Read The Moon In Its Flight for Free Online

the way to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and we started to drink as soon as we got to her room—no ice, no soda, just the harsh, warm gin out of the bottle. I held the bottle to her mouth as she let her dress and half-slip fall around her feet.
    We made love under the shower, weaving and thrusting and shuddering in the drenching spray of hot water that seemed to make me drunker. Clara was leaning against the porcelain tiles of the stall, bent over, and I behind her, my eyes blinded by the streams of water, my mouth open to its metallic heat. “Ben!” she laughed. “Oh, Ben! You rotten son of a bitch! Split me apart, you rotten bastard! Rotten son of a bitch!” I didn’t care. I didn’t care.
    After I dried myself and her, she lay on the bed, smiling at me. “I’m here for two days,” she said. “You’re not mad at me? Am I all right?” “Why should I be mad at you?” “Come and sleep,” she said, “and when we wake up I’ll show you some funny things I can do.” “Sure,” I said, and then she closed her eyes and was asleep in a minute. I dressed and left, and walked aimlessly for an hour, wanting to go back to the hotel. She could call me Ben again. She could show me the funny things she knew how to do. I finished my drunk in a bar on Sixth Avenue, just off Fourteenth Street, and lost my wallet in the cab that took me home.
    The next day I called Mrs. Stein at the hotel, and the desk clerk told me that she had checked out very early. It strikes me now that I never even knew why she had come in, that she might have come in for no other reason than to see me. But if I know Clara, she came in to see her mother and father, or to have her teeth checked, or to buy some clothes. She wouldn’t come all the way from California just for old times’ sake. I know Clara.
    I’m living now in a very decent apartment in an old, rather well-kept building on Avenue B and Tenth Street, with the estranged wife of a studio musician. She makes a very good salary as a buyer for Saks, so I have quit my job. Outside, Tompkins Square Park and the streets reel under the assaults of the hordes of mindless consumers of drugs. But in here we are safe behind our triple locks and window gates. About once a month my girl, who is really quite brilliant—she graduated magna cum laude in political science from Smith—and I invite a young filmmaker and his wife over, and we watch blue movies that they shot in a commune in Berkeley. We drink wine and smoke a great deal of marijuana and what happens happens. Each time they come over, we all pretend horror that “something” may happen, what with the wine and the grass and the movies. We laugh and make delicately suggestive remarks to each other. It seems clear that the young filmmaker’s wife likes me a great deal. Each time they come is a new time, and no one speaks of the last time.
    I’ve begun to write poems again, or let me be honest and say that they are attempts at poems. But they seem sincere to me. They have a nice, controlled flow. My girl likes them.
    This morning I got a letter from Ben. It had taken three weeks to reach me because it had been sent to the Avenue c address. I don’t really know what I’m going to do about it.
    I’m reading it again now. Somewhere in the building a young man is singing a song, accompanying himself on the guitar. I can’t make out the words, but I know that they are about freedom and love and peace—perfect peace, in this dark world of sin.
    dere old pal—
    you wuz alwaze crazee not to be into life. out here in colorado—the country will bring us peace—we are together, all together, suzanne, a sweet luvlee thing an clara too. come out an see us. good bread an good head aboundin. a commune for all us lost -ists. dig on it!
    ah jeezus! we all wuz sikk or wounded but now we’re gunna get healed. come on! you aint so g/d old.
    luv,
    ben

LAND OF COTTON

    Joe Doyle was born a bastard whose natural father’s name had been Lionni, or Leone. I