Postcard to Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle

Palo Alto, California, 1978 or 1979

Postcard to Kay Boyle

Dear Kay,  The Revolution never arrived.

Tonight, far off, flames are singing

to a black sky, a Gaelic god's

shameless indifference.  The half-inspired

novelist-revolutionaries you fed

on Frederick Street are now sixty-something,

glum in Tenderloin hotels stacked with tales

no one will publish.  A few have chucked words

to craft strawberry-scented candles

on the Mendocino coast... and their meth-addled

children hate the patchouli stench of them.

I hope you have forgiven me for using

your letter of introduction to Beckett

to light a turf fire in Donegal.  Kate bakes

brownies as if our kids are still at home.

I spend nights walking toward a fire

maybe fifteen miles across high desert.

God love you, Kay.  Never slack-jawed,

never too weary to insist on marzipan

for every living soul, you were beautiful

as soft Irish rain.  Where you are,

I hope you have settled in with your beloveds,

Joyce, McAlmon, Beckett, and Ernest Walsh...

and that Hemingway is not

there to taunt you.  Love, Red

*  This poem is included in Red Shuttleworth's 2010 poetry chapbook, Drug Store Vaquero (Phoenix: The Basement).