Happiness

I sent you this bluebird of the name of Joe with a "Happiness" tattooed onto his bicep.
(For a bluebird he was damn good size)
And all you can say is you think your cat has got him?

I tell you the messages aren't getting through.
The Golden Gate Bridge is up past it's ass in traffic;
tankers colliding, singing telegrams out on strike.
The machineries of the world are raised in anger.

So I am sending this snail by the name of Fred
in a small tricolor sash, so the cat will know him.
He will scrawl out "Happiness" in his own slow way.
I won't ever stop until the word gets to you.

"Happiness gets to me from the first word of his first poems, and whenever I read him, I am always greedy for more. His deceptively colloquial tone, his gravely frivolous wit, his passionate attachment to 'the destruction of being human': as a devoted reader I take the liberty of considering him to be my dear brother, my other self" - Eve Merriam.

In The Rainbow Grocery William Dickey reveals his care for other persons, and his concern with the improbable objects in life which are to him charged simultaneously with hilarity and fear. The result is a poetry of suprising grace, witty, and wise.
The Rainbow Grocery, which includes three sections - "In The Dreaming," "The Rainbow Grocery," and "Face-Paintings" -draws from the poet's wide horizon of experience in Oxford, Honolulu, and San Francisco. It is his fifth book of poetry. His first, Of The Festivity, received the Yale Series Of Younger Poets award in 1959. Other published titles are Interpreter's House (1964), Rivers Of The Pacific Northwest (1969), More Under Saturn which received the silver medal of the Commonwealth Club Of California for the best book of poems by a California author in 1971. William Dickey has held Woodrow Wilson and Fulbright fellow-ships, and is currently the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment For The Arts. He lives in San Francisco and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

Winner of the 1978 Juniper Prize, a poetry award granted annually by University Of Massachusetts Press.

Printed in U.S.A.