The Double-Bed Dream Gallows

By Richard Brautigan 1935–1984 Richard Brautigan

Driving through

hot brushy country

the late autumn,

I saw a hawk

crucified on a

barbed-wire fence.

I guess as a kind

of advertisement

to other hawks,

saying from the pages

of a leading women’s

magazine,

“She’s beautiful,

but burn all the maps

to your body.

I’m not here

of my own choosing.”

Richard Brautigan, “The Double-Bed Dream Gallows” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968)

Biography

Terence Malley observed in his Richard Brautigan: Writers for the Seventies, "In general, people who write or talk about Brautigan tend to be either snidely patronizing or vacuously adoring." Certainly Brautigan's work, perhaps due in part to his association with West Coast youth movements, generated a multitude of critical comment. Robert Novak wrote in Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Brautigan is commonly seen as the . . .

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