Back for Another Day

Everyone I know fears clairvoyance.
To be immersed in the present
wears the mind to bone on bone;
why ask for more?
Christine Mary and I went to Moscow,
Idaho, to drink and dance
in the middle of the day.
She introduced me to the Rolling Stones
and showed me the strut
Jagger immortalized, if there is
immortality . . .
Later she left to have a child.

Henry Miller wrote the best Rimbaud,
and next was Wallace Fowlie’s book
Rimbaud and Morrison.
Paula and Lucy met Jim and Pam
at Whiskey Go-Go. He was high
and she was bummed. Topanga Canyon
was where they were when she aborted.
Baudelaire at least loved the street.
He had the best waking dreams.
Jeanne Duvall gave him the best head.
He wanted his mother to be free
of her imitation lovers.

In the Palouse we stopped at a bar
and got Maced, though we were the only
customers. We talked too loud,
he said, about Vietnam.
I told Lindsay he must have been there.
In those days everyone made poetry
obsolete. You did what you could see.
It was called art, with a capital A,
like war started with W and R
was for rebellion.
Camus got the Nobel but crashed
and died. Kazantzakis died of old age.

All is gone now. Good riddance.
Life may have been remarkable then,
but how did you know
where it diverged from death?
Back in the day
they say, applauding memory.
In Seattle Linda runs into this guy who’s gay,
who hung his lover on a cross
to make his Jesus film, in Pullman.
She may have lost all she let herself love,
but we both grew too old to prefer
Rimbaud to Baudelaire.

(26 July 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander