Verna’s Passing

Ame called and told me about Verna. I am sorry she is going….and also a
little bit annoyed. It seems to me that with the passing of all these great souls: our parents and their peers, Olympos will be empty. Or do I have that backwards?
Maybe it is just filling itself up again…..Any way, as you can see, what ever
happens seems to set me off on some jacked up “religious trip”. I am thinking of my next book…..it will be titled, “The Deeper Meaning of Every Little Thing”.

I see Verna always standing right in the middle of hers and everyone else’s mortality with such grace and beauty. She is unlike any one I ever met. I see her presiding over you and me and Eliza in the bathtub at your house on Valley Road.
I see her marching across the backyard at Hodge road sheathed in a one piece black bathing suit, playing the tuba….heading for the bat chairs under the grape arbor where she and Wilder will summon Dionysis with wine and word and song.
How can she ever leave us? She never will!!!

Love Allen

Caroline, January 2007

How does one dance the pea vine? What is the relationship between watermelons and bears? What could a fly say that you would find so upsetting....I see you peeking out from under your frog hat....mincing across the stage floor at Macarter Theatre in 56 or was it 57...your bright eyes reaching out into the audience...
I see your bravery and fear dancing together as you faced the dark God who reached his hand into your childhood...
I see your love holding worlds together....I see your love...tangible, visible, resolute ready to cool and sooth the bitter bee stings of life....
I love you Cal and hold you in my heart where I dance and sing and celebrate your decision to be here amongst us ...your brothers and sister: the monsters.
Love Aldog

MARTY LICHTERMAN

Quick the smile to ease the mind's delay
Even tempered straight lips fall
across white teeth....
Catholic boy of Jewish blood...

Ancient dreams
Hung like dead bones
around the leathery neck
of the blind seer.

Your belief writhes ready to be born,
Moses on the Mississippi....
The deliverer eager to smash
the insidious testimony of the flesh.
Old friend which Jordan do you cross?
And to what Caanan do you go?




August 1972

UNDER A TREE OF THORNS

(for John Pretor Gilbert)

Under a tree of thorns in Bell Buckle
Halfway to Baldy, I sit watching my friend
Who will die of brain cancer before he is 28.
He reads Gregory Corso's Happy Birthday of Death
To me out loud.

I hang on his rapier like diction,
his passion for words, for language,
for meaning.
In him that mysterious power which calls young men out
To war, to love, to sacrifice was revealed.

In him that knowledge was full blown:
a ten thousand watt halogen lamp
Shining at midnight from the school parking lot
On the gymnasium wall.

John, at 18 you sang "the emptiness of retaliation"
Like one spent from centuries of vendetta.
I miss you and mourn you now 20 years after your death.

Some part of me is sitting with you still
Under the Thorn tree and you,
As you recite Lawrence Ferlingetti to me on a hillside in east tennessee
Are already west of the Golden Gate.
And moving westward still.

April 94

MEMORIA

MEMORIA

Now memory! Sing of all those almost forgotten things
The nakedness of those first journeys.
Falling down out of myself to swim
In the round green pool of the lover's eye.

That great green stone, childhood's companion,
Fed my nights with an unwinking luminosity.
The radiance of an inner sun stood sentinel
Above the tides day and night.
And I ran and swam
And hid in wooden boxes outside under maple trees
In thunderstorms.

My sleep was deepest in the worst of weather.
Thunder and lightning were the covers
I pulled over my boy's head.
I lived with the sad God and the sad Goddess
And a torturous brother named Pete.

At seven I had fallen far down from Heaven.
Let loose in the world, I sought the lost light.
Looking over my shoulder I wandered down the days.
Many times I looked with wonder at my empty hands.
And said to myself, " What for? What for?
Where the sword? Where the stone?"

Woman came to me with arms widespread.
She made of time a burning fountain.
And out of heart's blood a joy yearning to be bled.
Fearing blood and it's future,
I tore my hands from love's eyes and heart.

And now I careen
Through jungles of streets searching for love
And a Green Stone.

JUNE 1978

Caroline in the Dark God's House

Caroline, who made thee,
To thee I sing and give thanks for a sister.
Dark eyes, dark hair, Watermelons and bears,
Brothers and princes, princes to spare.

For seven years you kept her in the dark God's house.
There she became the vessel of his blind ecstacies.
What did you straighten in twisting her child's body so?
Near the eighty-fourth moon you set her free.

Remind her now of the favor she has won!
Love her, whom you use to join the worlds!
Part not the waters before her, lest she imagine
A promised land:
But rather let her swim through the tropics of the mind
Befriending the monsters as she goes.

SEPTEMBER 1979

FOR AMY, CHRISTMAS 1975

Amy, light from the source shines over my right shoulder.

My face is in the shadow.

I hunt the darkness for a mirror

When I look into it, what will I see?

A face in the shadow lit up by light from the source?

Light from the source?

Or just a shadow?

I remembered your birthday

But gave you no occasion to see

That I rejoice in your journey through the days.

The river whispers over the stones that sleep

In it's path across the land.

When the fire goes out gray ashes remain.

They are clean and they require no explanation

Now sitting on a low wicker chair,

The light all before and around me,

I look toward the horizon's radiance:

The effulgent glory of father and mother,

The passion and pain of the eternal brother,

Caroline, sister of the hearth, whose dark eyes

Peer into the red wine of a full golden cup.

And Amy, whose eyes in the cradle saw beyond the grave,

Does clench and unclench her fists sifting and resifting

The substance of the abyss: the rainbow whose arc

Inscribes the imagination with the possibility

Of each succeeding breath.