What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

Charles Bukowski

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781574231052
• eBook ISBN: 9780061873317
• Subtopic: Classics

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter

What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire is the second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski that takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 1970s to the 1990s.

1

blue beads and bones

my father and the bum

my father believed in work.

he was proud to have a

job.

sometimes he didn’t have a

job and then he was very

ashamed.

he’d be so ashamed that he’d

leave the house in the morning

and then come back in the evening

so the neighbors wouldn’t

know.

me,

I liked the man next door:

he just sat in a chair in

his back yard and threw darts

at some circles he had painted

on the side of his garage.

in Los Angeles in 1930

he had a wisdom that

Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard,

Nietzsche, Freud,

Jaspers, Heidegger and

Toynbee would find hard

to deny.

legs, hips and behind

we liked the priest because once we saw him buy

an icecream cone

we were 9 years old then and when I went to

my best friend’s house his mother was usually

drinking with his father

they left the screen door open and listened

to music on the radio

his mother sometimes had her dress pulled

high and her legs excited me

made me nervous and afraid but excited

somehow

by those black polished shoes and those nylons—

even though she had buck teeth and a

very plain face.

when we were ten his father shot and

killed himself with a bullet through

the head

but my best friend and his mother went on

living in that house

and I used to see his mother going

up the hill to the market with her

shopping bag and I’d walk along beside

her

quite conscious of her legs and her

hips and her behind

the way they all moved together

and she always spoke nicely to me

and her son and I went to church and

confession together

and the priest lived in a cottage

behind the church

and a fat kind lady was always there

with him

when we went to visit

and everything seemed warm and

comfortable then in

1930

because I didn’t know

that there was a worldwide

depression

and that madness and sorrow and fear were

almost everywhere.

igloo

his name was Eddie and he had a

big white dog

with a curly tail

a huskie

like one of those that pulled sleighs

up near the north pole

Igloo he called him

and Eddie had a bow and arrow

and every week or two

he’d send an arrow

into the dog’s side

then run into his mother’s house

through the yelping

saying that Igloo had fallen on

the arrow.

that dog took quite a few arrows and

managed to

survive

but I saw what really happened and didn’t

lik...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• About the Author
• By Charles Bukowski
• Copyright
• About the Publisher