SOME LINES FOR YOU
WRITTEN UNDER A REDWOOD IN THE CITY PARK
NOT YET THREE MONTHS SINCE YOU DIED IN MY ARMS
IN OUR HOME ON CHESTNUT STREET, SAN FRANCISCO

Drawn to the Temple where you worshipped
I slink along the edges of the city like a cat

Hawk family nesting in our Autumn Garden
Turning overhead like something out of Yeats's Second Coming

Marble Angel still holding her bowl of sacred water
Is that you?! Sitting in the shadow of the Weeping Willow?

t. walden

Resources:

Selected Bibliography:

Played drums with the John Benson Brooks trio's album, Avant Slant (One Plus 1 = II?) -- a Twelve-Tone Collage; Decca Records DL-75018. John Clellon Holmes wrote the liner notes, and describes the album as a "collage-in-sound, in which fragments of poetry, pop tunes, radio broadcasts, and Feiffer-like babble intermingle to form an aural history of Right Now." Holmes notes that the music contains "...that black humor which is so often our last defense against the confusion and sheer noise of a technological civilization that seems increasingly to measure its nerves in decibles..."

Jazz performances with Jack Kerouac, Philip Lamantia, and David Amram in New York, 1957 & 1958. The first of these, at the Brata Art Gallery, was the very first jazz-poetry reading in New York. Later performances were at the Circle in the Square. David Amram's recollection of these performances, first published in Evergreen Review in 1969, is available on his website. To see the reproduction of the handbill for one of the Circle in the Square gigs at full size, just click here.