1
just wanted to camp, reading outside,
Rexroth, a beautiful poetry, reading
bringing along
Kerouac and Snyder, Ginsberg
and that fellow, Witter
Bynner from New Mexico
to read Chinese
poems, poets singing of--
Jade Mountain
mad in the mountains
wedding the west, to beloved
Snowman
2
going through all the places, people,
rehearsing the story of California
the Big Sur
Yosemite monuments
the desert Mojave
SB and LA
New Mexico,
the old west like, my movie,
ROAD MOVIE
WEST of
MOVIE/ DREAM
SECOND CHANCE
the homeless guy
no name, over there, black and blue
in the shaded corner
3
country music on the radio, out of state plates,
through windmills, my poem
becomes the song of lonely spaces ,
yearning for love, the connection in the wind
headed into it, south from Texas into New Mexico,
the west, incredibly--
as I cross that invisible state line, crystalline shapes
and cotton candy clouds reflecting earth, red
planted in green, turning to prairie
grass deepening into sage, thunderheads
beyond covering mountains in distance
anvil like cardboard cloud,
pinned to flat lonely space, varoom, the Greyhound
bus to Amarillo, passes in black smoke
and I'm left,
Santa Fe train, a B-line into the distance my spirit
here enlarged, nothing like it,
Arkansas woods are interior
compared to this New Mexico-- space
and lonely wind, following the long march
of Katchina looking power-poles, a raven swoops
surfacing and the sinking,
butterfly stroke, swimming in this bottomless
lake of saline solution, unstinging to the eyes,
surface and sink
heavenly body of water,
immersed in my journey
leaving behind inside turning
to outer space
dying into this land, free
a soul left out flapping,
wholly bodiless
in the sun and wind, clearer again than I
could remember, here remembering
it even as I see,
4
Gallop, New Mexico
is the perverse twistings of one culture
upon another,
a sorry drunken Indian asking--
we were spotted as tourist,
I surprised myself
by letting out a rude reprimand,
I became the sorry one
as I watched him shrink away,
we turned
fast from this town of pawn and aimlessness,
lost without expression, lost pride
with out place,
invisible at the coffee shop,
we sheepishly downed
our enchiladas and coffee,
drifting out
onto the mysterious emptiness
of the winding path, confused,
washing machines on roads and
refrigerators in the cottonwoods
winking in the hot breeze
wrecked cars,
there a painted pony
lovely against the mesa sky
we WERE GOING TO A HOPI DANCE
a corn dance,
dancing for rain
and thanks for what crops were received
Kachinas represented these feelings
and prayed for the life, to continue
a tradition of designs carried their selves
weaving disparate places like Phoenix
and Hotevilla together, no Indian is the same
as I am not, the generalizations of an-- other
do not work, who would be the more spiritual
one? question mark?
I have a stone thrown at me
and a motion tells me to remove
my hat, Gringo with no respect,
the others all shielded from the sun, with umbrellas
and hats, too? I shrug, this is tricky
business but the mesmerizing music, or
rhythm continues, continues and that
is what is important, this art is about
continuing, being something different, and the
same, that stopping-- owning their life
is just their-- just wanting to go on, asking
nothing, before the corrupting addictions
to quell a people full of fear, arriving
we roamed to the rhythm
kicking shards
of dreamed pots at our feet, everywhere
where pots and bones, the procession
arrived in green fir and black grease,
the rhythm produced in the hot sun
a hallucination like
a hand bringing
something forward unseen, coaxing
over and over, the drone of bees, design
brought forward, differing feelings
and fads of the place, the figured spirits,
there, we watched from the roofs
of the tiny rock town, spirit ladders
reaching to the sky, watching
shuffling from foot to foot, captured
there in a time’s bubble,
clouds arriving
and-- looking up with surprise
to passing wind and rain
every one murmuring, the drone
continuing
the brief sprinkle
fleeting into dryness
of desert air, continuance,
the rhythms of sex,
or death, in the
cycle of life, beauty way
the meaning of order,
in a poetry of belonging
to something even larger
than this sacred place
standing apart is not allowed
or could one be capable of--
buried in that dirt I can only glimpse--
I cannot give up this divided life
a hypocrite? thrown stones
reluctantly we leave,
amazed and confused
driving away, to our civilization
and culture, we regretted
our decision, to go
we had been close and needed
to leave, we ever anxious to keep going
on to the next,
off balance a bit, we drove on
hardly stopping through
the tourist laden trading posts
5
dashed upon--wave after wave
remembering the yellow rabbit
brush, blue sky, green against red, earth
of New Mexico design, brings me back
coloring the place, already
but now, I’m driving highway culture,
East, now and I NEED TO PEE
I have to begin the search, losing the freedom
relying on Burger King--
I’ll be happy-- to see, my old friends,
I miss, but then the doubts, I’m so out of it,
out there, here, the
tightening spaces
make obvious the social ills
having become the life,
of the east,
the built upon built,
upon tension of--
the power politics involved,
becoming savvy in this Art,
the painting’s sensuality, so old fashioned
in that we don’t have the depth
for those big paintings any more
and the fashion changes to small,
“A Good Thing,” they say
the profane world is the subject
what we can see, that’s trouble enough
forgetting that inner space
although it is obvious
that it is becoming the only space
left, the new West the reaches
of the Romantic inner distance,
the debased art, the empty church
everything for sale,
in the what’s new
next economy, picking through for Poetry,
“negotiating rapture” I’ve heard it said
beyond innocent transcendental reach,
my poem repeats ,
un- original thought
if this was all there was, I’d end the poem here--
in desperation
add glamour to that despair
never seen reality, the ordered poem
what Long Island had been
looking for new poem, to keep going,
flipping through the fashion magazines,
having replaced art becoming the art,
next thing,
down runway,
