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)
4 comments:
Giving Liz a fire engine red Cadillac may be overdoing things a bit.
Long White Cadillac: The Blasters (live, 1986)
Long White Cadillac: Dwight Yoakam cover
Bolt steer horns on the hood of that Cadillac! Good golly... reminds me of the glory days of early rodeo, the fine years between Casey Tibbs and Larry Mahan... all celebrated on sixties TV with the series Stony Burke... and then Sam Peckinpah's beautifully rendered, with Steve McQueen in the title roll, Junior Bonner. Hot damn, yes! What I thought I was gonna git outta poetry was an old time Cadillac with steer horns on the hood and a horn that would play nine different versions of Faded Love. Hurrah for them ol' Cadillacs, but, as Billy Joe Shaver sings, "They's Cadillac buyers 'n ol' five-'n-dimers like me."
Tom,
Talking about outlooks, can twenty eight pages be bearers of a new one ?
"..When he first views the world through the windshield of his 'own' Cadillac car". I suppose the outlook inherited, by being on the other side of the windshield is synonymous with
reading, and writing about making it in Wicker Baskets. And then, commenting about them as well. Hah ! Lets have a laugh about that - and hum quietly with our windshields- err - screens down, about not being able to make it in those Cadillacs.
*YOUR CADILLAC DEALER*
Nice poem and not at all "catty".
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