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The Far West

By Tim Dlugos 1950–1990 Tim Dlugos

The city and the continent

trail off into cold black

water the same way: at

the western edge, a flat

stretch with precipitous

planes set perpendicular

and back from the beach

or beach-equivalent, a blacktop

margin where the drugged

and dying trudge, queue up

for Hades. Bolinas

had its junkie lady with gray

skin, gray sweater, stumbling

through the sand with the short-

burst intensity and long-run aimlessness

of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers.

Dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years

before I saw it. I’d huddle

at the foot of the cliff in a cold

wind late at night, wrapped

in Indian blankets, waiting

with strangers as the tidal wave

or temblor hit. Tonight I walk

with old friends in a new dream

past a vest-pocket park of great

formality and charm in the far

West Village. My disaffected

former confidant has grown

a pony tail and cruises up

the street on a “hog,” a “chopper,”

which seems a perfect locomotive choice.

I walk out to the quay where gondola

after enormous gondola departs

for “the other side,” not New Jersey

anymore, anymore than something

prosaic as another mass of land

past the bright horizon

could function as a mirror

of the chopped-away Bolinas hill.

O western edge, where points

of interest on maps of individual

hearts and bodies disappear

in waters of a depth unfathomable

even in a dream, I had thought

that sleep was meant to blunt

your sharpness, not to hone

and polish with the lapping

of the hungry waves of Lethe.

Source: A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011)

Biography

Poet Tim Dlugos was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. From 1968 to 1970, he was a Christian Brother at LaSalle College in Philadelphia. He left LaSalle and moved to Washington, DC, where he participated in the Mass Transit poetry readings. In the late 1970s, he moved to New York City and was active in the Lower East Side literary scene, where he was a contributing editor to Christopher Street . . .

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