I Would Have Saved Them If I Could

"What's the best Bukowski poem you ever read?"

"I don't know.  It's hard to remember them.  There are so fucking many.  I've gone back and reread some, though, and they don't age well."

"What do you mean?"

"You know, all that calling women whores and bitches, and the constant need for drink, the rotting teeth and the smell of puke, etc."

"It's the poetry of the street, man.  That is the way it is."

"Yea.  You're probably right.  No justice for the poor.  Maybe it's me.  I've probably changed."

"So what do you read now?"

"I don't know.  I'm not obsessive anymore.  I used to read everything a small press like Black Sparrow put out, or those Vintage Contemporary things Fisketjon edited, the whole literary rat pack thing.  Or I'd get hooked on an author and read everything they'd written, then everything by 'The Russians' then 'The French', and of course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Woolf, and Faulkner, though reading Faulkner sometimes wore me out like trying to read "Ulysses," could, and of course I could never get very far through "Finnegan's Wake."

"So what do you read now?"

"Whatever comes around, probably, a Booker Prize winner or something nominated for the National Book Award.  But I don't read nearly as much as I used to."

"Huh."  

"Yea." 

"I'm going to get a drink.  Do you want anything?"

"No, I still have this."  

As the inquisitor walked away, he sat alone looking around the room, wondering.  Life was pretty repetitive, he thought, and you got tired of the repetitions.  People got stuck.  Some had been stuck for many years and there were others just beginning the process.  It was exciting at first, of course, but like anything, in time things would lose their flavor.  There were always new customers, though, and ideas seemed always to get recycled.  

He sat alone for awhile, but the inquisitor never came back.  He saw him chatting with a group in the other room, nodding his head enthusiastically.  In a bit, he rose and shuffled through the indoor crowd to the door unnoticed.  Outside there was a crowd, too, but it was more dispersed and there was the night air.  As he felt for his keys in the front pocket of his pants, he thought his taste for people and ideas mirrored his reading habits.  Some things just didn't age well.  He's read Malraux, and he scoured his memory for the title of anything he'd read.  But that was a long time ago and nothing came to him.  What you remembered were the things you felt worth reading again.  He could quote quite well from many of his favorites, but other works just faded in time.  Only the penumbra of the work was left, though he thought that was fine.  Yes, he could remember reading Malraux, knew where he was at the time, and he remembered how it had made him feel.  He'd felt much about people and about books.  And there was music and there were the visual arts, and it was the visual arts, he thought, that held up best and were by and large most memorable.  He still liked looking at people but the sound they made, often, was like listening to the music of his youth.  Most of it was unbearable.  

As he started the car, something came back to him that he couldn't quite remember, a title, he thought, of something he had read long ago.  "I Would Have Saved Them If I Could."  He was sure he'd read that one, but for the life of him, he couldn't remember anything but the title.  Still, it was a good title, he thought.  It was a damn good title. .