STEPHANIE DICKINSON

We were three student poets who met in a writing class now driving a two-lane highway from southwestern Minnesota to a writer’s conference in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Cɪᴛʏ Lɪɢʜᴛs ʀᴇᴠɪsɪᴛs ᴛʜᴇ Bᴇᴀᴛ Gᴇɴᴇʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ. We’d brought along weed and a bottle of gin, stowed in the trunk. 
        The fields rolled away in snow, here a fence, there a lane, but everywhere clumps of wind-stiffened brush, early March, and the space, desolate. I wanted to hug myself. I pressed my cheek to the car window. It felt as if we would never reach our destination, that the long drive should have ended hours ago in front of the university. Monotony drifted over us like snow. We talked like strangers, not housemates. 
        We lived in a rundown Green Valley farmhouse seven miles from our college. The rent was practically nothing. The black-haired boy had his bedroom downstairs, the blond and I froze in our separate unheated bedrooms upstairs. In the cellar a plank over the waterlogged floor led to a toilet and a grimy tub with a rusted showerhead.  
        I sat in the back seat and the black-haired driver lifted his blue eyes into the rearview mirror. “You okay?” he asked. He liked to laugh about coming from money, his father being Jewish and a state senator, his mother a gentile German. “Sure.” I smiled, waiting for more. He didn’t offer any. We had started our trip in the morning with the high finish of March sun on snow. Now the light was sinking. In the passenger’s seat, the tall blond with bow lips slouched, too smart for his own good, leftover acne cratering his cheeks. His father, a security guard at the poultry processing plant, had been strict, while his mother, a homemaker who called me love, spoiled him with homemade donuts. 
        “Rexroth and Snyder are the only real poets who are going to be there,” the blond said, expecting no argument. “They are Buddhists more than Beats.” 
        The black-haired boy asked, “What about Ginsberg?”  
        The blond shrugged. “He wrote one good poem. ‘Howl.’” 
        “What about ‘Kaddish’ or ‘The Fall of America’?” I asked. 
        The waning light floated through a little town drifted in for the winter. A post office. A Texaco station. Painted on the liquor store door: Gone Ice Fishing. No tire prints scored the snow.  
        “I rest my case,” the blond said, a smile tweaking his mouth, his wide nose like a hat brim over his cupid lips. “One brilliant although imperfect poem. ‘Howl’ goes off when the chanting begins.” He was still crazy about a tall, sinewy girl named Katy who had broken up with him months ago. Nights in the frigid farmhouse upstairs, I would hear him moan. 
        “Consider ‘Howl’s’ energy, those long run-on sentences,” I interrupted, as if I were an ardent admirer of Ginsberg’s rhythms. More to the point, I wanted to push back against the blond, who thought his opinions were received truths. I pictured a bonfire in the farmhouse lane the night the moon hid behind blue clouds like jeans ripped apart to make rags. It was the night the black-haired boy and the blond had argued and burned their own poems to prove their devotedness to high art. Katy and the black-haired boy’s girlfriend, the cellist, had looked on. Their work wasn’t good enough to live so fire would purify their words, although they frantically retyped the poems the next day. 
        “Ezra Pound said ‘Make it new,’” the black-haired boy reminded us. 
        “He didn’t say make it gibberish. That’s lazy,” the blond said, a fierceness in his voice. “I’ll tell you who made it new: Robert Frost. The exemplar of American poetry. Frost had a dark heart, and his poems are the quintessential of new. So, if you think he’s a regional traditionalist, you better think again.” 
        The last light gave the trees a glare. We passed a farm with a windmill, a half-burned barn, and a line of ash trees. In the winter sky a sudden tumult of starlings, hundreds flying through the dusk, congregating on the windmill, watching us pass.  
        “Robert Frost, come on! New?” the black-haired boy roared, slipping his eyes into the mirror and winking. “He’s Agrarian and Gothic and Old. Ginsberg is Urban and Gritty and Newer.” His eyes told me he enjoyed needling the blond and I was his buddy and cute no matter what took a bite out of me, but I was not his type. He liked tall women, sophisticated women—cellists and violinists.  
        “You come on,” the blond said, flushing. “He won four Pulitzer Prizes.” 
        The two argued about Robert Frost for miles and miles. 
        The North Dakota Badlands lay west. Nebraska to the south, where the Platte River froze. Around us the winter wheat fields hibernated. This was the Red River Valley. The Bois de Sioux and Otter Tail merged to form the Red River, which flowed strangely north into Manitoba. I wanted to follow the river north, to travel into the deeper cold. I craved numbness. Me who a year and a half ago had almost been killed at a house party. A father’s shotgun in the hands of his drunk and jealous teenage son. I hid my injuries or tried to. I scavenged compliments like a crow seeks shiny objects. I’d been told, but for my scars, I was pretty. I looked more like 15 than 20. I could stand the scars, but not the paralyzed left arm, crooked at my side. The clenched fist. Nerves shot. Everything I looked upon I saw through those fingers. Those scars. 


The darkness gathered Hwy 371 into it, enveloped all the trees and haunted farmsteads, and at last signs for Grand Forks appeared, and we met the headlights and taillights of other vehicles—mostly 18-wheelers bound for Canada. The snow started falling through the high beams, scattering as if the flakes were haphazard birthday candles stubbed into the flatlands. We entered civilization, or its detritus—strip shopping centers, four-way stops, the train station waiting for the Western Star to pull in. We cruised down University Avenue under a banner that read Gʀᴀɴᴅ Fᴏʀᴋs Wᴇʟᴄᴏᴍᴇs ᴛʜᴇ Bᴇᴀᴛ Gᴇɴᴇʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ. It snapped like a prehistoric bird flapping its wings. We drove by the Shangri La and Hamm’s Beer Parlor and an Army Navy surplus. Places time would soon forget.  
        “I’m starving,” the blond announced. “We have to eat at Whitey’s now.” His long fingers massaged his stomach as if they were soothing the hungry spot. The spot that still craved Katy. 
        “We need to check in at the Ryan first,” the black-haired boy said. 
        “Whitey’s now! The Ryan can wait,” the blond insisted. He had been to last year’s conference; he claimed he knew all the ropes.  
        We parked in the heart of downtown where the Red River forked with Red Lake River. When I got out of the car, wind devils swirled my long brown hair straight up. It was a downtown from a past before I was born, a past I’d seen in snapshots. A vintage war movie showing at the Empire Theatre. The mannequin in the window of Straus Department Store wearing a lavender dress with padded shoulders and a cinched-in waist. Penny’s, Salvation Army. The blond slipped on gray ice crusted to the curb and I helped him up. I could feel the new snow catching in my eyelashes and I smiled. 
        The lights of Grand Forks blur in the years falling between me and that city. 


Whitey’s was packed with voices, blasting radiators, and clanking silverware. Cattle farmers and blue-jeaned women stood three deep around the island bar. Servers glided by carrying platters of sirloin steak, king crab, and pork chops, busboys trailing them, pushing carts heaped with dirty dishes, lobster claws, bones, and napkin tumbleweeds. We stamped snow into the carpet. “Three of you? This way.” The hostess ushered us to a red patent leather booth fronted with yellowy mirrors. I sank into the cushions. 
        The blond ordered a beer for himself and a Tom Collins for me, since he was 21 and I was 20, and the drinking age in North Dakota was 21. The frosted glass tinkled with ice and gin, topped off with a maraschino cherry. “A Tom Collins is one step up from a Shirley Temple,” the blond chuckled. “Liquor should be like a woman your senses get trapped into loving.” The drink went down fast, the second one faster. In the mirror my dark hair looked tangled, my lips swollen, my dark eyes huge, like a deer startled by its own visage; only the tiny mole on my chin and the scar tied the image to me. 
        “To poetry.” The black-haired boy raised his beer. “Free verse.” 
        The blond threw back his head and laughed. “To metered verse. To trochee and anapest.”  
        My housemates wolfed down their sirloin burgers and swirled their fries in puddles of ketchup. I lingered over a butter-glistening baked potato heaped with chive-flecked sour cream. My meal entire. The front door thumped and stayed ajar as the icy air gusted in. 
        The black-haired boy’s eyes crinkled at their corners. “There they are.”  
        “They look like their poetry—aging badly,” the blond said, but having to admit, “There they are.” 
        The Beats were strutting into Whitey’s single file. Living American literature. Faces familiar from book jackets. Coatless Peter Orlovsky led the way, a ripe-bellied Russian giant in a T-shirt, followed by wiry-haired Allen Ginsberg, who played finger cymbals. Behind them Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s pointy white beard and Michael McClure’s matinee-idol good looks, his exquisite wife and daughter bundled in furs. A professorial Rexroth. Miriam Patchen wore a prairie dress that billowed below her jacket. Black Mountain Buddhist Gary Snyder, his waist-length hair in a bun, his face wrinkled as if his whole life had been spent smiling, tiny golden suns radiating from his eyes. Bringing up the rear, an impish Gregory Corso, wearing his army fatigue jacket and stomping the floor with his combat boots. “I want steak and sea-smelling cunt,” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “The Italian Daddy is here.” 


The beatific Beats. They tore apart the 1950s in Venice Beach and Greenwich Village, openly gay, chanting jazz-worshippers. They aimed to make poetry more sacred by freeing it from academia, from uptight American conformity. More humorous, more political, an illumination heightened by sex and drugs and meditation. They called themselves “Daddies.” An angry, boisterous boys’ club. Unsaid: Girls Not Welcome Here. 
        “Kerouac will last. On the Road. The Dharma Bums,” the black-haired boy said between French fries. 
        “On the Road, yes, Dharma Bums, no.” 
        “How about Gregory Corso? Some critics compare him to Shelley,” I said, working my sentence in edgewise. “His lushness.” I kept Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death and Elegiac Feelings American next to my bed, along with Ai’s Cruelty and Sylvia Plath’s Colossus. 
        “Lushness? Shelley? Like Ginsberg he wrote one good poem, ‘Marriage,’” the blond opined, not unkindly but what he probably considered honest. He spoke in a soft voice, but his features remained hard, rigid, without the fluid expression of the black-haired boy, whose eyes darted like birds.  
        And while the rogue scamps of mid-twentieth-century literature disappeared into the back banquet room to place their orders, the vegetarians and carnivores alike, we debated the use of “thru” and lowercase “i.”  
        The room felt energized. Iridescent. Electric. 

 
At the Ryan Hotel my housemates shared their quarters, while I had my own room. Cavernous, the bed an ice sheet with pillows like drifted snow. My red hatbox suitcase spilled its contents: the brown corduroy jacket, the sleeveless tops, the black jeans, platform shoes, spring clothes not for North Dakota where winter still reigned. The rattling and hissing radiators crouched in the corner emitted little heat. In the deep claw-and-ball bathtub I soaked. My pale left arm floated on the water’s surface in its own world. Like an innocent. We no longer spoke to each other in the old way. The arm knew my shame, how I tried to hide its paralysis, stuffing its fist in a pocket. I knew its burning, its electrical shocks. All the waiting when you’re in the hospital; waiting for daylight, waiting for night, waiting for them to stop jabbing you, waiting for the arm to move. But all the waiting wouldn’t awaken my arm. I picked up the hand and soaped it, bending the fingers stiffened like sea anemone, like bits of broken coral. 
        Afterwards, still dripping, I wrapped the fat white towel stamped Ryan around me and breathed a hole in the iced window, pressing my arm against the frost. On the drapes, red-eyed pheasants limp in hunters’ arms, like victims of pillage. I stared into the long mirror at my flat stomach, my breasts, my rounded butt.  


I had wandered far away when the in-room phone on the dresser rang, and a red button blinked, summoning me.  
        “Come down to our room. We’re smoking,” the black-haired boy announced. 
        I dressed, putting on my platform shoes that made me almost tall. The elevator, a grilled cage, creaked me down from the seventh floor to the fourth. Their room hot and small, one double bed, the blond sitting back propped against the headboard, a baggie of weed between his knees. He rolled joint after joint, skinny and long, like himself. The black-haired boy fired one up, and after a hit, put the lit end between his lips and blew smoke into my mouth.  
        I hated weed. The smoke sent me into my body, into my left arm, down through the flames into the hand. Weed made me try to think my way into my fingers and open them. Weed, a fool’s errand.  
        Here the radiators threw out buckets of heat and my left arm burned, as if the fingers had plugged themselves into a wall socket. Smoke wisped through the open transom. We heard the elevator clang, and a woman and a man talking in the hall.  
        “Who’s smoking reefer?” the man shouted. Bang bang. A fist on the door. “Let me in.”  
        More pounding. The blond shuffled off the bed. “It’s him.”  
        We knew who him was. The same voice that had demanded sea-smelling cunt at Whitey’s.  
        “This is for our memoirs,” the black-haired boy chuckled, passing me the joint and unlocking the door. 
        The Beat rapscallion strutted in, followed by a woman in a red muffler, much younger than him but older than me. He plopped down on the edge of the bed, the woman beside him. She wore red mittens and I smiled at her.  
        “Give me a hit,” he ordered in a thick New York accent.  
        I handed him the joint. He inhaled greedily and grabbed for the liquor in his jacket pocket. “Do you know who I am?” He growled, waving around the almost empty bottle. “I’m the poet Gregory Corso.”  
        The black-haired boy caught my glance, his eyebrow tilted. Of course we knew.  
        The poet Gregory Corso was drunk. He jabbed and punched the air, he cocked his head, looking sideways. His hair—a few gray strands scouting among the brown curls. Was he sneering at me, or perhaps smiling? Missing his two front teeth, the gap was a broken doorway to the mouth and his words. His elegiac address to Jack Kerouac went through my head. O butcher . . . even this elegy, dear Jack, shall have a butchered tree, a tree beaten to a pulp. 
        He must not have been smiling, because he stared at me angrily. “Did you roll this joint?” I shook my head. His narrowed dark eyes were hard. Tarred over. They had no light inside them. Maybe the women and men who stared into his eyes had wanted to steal his elfin soul. He held up the toothpick joint and squinted at it.  
        “Who rolled this spliff?” he demanded. “Give me the weed, give it here.” He curled his lips back so we could see the missing teeth. 
        Silence.  
        Heat poured from the radiators. My arm was on fire, and I bowed to the pain. I thought of the gin bottle in the cold car trunk.  
        The black-haired boy handed over the baggie and rolling papers to Gregory Corso. They all watched him pinch buds into the paper, twirling, and licking, his joint fatter than a cigarette. The woman in the red muffler took off her mittens and lit it.  
        “What a fine Aries am I,” he recited. The first line from a poem I recognized. “What sign are you?” he snarled at me abruptly. 
        “Virgo.” 
        “I see pain and suffering in your eyes.”  
        His companion pressed her leg against his; her arm tightened around his neck.  
        “What nationality are you?”  
        “American,” I answered, chills crawling over my back like ants.  
        “No, no! American, bah! What ethnicity? I was born in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Little Italy, New York City. I am Italian.” 
        I flushed. “Czech.” 
        “Aah, Czech. The Czechs love me.” 
 

I stood up, asked the black-haired boy for the car keys, and told him I was going for the gin. I hurried out, taking the stairs to the lobby. Trees were roaming at the edge of the lot; the wind had uprooted them. The gusts pushed me deeper in toward the car, which hid under a dusting of powder. The cold air smelled of simmering apples and set fire to my ears, separating my toes from my feet, tempting me to take off my platform shoes and run barefoot into the snow.  
        I heard him behind me. My fingers were stiff and I fumbled with the trunk key. 
        “You’re an angel,” he slurred, taking the key from my numb fingers. “I couldn’t let an angel freeze.” He turned the key and popped the trunk. I reached for the bottle nesting on top of the spare tire, but he pounced first. Twisting the cap, he swigged, taking a deep kiss of spirits, then, lifting the bottle to my mouth, sloshed the gin over my lips. I swallowed what tasted like icy juniper berries and pushed the gin away. His thumb rubbed over my cheek roughly. “I wanted to taste the snow on your face.” His words, I knew then, I would carry all the way through. In the heart of the chill a secret fire flamed, and he swung my hand as we kicked through the new snow, both of us laughing. “Once we get inside put your hands under your armpits to warm them up.” He claimed he was born with his eyes wide open and missed nothing. He had wintered on the streets as a kid, and his fingers lived under his armpits, or else they would have frozen. I was a farm girl and knew the touch and warp of rust. 
        When we knocked on the black-haired boy’s room, the blond came to the door. I returned the car keys and told the blond goodnight. “Roll your joints fatter, kid,” Corso said in his New York fast-talk. “No one likes a miser.” 

 
I took off my jacket and slid the window up, letting in the odor of smoldering apples and snow. Gregory Corso lay flat on his back on the bed in my room. “Undress me,” he mumbled. “Get my boots off.”  
        I had been asked to an unfamiliar landscape and bent to the task. I untied the laces and, gripping the boots by the heel, I pulled, first the right, then the left. The left boot struggled, perhaps sensing I could use only one hand, but I persevered, wrenching it free. It took only a finger to slip his socks off as he began to snore lightly. Green socks, no holes. His feet, strangely childlike, smelled musky, animal and sweet. Barefooted, he roused himself long enough for me to tug on the sleeves of his army jacket from a war he hadn’t fought in. 
        He fumbled at the zipper to his corduroy pants. “Angel, get him out of there. Come on.”  
        Him. I finished unzipping his pants, the sound of metallic teeth echoing. His pants too had fallen asleep and seemed to resent my tugging first one leg, then the other. He wore no underwear. Then I unbuttoned his shirt, I touched his chest, which felt smooth and passive, like a body waiting for its spirit to return. The curtains billowed, the wind hurrying in. I was riding in the car with my grandparents, a 3-year-old, the radio playing as we turned into the farmhouse lane. Little people lived inside the radio and sang for me. Pleasant the drowsiness had been, but better still my grandfather carrying me inside and putting me to bed. Gregory Corso became the girl who fell asleep, and I was the grandfather. 
        I could see all of him—his relaxed face looking less like a fistfight, his knees and ankles, his navel, the scratches like a half-shredded shirtdress, the bruises, a midafternoon in his cell that had lasted forever. I knew some of his history. His 16-year-old mother had given him up before his first birthday. Five foster homes in 11 years, then living on the streets of Little Italy, on the rooftops, the small thefts. A toaster, a radio, a suit. He went to the best schools. Prison. Age 13, The Tombs. Age 17, Dannemora. There he read the Greeks, the Romantics, he idolized Percy Bysshe Shelley. He began writing in his quirky poetic language. His vulturic salutations arising. There, it was rumored, he had been raped. 
        “Get him up.” Tight hipster words used to impart orders. 
        Him. I took him in my hand, his penis, curious but not filled with desire. Like an explorer having gone this far, I forged on. I felt the choir of other mouths that had sung here. The other eyes who had read his ye bomb ye bang ye orangutan. Every night he must tell a different someone to get him up as he starts to snore. 
        “Use your tongue,” he commanded. 
        All the hands and mouths he had invited to his carrion star. I was one more who used her tongue. His penis hardened. “Take it all in, angel.” I took it all in until I imagined a snow of semen skittering across the bed. 
        Around us the dresser with the Gideon Bible, the brightness of revelation. The angels from Greenwich Village. The Gaslight Cafe. The low rents. Waiting in the stairwell at the Seven Arts Cafe poetry reading ready to go on. Cock-‘n’-Bull Coffee Shop on Bleecker Street. The barefoot winner of Miss Beatnik, identified only as Angel. Dark hair, dark eyes, a mole on her chin. Here too, a story circulated about his womanizing, the Beat poet in Paris traipsing on the roofs and in the gutters and reading poetry in the streets, and the French girl he had invited to his Paris squat for dinner.  
        The girl knocked, beautifully dressed, and he asked her to come in. 
        “Now take off your clothes,” he said, naked himself. 
        She shook her ringleted head. “You promised dinner.”  
        The poet picked up a green pepper, bit into it, and smashed it on the table. “There’s your dinner.”  
        She walked out. 


I pulled the bedspread out from under him, then the sheet to cover him. I took off my black hip-huggers and sleeveless top, letting my clothes pool on the floor. I tried lying on my stomach with my left arm under me like a broken wing or a wishbone, then I turned onto my side, my left arm still under me. I settled my head on his chest and ran my fingers over his breastbone and belly, the skin soft against the gristle of him, the last thing you’d expect. I listened to the wind, I listened to his heart, a heavy beater like mine. The moist place where my breath touched his shoulder—juniper. I fell asleep in the berries and pine needles; a snow town between us. Weightless as low clouds I wandered my farm childhood. I saw the orchard, the trees standing on their heads, barnyards, wet hay, and in the farmhouse every room filled with winter. 
        He breathed in. I breathed out. 

 
I woke to an empty bed. A bright cold sun spilled into the room. I bathed and dressed, sure that I would never see the poet again, and then I heard him outside in the hall.  
        “It’s me.” 
        I opened the door and he bounded in; his hair was rumpled but he’d put on a clean pullover and jeans, the combat boots and jacket seemingly glad to be back where they belonged. He held a bottle of champagne in each hand. “Gimme the toothbrush glasses. Let’s have breakfast.” 

 
Plows were scraping the snow into seven-foot drifts on either side of the street. “Angel, lovely. Lovely,” he said over and over while we waited in front of the hotel. “Where are the fucking cabs?” A station wagon with Red River Taxi lettered on its dented door pulled up, driven by a tiny woman wearing large fuzzy earmuffs that made you want to pet them.  
        “To the University,” he barked in a congenial way.  
        More banners stretched from lamppost to lamppost across the street. He reached over the seat and shook the cabbie’s shoulder. “See? See? That’s my name up there,” he said with unabashed joy and a toothless grin. “That’s my name.”  
        The cabbie glanced at him in her mirror. “Which name?” 
        “Gregory Corso. It’s a saint’s name. Saint Gregory the Great.” 
        Her eyes crinkled at their corners, and she winked at me. I loved winks and considered them gifts. 

 
We walked toward the exhibition gallery, where Kenneth Patchen’s painted poems and silk screens covered the walls. His illuminated manuscripts of enchanted birds, elephants, zebras, and gilded words surrounded us with their goblin beauty. Miriam Patchen, white-haired and fine-featured with crystalline blue eyes, had curated her husband’s work. She described Kenneth Patchen’s process and their relationship, his years of being bedbound, his brilliance, and his death.  
        “Miriam! Miriam! Come here,” Corso shouted, his nose practically touching the painted poem that read We Three. Come Closer. Closer. “Your boy is William Blake for our fucking age.”  
        She waved and went on talking about the garden tools and tree sprigs, the spatulas and brushes, the crayons and Easter egg dye her husband worked his magic with. His desk, a board on a pulley, braced against his knees. Patchen came from Youngstown, Ohio, the steel mills, and spent the 1930s drifting around the country, looking for kindred souls, writing poetry. Passing through Boston, her college town, they met and soon married. Her skirts swished and her voice had the purity of a flute. 
        “Miriam! Miriam! Come say hello! Kenneth paints and writes like a god. Even dead he’s better than all the living who call themselves poets and artists.”  
        Miriam embraced him. “Gregory, you don’t need to take up all the air in a room.”  
        He disagreed.  
        It was a friend’s steel vehicle that Kenneth Patchen was helping to repair that had fallen on top of him and damaged his spine, followed by botched surgeries that left him in chronic pain. 


We trailed the arrows to the student union, where triangular couches and block cushions surrounded a crackling fire. Just as last night’s spitting cold had been inviting, now the warmth beckoned. The black-haired boy and the blond were talking to two tall college girls who held clipboards. They hardly noticed when I came in with Gregory Corso. Then the black-haired boy raised his head and waved. The blond glanced our way and nudged one of the girls. They all looked and I saw their laughter, although I couldn’t hear it. Through their eyes I looked too skinny, my pale midriff showing between my black jeans and frilly top, holding hands with the much older drunken poet, his jester antics, his boxer’s mien. Two freaks. 

 
We were sitting near the fire, when a boy in a green T-shirt approached us, hesitating, then mustering up his courage. The boy shook his idol’s hand, telling him how he loved his “Hair” poem and showing him a mimeographed copy of it, wanting the poem’s author to sign it.  
        “An autograph? Where did you get that?” Gregory Corso screamed, jumping to his feet. “Where did you get that?”  
        The boy flinched, holding out his notebook as if to ward off blows. “From my Composition teacher.”  
        The poet tried to rip the poem out of the boy’s hand. “Who’s your teacher?” he growled in the boy’s face. “That’s a violation of copyright. Who’s your teacher? Take me to him.”  
        The boy hurried away, still clutching the mimeographed sheet. Gregory Corso, said to be the smartest, the funniest, the most outrageous of the Beats, chased the boy toward the exit stairs, cutting off his escape.  
        “Who’s your teacher? You violated my copyright. Who’s your teacher?”  
        They ran back and forth, sallying about the circular student center, everyone staring; even the workers in the food-service line had halted, tongs in plastic-gloved hands, to watch. I felt empathy for the boy, who unintentionally waved a red scarf before the half-mad bull. At last, the boy dodged him and raced out of the student union. Falling into the chair beside me, Corso took a drink from his flask. After all the laws he’d violated, why should the copyright law be the only sacred one? Still breathing heavily from the chase, Corso vowed to find the teacher, the mimeographic fraudster. I tried not to look at the blond and the black-haired boy or the two tall girls, but this time I could hear their laughter, full-blown, unstoppable.  
        “Angel, come on,” he said to me. “The mortician is about to pontificate.” 

 
Rexroth would soon read in the main auditorium and almost every seat was taken. A giant in American letters, a self-taught polyglot, author of 50 books, poet, essayist, painter, translator, playwright, father of the post–WWII San Francisco Renaissance, a bohemian-Buddhist-anarchist-pacifist, Rexroth was said to have written the most beautiful love poems of the twentieth century for wives he had treated abominably.  
        Leading the way up the carpeted stairs, Corso found one open seat, patting his lap for me to sit. Rexroth loomed incredibly tall and did resemble an undertaker, white-haired and distinguished. He recited first one of his translations from the Chinese. A poem with lotus blossoms and twilight. I enjoyed its loveliness of clarity and shadow.  
        “The last line saved that poem,” Corso yelled. Everyone in the auditorium turned to look. Sitting on his lap, I felt my cheeks flame. Rexroth read another poem. “That’s a single-image poem. You’re not a bohemian jazz-blower, Rexroth. You’re an academic.”  
        A titter moved through the audience. Rexroth stared down from the podium, then gazed up, scrutinizing his heckler. He shuffled the onionskin pages in his notebook and the microphone picked up their rustling. He began reading another poem. 
        Corso reached into his deep pocket, fishing out a flask that he drank deeply of and passed to me. I took a sip. “No beatific, Rexroth, you’re blowing smoke up our asses. Nothing spontaneous in any of that humbug.” 
        Rexroth stopped reading. He let the silence grow, like the hush in a dark room you’ve never entered before. “I am tired of your sickness, Gregory.” 
        The auditorium seemed to hold its collective breath, and then heads once again turned to peer at the madcap fool. We were all bystanders to a collision.  
        The word sickness reverberated. I felt Corso flinch as if he’d taken a blow, and the people in the neighboring seats shrank away from us.  
        “I’m tired of being admonished,” Corso shouted. 
        Rexroth spoke calmly into the mic. “Get out, Gregory, and take your sickness with you.” 
        The buffoon had been spanked.  
        We walked up more stairs to the exit, and then Corso turned. “Ask your wives about sickness, Rexroth. Love poems? Baah. Bluebeard’s closet.” 

 
I leaned against the window in the student center. Did the artist’s behavior matter? The celebrated male poet on the reading circuit hunting for the youngest body to bed always to be forgiven? The sun was winnowing away, too weak to melt the frost on the glass. Late midafternoon, and the glow that winter gave off seemed to originate in the trees and cornices, all shivering with spectral light. Grand Forks, so far north, too cold for many people’s blood. No stage to mount, the microphone spotlighted and ringed by folding chairs and couches waited in the student center dusk for Gregory Corso. I sat down. His jacket lay across my lap as the poet made his way forward, his curly hair crowning him like an unwashed halo. The black-haired boy, the blond, and the two girls I’d seen them with this morning sat crowded together on a couch. 


Earlier, Corso had mentioned that he would open his reading with “Bomb.” How many times had he recited it, lugging it around the world, declaiming the multipage poem typed in the shape of a mushroom cloud? And so he strode up to the microphone, interrupting the master of ceremonies. 
        “Yeah, yeah, they know who I am.” 
        Bluntly, in his New York accent, he began. Budger of history  Brake of Time  You Bomb. A direct address to the world destroyer, he lowered his voice to I cannot hate you. His voice was everywhere, as he conjured the mushroom cloud. The Corso before us, not the jester, nowhere, he beckoned the Bomb, teasing and daring it in his archaic language mixed with whimsicality. He distinguished Bomb from tomahawk and flintlock and burning sword, from recognizable deaths—subway and car crash and heart attack, calling forth the images. Turtles exploding over Istanbul. The jaguar’s flying foot soon to sink in arctic snow. Hallucinations starting to vibrate, flying apart, imploding, Corso lunging after them. His mouth of broken teeth spewing out Hersperean hair and cypressean torches. 
        My hand slipped into his jacket pocket, empty but for a prescription bottle from a pharmacy on Bleecker Street in New York City. A world away. I read his name many times on the bottle: Gregory Corso. How different his name there compared to the man reciting. For sleeplessness. Nembutal.  
        The mushroom stalk rose in the student center, the poem’s heat creating an updraught of debris. The audience engulfed in the smoke and dust. 
        Corso read as if reading the poem for the first time, Bomb O havoc molten cleft Boom, as if the poem had just been scratched from his flesh. He played with the words Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps, delighting in them. He pranced away from the microphone, his voice a growl or a choked softness strong enough to be heard. He boxed O piece of heaven which give both mountain and anthill a sun, jabbing the air, by turns pensive, expansive, even intimate—I bring you Midgardian roses. Arcadian musk. The audience became one, and he did with us what he pleased. Laughing, weeping, raging, he called out the Bomb’s maker. Oppenheimer seated in the dark pocket of light. He sexualized the Bomb. O Bomb I love you. I want to kiss your clang eat your boom. And then the explosion. Ye stars BOOM. A cosmic joke. BOOM BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns BOOM. BOOM. He spat out the words with savagery. Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM. 
        The street fighter took a bow. The applause was deafening. The black-haired boy and his two friends rose to their feet, clapping. The blond remained seated. The poet read for twenty more minutes and finished with “Marriage.” Another standing ovation.  
        Corso leapt to me, took his jacket, and squeezed my hand. “Angel, we have a ride back to the hotel. How about a hot bath?”  


It was over and Grand Forks lay behind us. We drove past the same fields, brighter with the new snow that had fallen. The wind had come up and the car shook. Trees threw their shadows into the snow, inviting us to climb them and see where they led. 
        “Well,” the black-haired boy said, a full head-turn into the back seat. “What do you think?” 
        I sat in the passenger’s seat and the blond stretched out in back, his parka pillowing his head. His skin looked the nauseated color of field stubble. They’d eaten at a diner and the blond had gotten sick. Later he’d tell his friends about his unforgettable time in Grand Forks.  
        “The high point was Rexroth telling the brat Corso he was tired of his sickness. How can you admire that fool’s poetry?” the blond said, lifting his head. 
        “Admire? His ‘Bomb’ is one of the great long-form American poems,” I said. 
        “He threw words on the page with a gravy ladle. Random. BOOM,” the blond argued. “Finger painting with words.” 
        They didn’t ask about my time with Corso; they believed they knew. I could feel the poet’s fingers threaded through mine. My type he’d seen before from his life in Greenwich Village. On Christopher Street. On Bleecker. In Alphabet City. I was the girl for his arm, childlike and shy, big-eyed, and thin. An angel whose name he didn’t need to know. And I was drawn to him, the outrageous, flawed rebel who spoke his mind regardless of giving offense. 
        “Hey, getting back to the main point,” the black-haired boy piped up. “You have to separate the artist from his art.” 
        We argued about T.S. Eliot’s committing his sane wife to a mental institution, Hemingway’s killing of elephants, Rimbaud’s slave trading. Ezra Pound, the fascist anti-Semite; Edna St. Vincent Millay, the addict philanderer. Ford Madox Ford, a compulsive liar and bigamist. Pablo Neruda abandoning his wife and their child born with hydrocephalus. William Burroughs shooting an apple off his wife’s head and killing her. Rexroth expecting all his wives to support him financially and be his personal secretary, while he flagrantly cheated.  
        Grain elevators rose from the prairie like cathedrals, and we had it all to ourselves, this landscape of gray fields and sky and unrepentant cold.