`To My Surprise They Do Not Throw It Out'

My brother trusts me enough and has, I suppose, grown self-confident enough to show me a binder of poetry he wrote in the spring of 1975, around the time of his 20^th birthday. Titled A Series of Deep Meaning Poems, it has the virtue of making fun of late-adolescent angst and cleverness while indulging in the same. It reads like Dylan crossed with the sterner stuff of Captain Beefheart's lyrics. I'll reproduce just one sample, I promise. This is from a poem of six four-line stanzas, “There's Just No End to the Distinctiveness”:

“Amid this energy I tried to find

What Formosans do with cucumber rind.

To my surprise they do not throw it out

But instead mix a cure for the gout.

“Tonnage delivered by all hands climbed,

Country is named but never rhymed.

Sixteen cartons sent to the front,

Grocery bags and old men grunt.”

At the time, I was working as a clerk at the late Kay's Books on Prospect Avenue in downtown Cleveland. Ken stopped by and asked me to read the manuscript. Probably for pharmacological reasons, I have no memory of this. He says I spent several minutes looking at his poems, standing beside the counter on the second floor. I returned the binder and said something like, “There's a couple of good lines in there.”

That sounds smug and patronizing today, which would have been typical for me at the age of 22, but Ken says he felt pleased and relieved by my response. Is it possible to be retroactively grateful for words one has no memory of uttering?