Traveling Sprinkler Read Online Free Page B

it back. Later, after he’d published another poem of mine, “Knowing What to Ignore,” he took me to lunch at the St. Botolph Club. I had a delicious bowl of leek soup and suddenly he leaned forward and whispered to me that Walter Cronkite was at a table across the room. I looked and, wow, there was Walter Cronkite, looking a little older than when he cried on the news after Kennedy was shot, but not that much older.
    I sent Peter Davison the manuscript of my first book of poems. He’d recently published Stanley Kunitz’s
The Poems of Stanley Kunitz
—a book I loved and carried around with me—and he’d bought me leek soup at the St. Botolph Club in Walter Cronkite’s presence, and he’d said encouraging things, and he’d published “Knowing What to Ignore.” I’d left out “Misery Hat” because I knew he didn’t like it. I thought it was a good bet that he would publish my book. In the end, though, he rejected it.
    But he was a genial, intelligent man—a bit of a name-dropper, perhaps, as are we all, but a nice man and a sharp-eyed editor. Oddly, the main thing I remember about him was that he wore a beautiful tie and pronounced his first name “Meter.”
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    I LIKE WRITING in the car. I can drive somewhere, park, put my notebooks and my papers on the dashboard, clamp on my headphones, and think hard in all directions. Sometimes I put the white plastic chair in the back seat, so that I can sit beside the car when it gets too hot. The air-conditioning doesn’t work anymore, and I’m always on the lookout for a place to park with dappled shade. I live for dappled shade. There’s a corner of a parking lot near Planet Fitness that is particularly dappled. I thought I saw Gerard Manley Hopkins there once, in his car, muttering over a dictionary of Anglo-Saxon.
    One of the small great moments in
Crazy Heart
, the movie with Jeff Bridges, comes early on, when he arrives somewhere after a long drive and the first thing he does is open his car door slightly and pour the urine from his travels onto the parking lot. It’s not hard to do once you get the hang of it.
    My power steering has a leak—the fluid dribbles out uncontrollably. I had it fixed once and I’m not going to fix it again until I get things settled with the IRS. So I have no power steering, and I have to struggle to maneuver into a parking space or turn a tight corner. And the brakes are getting worrisomely soft again. But it’s my car, my Kia Rio, and I love it. I really love this car. No car has ever been this good to me. I will be faithful to this car forever. I will nurse it along. If, when I’m a wobbly old man wearing young man’s blue jeans, the University of Texas asks me to sell them my correspondence, which they probably won’t, I’ll say to them, Forget the letters, forget the manuscripts, what you want is my green Kia Rio. And maybe my traveling sprinkler, too.

Four
    I ’M OUT IN THE GARDEN, Maud, and very fine clouds have, without my noticing, moved across the moon and collected around it like the soft gray dust in the dryer. I want to scoop the gray clouds away and see the moon naked like a white hole in the sky again, but it isn’t going to happen.
    About an hour ago I had a little scare. I was listening to Midnight Star playing “Freak-A-Zoid” on my headphones, that eighties standby, and I was remembering a time in music camp when a green-eyed cellist and I wrote “1976” in the sand. And then, through the music, I heard a very weird short barking sound.
    What in the holy Choctaw Nation was that? I tore off my headphones. It was not a normal dog bark. Maybe a coyote bark? Not like that. Coyotes go
ooo-ooo-ooo
from miles away, mournfully. I said, “Hey there.” It was quite close—it came from behind me, in the overgrown area. Did porcupines bark? No. Once