|
The death of Philip Lamantia on March
7, 2005 marks the end of an extraordinary career-a career
whose movement touched on issues of Surrealism, drugs,
madness, ecology, bohemianism, religion, nature, the
occult, and various other things as well. He was one
of the readers at the legendary Six Gallery reading
on October 7, 1955, the reading at which Allen Ginsberg
first read "Howl" and which launched "The
San Francisco Renaissance." Lamantia told me once
that he was considering calling a new book High Poet-and
he meant "high" in all its senses. (The phrase
calls to mind the similar phrase, "high priest.")
Lamantia was also a consciously Californian poet, born
in San Francisco and deliberately exploring aspects
of his natal "place." This is a slightly revised
version of a review I wrote when his Bed of Sphinxes:
New & Selected Poems appeared in 1997.
PHILIP LAMANTIA, BED OF SPHINXES: NEW &
SELECTED POEMS 1943-1993 (CITY LIGHTS BOOKS)
From virtually all perspectives-early Greek philosopher
to twentieth-century specialist-there is agreement that
artistic creativity and inspiration involve, indeed
require, a dipping into pre-rational or irrational sources
while maintaining ongoing contact with reality and "life
at the surface." The degree to which individuals
can, or desire to, "summon up the depths"
is among the more fascinating individual differences.
Many highly creative and accomplished writers, composers,
and artists function essentially within the rational
world, without losing access to their psychic "underground."
Others, the subject of this book, are likewise privy
to their unconscious streams of thought, but they must
contend with unusually tumultuous and unpredictable
emotions as well. The integration of these deeper, truly
irrational sources with more logical processes can be
a tortuous task, but, if successful, the resulting work
often bears a unique stamp, a "touch of fire,"
for what it has been through.
-Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire (1993), a
favorite book of Lamantia’s
"LAMANTINES:
A species of herbivorous mermaid-like mammals native
to Africa and the Americas, inhabiting the mouths of
larger rivers. They play, in West-African myth, a role
similar to that of the Sirens in Europe."
-Lilyan Kestleloot: Les Écrivains Noirs de Langue
Français quoted at the beginning of Philip Lamantia’s
book,
The Blood of the Air (Four Seasons Foundation, 1970)
One of the reasons very little has been written about
the poetry of Philip Lamantia is the fact that Lamantia’s
poetry is extremely difficult to write about. How does
one "explicate" a passage like this, from
"Hypodermic Light":
It’s absurd I can’t bring my soul to the
eye of odoriferous fire
my soul whose teeth never leave their cadavers
my soul twisted on rocks of mental freeways
my soul that hates music
I would rather not see the Rose in my thoughts take
on illusionary prerogatives
it is enough to have eaten bourgeois testicles
it is enough that the masses are all sodomites
Good Morning
Or a line like this, from "From the Front,"
a poem which refers to "desperate surrealism":
Motorcycles of atonal venetian blind dust of wind rooftop!
Interestingly, and adding to the complexity: the violence
of Lamantia’s language is often at some distance
from the images of the poet on the covers of his early
books: handsome, but gentle.
Lamantia’s biographical note in Donald M. Allen’s
New American Poetry (1960) is typically terse:
Born 1927 in San Francisco. Lived in New York City,
Mexico, Europe and North Africa. Hailed by André
Breton as an authentic surrealist poet; first appearances
in View, 1943-45; broke with surrealism by 1946. Since
then mostly underground, and traveling.
Ann Charters gives us a little more in her introduction
to the Lamantia selections in The Beat Reader (1992):
Philip Lamantia was born in San Francisco on October
23, 1927, the son of Sicilian immigrants. He began writing
poetry in elementary school and was briefly expelled
from junior high for "intellectual delinquency"
when he immersed himself in the work of Edgar Allan
Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. At age [fourteen], after being
introduced to surrealism by the Miró and Dali
retrospectives at the San Francisco Museum of Art, he
began to write surrealist poetry, realizing that "the
purely revolutionary nature" of surrealism, "even
before my knowledge of Surrealist theory, was part of
my own individual temperament." Shortly afterward
Lamantia left home to join the Surrealists in New York
City and was welcomed by André Breton as "a
voice that rises once in a hundred years."
There is also a charming chapter on Lamantia in Neeli
Cherkovski’s Whitman’s Wild Children (1988)
and a complex article, "Destroyed Works: Philip
Lamantia’s Excessive Subjectivities," written
by Jody Norton and published in Sulfur 29 (Fall, 1991).
Bed of Sphinxes is Philip Lamantia’s second Selected
Poems. His first, also published by City Lights, appeared
in 1967 as number 20 of the Pocket Poet Series. The
new Selected Poems is a handsome production, with a
cover design by Rex Ray. The opening poem, "Touch
of the Marvelous," evokes Lamantia’s "surreal
youth." The poem originally appeared in VVV in
1944:
The mermaids have come to the desert
they are setting up a boudoir next to the camel
who lies at their feet of roses
A wall of alabaster is drawn over our heads
by four rainbow men
whose naked figures give off a light
that slowly wriggles upon the sands
I am touched by the marvelous....
The word "marvelous" alludes to a famous
passage in André Breton’s 1924 "Manifesto
of Surrealism"-the "First Manifesto":
Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful,
anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous
is beautiful...only the marvelous is capable of fecundating
works....
How does the marvelous "fecundate" Lamantia’s
poem? Mermaids, themselves creatures of the marvelous,
belong to the realm of the ocean. In Lamantia’s
poem they show up in the desert and are associated with
camels-equally marvelous creatures, but, unlike the
mermaids, real. Indeed, the desert is blossoming here,
at least "at their feet of roses." In the
next stanza, a wall "is drawn over our heads."
Wouldn’t that make it a ceiling, not a wall? And
how can light be said to "wriggle"-an interesting
word choice in a passage which begins by sounding almost
Biblical: "A wall of alabaster is drawn...."
And what about "touched"? Does that mean that
the marvelous affects the speaker, "touches"
him? Probably. But there is at least a glance at the
meaning of "touched" as insane: "I am
touched." A moment later, a Muse figure appears.
Her name is "BIANCA"-capitalized and meaning
"white." She is also "the angelic doll
turned black," however, as well as "the child
of broken elevators" and "the curtain of holes
/ that you never want to throw away." The change
in the meaning of "of" in those two lines
is dizzying, but no matter: not only is BIANCA "the
first woman," she is also "the first man."
Indeed, the speaker says, "I am lost to have her."
Shouldn’t that be lost unless I have her?
In 1953 Breton defined Surrealism as "a far-reaching
operation having to do with language," "the
rediscovery of the secret of...language," an attack
on the "utilitarian usage" of words in an
attempt "to emancipate them and restore all their
power" ("On Surrealism in Its Living Works").
Surrealism, Breton goes on, took up arms "against
the tyranny of a thoroughly debased language";
it was an "operation which tended to bring language
back to true life":
The spirit that makes such an operation possible and
even conceivable is none other than that which has always
moved occult philosophy: according to this spirit, from
the fact that expression is at the origin of everything,
it follows that "the name must germinate, so to
speak, or otherwise it is false." The principal
contribution of Surrealism, in poetry as in the plastic
arts, is to have so exalted this germination that everything
other than it seems laughable.
Lamantia’s poem germinates. The opening lines
purport to describe something: they are a a narrative
to some degree. Yet "mermaids" (inhabitants
of the ocean) and "camels" (inhabitants of
the desert) operate in vastly different contexts: they
don’t go together any more than a word like "wriggles"
goes with a word like "alabaster." But of
course the incongruity is the point, as in Lautréamont’s
famous chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella
on a dissecting table. "Realistic" narrative
is ego-affirming; it situates us in relation to something
we suppose actually exists: if there is a desert, we
expect there to be camels. The opening line of "Touch
of the Marvelous" appears initially as a narrative-something
is described as having occurred-but it is in fact a
syntactical yoking together of two utterly separate
concepts. The poem places us at precisely the point
at which something utterly irrational and magical begins
to happen to a world which is ordinarily under severe
rational control:
I am touched by the marvelous
as the mermaids’ nimble fingers go through my
hair
that has come down forever from my head
to cover my body
the savage fruit of lunacy.
One mode of language-realistic description-is undercut
by another: the freedom of the words to mean beyond
the restrictions of description, beyond the necessity
to "name" the world. In the process, the ego
shifts and transforms itself, though it never disappears
entirely:
I am looking beyond the hour and the day
to find you BIANCA.
"Touch of the Marvelous" is a masterful and
extremely early poem, written perhaps when the author
was fifteen, certainly before he turned twenty. One
can easily see how exciting this work must have seemed
to Breton and others:
In the rose creeping into the tower of exiles
when the buffet is laden with jewels
when the night is filled with hate
when the womb of Eros is deserted
when the sleeping men are awakened
when the old lovers are no longer frightened
-my heart
Philip Lamantia was one of the readers at the famous
Six Gallery event-the event at which Allen Ginsberg
first read "Howl"-on October 7, 1955. In Dharma
Bums, published in 1957, Jack Kerouac presents him as
"delicate Francis DaPavia" who "read,
from delicate onionskin yellow pages, or pink, which
he kept flipping carefully with long white fingers,
the poems of his dead chum Altman [actually John Hoffman]";
Lamantia also shows up as David D’Angeli in Desolation
Angels (1965). Lamantia’s first book, Erotic Poems,
was published in 1946. His second book, Ekstasis, was
published by the Auerhahn Press in 1959. In that same
year Auerhahn also published Lamantia’s Narcotica.
On the title page were the words, "I DEMAND EXTINCTION
OF LAWS PROHIBITING NARCOTIC DRUGS!" The opening
piece begins,
-against you, psychiatrists would be conscience of the
people! No more!-against you, doctors, druggists, sociologists,
idiots, asses, the whole fuckingload of shit perpetuated
out of STUPIDITY to elevate that most detestable NADA,
that void attempting the determination of states of
being-of BEING!-and which goes under the name of safety,
fuck yr safety, WHO NEEDS IT?
On the cover was a haunting set of photographs, taken
by Wallace Bermen, of Lamantia shooting up. At the center
of the photographs is a cross.
Ekstasis was followed in 1962 by the amazing book,
Destroyed Works, also published by Auerhahn. In his
author’s note to Ekstasis Lamantia wrote of the
"erotic, mythic, magical and devotional" nature
of his poetry: "My object is a revelation, in manifestation,
of beauty-its world, natural or supernatural...."
Here, in a note not included in Bed of Sphinxes and
dated October 20, 1960-three days before his thirty-third
birthday-he writes:
For me it is the Vision in its density and the truth
of what I see the breath is in the Vision and I come
to the rhythms it is above all a question of MY VISION
thru which the images are focused, the beat in the activation
of this energy field, hence the density, that the Being
of poetry erupts out of nerves emotions skeleton muscles
eyes spirits beasts birds rockets typewriters into my
head and I see, the weir pivot, at that point all is
Evidence Clarity Incomprehension Flame of Perfect Form
and Chaos.
I have already quoted some lines from the opening poem
of the book, "Hypodermic Light." Here are
the first two sections of that poem complete:
It’s absurd I can’t bring my soul to the
eye of odoriferous fire
my soul whose teeth never leave their cadavers
my soul twisted on rocks of mental freeways
my soul that hates music
I would rather not see the Rose in my thoughts take
on illusionary prerogatives
it is enough to have eaten bourgeois testicles
it is enough that the masses are all sodomites
Good Morning
the ships are in I’ve brought the gold to burn
Moctezuma
I’m in a tipi joking with seers I’m smoking
yahnah
I’m in a joint smoking marijuana with a cat who
looks like Jesus Christ
heroin is a door always opened by white women
my first act of treason was to be born!
I’m at war with the Zodiac
my suffering comes on as a fire going out O beautiful
world contemplation!
It’s a fact my soul is smoking!
.
That the total hatred wants to annihilate me!
it’s the sickness of american pus against which
I’m hallucinated
I’m sick of language
I want this wall I see under my eyes break up and shatter
you
I’m talking all the poems after God
I want the table of visions to send me oriole opium
A state of siege
It’s possible to live directly from elementals!
hell stamps out vegetable
spirits, zombies attack heaven! the marvelous put down
by
martial law, America fucked by a stick of marijuana
paper money larded for frying corpses!
Here comes the Gorgon! There’s the outhouse!
Come up from dead things, anus of the sun!
Compared to that, even "Howl" sounds a little
like a Sunday School picnic. One is not surprised to
discover that Allen Ginsberg referred to Lamantia as
his "teacher." The religious impulse behind
these poems-their thrust towards direct experience of
deity-is as clear as day. Reading them, one remembers
writers like the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart,
with his term "breakthrough." These passages
from Eckhart’s Selected Writings suggest the central
focus of Destroyed Works:
I have occasionally spoken of a light in the soul which
is uncreated and uncreatable. I constantly return in
my sermons to this light, which apprehends God without
medium, without concealment and nakedly, just as he
is in himself...this light is not satisfied with the
simple, still and divine being which neither gives nor
takes, but rather it desires to know from where this
being comes. It wants to penetrate to the simple ground,
to the still desert, into which distinction never peeped,
neither Father, Son nor Holy Spirit. There, in that
most inward place, where everyone is a stranger, the
light is satisfied and there it is more inward than
it is in itself...Turn away from everything therefore
and exist in your naked being, for whatever is outside
being is ‘accidence’ and all forms of ‘accidence’
create a Why.
That we may ‘live in eternity,’ so help
us God. Amen.
"There is some way out of Guerrero Street! there
must be!," writes Lamantia in "Deamin,"
"when will he come with the big hypo?" And
in "Still Poems": "everywhere immanence
of the presence of God...Constant flight in air of the
Holy Ghost."
In a short paper it is barely possible to deal with
as complex a figure as Philip Lamantia. What I’ve
tried to do here is to suggest something of the early
development of this amazing American poet who has still
not received anything like his proper recognition. Other
books followed Destroyed Works: they are Selected Poems
(1967), The Blood of the Air (1970), Becoming Visible
(1981) and, perhaps the most significant in developmental
terms, Meadowlark West (1986). Of the new work published
in Selected Poems (1967) Lamantia remarked that "I’m
returning to my initial sources-like an act of nature."
"Astro-Mancy," one of the most important of
the new poems, announces that
I’m recovering
from a decade of poisons
I renounce all narcotic
& pharmacopoeic disciplines
as too heavy 9-to-5-type sorrows
Instead I see America
as one vast palinode
that reverses itself completely until
Gitchi Manito actually returns....
The poem offers a vision of "matter lovingly heightened
/ by meditation, and spirit / transmuted into matter":
the whole commune conducted by
direct rapid transcription
from a no-past reference
antirational, fantastically poetic...
Each one his own poet
and poetry the central fact....
The Blood of the Air has some fine love poems ("Only
for those who love is dawn visible throughout the day"-"visibility"
is a theme here and elsewhere) and the extraordinary
"Flaming Teeth":
I’m obsessed by death fantasies
Husks
And the Night Thoughts of Edward Young
Death is a pineapple in the cake of death
Which wing?
I deny death I don’t know why
Ask the swans who are rocking me under the chair forest....
"Horse Angel" ("All horse cultures /
And the horse in dreams!") is to some degree explicated
by a note in Becoming Visible:
Cabala-the term cabala has been elucidated by the twentieth
century alchemist Fulcanelli in Les Demeures Philosophales
where he explains its derivation from the Latin, caballus,
for horse, but signifying the transmission of knowledge
and "revealing the source of all sciences"...The
figurative image of the cabala as spiritual vehicle
is the Pegasus of the Hellenic poets which derives from
the Greek word for source: "to know the cabala
is to speak the language of the horse."
The esoteric and the oneiric-even the obsessional-are
constantly meeting in Lamantia’s work. (It is
perhaps also relevant to note that the name "Philip"
means "lover of horses.")
Becoming Visible contains the title poem of this collection,
"Bed of Sphinxes." As the phrase "becoming
visible" might indicate, the section plays on modes
of visibility and invisibility. (An elaboration of an
earlier theme: I cited the love poem in The Blood of
the Air; "Invisible" is also the title of
the penultimate poem in Touch of the Marvelous.) This
is from "In Yerba Buena":
Beauty a great invisible
walks between luminous slabs...
Those natives called Ohlone
in the peculiar humors of the weather
and those who danced
to placate "The Great Invisible"
in the bay of Yerba Buena
"dance on the brink of the world"
Myth and Native American themes are important in this
book. Lamantia’s genuinely helpful notes (for
the most part not included in Bed of Sphinxes) touch
on a number of things, many of them having to do with
place. "Yerba Buena," he writes, is Spanish
for "good herb," "for the white-flowered
wild mint. This was the name of the pueblo, settled
in 1835, that was to become the city of San Francisco."
Oraibi, "literally ‘high rock,’ [is
a] Hopi Indian village, [in] Arizona, founded in the
12th century, the oldest continuously-inhabited settlement
in what is now the United States." "Washo-a
tribe whose original territory lay in the verdant area
of Lake Tahoe, on both sides of the California and Nevada
border. Their peyote rite ‘The Tipi Way’
in which I participated in the early 1950s has been
a constant source of poetic inspiration." "The
Romantic Movement" continues the love poems to
"Nancy" which are a prominent feature of The
Blood of the Air; it plays upon "romantic"
meaning lovers and "romantic" meaning a certain
period and style of writing.
In "Multidimensional Superreality," a review
of Meadowlark West published in Poetry Flash (October
1986, #161), poet Ivan Argüelles suggested that
the book was Lamantia’s Parlement of Foules. Birds
have always been important inhabitants of Lamantia’s
poems, as they are in many poems of "the Romantic
Movement," and one poem in Meadowlark West refers
explicitly to "the Dawn-Bringer Meadowlark."
"Bird" is of course also the name by which
Charlie Parker was known, and that is relevant here
as well.
Birds abound in Meadowlark West, as does what Lamantia
calls "mystic geography." This is from "America
in the Age of Gold":
There are many centers of mystic geography
but the great Black V of gold flashing in the meadow
Bird
unknown
opening the air like all the lore of the chants
this may serve as shield
for the companions of the kestrel....
The poems in this section are a celebration of "Poetry
magic love liberty," of "imaginary birds"
as well as real ones. But they are above all a celebration
of the Northern California landscape:
all over Northern California still the end day imaginary
land
lupines and poppies vegetable craters volcanic whispers
"America in the Age of Gold" explicitly asserts
that "these [Pomo] spirits are here now."
Argüelles suggests that there is a sense of "coming
home" throughout Meadowlark West, and that is surely
an element as well: "ancient wood my native land
all this that vanishes." The concluding poem of
this section is the magisterial and enigmatic "Shasta,"
a mountain named for the Native Americans who once inhabited
the region north of it. Lamantia’s poem contains
a moment of ecstatic vision:
I see chthonic man, and it’s the wheel-the hated
wheel-sending up a sliver of lucent dawn arched on a
sunbeam serrating the vegetable stone: the light of
her going by, a superior earth being, her clothes blued
as a tissue of incandescent gold, something like an
appearance of words-seen.
The vision is "something like an appearance of
words-seen." In its thrust towards transcendence
poetic language becomes the primary means of naming
"Nature," "geography in a mystic state."
As he experiences the natural world as "the sublime
in the old sense"-and as "image" transforms
itself into "language"-the poet’s voice
becomes something akin to "the great booming voice
of nature":
on that chain of Ohlone mountains
shafts of light on a bobcat
through the thick madrones
first seen emblems that endure cupped my nine years
the great booming voice of nature
(from "There")
Bed of Sphinxes concludes with a section of "Uncollected
Poems (1985-1992)." The first of these, "Poem
for André Breton," is an homage to Lamantia’s
lifelong mentor. With its reference to "oak leaves
burnished with mysteries of marvelous love"-druids
but Northern California as well-it brings us back to
the earliest poems in the book. (The word "marvelous"-like
the word "dream"-echoes throughout Bed of
Sphinxes.) The poems in this section are testimonies
to Lamantia’s continuing power. "Egypt"
is a haunting, haunted evocation of "the Companions
of Horus" who "come into view as the Resurrection
Band." The poet has a vision of "supernatural
beings" as well as of the beginnings of language:
These moving realities appear on the Nile
as if a postcard view of it held up a hieratic bird
Silent tonalities a secret passage the beginning of
language
*
supernatural beings somewhere become vanished Horian
light
*
become visible within crepuscular shadows at the nightfall
of the
world
whose matrix is Cairo....
The concluding poem of the book, "Passionate Ornithology
Is Another Kind of Yoga," again deals with birds:
"Thirty feisty finches at the window." It
reminds us that
We, too, were once avian
bridge-window-to another life....
It is a fitting conclusion to a powerful book.
One senses in a considerable amount of Beat art-painting
as well as writing-a deliberate evocation of the infinite.
In Philip Lamantia’s poetry the infinite is experienced
as language. His work is, precisely, "a far-reaching
operation having to do with language." Its vast
openness allows almost anything in it to connect with
anything else. This is from "Ex Cathedra,"
one of the "Uncollected" poems:
To weave garter belts with chaos and snakes, the nun’s
toenail
of crimson phallus, her breast of alligator, her tail,
crow’s
buttocks. Steel pricks of the ciborium dovetail her
white
pantaloons-snake oil on a eucharistic tongue.
If the garter belts, the white pantaloons and the buttocks
remind us of the erotic-even parodic-nature of this
writing, the nun and the eucharist remind us that it
is also, as Lamantia points out, "devotional."
It is no easy task in an unbelieving time to write religious
poetry, but that is what Lamantia has done. That the
poetry is immensely passionate, challenging and offers
far more "riddles" than it does "answers"-it
is at times totally baffling!-is one way of measuring
the tone of the religious impulse in our time. A bed
of sphinxes is hardly a bed of roses. Matthew Fox has
called for more "endarkenment" as a corrective
to our too intense involvement with "enlightenment."
Philip Lamantia’s poetry has plenty of that. He
remarks in "Primavera," "This way the
poem becomes an open sluice for darkness." And
for him"agnosia," the paradoxical knowing
of God through not knowing, is as central an issue as
it is for Michael McClure: "Poetry knows in the
not knowing" ("Isn’t Poetry the Dream
of Weapons?").
Can language be a vehicle of the transcendent? Can
religious poetry be written outside the church? ("The
absolute pulverization of all the churches will be the
grace of love’s freedom!" Lamantia writes
in "Ex Cathedra," though he will die as a
Catholic.) What is the nature of the holy? These are
serious questions, and Philip Lamantia’s poetry
raises them in a serious, deeply resonant way. It is
a considerable achievement, and it involves a constant
disruption of the "ordinary"-the "ordinary"
is precisely not the "marvelous"-functions
of language. "N’importe où hors du
monde," writes one of Lamantia’s heroes,
Charles Baudelaire, "Anywhere out of this world."
(Baudelaire is himself quoting the English poet, Thomas
Hood.)
I want to end this essay with two passages that didn’t
make it into Bed of Sphinxes. The first is a poem originally
published in Wallace Berman’s Semina (no. 4, 1959);
it also appeared in Lamantia’s volume, Ekstasis.
It was the inspiration for one of artist Jay De Feo’s
most haunting drawings, "The Eyes" The poem-which
is perhaps too Catholic or too Pre-Raphaelite or even
too sentimental for this volume-is simple, direct and
beautiful. It is an evocation of the Virgin Mary as
Mother Goddess/Muse-the phrase "Queen Mirror"
seems to be an interesting metamorphosis of "Queen
Mother"-and an affirmation of the religious character
of Lamantia’s poetry. The poem does not represent
his final direction. In a short time the young man will
move beyond the need for an intercessor like the Virgin
Mary or Jesus-he will be after something far more direct-but
it is fascinating to speculate on what, at this point,
he might have meant by "sin":
Ah Blessed Virgin Mary
pray for me I live in you
to sleep in God
and die in God
to praise His Holy Name
O Blessed Virgin Mary
ask Jesus to embed in me
a sword of sorrow
to kill my sin
my sin that wounds His Wounds
Tell Him I have eyes only for Heaven
as I look to you
Queen mirror
of the heavenly court
The second passage is a few lines from the poem, "The
Enormous Window"-a play, perhaps, on E.E. Cummings’
title, The Enormous Room. In a way, these lines summarize
what this poet is all about:
In the tropics
the doctors prescribe
sand for the heart
Ad astra
Ad astra
____________________________________________________________
LAMANTIA
All of the poets
Have come to church today
All of the maudit
Poets-tutti-
Have come to mass this morning
For Philip, lover of horses,
Lover of verses
They have come
To be touched
By the marvelous
To be overcome
By the marvelous
To come like mermaids to the desert
Of organized religion
And to say to the non dieu
Je crois que je suis
Blessé
Par la croix
Par la croix de dieu
Only the marvelous is
Beautiful
And Philip’s ashes
Whirl up in the wind
To touch us
They are whirling
Words
"Listen, man,
That’s the shrine
Of Saint Francis
In the city
Of San Francisco-
You meet me there"
Lamantia
’Frisco born
With his feet of roses
With his tongue of steel
With his eyes of lemon trees
With his voice of reeds
With his hands of manzanita
With his elbows of crabgrass
With his legs of cactus
With his wit of fire
With his eyes of purple undertakers
With his lips of tule reeds
With his cock of redwoods
With his balls of low-lying hills
With his tender
Eruptions of poppies
And pasta
With his massive
Greed for life
-Looks back at us
And says,
How is it back there?
Will none of you ever
Break through?
Will none of you ever
Reach-
And the speech
Ceases
As the damned
Poets
Crowd the cathedral
Of Philip’s consciousness
The Church of Lamantia
And say:
Fuck
I demand the extinction
Of every law known to man
I demand
That every boundary be
Broken
I demand
The marvelous
The savage fruit
Of lunacy
I am looking for you Bianca
In every North Beach alley
the ships are in I’ve brought the gold to burn
Moctezuma
I’m in a tipi joking with seers I’m smoking
yahnah
I’m in a joint smoking marijuana with a cat who
looks like Jesus Christ
heroin is a door always opened by white women
my first act of treason was to be born!
I’m at war with the Zodiac
my suffering comes on as a fire going out O beautiful
beautiful world contemplation!
It’s a fact my soul is smoking!
Come up from dead things, anus of the sun!
|
