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I didn’t expect to make this announce-
ment this morning—which is being posted both on Robert Frost’s Banjo & The Days of Wine & Roses—but it’s a fact: The Days of Wine & Roses is not simply a blog anymore; it’s also a paperback book that you can own for a mere $10 US: it’s available at this link.
For those who are short on cash, it is available as a free pdf download, & of course the availability of the poems in book form doesn’t mean the end of The Days of Wine & Roses blog: the poems will continue to appear here in published order. For those who’ve also followed my more recent poetry on Robert Frost’s Banjo, I should point out that The Days of Wine & Roses only covers poems written in San Francisco between 1990 & 1996, with one “postscript” poem from my Idaho days in 2003. Don’t worry—poems from the last few years will find their way into book form, especially now that I know how easy it is on lulu.com. It’s also free to the author, tho if you want copies of your own work, you do have to pay full price (I’ll be forking over some dollars myself here in the near future!)
Anyway, so happy to share this with you folks. Without your support, I don’t know that this would have happened!
Rain’s falling already, I’m waiting to catch hold of an umbrella—
* * *
one of those unavoidable collisions in the midst of stoplights & Black-Eyed Susans
* * *
an unbalanced picnic basket, incorrigibly lonely
* * *
“however extravagant, also shy”
* * *
a castle filled with cuckoo clocks & 2 dozen cases of Diet Pepsi & several ceramic dachshunds with bobbing heads
* * *
a radio tower lost in a blue eyeshadow cloud—a
Plymouth plows thru the pink auroral jungles of Western PA
* * *
Rain’s falling already, I’m waiting to catch hold of an umbrella—
* * *
The moon, of course, looks suspiciously like a glass of 2% milk about to spill, & Catalina is pretty far off, & Max is waiting there, reading a movie magazine amidst an invasion of fog
* * *
a castle by the sea & a percolator bubbling, intemperate as a spoon
* * *
So many unanswered questions, so many drowned ‘78‘s
* * *
so many black rotary phones & bracelets jingling & Max’s theatrical hands
* * *
so much honey dribbled on burnt toast
* * *
a teardrop mandolin in an orchard
* * *
Rain’s falling already, I’m waiting to catch hold of an umbrella—
Jack Hayes
© 1990-2010
I wanted to write you a beautiful poem recalling the dozens of
sand dollars dying in the sand as the white unhealthy fog
covered us—it
wasn't my fault Lily—it wasn’t a beach this
road inundated in two feet of snow two silhouettes walk down, &
one tries to steal a kiss;
So there were 2 people on that road’s shoulder & neither one of
them wore my tweed coat—
which just about then seemed like a whole lot of mirrors woven
together; &
I could hear you, Lily, saying, So this is outer space...
a theorem explaining the intersection of parallel lines; the
sputtering candle, a metal bookcase filled with regrets; & I
think I remember you from another Saturday, a
boat cut adrift, now sailing past the concrete
shore where my memories washed up
lonesome as shoes without a stove to thaw them
Jack Hayes
© 1990-2010
This is your final notice the stars announced Clear out!
it's astounding what a desolation of phone poles &
clotheslines—the
shirts & trousers hanging there frozen—lurched into the wind's
mouth but
it wasn't wind, it was the Great White Whale itself plunging
like the
Great Northern Freight Train pitched into infinity, like a house
that can't stop moving;
& it wasn't a house, it was an abyss inside my pocket with my
cigarettes; or else it was a frozen waste the train moans a
formidable zero while traversing; but listen, there's no
hopelessness much emptier than this here boxcar;
The engineer doesn't know much anymore,
for instance whether his home's still underwater or which station
comes next:
Tungsten, Old Crow, Antarus—some star that's the clue from 500
crosswords I never
remember one Sunday to the next, which between horizons is
10,000
miles; it's true you said:
if you miss the train I'm on you will know that I am gone
Jack Hayes
© 1990-2010
A pair of tamaracks plus their naked, rawfingered shadows—
painfully configured hands & black snow generally, blacker snow
locally where the tamaracks' hands reach out at obtuse angles
untouching—
all these black gloves abandoned gesturing from the drifts,
all these
spectacles & their bent black rims—
& not much else can be seen for a month of Sundays inside this
snowdome except the confetti
which looks like a lingerie catalog shredded then reincarnated as
black snowflakes about the
size of eyelets;
the trees had their own ideas of anguish;
you knew how they felt about such things, Lily: you
felt like them watching a glove floating under the bridge &
through the canal's fingers which are black ice; your body,
standing over the bathtub
feeling absurd dripping icicles like a tamarack's needles; & I'm
somewhere else,
the way the glove's wrung-out when the cops fish it out
Jack Hayes
© 1990-2009
The stars you thought you could count on as
recently as Friday 11/21/91, Lily... well those stars have
drowned like spooned
sugar dissolved in steamed milk:
another headache, & what are you left with but cold sweats &
symptoms of
night blindness; & what's left to eat anyway?
Ice & snow, a few decimal points left over from Mr Infinity's
breakfast, a
31st birthday cake crumbling with frostbite—its sugary roses,
they're teeth breaking off biting down on an ice cube;
No one says it doesn't hurt like a mouthful of ice caps,
this grind; & what's left in the fridge?
2 beers, a map of the Northern Hemisphere's night sky in
winter, a
paperback Leibniz wrapped in foil for freezing—not to mention
a motorized voice
(& it's echoing oddly staccato & to the tune of The Queen of
Night's Aria), bellowing
Happy Birthday & Last Call
Jack Hayes
© 1990-2009
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