Charles Bukowski + Mary Oliver
August 24, 2022
New Neighbors
Bored with the Bs, Charles Bukowski
bopped down a few shelves to
visit Mary Oliver, wedged himself
between her Handbook and the
New and Selected, like a bro
at a bar on Saturday night.
“I want to drink wine with
the assassins,” he said
by way of introduction.
Dreaming of kale’s
puckered sleeve, Mary
expressed no interest in the con-
versation. Such silence.
But there he remained,
more than a week.
Anyone seeking his fix of
Bukowski would not
have thought to
look among the
gannets and the whelks
and the poppies—or
at Blackwater Pond.
“I would kill an elephant
with a bowie knife,”
he announced. Dorothy
Parker re-applied her
lipstick, red matte
since you ask,
and smiled in
his direction: “Wild and fickle
and fierce is he!”
Misfiled yet again,
Meghan O’Rourke
sought an escape, or
at least a return to
alphabetical order.
“It’s warmer this August
than it has been for decades,”
she declared, only to hear
“I’ve been bombed out of
better places than this.”
But Aimee Nezhukumatathil
leaned over to yell,
“I know you are dangerous.
I see it in your shiny teeth,”
which caught Mary’s attention.
She sensed a shadow—
and wait, is someone
smoking?—over
the Guidebook’s shoulder.
Who’s there?
O, a turnip-hearted skunk cabbage,
No wonder.
“In the past couple decades,
we had a long-standing rule of
keeping Charles Bukowski
behind the register,”
the bookseller said.
*****
Origin story: Someone had put Bukowski’s Storm for the Living and the Dead in the middle of the Mary Oliver books at the local Barnes & Noble, and I thought it was a funny poetry in-joke. After taking a photo, I decided to write a poem that brought together the two wildly popular and wildly different authors along with some of their shelf mates.
“The kale’s puckered sleeve,” and “turnip-hearted skunk cabbage” are phrases from Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems: Volume One; “Such Silence,” “Gannets,” “Whelks,” “Poppies,” and “At Blackwater Pond” are titles of poems. “Such Silence” actually comes from Oliver’s Blue Horses, not the New and Selected.
The Bukowski verses are from Storm for the Living and the Dead. Meghan O’Rourke’s quote is from her collection Sun in Days, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s is from Oceanic. The Dorothy Parker line can be found in Enough Rope: A Book of Light Verse. The bookseller’s words belong to Annie Metcalf, who was quoted in a 2017 article in Electric Lit.
*****
Head over to author Tanita S. Davis's site for the Poetry Friday roundup on August 26th.