Henry Miller’s Best Friend…
Mary and I met Emil at the Henry Miller Museum in Big Sur. We had driven up from L.A. after moving to the States in late 1986. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, and a honeymoon as well (having married 8 years earlier). We were staying at the Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn… Eating Mushrooms, exploring.
We went to the museum. Emil was there, and he was taken with the beauty, and foreign accent of my wife. He took her hand and proceeded to kiss it up to the elbow, the old smoothy. We still have a poster he signed. We talked with him for about 2 hours about Henry, and art, Anais Nin. What a wonderful person.
Great Memory!
G
Why did Emil convert his house into a memorial for Henry? “Because I missed him.”
As for poets
The Earth Poets
Who write small poems,
Need no help from no man.
The Air Poets
Play out the swiftest gales
And sometimes loll in their eddies.
Poem after poem,
Curling back on the same thrust.
At fifty below
Fuel oil won’t flow
And propane stays in the tank.
Fire Poets
Burn at absolute zero
Fossil love pumped back up.
The first
Water Poet
Stayed down six years.
He was covered in seaweed.
The life in his poem
Left millions of tiny
Different tracks
Criss-crossing through the mud.
With the Sun and Moon
In his belly,
The Space Poet
Sleeps.
No end to the sky—
But his poems,
Like wild geese,
Fly off the edge.
A Mind poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.