Robert Creeley: A Wicker Basket

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up there: photo by ...storrao..., 2 April 2014

Comes the time when it’s later

and onto your table the headwaiter   

puts the bill, and very soon after

rings out the sound of lively laughter --

Picking up change, hands like a walrus,   

and a face like a barndoor’s,

and a head without any apparent size,   

nothing but two eyes --

So that’s you, man,

or me. I make it as I can,   

I pick up, I go

faster than they know --

Out the door, the street like a night,   

any night, and no one in sight,   

but then, well, there she is,

old friend Liz --

And she opens the door of her cadillac,   

I step in back,

and we’re gone.

She turns me on --

There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,

and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie,

with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,   

and I eat it --

Slowly. And while certainly

they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket   

of these cats not making it, I make it

in my wicker basket.

Robert Creeley:  A Wicker Basket, from For Love, 1962

  General Motors advertisement for Cadillac automobiles: Life, 1 April 1957 (Gallery of Graphic Design)