At that time
There was a time, and at that time I thought Trout Fishing In America was strutting smug, smoking dope and seducing doe-eyed flower children. At that time I thought he was faking a world with epiphanies every seven minutes, where he wandered as a seer not bound by making a living or even getting grades, where he needed no future because he pretended to live in the eternal now and somehow he got away with it. At that time the world or someone provided for him although he wrote stuff like I wrote at that time, and no one told him he needed to have something to say and no one told him, well how do you expect to sound if you get up and read your poem after you’ve read Rilke or Shakespeare or anyone else, really, at that time? Even Ferlinghetti gave him the nod at that time and told him he was un beau naïf and I guess one thing that makes you a naïf is when you’re in your 30s, maybe the age of Jesus, and not an actually naïve 17.
At that time Ferlinghetti said he’d hoped Trout Fishing would mature out of naïveté and become, you know, a writer, but he never did, just despaired and finally emptied his head clean out with a bfg and by the time he was found a month later he’d become trout bait. Turns out he was never in the world enough to leave it, never fed or housed, actually a true naïf which is to say that he never grew into anything at all, never got planted, never took root, only made do with the water in the puddles. You can’t say he failed to choose a path in life, failed to make the sacrifice of choosing because there was nothing for him to choose at that time. Richard Brautigam the bridegroom, never consummated only consumed, for all time.
KAREN GREENBAUM-MAYA is a retired clinical psychologist, former German major and restaurant reviewer, and three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared all over the place. Her collections include three chapbooks, Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and, Kafka’s Cat (Kattywompus Press), and The Book of Knots and their Untying (Kelsay Books). A collection of poems about her late husband’s illness and death from lung cancer in 2018, The Beautiful Leaves, was published by Bamboo Dart Press in 2023. Bamboo Dart Press will also bring our her sixth collection, Eve the Inventor in July 2025. She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a long-running poetry series in Claremont, California.