to Charles Bukowski.
First we put lights on
his tree, then drank beer
and talked while his daughter
hung ornaments, one over
the other, on the low branches.
My wife noticed the odor
first--sour shrimp sewage,
bits of soft meat and exoskeleton
floating around bags of chemical
fertilizer and bullshit
in the garage.Company's
coming for dinner, she said.
I go on out
to the front yard, look down
at the broken lawn sprinkler
at a jacaranda needing a stake
at winter strawberries
turning a faint red
and I call to neighbor-
hood kids, and my own,
load them into the bus
and drive to the beach,
in a blare of music.
Where now the surf
I hear Bukowski reading
poems, celebrations of
impossible hardons, bangs,
mechanical and other failures,
and a few triumphs.
For once I have done
the right thing.