Going through the mags typing up poems for New Yawk friend came upon Mr.
Wang writing about photo Mr. America 1951 stuck in mag, The Naked Ear. Mr.
Green (Mr. America) is showing his cock and his muscle and, believe me, he has
more muscle than cock. But why does Mr. Wang worry about such things…Mr.
America 1951 in a 1959 magazine? And the editor has changed the title of my poem
Layover to read Lay Over.
To show you what this does to the central essence of my poem, allow me upon
the next page to show you the poem.—
Making love in the sun, in the
morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
making love in the sun
making love by a carpet redder than our blood
making love while the boys sell headlines
and Cadillacs,
making love by a photograph of Paris
and an open pack of Chesterfields,
making love while other men—poor fools—
work.
That moment—to this…
may be years in the way they measure,
but it’s only one sentence back
in my mind—
there are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
I pass the hotel at 8
and at 5; there are cats in the alleys
and bottles and bums,
and I look up at the window and think,
I no longer know where you are,
and I walk on and wonder where
the living goes
when it stops.
Can’t you see that the changing of Layover to Lay Over violates the essence of the
poem? By Layover, I meant getting out of the stream of dead life. But my editor
friend seemed to think it was just a lay that was over. Which it probably would
have been if it had been him or Judson Crews….
