Brian read some of it, too, and said, “Hm! It’s a work of art.” He didn’t seemed particularly excited, but he handed it over to Richard with a noticeable amount of respect. Bill Houston shared the guard’s uncertainty about it.
Later, Bill Houston wanted to read it again. He borrowed it and kept it for a while after supper. It was just nice to have a document created by other prisoners. He couldn’t make any sense of the poem, but sadness overcame him when he looked at it. He gave it back to Richard without comment.
But he thought about it off and on all night, and the next day without any preliminaries he said, “That’s a beautiful poem, Richard. I’d like to take a copy with me on my ride.”
Richard said nothing, but he jumped up and moved about his cell. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally.
Bill Houston and Richard talked a lot about what each was going to have for his final meal. Bill Houston wanted steak. Richard couldn’t decide between chicken and pork. Bill Houston was grateful to know they wouldn’t be eating the same thing. It seemed appropriate that the State of Arizona should provide them with a variety of foods before their big finish. Bill Houston didn’t like to hear the guards calling it The Last Supper. It was a common prison expression, but he’d already heard enough about how Richard Clay Wilson would turn out to be his savior.
It was getting on his nerves. “I never asked you to die for me,” he told Richard.
Richard only put his earphones over his head and pretended to be alone in the universe.
“C’mon, Richard.” Bill Houston waved his hand before their window. “Hey. C’mon.”
When Richard removed his earphones, tiny music came out of them like the whirring of a bug.
“Listen. How about reading me your poem one time?”
Richard appeared lost in a haze of considerations.
“Fact is, I read terrible, Richard. So that’s why I’m asking you.”
Richard opened the small stereo cassette box that housed the poem like a jewel. He unfolded the document and stepped back, standing himself up on the far side of his cell where Bill Houston could get a bigger picture of him. But he cast his gaze toward the corner, where there was nobody. “Talking Richard Wilson Blues,” he said. “By Richard Clay Wilson.” And he read in a Baptist sing-song:
“I felt like a man of honor of substance,
but the situation was dancing underneath me—
once I walked into the living room at my sister’s
and saw that the two of them, her and my sister,
had turned sometime behind my back not exactly
fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons
moving on the television in front of them,
surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas
standing up next to the iron on the board.
I stepped out into the yard of bricks
and trash and watched the light light
up the blood inside each leaf,
and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm
on this mother? Where do you turn it on?
I think you understand how I felt.
‘I’m not saying everything changed in the space
of one second of seeing two women, but I did
start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted
she be sexy. I just wanted to live.
And I did: some nights were so sensory
I felt the starlight landing on my back
and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers.
But the strategies of others broke my promise.
At closing time once, she kept talking to a man
when I was trying to catch her attention to leave
It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines
and black masses and black hydrants filled
with black water. I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass,
but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife
and I took out his guts and I said, ‘Here they are,
motherfucker, nigger, here they are.’
There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on.
At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me
from the side of the room where I saw her standing,
the way the sacred light played across her face.
“Right down the middle from beginning to end
my life pours into one ocean, into this prison
with its empty ballfield and its empty
preparations. If she ever comes to visit me
to hell with her, I won’t talk to her.
God kill you all. I’m sorry for nothing.
I’m just an alien from another planet.
“I am not happy. Disappointment
lights its stupid fire in my heart,
but two days a week I staff
the Max Security laundry above the world
on the seventh level, looking at two long roads
out there that go to a couple of towns.
Young girls accelerating through the intersection
make me want to live forever,
they make me think of the grand things,
of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies.
Sometimes I stand against the window for hours
tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal
meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body.
“Jesus Christ, your doors close and open,
you touch the Maniac Drifters, the Fireaters,
I could say a million things about you
and never get that silence. That is what I mean
by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth,
where nothing bad has happened.
I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told
when you will come to save us. I have written
several poems and several hymns, and one
has been performed on the religious
ultra-high-frequency station. And it goes like this.”
Without waiting for any applause, Richard went immediately back to his bunk and returned the poem to its case.
Foster, the elderly suppertime relief guard, had joined them during Richard’s recital of the poem. “Who’s a maniac drifter?” he asked now. Bill Houston was embarrassed. He thought it must be an insult to ask any questions about Richard’s poem — Foster ran the risk of revealing that parts of it were stupid.
“That’s a gang on the Southside,” Richard said, “and the Fireaters, too. I was a friend to them. Once upon a time I carried a message. And then they had a war.” He held up his head in his annoying way. “They in my poem,” he said with genuine pride.
The three of them stood chained together by an awkward silence, and yet separated by prison bars. “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” Foster said. And then he didn’t tell them anything.