"I'm walking here." — Ratso Rizzo

In a memorable scene from "Midnight Cowboy" (1969), Ratso Rizzo (played by Dustin Hoffman) crosses a New York street, talking to his friend and not looking where he's going when he walks into the path of a taxi which shrieks to a stop. Ratso bangs his hand on the hood, shouting at the driver: "Hey can't you see I'm walking here! I'm walking here! Up yours, you sonuvabitch!" It's my mantra. It's how I get into a space in my head that's ready to write. It's how I fend off the other voices out there telling me to shut up, cool off, sit down, relax. If I'm not careful, I'll care too much about what others might think. I zip my mind open to the New York City in my head, its miles of glass and racks of Florsheims, steam rising from the streets, to that place where Ratso doesn't give a shit about the oncoming cab. He has his own scrappy life to live, his own death to limp toward.

Some days my mind is lined with shelves, arranged by image, object, gesture, tone of voice. There are drawers bulging with phrases from childhood: sacre bleu, Jesus Christ on a crutch, blow it out your ass, your Mama wears Army boots. Closets of words on wire hangers: trillium, blast gun, frailty, colostrum. Old shoe boxes stuffed with songs: "I'm Fixing a Hole," "Dock of the Bay," "Little Fugue in G Minor," "The Heart of Saturday Night." And movie houses with sconces and Cry Rooms. This week it's Anna Magnani in "The Rose Tattoo," sassy mess of a woman, complex mass of raging talent and moral contradiction, middle-aged, vital, physical, a woman of the hoi polloi, brimming with bawdy wit, an overblown rose, revealing her own glorious decay, her flagrant thighs fat and waxy, all instinct and unbridled ego, Burt Lancaster hiding beneath the silver palm fronds in the neighbor's back yard. He's spooked the chickens crazy. She's waving her hand at tragedy. That's where I want to be, inside a life.

Outside our window is my neighbor's gray asphalt tile rooftop. Rashu and Kristen moved in a couple of years ago. Kristen works for an international relief organization and met Rashu when she went to Nepal. Last summer, some crackheads broke into their house while they were away visiting Rashu's family. They lost their computers, their stereo and TV, the Nepalese handicraft, tooled treasure boxes and shadow puppets, bolts of pashmina and cashmere, all they'd carried back to sell at the Saturday Market. In their place, used needles and bloody cotton balls bloomed like a harvested crop on the living room rug. We watch their house more carefully now. I have to peer over the top of my computer to look down through the crosshatching of the summer screen and deep into their back yard which is filled with potted lavender. A friend is storing them along the edges of their lawn, starts for his Lovely Lavender business. They throw their scent up here on summer afternoons.

Larry Levis wrote in his book, The Gazer Within:

To really look inward inquiringly, as Sydney advises... is to discover how empty I am, how much of an onlooker and gazer I have to be in order to write poems... that miracle of dawn or twilight along the road, and me there, looking out of my skull, a witness to it... this must occur many times, with regularity, or else the world would be nonsense, a mute noise.

A patch of blue, a blossom or two, a satellite dish with its electronic eye trained on the heavens. On the sill a broken branch from Whitman's grave stuck into the dusty neck of a brown bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale, and taped to the wall above my shoulder a famous photograph of Emily Dickinson on cheap postcard cardboard, the ink gone purple with age, her large, feral eyes glinting and in each, a thin crack of light, as if reflecting a door ajar in a dark room, letting in the blaze of the summer or the cold, dead light of the moon. Her hands touch a clutch of forget-me-nots, her pale fingertips already wispy, going to bone. My husband gave me this as a gift. His father, dead in 1980, an English teacher and closet poet, gave it to him in 1974. It's an advertisement for Poet's International in Pittsburgh. On the back his father has scrawled, Hi Joe – This'll keep it real all right all right!

Sometimes, it's enough to build a poem on, to I glean from, the gaze blooming, spiraling, webbing and crisscrossing inside my skull: clicking branches and bicycle spokes, children's raw voices, the hoarse barks of chained dogs, intermittent swish of cars, slish and clash of recycling bins carried to the curb and dumped into the cart, and on quiet afternoons, clotheslines of ragged laundry and American flags on poles beside front doors, snapping violently in the northern wind. I'm walking here, stopping traffic, honing my gaze.

The American Poetry Review

Editors:
Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Arthur Vogelsang
Associate Editor:
Elizabeth Scanlon

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Poetry Daily / Amazon.com

Selected books available by Dorianne Laux:
Facts about the Moon — Hardcover
The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry — Paperback

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