A Poet's Things

Leo was reading "Alice in Eleven Dresses" on my in-car CD player as I was passing a cemetery just down the road from his old apartment in rural Connecticut, and I thought how fitting it would be if that cemetery were his final resting place. "Alice" was how Leo entered our lives. We were taking a break from our first recording session with Curbstone Press poets when Leo sprung that piece on us, his "young man poem" which he rightly thought might appeal to us young men. Now we have finished our score of Crossing America, his epic hitchhiking poem, which ends with "Alice," and I was driving to his old place to visit with his widow and daughter at a yard sale where they would be parting with some of Leo's things, and giving some to us. I thought a circle that had changed all of our lives was finally completed.

Not so simple. It took us five years to finish Crossing America; closure never comes cheap with Leo. His widow, Nancy, was running up to the tub when I knocked on the door. The yard sale was off -- cancelled by last night's thunderstorms -- and Leo was, in fact, buried elsewhere. But the poet's daughter, Amy, was ready to see me two towns over.

Amy and I pawed through old family photos, never quite finding an image of Leo when he was on the bum (not surprising: hitchhikers in the late 50s weren't too mindful of the documentary record), though we stacked up many pictures that belong on the Hoobellatoo Web site -- Leo dozing surrounded by cats, Leo being honored as Poet Laureate of Connecticut -- and then repaired to a pizza joint near her mother's antique shop, where we devoured a large bacon-and-onion pie and talked about the man.

Amy showed me a newspaper clipping found in Leo's wallet at death, which might be considered the seed of his final poem-to-be. It describes a 15-year-old boy from a group home accused of raping a 24-year-old woman outside a subway station. Leo never shied away from brutality, from "eye gouging out horror" ("Alice in Eleven Dresses" relates how a bum date-rapes a bag lady), but we agreed that what drew Leo to this news story was probably the youth of the rapist, his group-home troubled youth, his trial as an adult. These are primary materials for the great poet of ruined childhood.

At Nancy's antique shop, Hoobellatoo seemed to provide Poet's Widow's Luck. Notoriously slow on most Saturdays, Nancy rang out a $1000-plus sale as soon as Amy and I assumed our perches on her Victorian couches. It was suggested that Amy make a stuffed animal of me and leave it on that couch for continued good fortune! Then Nancy gave me a gift that can't be priced: the last garment that Leo wore, a down vest that still smelled, she said, faintly of his body, even after he passed.

"Bye, Leo," the widow said, biting back tears, as she handed me the bulky vest, which was installed in the Skuntry Museum alongside the Pops Farrar fishing hat and notebook used by Rosco Gordon to compose his memoirs.

Amy and I left Nancy at her shop and went back to Leo's old place to meet a family friend, who was dropping off some items for the rescheduled yard sale. Amy quietly led me upstairs to see Leo's last stack of books, still piled on the nightstand next to his half of the bed. A history of Guatemala and the depredations of the United Fruit Company had a leading role at the top of the pile; further down, Leo was working on (or hoping to get to) Boswell's Life of Johnson, a modern biography of Shakespeare, a paperback murder mystery and a selection of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, whom Leo hymned in Crossing America and seems to have continued to struggle and dance with until the very end.

As I was marveling at those books, and trying to imagine Leo trying to read himself to sleep, not knowing that he would soon be falling into endless, dreamless slumber, Amy dumped something on the bed. Neckties. "These were Leo's ties," she said.

I think I knew where this was going. There had been talk, surely too much talk, about Leo's boxer briefs. Over the phone Amy had told a story about Leo once trying to dry some underwear in a hurry by hanging them in front of the oven's open broiler. Some of the cotton caught on the broiler element, and the poet suddenly had some singed, holey boxers. Amy closed the hole with a sewn heart, and embroidered "Poet's Corner" on the unfortunate underwear, which became Leo's Good Luck charm to be worn at all important events.

Though in time the lucky briefs went the way of all undergarments, there were many other less decorated drawers left in the poet's collection at the time of his passing. After come encouragement -- "Young men are wearing boxers again!" -- from a family friend, who seems to have consulted on the yard sale project, Amy had resolved: "Leo's underwear is going out" for sale.

I had opposed this idea, adamantly.

"We crossed America to record Crossing America," I reminded her. "There are musicians all over this country who would be honored to get a pair of Leo's boxers in the mail!"

I had then tested this theory that afternoon at the pizza parlor by phoning Elijah using her cell phone. Lij politely declined. "You say we're getting his last vest?" Lij said. "I'll just come see that in the museum." Alas, if even Elijah wasn't on the bus for the have-a-pair-of-Leo's-boxers proposal, then this was just my madness.

But over here you have a tangle of neckties. That is different. Less squeamish. I made an immediate pre-yard-sale bid on the ties, and Amy cut me an even better deal: ten ties for five bucks. I could see them dangling like an emptied noose from the rafters of the Skuntry Museum, Leo cut free at last from all bullshit and commerce, Leo freed of everything except his poetry, which will live as long as this tongue is spoken.

But I knew his ties would not stay in the museum. I sent ties out to some of the core people from the Crossing America project, with instructions for their use. I asked people to read a poem by Leo on any day that they wear his tie, and then submit to the Skuntry Museum some account of what they did on the day they were wearing Leo's tie.

And, of course, they must treat their Leo tie with honor and respect, as one would handle a cherished national flag, for all of us who crossed America with him now live, in part, in the land of Leo.

- Chris King

Last Modified: Jul 28, 2002 at 9:33AM (EST)