Sam at Yeats Grave

Ok.  Yeah yeah.  So there he is at the grave of Yeats and I can appreciate that and  the “Horseman passes by” stuff and all that.  But all I can think of is the day he nearly burned down that house in Bellevue back then in 1976? trying to kill some damn bugs in a tree and . . . I was smart and smug and full of myself and you and I and Tim went to his house drunk and then we drank and drank some more and we made fun of Sam for no clear reason or at least I did and Tim kept smoking and you were trying to smooth over my positively absurdly bad behavior and then after Sam’s wife became uncomfortable we decided to leave and stumbled away into the night and Tim ridiculed anyone who made any reference to Yeats and I didn’t agree because I was having a Romantic relapse but we got into the car and quietly drove off in the night towards somewhere.

But then, later  . . .we laughed at that night because we had drunk far more or at least bragged that we had because we were never going to get caught because the stars wouldn’t let us and walked in the fog by the slough and saw creatures and weren’t afraid although I worried there were a lot of shadowy demons around you then and I didn’t really need those demons in my life but you weren’t bothered by it so I just went with it and on an on and we never got caught.  And we stopped talking about Yeats and Picasso started to be talked about and Picasso was heroic and confused and loved the women and we loved Picasso and I went to his house and stood in his studio and wanted to stay there until the French law clerks chased me away because the studio where Guernica was painted is now a storeroom for law files and I didn’t want to leave but then I did and we talked more about Picasso and painted paintings and then painted more until the paintings started to stack up with no where to go until you went to your really great island in Croatia and the painting slowed and then this summer I didn’t paint anything but stared at the bulls I painted last summer and thought there once was a lot of life in my imagination and I can’t let that go.  Long live the minotaur and long live Yeats I guess and raise a toast to the Greeks and those splendid vases.