Tristessa (Annotated)

—some people have vibrations that come straight from the vibrating heart of the sun, unjaded …

But Tristessa keeps looking at me and I keep staring at her, suddenly we love each other as Bull drones on and I admire her openly and she shines openly—Earlier, I’d grabbed her, when she said “You remember everything the other night?”—“Yes”—“in the street, how you kiss me”—

But then Bull explains: “She dont want love—You put Grace Kelly in this chair, Muckymuck’s morphine on that chair, Jack, I take the morphine, I no take the Grace Kelly.”

—“Give me a shot of morphine so I can think the way you do.”

I show her the pictures I’ve been painting, of Bull in his chair in purple celestial opium pajamas, of me and my first wife (“Mi primera esposa,” she makes no comment, her eyes look briefly at each picture)—Finally when I show her my painting “candle burning at night” she doesnt even look—They’re talking about junk—All the time I feel like taking her in my arms and squeezing her, squeezing that little frail unobtainable not-­there body—

She would look awful if she wasnt holy Tristessa—

My poems stolen, my money stolen, my Tristessa dying, Mexican buses trying to run me down, grit in the sky, agh, I never dreamed it could be this bad—

And only last year she’d stood in my room and said “A friend is better than pesos, a friend that geev it to you in the bed” when still she believed anyway we’d get our tortured bellies together and get rid of some of the pain—Now too late, too late—

At night little Mexican cop whistles blow that all is well, and all is all wrong, all is tragic,—I dont know what to say.

What shroud was the reason why darkness and heaven commingled to come and lay the mantle of sorrow on the hearts of Bull, El Indio and me, who all three love her and weep in our thoughts and know she will die—Three men, from three different nations, in the yellow morning of black shawls, what was the angelic demonic power that devised this?—What’s going to happen?