Remembering Harvey

Glenn called, 25 years since poet and dear friend Harvey's suicide. "Seven tigers / nothing unusual / never mind." Which I will celebrate by getting three metal signs, a line each, and put them coming up the driveway, like the old Burma Shave signs. Built him a little cabin on our property in Missip, and he spent 6 months with us there, after the years on Cape Cod together and visits to The Vineyard. Read many of his poems today. He could sit in a dark room and recite pages of his own work, and then do Lorca, in Spanish. I published many books of his, a great many broadsides. His death was a cold thing, just days after leaving us in Missip. I'd installed a composting toilet in his cabin, what became the guest cabin, homemade device (I've built a great many, of several designs), his model was the raised platform with toilet seat, cut out below, with a rubber gasket underneath and a vent stack behind that went straight up, underneath was a 55 gallon drum held tight with a small jack. When it was three-quarters full, take out that one and install another, then the shit was composted twice and used on non-root crops the first year. Mind-numbing rotational charts, we grew so much there, an acre truck patch and an acre of corn; body-numbing work load but we were young and stupid. After Harvey's death I had about 40 gallons of his shit. Turned part of him into soil. Read a Sandford novel, that fucking Virgil Flowers. A good plotter, a decent writer, acceptable escapist fiction. I needed a day of not thinking, worked wonderfully, recharged and calm. Still don't understand some of the things that have happened recently, never will. Events viewed from different points of view are different events. Everything affects everything. Talk about over-lapping Venn Diagrams, talk about fractals, talk about Brownian Motion, the 2nd Law Of Thermodynamics, and on to entropy, post-structuralism, and the global recession. Many communications wondering what the hell was happening. Riders Of The Storm, was that the title? Jim Morrison and The Doors, I probably have that somewhere, but I'm not listening to much music except when I cook, the CD player is toast. I need a wind up radio, for when the power is out, and a boom box that will play both CD's and cassettes and accepts batteries; I need a lot of things but most of them are unimportant, that's the human condition. I just put away the food, the film crew didn't show, maybe tomorrow and if not then I have meals for a week, had one last bite of butter beans. Near as I can tell butter beans are baby limas. If you buy a can of butter beans, which you can, in the south, and read the label, it says lima beans. There are many varietals, all with different names, a can of beans, no, worms, and I've grown dozens of varieties, I love them, they melt to a smoothly butter texture in the mouth, a great feel. They need flavor enhancement. I cook them with smoked jowl bacon and lots of black pepper, test them for salt after an hour, don't add any before then, the bacon will be salty. You can cook them in two hours, if you're in a hurry, but they're better cooked for four, at a lower heat, and eaten tomorrow. So much of what I do is better later. I've learned to let things rest. Harvey was The Zen Butcher, cut meat for a while, at a neat little shop, when his mate at the time was going to school, or something. Realize I don't know anything about anything. Remember she was a vegetarian. What was I cooking? Probably a proto-ratatouille, what I thought I would make. Eggplant is the guiding principle, what you thought you meant. I'm sweeping, later, something is different. Probably nothing, but a few things that seem to fit together. Did you see the license plate, when they were speeding AWAY, pretty sure they we hadn't seen that the same way, whatever it was. What I thought about you.