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PACIFIC RADIO FIRE
Richard Brautigan
THE largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking. My friend’s wife had just left him. She walked right out the door and didn’t even say good-bye. We went and got two fifths of port and headed for the Pacific.
It’s an old song that’s been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it’s been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.
We sat down on a small corner-like beach surrounded by big granite rocks and the hugeness of the Pacific Ocean with all its vocabularies.
We were listening to rock and roll on his transistor radio and somberly drinking port. We were both in despair. I didn’t know what he was going to do with the rest of his life either.
I took another sip of port. The Beach Boys were singing a song about California girls on the radio. They liked them.
His eyes were wet wounded rugs.
Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can’t help at all.
It’s just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There’s nothing you’re ever going to say that’s going to make anybody happy when they’re feeling sh**ty about losing somebody that they love.
Finally he set fire to the radio. He piled some paper around it. He struck a match to the paper. We sat there watching it. I had never seen anybody set fire to a radio before.
As the radio gently burned away, the flames began to affect the songs that we were listening to. A record that was #l on the Top-40 suddenly dropped to #13 inside of itself. A song that was #9 became #27 in the middle of a chorus about loving somebody. They tumbled in popularity like broken birds. Then it was too late for all of them.
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The Forgotten Captain
Tomas Transtörmer*
We have so many shadows. I was walking home
in the September night when Y
climbed out of his grave after forty years
and kept me company.
At first he was quite empty, only a name
but his thoughts swam
faster than time ran
and caught up with us.
I put his eyes to my eyes
and saw war’s ocean.
The last boat he captained
took shape beneath us.
Ahead and astern the Atlantic convoy crept,
the ships that would survive
and the ships that boast the Mark
(invisible to all)
While sleepless days relieved each other
but never him.
Under his oilskin, his life-jacket.
He never came home.
It was an internal weeping that bled him to death
in a Cardiff hospital,
he could at last lie down
and turn into a horizon.
Good-bye, eleven-knot convoys! Good-bye, 1940!
Here ends world history.
The bombers were left hanging.
The heathery moors blossomed.
A photo from early this century shows a beach.
Six Sunday-best boys.
Sailing boats in their arms.
What solemn airs!
The boats that became life and death for some of them.
And writing about the dead—that too is a game
made heavy with what is to come.
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     Boys sailing boats in Green Lake wading pool. Summer, 1934.
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*Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2011
More info: http://tinyurl.com/transtromer-samples
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