"Where literature is concerned,
I will not cooperate at all":
A mind resolutely turned
From the social crusades of fall.

Seventy-eight years later
I agree with the "dilettante";
Twenty-five years cater
To reclusion in a shanty,

"Writing frightening verse
To a straight-toothed dude
In New York." Curse
My reckless solitude!

The short-order cook and the dishwasher
argue the relative merits
of Rilke’s Elegies
against Eliot’s Four Quartets,
but the delivery man who brings eggs
suggests they have forgotten Les fleurs
du mal and Baudelaire. The waitress
carrying three plates and a coffee ***
can’t decide whom she loves more—
Rimbaud or Verlaine,
William Blake or William Wordsworth.
She refills the rabbi’s cup
(he’s reading Rumi),
asks what he thinks of Arthur Whaley.
In the booth behind them, a fat woman
feeds a small white poodle in her lap,
with whom she shares her spoon.
"It’s Rexroth’s translations of the Japanese,"
she says, "that one can’t live without:
May those who are born after me
Never travel such roads of love."
The revolving door proffers
a stranger in a long black coat, lost in the madhouse poems of John Clare.
As he waits to be seated,
the woman who owns the place
hands him a menu
in which he finds several handwritten poems
By Hafiz, Gibran, and Rabindranath Tagore.
The lunch hour’s crowded—
the owner wonders
if the stranger might share
my table. As he sits,
I put a finger to my lips,
and with my eyes ask him
to listen with me
to the young boy and the young girl
two tables away
taking turns reading aloud
the love poems of Pablo Neruda.

GIC to HAR**

It is late at night, cold and damp
The air is filled with tobacco smoke.
My brain is worried and tired.
I pick up the encyclopedia,
The volume GIC to HAR,
It seems I have read everything in it,
So many other nights like this.
I sit staring empty-headed at the article Grosbeak,
Listening to the long rattle and pound
Of freight cars and switch engines in the distance.
Suddenly I remember
Coming home from swimming
In Ten Mile Creek,
Over the long moraine in the early summer evening,
My hair wet, smelling of waterweeds and mud.
I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse,
And instantly and clearly the revelation
Of a song of incredible purity and joy,
My first rose-breasted grosbeak,
Facing the low sun, his body
Suffused with light.
I was motionless and cold in the hot evening
Until he flew away, and I went on knowing
In my twelfth year one of the great things
Of my life had happened.
Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek.
On the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive.
And I am on the other side of the continent
Ten years in an unfriendly city.

A reading at Kenneth Rexroth's bookstore,
Union Street in San Francisco, 1971.

He was incoherently drunk, slurred his poems,
insulted the host, insulted the audience,
hit on the awestricken hippie girls,
delivered every kind of obnoxious possible.

Fortunately, I had read his poems
and arrived prepared to witness his act.

I'd thought his poems were overrated,
I found his persona to be spot on.

At the reception, I drank a beer beside him.
He glanced up, called me a *****
and said he ought to kick my ***.

Three weeks back for Vietnam,
I laughed directly into his face.
He turned onto another potential victim.

Instead of some street smart poet,
I saw him as just the flip side
of the New York pretentiousness
he professed to despise.

But everybody loved the clown.
Entire younger generations still do.

Still, I'm sticking to my first impressions.
Only toddlers beg to be worshiped.

Sometimes it feels good to be the odd man out.

  ~mce

The other night when it was foggy on the coast, we went indoors.
Mendocino has not changed since we first camped here in the 60s.
The Point Arena lighthouse strobes through the density of that darkness.
I sat at the wooden kitchen table with my volume of Rexroth.
The new twisty bulb over me gave off a pale light.
I had something in mind to tell you about, but I forgot to say it.
That full moon rose over the rain-fattened Garcia River.
Don't the different testaments on our shelf back home need a new addition?
A Now Testament, with new chapters always coming along.
The experience of our full evenings becoming subheadings.
Our early days held a war to worry about.
We are far removed from the sorrowful explosions.
The new ways of dying don't excite me much.
Torn holes of hatred in the earth expand,
while older ones smolder in our memory.
Life could be filled with goodness.
Maybe goodness is life and it is all that simple.
What is not good is not life.
Yesterday we went around the outer edge
of that poor farm town.
We sat in that small church with all the vaqueros,
while the baby behind us cried and cried.
I knew what she might be crying about.
The place we were staying, out in the country, so far from it all.
And lonely.
Your voice hushed when I thought about writing these lines.
I didn't say anything that might make you wish to be silent.
The moon, soon buried in that mist blowing in off the sea.
Everything here so slow and dark.
It happened this way before.
Even though it is a different form of darkness and loneliness,
it is still here now.
A few more years might make it go away.
but that would no longer be now.

When deprived of
Rational thought
For long enough
The brain begins
To gather knowledge
From the smallest
Crevices of humanity
And in the cracks and
Crags of Know and Is
Runs tributaries of
Emotion and Touch
And the whole thing
Is a metaphor
And the whole Ship
Is a crazy illusion
In the mind of an infant
Vibrating nonsensical
Everything throughout the
Walls of human record and
Memory,
This is my doctorate and thesis
This is my final showdown and hoorah
This is staring down eternity
This is laughing with god
This is feeling it and running it down with bare hands
This is the how within the why
This is you me all the faces all the ads and fables
Every leaf and grain of sand in
Every toenail and cornea
This is poverty hunger sickness anger frustration confusion bliss
This is life love and the pursuit
This is the final frontier, the jumping off point
That comes every so often
Like an old friend
To remind you to
Get it all together
Into a single image
Of worship and Holy
And see it and eat it
And spit it back up
In bulimic flowering
Yeah, this is war
This is the last supper
This is Rexroth and Bukowski
In love with Hate
Saying, "Give me something better or get out of my way."