Found Poems A Short Cultural History of Salt Lake City

I found this poem in Salt Lake City on Dec. 23, 1969. It starts with a ride in the Chevy of a Boy who hates Niggers and ends at Tex Williams, ex-cowboy star who now works with the Navy YMCA in San Diego. I'm gonna to make it short cause we all have other things to do, like the people in Salt Lake City today who got no time for poems cause their babies are howling in the hungry wilderness of this nearsighted Far West beyond which Socialists, Art Teachers and Perverts are climbing up the other side of the mountains and people here by the Utah Hotel shouldn't look at me like that just cause I don't wear chaps don't mean I have a gun in my pocket or my hand in your Daughter's pine-scented private forest.

So the first thing I did after the Boy who won't come to Chicago cause of the Niggers is I went to the Charles Discount Store which is owned by an older Jew who sold me two pairs of socks and, who, had he found out I shared his God, would probably have sold me two pairs of two toned saddle shoes and talked my Heritage out of me. But I was off with my handsome argyles to the Mormon Temple and Tabernacle and Visitor Center where in this statue Adam and Eve were wearing robes while animals ran unabashed in the forest of a salacious mural right behind them and I asked our guide who had not, at the age of 43, yet befouled his body with tobacco, alcohol, tea or coffee, why I asked him do Adam and Eve have clothes on. "That's just the way the artist did it" he stammered as though artists had the ability to sculpt fully-dressed Adams and Eves into our belief or draw immaculate conceptions into the real World.

And after the movie Man's Search for Happiness in the lower lobby in which Grandpa wades through a miasmic heaven in a white shirt, white tie, and white ducks to be united with a tearful grandmother and a white host of the saved. I went to the Esquire Theatre to see Black Velvet, a low budget stag that cost maybe forty fifty dollars in which Julie (Kim Alison) uses her behemoth body, cleverly concealed throughout in layers of underwear and oleo, to buy enough social mobility to climb from a truck stop waitress job to the high dive of the Las Vegas Starlite where Brad her boyfriend is shooting stills of her ample thighs and immense copacabanas. And everyone in the theatre was a 64 yr old Man with jowls like pink cumulus clouds, sitting by himself, including the older Jew from the Charles Discount Store whom I noticed across the aisle who seemed not to be watching Joe clutching Julie's hard earned tips in the back of the Diner so much as wondering how, in so few years, a Jewish Family from Eastern Europe could end up in Salt Lake City selling boots to families with blinking Santas throbbing in their front yards and babies baying for wisdom in their Western cribs.

AND THEN I passed the John Birch Society Book-store where I read pamphlets and leaflets decrying the carnal, communist, and corpuscible sins of this country and sex education and Marx in the high schools and a Woman chewing Chiclets outside walked by looking into the window and the Joe McCarthy tints said Amen and shuffled down to the Corner. Later, eating at the Utah Cafe. I noticed a man sitting near me at the counter with no teeth and a beard and a brown suit in which the pocket was filled with ball point pens lined up like cigars and of which the zipper was completely missing and he ate half his grilled cheese sandwich before putting the second half, the chips and the carrot Curl into a brown paper sack and lighting a cigarette a Chesterfield and looking like Ezra Pound who was born not far from here in Hailey, Idaho. His name was Seth Morrison, born in Salt Lake in 1895, educated at Andover and Yale before going to the war in 1917 after which he returned to the West to be with his lumber trade and sawmills and remembrances of Latin Poetry and New Haven and Since his Home burned down in town he lived flippantly in a Flop House down the street with his Yale education and his small senilities while the people in the Utah Cafe had Daughters with piano teachers and though he was queer cause he didn't shave and smoked the last acts of his cigarettes in a black holder.

And we traded addresses and I wanted to pay for his meal, but he did and I left to catch a ride back to the snowy mountains South of the City and on the sidewalk I had already written him my first letter which went "Dear Seth, what are you doing in Salt Lake City in a narrow hotel, you who introduced Alpine skiing to the area and culture to the Utah Cafe. Why don't you at least go to Chicago where they have Niggers and Adams and Eves without clothes. Yours,"

The other passenger on my bus ride back to the mountains was Tex Williams who couldn't stop talking just as I'm sure couldn't stop riding them Doggies down years ago on TV and radio and when we passed a shiny blue pick-up on South Temple Street, he said "Jesus, what a pick-up, I've never seen one like that before" and we stopped at Colonel Sander's so he could get a chicken dinner, he came out and said, "Jesus, what a place, I've never seen a place like that before" and when the rain turned to snow halfway up the canyon, he said, "Jesus, someone's shaking out a feather bed upstairs, don't you think?" and then he asked me where I went to school and when I got out he said, "Jesus, you were great to have along and whatever you are out of school, you're twice as good in it."

And here the poem ends with Tex Williams riding off in the sleeted night in the white bus to his Alpine Lodge and the Far Western Stars twinkling America up Above.