Incense fills the room
with peach blossoms.
Beneath a thousand petals
the moon slides down the window.
The opium is wet leaves and earth.
You fill your lungs
and mountains are crowned with glass.
The oriental depth and simplicity of this poem, the richly suggestive directness of its statement, drifts through the reader’s mind precisely like the smoke of its title. Peach blossoms, petals, moon, window, leaves and earth are fused in this final image, all a result of the smoke of its title and work like a drug to conjure a gently hallucinatory image: mountains “crowned with glass.” Such simple elements combining to disclose the curious interpenetration of interior and exterior worlds—the human body, the room, the sky, the moonlit mountains—are a marvelous example of a poem’s power to alter consciousness, to show us the secret relations of things, to give us a wholeness of perception not always available to our everyday awareness. The Dreams of Mercurius is a fine beginning.
In her journal, Mom wrote, “Randy’s Chap Book, Dreams of Mercurius, was handed to me today—Gary Young published 300 copy’s. This is a goal I’ve directed long moments of thought toward him for years, and this is only the beginning.”
Stephen Kessler’s review had a great effect on both Mom and Randy. I don’t remember paying too much attention. I’d been overwhelmed with work and had just been in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I remember being happy for Randy, but wondering why one of the more oblique poems was his choice for the title. Mercurius, a god of abundance and success, also served as a guide to newly deceased souls entering the afterlife. Success and abundance, like the kind Dad worked so hard for? Guiding the dead to an afterlife? I didn’t get it. Anyway, I didn’t have time to elaborate. The opportunity the director Richard Brooks had given me to play Theresa Dunn, a masochistic young woman unconsciously seeking out death while looking for love in all the wrong places, consumed me. Meanwhile, Mom couldn’t resist sending me a brand-new poem, one that Randy had just finished:
In the field beneath the Milky Way,
beneath the darkness, cool & perfect,
lying like a great whale
beached in a dream,
I listen to the owl
lift out of the sycamores
and cry like a soft white bell—
Dear Randy,
This is a completely beautiful interpretation of an observation. I’m overwhelmed at the twist of fate which made me one-half of a genetic act bringing you into life. I’m proud to be your parent because of what it means in terms of who you are. I feel this rumbling inside me every time I read your work. I don’t like to call them “poems” because that word has a tone of frothy, mind wanderings, and I don’t in any way equate that to what you write. I’m sorry I have such a difficult time expressing myself regarding your work, which is of great importance. I dread the day when I won’t be a part of your poetic process, but I realize it will come, and I promise to deal with that when it happens. I admire the way you ignore us dullards who get a gleeful expression as we tell you of misspelled words, etc….like that’s of such importance. What silly needs we have. Don’t ever lower yourself to our level—technical correctness is mechanical, but your words are the precision tools of a genius.
Love, Mom
* * *
—
Excited by Randy’s success, Mom enlisted me to send a batch of his new poems to my friend Larry McMurtry, for his take.
Dear Diane,
I’ve been reading your brother’s poems. There’s quite a bit of technical variety in them, lots of wonderful rhetoric. They would make an interesting book, and yet there’s a direction to most of the poems that’s limiting them. I can’t tell whether it’s accidental, temperamental or what. Most of them have an iconic strategy: he sets up a figure (potter, gardener, fisherman, saint) and, in establishing the icon, often sort of blocks the poem from getting really particular. He seems to go naturally to the “you” poem, the second person voice, but in about half a dozen poems, he allows the “I” to come in. These poems are much more impressive and dramatic, I think, though I’m not simply equating the “I” with Randy. In reading a whole group of them, one gets a sense of a guy sort of directing the reader away from himself. He’s hesitant to use his own personality. Yet, when he does, or seems to, it works very strongly. I’m still digesting. He wrote a couple of quite good poems. Randy sure moves on his own track, and no other.
Love, Larry
Randy was spared Larry’s response, but not Mom’s, which was, as expected, glowing:
Dear Randy,
Your poem silverado canyon has moved me to the point of wanting to write you a long, personal epistle about my thoughts concerning you and your writing, but most especially the effect your words have on me. As I read your delicately worded poem I got a vivid picture of you and the complexities of your thinking. I can only imagine what it must be like to have a vision of the world that expresses itself in thoughts like:
ONCE UPON A TIME
Father is doing a handstand on the beach.
His thin, muscular legs dangle backwards over his head.
Once, a long time ago I studied the photograph.
His face was not where it should be.
Even after turning the picture upside down something was wrong;
How could he hold the world in the palms of his hands?
It frightened me then. It frightens me now.
Father upset nature. At least in my mind he did.
* * *
—
After staying away for as long as he could, Randy returned to Hall and Foreman. Just like old times, Dad tried to hide the disappointment he felt about Randy from Hugh and the employees, but he incessantly griped about him to Mom. Mom had moved to a higher plane in her defense of Randy. As she’d said in her letter to him, she truly believed he was a genius. That word, “genius,” for her was an irrefutable shield against the ordinary expectations of people like Dad. Given her own dreams, it must have been a place she, too, would have liked to take refuge.
Decades later, on a phone call with Randy, I tried to get him to talk about Dad. He didn’t bite, but days later wrote me:
I don’t have a pleasant memory of Dad. I was afraid of him the whole time. Remember when he spanked us, and we had to pull down our pants before he whacked our bottoms? I’ll never forget running around clutching my butt screaming. He was sadistic. You have to admit he had a sadistic nature. And I wonder where I got mine!!!! Even way back, even then I knew he didn’t get me. He would pounce on me for the weirdest reasons. Like with math. He’d ask me what one times one was. I’d say, “Two.” “Pull your head out of the sand.” That’s what he’d say. He’d say, “Pull your head out of the sand. It’s one.” “How come it’s one and not two?” I asked. He actually slapped me on that one. What did I do wrong? Why was he so pissed? I didn’t get it, so I didn’t say it right, so what? He made me feel like I didn’t know anything. I’ll tell you this. There was no way I was going to become his civil engineer son, that’s for damn sure. And those weird Toastmaster’s events where we were supposed to give speeches on subjects relating to success. Well, guess what, Dad wasn’t as brave as he made himself out to be. He too was nervous before going on. He would shake, just like me. He would shake like a leaf. Sure, he fought through all that fear, but it made for a tight, unlovable person. Money was everything to him. He kept making money and more money; that’s what he did. There was no telling what he was going to do. He proved it later on when he threatened to leave me down at the tip of Baja on a motorcycle trip he thought would bring us closer together. I was only 19. God, I hated that. Sometimes, I think Mom hated him too, especially when he would say things that made her fume, she’d get so mad she’d just shut up. Remember? I mean, she wouldn’t speak for a whole evening. One time he tore the door off the bathroom just to get at her. Now that’s anger. Dad scared me. If I did something wrong, if I was clumsy, if I was not thinking ahead, if I did not have a game plan, or an approach to say, peeling an orange, there would be trouble. If my fumbling hands made me puncture the pith of the skin so the juice dripped out he would lose it. He didn’t have patience with my awkwardness. He wanted precision in the world, and, from me, less meaningless talk.