I.
October in the air.
Sun backs down in sidereal stare.
Think about the cosmos, think about the rain…
or Cassady racing o’er the plotted plain.
Otherwise it goes like this:
Gertrude’s Toklas and ambergris.
Just some words to make a line.
Trade you your Alice for my Portable Stein.
Mathematical methods, then.
Radicals subverting ten.
Failing that, the old King James
will reveal a script to me
and light it up in flames.
But will it really, though?
Knowledge withers, the more that I know!
California’s filled with malcontents like me.
Our grandfathers hiked from sea to shining sea.
Youth is over. Now what’s left?
Jerry’s fingers are light and deft,
flying up and down the strings.
Years have informed him what agility brings.
Sitting at the guitar all day
Jerry-style would turn me gray.
Never. I’m the man of words.
So says Jerry, picking through
a stack of minor thirds.
Seems like he’s got it down.
Bends high E to a smile or a frown.
Wallace Stevens or Picasso’s blue guitar –
but oiled in mud and made to sound like tar.
Missing middle finger works –
guides his picking through sleights and jerks.
Never puts the damn thing down.
Sits like a stoned-out Bacchus awaiting his crown.
More and more I’m a hanger-on,
shoring up my final pawn.
Well, I’m not a man of tunes.
Still I think it’s in me to
concoct a book of runes.
So lyric is the thing!
Something for Garcia to sing.
Sappho? Whitman? Can they help me to my song?
Just who’ll give me help if I’m to get along?
Songs were few and far between.
Now they’re legion and navy green!
Jingle-jangle, diamond sky…
Dylan is great, but Robert Hunter will try.
What to write about, though? It’s hard.
How does one begin a bard?
Owsley’s treats may show the way.
Bring me one or two or three
or four upon a tray.
II.
[Briskly and steadily]
Where’s the outset?
Owsley touts it
as a soporific to the self –
aphanisis
of the business
of the evil ego’s little elf.
So far, nothing.
Am I sloughing
something that I guess they call one’s guard?
In a minute,
past some limit,
will I tap the Universal Bard?
Will my tapping
catch it napping?
Will it open up its treasured wealth,
or, defiant,
glower silent,
angered that I didn’t knock with stealth?
Shifting notions
cause commotions.
Often seems as if the mind’s at war.
Thought relaxes
on its axis.
Let it go – that one I had before.
Swiftly follow,
through the hollow
of the mind and of the grinning skull,
wordy figments
decked in pigments.
Some are gleaming bright and some are dull.
What’s that figure
looming bigger?
Is it in my speech or on my tongue?
Goodness heavens!
Evening reddens
as the tired disc slops off its rung.
Where’d the thread go
through the ghetto
of the worries that I had before?
Can’t remember,
last September,
why I hesitated at the door.
Never mind it.
I opine it
never came to being such and so.
Memory is
swift as glee is,
ever copulating to with fro.
Vast expansion.
Lo! A mansion
opens up upon a universe.
Though I’m mortal,
I’m the portal –
keeper and exchequer of the burse!
From a bottle,
Quetzalcoatl
leaps for succor through the granite nurse.
In a flurry,
hope and worry
vanish at his hushed command, “Disperse!”
Thorough, global,
endless, opal –
something tells me I have found the source.
Quetzalcoatl
at the throttle
nullifies each blessing and each curse.
Global, thorough,
endless borough.
Part of it is smooth and part is coarse.
Infinitely
void of pity,
here it sits, permitting mass and force.
Love commences [slacken the pace]
at the senses,
extricating Truth from what is terse.
See the heroes
flicking zeroes.
Daylight falls, and then the starry hearse.
Smell the vapors
at their capers
winding in and out of nasal reeds.
Taste the acid
gleaming placid
on your tongue, attending to its needs.
Hear the ciphers –
death-to-lifers
placing in effect each new efficacy.
Touch the fabric [abrupt ritard.]
A-bra-ca-DA-bric
that’s the weft that
runs across your
melting pillow…
III.
Rise, Quetzalcoatl – rise.
Quetzalhunter uncloses his eyes.
Ten o’clock tomorrow or the next day’s morn.
Lost echoes within you deign to be reborn.
Vision. Is it clearer now?
Catch the dewdrops on Eden’s brow.
Eden. That’s a word to say!
Bathing would likely help to sweeten the clay.
Was it merely a day or two?
Sequence has been set askew.
Let me read my scattered notes.
Pages strewn across the floor
in half a dozen moats.
Dark star, you pour your light
at the end of your dizzying flight.
All the light you once possessed remits to ash –
a memory of your cataclysmic flash.
Don’t know quite what it’s about.
I was merely the faithful scout.
Really, that is how it felt.
Ice petal flowers mark the transitive belt.
Searchlight casting through clouded vaults,
shall you stroll into my faults?
I shall be your Iliad!
Rilke, likely, and a bit
of T. S. Eliot.
Yellow and parts of green.
Dawn devolves in ethereal sheen.
Nothing very urgent, nor precisely grand,
but simply an world, a newer world at hand.
Something that I spoke before,
ere I passed through this sable door,
never knowing what I said,
bringing to life the words I fancied were dead.
Hunger follows. It’s been awhile.
Stomach’s still involved in style.
Guess the world is not so new.
Seems I’ve merely combed it through
and through and through and through.
And these two sheets are filled
with the tale of a man to be killed.
But I can’t remember if that man was I.
The chorus repeats, “You know he had to die.”
Graceful instruments are known.
Morning shatters. You’re all alone.
Can’t recall what prompted that.
Now, though, the stolid rhymes appear to fall flat.
Here’s the monster – the gator poem!
Wrote it as I stumbled home.
Clump of roots beneath a tree
jumped out from the gloomy spot
in lazed pursuit of me,
said we’d been friends before.
“Buddy, you’re never around no more!”
Sleepy alligator in the noon-day sun…
And this one about Dupree, whose race was run.
Stole some diamonds for his wife.
Judge says, “Son that’ll cost your life.”
Then the one about the moon.
Just a barrage of nonsense to fit a tune.
Likewise, one with a “China cat”.
Thought I heard a bluesy scat.
Guess we’ll see what Jerry thinks.
“Hunter, these are fit for tunes
they play in skating rinks!”
Ah, Haight and Ashbury!
they’ll be singing in twenty-oh-three.
Something will be lost and something will be freed.
The times are a-changin’. Yes indeedy deed!
* * *
Peel my skin up from the floor.
Am I precisely what I was before?
Airy perch on which the overspirit preens.
One self misses what another self gleans.
But will they come to song –
all these lines I’ve dragged along?
Will they dance in the volumed domes?
Combine with tunes in multistaved homes?
Not for me to know, is the answer I gather.
Melody surely will set them astir.
Guess I’m sort of learning how.
Jerry wants a lyric and he wants it now!
Jerry wants a lyric and he wants a lyric now!
Jerry has a melody and wants a lyric now!