Thursday, January 27, 2005

As the Head Clears.... All-day rain yesterday, gentle and warm, taking what was left of the snow, up to a 500-foot radius of my house. I still have more snow within that circle than anywhere in the county, I think. Long shadows, brief afternoon light. My dark-blue pickup is now a solid khaki color from barreling up and down these gumbo roads. So I wanted to quote Allen Ginsberg because no one ever does, because, I mean, it's Allen Ginsberg; these are more like performance pieces, not lines you quote in writing. But I worshipped him once when I was 17; he was my first real crush after Walt Whitman. I said once at a crowded table in the Chez Eduoard (L.A., 1970), in all innocence and earnestness, that I wanted to move in with him and Peter Orlovsky and have his baby; after a moment of stunned silence, Nelson Benedict, an epileptic chemist from Boston, said, "Are you kiddin' me? They'd make a sandwich outta ya." My mother, who also was present, began to seethe. Anyway, here's a little bit extracted from the "Sunflower Sutra" (1955): ... A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the hip new moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! How many flies buzzed around you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul? Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once-powerful mad American locomotive? You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower! And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not! ... 4:47:12 PM    comment []