Patrick Collins
collins@austincc.edu

Patrick E. Collins  is a poet and memoirist. His M.F.A. is from the University of Arizona. His work has been published in such literary journals as the James White Review, Dionysus, Gulf Stream, and Borderlands, where he was subsequently the Journal's Coordinator. Currently he teaches composition, American literature, humanities, and creative writing at Austin  Community College, but in the past ten years has also taught Writing classes at St. Edward's University, Park College (Austin Center), and the University of Arizona as well as in UT Informal Classes and private alternative high schools. For the past five years, he has read regularly with the Austin Queer Poets. Prior to his life as a writing teacher, he was an actor and pie maker in San Antonio.

In August

Nothing happens.
Cactus on the side porch blooms.
Its purple flower fists the afternoon.
A mangled yellow zinnia opens.
The oldest eucalyptus tree on Congress St.
Climbs by nail lengths toward the sun.
The sun shreds everything.
In the evening, monsoons threaten
From behind the eastern mountains;
Heat lightning fails to threaten an avaricious earth.
Bitter washerwoman wind wrings the tops of trees.
Her blistered hands
Push the West
Through the tiny leaves and spindly sticks
Above this prickled place.
Rain sheets down and covers everything.
No one sleeps.

Once I Lay on Shower Bottoms

Once I lay on shower bottoms.

Cold blue tile against my eyes and nose pressed a cold comfort to
The thud of thought and skin that had been my head.

The empty, near flat vodka bottle tossed against the dull white
Toilet brush receptacle I could see past the angled open
Shower door when I turned my head flat above the floor.

I'd missed the trashcan.

I'd turned the gas on.

The cold would stop my thoughts a minute and I'd think
So this is what Plath thought.

I loved the smell of gas then.

So heroic mixed with the vodka.

I'd be Lord Hamlet's father's ghost when I awoke.

And then it seemed too quiet.

I hit my head against the tile again, then raising up, against the
Steel hot water handle.

My head go wet. I was afraid again.

Propped on hands and knees I'd crawl out of the shower stall
Onto the bathroom proper floor and hit my head on the white wall heater.

I turned the gas off and lay my head down on the toilet rim.

At first I thought I'd end my tale with a few smug lines about
Mithradades dying old or how some row all the way to God
in Schizophrenic boats before they reach a fertile shore.

I considered ending in rhymed couplets.

But this afternoon I passed an old red dog
sitting lion-like beside a bush. His eyes were
of the sun and about as blank.

I end with the glare of a red desert dog.

Coming of Age in American Samoa

I was once lusted after by Allen Ginsburg.

It’s true. In 1970. I’d taken the year off from high school to do drugs and become a revolutionary in San Antonio, Texas.

San Antonio was at the time a major military center, and most of the decisions about bombing Vietnam had been made 50 miles up Hwy. 281 at the Johnson Ranch over barbecued brisket by the Perdenales River. All over downtown San Antonio on the weekends you could see the air force guys from Lackland who were being trained to bomb the North and drop napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs on the Viet Cong and sometimes on the army guys who were being trained at Ft. Sam Houston because once they got to Vietnam, everything was lost. Anyway, San Antonio was not a major center of the peace movement, but a few of us were there.

So, on that clear February day we gathered behind the American Friends Peace Workshop on Durango Street to pile into Tom Flowers (that really was his name) green and white VW bus with the big blue flower-shaped bumper sticker with Peace printed in the middle. It was still a few months before Nixon invaded Cambodia and the kids at Kent State and Jackson were shot, and would be years before we knew that even our silliest paranoid fantasies about the government were true. And even though some kids—not myself, of course—had by that time been getting beaten up or jailed for six or seven years, and other kids a little older, mostly Chicano or poor or working class from the neighborhoods who, because the still segregated high schools denied them college prep courses so they could get the draft deferments, became the War’s cannon fodder, or like me who could afford a shrink and a psych deferment (in Texas it was safer to be crazy than Gay) were coming home disarranged if at all. And even though there was an unsettled feeling in the nation and even in San Antonio, that a military take-over or a revolution of some sort was just around the bend, we who thought we were the vanguard of that possible revolution, one of whom piling in Tom Flower’s bus was Allen Ginsberg, were feeling, well, not bad.

(You see, it’s important that I write this, as I digress again from Allen Ginsberg, because I realized not long ago how many of those conditions from 35 years ago—bombing Asian countries from the Texas hillcountry, the federal government spying on Americans, even the F.B.I. out to get the Catholic Workers—exist again right now. Except now we aren’t involved in another country’s civil war, we’re creating one. I want to tell you that Somalia or Iraq or keeping oil wells in Saudi Arabia safe for SUVs or employment for the madmen in the CIA is worth wasting even one best mind of another generation, we’re destroyed again by madness starving hysterical naked through negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. And still young men and women pick up their guns and volunteer to die.)

But on that chilly day in February 1970, the six of us were in the bus on the way to the Selective service Office on South Main. We held a mock draft lottery and died all on the lawn, U. S. Marshals looking on; Ginsberg chanted verses in Sanskrit while chiming with his finger cymbals; Army Intelligence photographers on the 4 th floor of the Arsenal across the street illegally took our photographs (we waved); --and of course the two obligatory verses of “We Shall Overcome” were sung, although by 1970 the pacifism of the Civil Rights anthem was viewed with suspicion--a— then I spent the afternoon, dressed as death, in black sheath and white greasepaint, sitting at a rectangular oak veneer tabletop in the draft board staring at two typing secretaries who had become so inured to this kind of thing that, when I got up and asked for directions to the men’s room, they gave them to me.

On the way though, back in the bus, Ginsberg, sitting in the front passenger’s seat while Tom Flower drove, turned around and stared at me for the longest time. I was years from telling anyone I was homosexual, and Gay was a word I was yet to hear, but I thought of course everyone knew, they could see it, in that way that sixteen year olds think they’re made of cellophane and honey and thrift store overcoats, and secrets caused a hundred deaths a day—and how wonderful to be swept away by a famous poet to New York, what a whirl it would be to be given an actual life.

But what would it be like to have sex with Allen Ginsberg. I mean, that would have to be part of it. The idea of sex with a man certainly appealed to me, but Ginsberg was fat and hairy, all stomach and ragged beard; he reminded me of a tarantula, and not even getting out of San Antonio, Texas, seemed worth that.

I was wrong of course.

Ginsberg continued to stare at me, piercingly, knowingly, a while longer, his dark eyes softened by a glaze, and then turned and looked out the window. And though hi laughed—along with everyone—when I lost my head in the black sheath while putting it on and looking for the hole—it was never quite the same. He didn’t look at me again, not in that way.

But thirty years later, during hermetic poetry week at Naropa Institute’s Creative Writing Summer Session, Allen Ginsberg sat down next to me again, in the audience of an outdoor panel discussion. Where have all the flowers gone?

On stage—actually two oblong folding tables pushed together—Diane DiPrima was interpreting Shelly’s Prometheus Unbound using alchemy, I Ching, Kabbalah, and the Tarot, but under the canopy on that July day in Boulder, in the week of the Bicentennial of the Bastille’s fall, summer Rocky Flats was finally busted by the FBI and Snowmass Mountain burned, Mr. Ginsberg was wearing a polyester blue suit, white shirt, and skinny maroon tie, and had shrunk. I was shocked. He’s turned all arms and legs, a man of very little body and much less beard. He didn’t recognize me. He still resembled a spider though, a gray, spinning Daddy Longlegs. It was good to see him.

I wondered if I should introduce myself; after all, we might not ever be that close again, and I didn’t want to miss another defining moment in my life. But what could I say—I couldn’t just turn to him and say—Mr. Ginsberg, you once looked on me with lust when I was young and blonde and needed you to take me, and you were ample and holy in a Volkswagen going back to New York.

That July was unusually hot for Boulder, and the humidity caused the swamp coolers not to work, but Ginsberg smiled often and nodded in reaction to DiPrima and the crowd under the canopy before he finally rose from his folding chair and moved upwards towards the dais.