Garden romp by gardens... by Johnathan Morpurgo |
spiral dance by Stacy Lanyon |
For a few years there, we had yearly garden
pageants, Earth Celebrations, and Garden
Parades. There is a poetry in walking
through the streets, into the nooks and crannies of the city, where the
Earth wakes, and the wild winds its way back between the cracks into our
presence. We’ve carried banners, recalled gardeners, and continued our
procession through the years, through the trees in our concrete jungle. This year, we’d let the poetry mingle,
between texts, green spaces and memories.
“It was inevitable , the scent of bitter almonds always
reminded him of the fate of requited love” I read from the first lines of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, in homage to the maestro of magic realism, whose
writing helped me see the world as mutable, that there are multiple realities
out there, not just one right way to be. These were the first lines of our Lower East
Side Poetry romp through the Community Gardens.
Poetry lingered throughout the Lower East Side, between the trees, all day
long.
“In the rooms the women come and go,
Talking of Michaelangelo” we read from the Love Song of J Alfred
Prufrock
Why were we all there?
Einstein suggests:
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Gardens are ideal places for such
practices.
The invitation was simple.
Join
Public Space Party April 26th at 2 PM for a march / procession through the
Lower East Side community gardens to remind the city that community gardens are
for everybody and they need to be made permanent.
Bring a poem. Bring snacks. Dress for spring!
Join us as we read poetry and revel in the democratic possibilities of these spaces all afternoon long. Bring a poem, a snack, and something to share as we meander through these green treasures of the Lower East Side.
Jane Jacobs reminds us: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
Public Space Party is a practice and a group dedicated to supporting democracy, fun, joy, justice, and full participation in a vibrant public commons.
Bring a poem. Bring snacks. Dress for spring!
Join us as we read poetry and revel in the democratic possibilities of these spaces all afternoon long. Bring a poem, a snack, and something to share as we meander through these green treasures of the Lower East Side.
Jane Jacobs reminds us: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
Public Space Party is a practice and a group dedicated to supporting democracy, fun, joy, justice, and full participation in a vibrant public commons.
A
few days before, we made a banner for the event, reminding the world all the
gardens need to be made permanent. Flowers forever, number two noted. The
City Council can introduce a bill to do this today. We need to ask them to do so. The action was also a
call to remind the city to act.
Prop making. |
We
met on a sunny afternoon in the corner of Stanton and Attorney Streets, at a
garden, where a vacant lot once stood.
Over the last two years, we’ve transformed this lot into Siempre Verde
Community Garden.
We’d
scheduled our poetry romp to coincide with Shakespeare’s birthday. The bard loved flowers and gardens, referring
to them n play after play.
Here’s
flowers for you.
Hot
lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram.
The
Winter’s Tale
It also happened to coincide with the Lower
East Side United Gardeners Spring Awakening Festival.
Please join us for a LUNGS–East Village
“SPRING AWAKENING” as we parade from garden to garden Saturday, April 26 1-3pm .
It’s a celebration of our community gardens!
We are asking all gardens to be open from 1 til 3 and welcome
the revelers. Bring your smiles and kids, your music and your dance and
join us as we snake Pied Piper style through Loisaida.
Flower Power–Peas & Love–Salad Daze
Three groups will parade through the neighborhood visiting each
garden and then converge at 3pm at El Jardin del Paraiso on E.4th St, btwn Aves
C & D for continuing music and frivolity.
Each group will form at
one pm.
Flower Power comes from the north beginning in
Dias Y Flores on E. 13 St btwn Aves A & B. Smells like Flower Power.
Peas & Love breaks out of the south at Children’s Magical Garden on
Stanton and Norfolk Sts. Dance like nobody’s watching.
Salad Daze blasts
in from the west erupting from LaGuardia Corner Gardens at LaGuardia Place and
Bleecker St. The The Salad Daze posse will be on bikes. Speed and dazzle.
As
I arrived, gardens blocks were already zipping to and from, joining us in the
streets and the garden.
JC,
who helped MC and organize, was there to greet everyone. The poetry
event was his idea from the previous springtime. As we circled and started
reading and sharing, JC recalled the legacies of Lower East Side
poets including Pedro
Pietri. And he read his own poems about thriving and striving, meandering
and dreaming in the city.
Thanking
the Public Space Party, Jeff Wright gave his best impersonation of Pedro Pietri. He stood recalling his adventures with the community
gardens, wondering if these really could be democratic spaces. After losing the keys to his community
garden, he created a key ceremony in which other garden supporters, gave him
their keys, calling the ritual the Key
Ceremony. He read poems about being
denied a space to share information or to gather in his own way in his life, in
his neighborhood.
As
he read, more and more friends joined us.
Kim
read poems about the planet and its struggle to survive.
Accompanied
by Eric, Monica read the poem the Word by Pablo Neruda.
The word
was born in the blood,
grew in the dark body,
beating,
and took flight
through the lips and the mouth.
Farther away and
nearer
still, still it came
from dead fathers and
from wandering races,
from lands which had
turned to stone,
lands weary of their
poor tribes,
for when grief took to
the roads
the people set out and
arrived
and married new land
and water
to grow their words
again.
And so this is the
inheritance;
this is the wavelength
which connects us
with dead men and the
dawning
of new beings not yet
come to light.
Still the atmosphere
quivers
with the first word
uttered
dressed up
in terror and sighing.
It emerged
from the darkness
and until now there is
no thunder
that ever rumbles with
the iron voice
of that word,
the first
word uttered—
perhaps it was only a
ripple, a single drop,
and yet its great
cataract falls and falls.
Later on, the word
fills with meaning.
Always with child, it
filled up with lives.
Everything was births
and sounds—
affirmation, clarity,
strength,
negation, destruction,
death—
the verb wook over all
the power
and blended existence
with essence
in the electricity of
its grace.
Human word, syllable,
flank
of extending light and
solid silverwork,
hereditary goblet
which receives
the communications of
the blood—
here is where silence
came together with
the wholeness of the
human word,
and, for human beings,
not to speak is to die—
language extends even
to the hair,
the mouth speaks
without the lips moving,
all of a sudden, the
eyes are words.
I take the word and
pass it through my senses
as though it were no
more than a human shape;
its arrangements awe
me and I find my way
through each resonance
of the spoken word—
I utter and I am and,
speechless, I approach
across the edge of
words silence itself.
I drink to the word,
raising
A word or a shining
cup;
in it I drink
the pure wine of
language
or inexhaustible
water,
maternal source of
words,
and cup and water and
wine
give rise to my song
because the verb is
the source
and vivid life—it is
blood,
blood which expresses
its substance
and so ordains its own
unwinding.
Words give glass
quality to glass, blood to blood,
and life to life
itself.
—Pablo Neruda (translated
by Alastair Reid)
Moved by Neruda’s “wavelength which connects us,” I followed.
Looking around the garden, I welcomed everyone and recalled the many
gardeners and heroes we’ve lost this year, including Matt
Power and Pete
Seeger, each of whom defended and celebrated
the gardens in their own distinct ways.
But most of all, I told everyone I wanted to recall the poems my father and I had shared before he departed to parts unknown, shuffling off this mortal coil just a month ago. So I told the story of my father, who ran away from school to become a beat poet when he first heard Howl almost six decades prior. The last time I saw Dad, we read Robert Frost together. Barely able to walk, he told me Lone Stryker was one of his favorite poems.
The Lone Stryker by Robert Frost
He knew another place, a wood,
And in it, tall as trees, were cliffs;
And if he stood on one of these,
'Twoud be among the tops of trees,
Their upper brancjes round him wreathing,
Their breathing mingled with his breathing.
If——if he stood! Enough of ifs!
He knew a path that wanted walking;
He knew a spring that wanted drinking;
A though that wanted further thinking;
A love that wanted re-renewing.
Nor was this just a way of talking
TO save him the expense of doing.
With him it boded action, deed.
Laying in bed, wanting to live and love, barely able to get up, Dad really was the thought that wanted further thinking. I told him so, looking at him for the last time last January.
Standing in the garden, I recalled calling Dad to tell him Allan Ginsberg had died in 1996. My favorite poem by Ginsberg is Kaddish, so I read the first page, recalling my father with each line.
Kaddish,
Part I
For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after--
And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing
how we suffer--
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,
prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-
swers--and my own imagination of a withered leaf--at dawn--
Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine accelerating toward Apoca-
lypse,
the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom
Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed--
like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion--
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,
trapped in its disappearance,
sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worship-
ping each other,
worshipping the God included in it all--longing or inevitability?--while it
lasts, a Vision--anything more?
From Collected Poems 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg, published by Harper
& Row. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Online
Source
It felt so good to be there with everyone. The gardens help us heal and love and care for so many others along the way. Listening to so many voices, perhaps just perhaps we were all expanding “our circle of compassion” as Einstein beseeched us to do.
But it was also time to move. JC stood reciting his homage to movement, Spoke N Word, calling us to the next garden.
So, we walked with our banner, walking north to Houston street, where we’d pause, read, and be.
Erik, who not only hangs out and documents, creating many of these wonderful photos, but who read and shared with all of us. |
I’m not usually a poet but… she was ready to try, confessed Monica who howled with love at Petit Versailes, the lovely, queer public commons just north of Houston Street.
Dada
would have liked a day like this Monica declared, reading from lawrence
ferlinghetti's untitled poem 23. With
its various very realistic unrealities each about to become too real for its
reality which is never quite enough to become Bohemia… yes dada would have
liked a day like this with its sweet
street carnival and its too real funeral just passing through it.
Peter
and Jack joined us, reading a random passage from 100
Years of Solitude. Poetry dripping
from every page, their memories lingering in time, connecting all of us to a
previous moment in time when we first read it and the life we lead before
this moment, the zigging meandering road between there and here, and in
between.
Erik,
Stacy several others read their own, highly intimate
poems on love, sadness, loneliness,
and hopes. These personal poems were some of the most
lovely of a day of many. One day, I hope we can collect them
all into one poetry chapbook for others to read in their own gardens in another
time, another city.
I think you need to go, Peter confessed, reminding us that the
poetry block was needed at El Jardin Paraiso.
So we walked over, quietly, greeting friends from decades of struggle to
preserve these spaces. Holding hands, we
joined in a spiral.
And slowly we listened, climbed the tree house, and merged, as
the dialectics of our bountiful opposites, intersected, connected, into a
synthesis of stories.
Monica suggested we read The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
together, passing the book along in, from person to person. This was a poem Monica woke with her
grandmother, who listened, hearing the words deep in her sleep, only to awake
once more, if only for a moment more.
Barbara read
Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Sitting there, I read the final lines of Kaddish, about those of us that walk
through these streets of own Lower East Side
decades prior and today.
It leaps about me, as I go out and walk the street, look back over my shoulder,
Seventh Avenue, the battlements of window office buildings shoul-
dering each other high, under a cloud, tall as the sky an instant--and
the sky above--an old blue place.
or down the Avenue to the south, to--as I walk toward the Lower East Side
--where you walked 50 years ago, little girl--from Russia, eating the
first poisonous tomatoes of America frightened on the dock
then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?--toward
Newark--
toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned ice
cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards--
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,
and learning to be mad, in a dream--what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window--and the great Key lays its head of light
on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the
sidewalk--in a single vast beam, moving, as I walk down First toward
the Yiddish Theater--and the place of poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now--Strange to have moved
thru Paterson, and the West, and Europe and here again,
with the cries of Spaniards now in the doorstops doors and dark boys on
the street, firs escapes old as you
--Tho you're not old now, that's left here with me--
Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe--and I guess that dies with
us--enough to cancel all that comes--What came is gone forever
every time--
That's good! That leaves it open for no regret--no fear radiators, lacklove,
torture even toothache in the end--
Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul--and the lamb, the soul,
in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change's fierce hunger--hair
and teeth--and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin,
braintricked Implacability.
Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you're out, Death let you out,
Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with
God, done with the path thru it--Done with yourself at last--Pure
--Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all--before the
world--
There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you've gone, it's good.
No more flowers in the summer fields of New York, no joy now, no more
fear of Louis,
and no more of his sweetness and glasses, his high school decades, debts,
loves, frightened telephone calls, conception beds, relatives, hands--
No more of sister Elanor,--she gone before you--we kept it secret you
killed her--or she killed herself to bear with you--an arthritic heart
--But Death's killed you both--No matter--
Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and
weeks--forgetting, agrieve watching Marie Dressler address human-
ity, Chaplin dance in youth,
or Boris Godunov, Chaliapin's at the Met, halling his voice of a weeping Czar
--by standing room with Elanor & Max--watching also the Capital
ists take seats in Orchestra, white furs, diamonds,
with the YPSL's hitch-hiking thru Pennsylvania, in black baggy gym skirts
pants, photograph of 4 girls holding each other round the waste, and
laughing eye, too coy, virginal solitude of 1920
all girls grown old, or dead now, and that long hair in the grave--lucky to
have husbands later--
You made it--I came too--Eugene my brother before (still grieving now and
will gream on to his last stiff hand, as he goes thru his cancer--or kill
--later perhaps--soon he will think--)
And it's the last moment I remember, which I see them all, thru myself, now
--tho not you
I didn't foresee what you felt--what more hideous gape of bad mouth came
first--to you--and were you prepared?
To go where? In that Dark--that--in that God? a radiance? A Lord in the
Void? Like an eye in the black cloud in a dream? Adonoi at last, with
you?
Beyond my remembrance! Incapable to guess! Not merely the yellow skull
in the grave, or a box of worm dust, and a stained ribbon--Deaths-
head with Halo? can you believe it?
Is it only the sun that shines once for the mind, only the flash of existence,
than none ever was?
Nothing beyond what we have--what you had--that so pitiful--yet Tri-
umph,
to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower--fed to the
ground--but made, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,
shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth
wrapped, sore--freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.
No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the
knife--lost
Cut down by an idiot Snowman's icy--even in the Spring--strange ghost
thought some--Death--Sharp icicle in his hand--crowned with old
roses--a dog for his eyes--cock of a sweatshop--heart of electric
irons.
All the accumulations of life, that wear us out--clocks, bodies, consciousness,
shoes, breasts--begotten sons--your Communism--'Paranoia' into
hospitals.
You once kicked Elanor in the leg, she died of heart failure later. You of
stroke. Asleep? within a year, the two of you, sisters in death. Is
Elanor happy?
Max grieves alive in an office on Lower Broadway, lone large mustache over
midnight Accountings, not sure. His life passes--as he sees--and
what does he doubt now? Still dream of making money, or that might
have made money, hired nurse, had children, found even your Im-
mortality, Naomi?
I'll see him soon. Now I've got to cut through to talk to you as I didn't
when you had a mouth.
Forever. And we're bound for that, Forever like Emily Dickinson's horses
--headed to the End.
They know the way--These Steeds--run faster than we think--it's our own
life they cross--and take with them.
Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, mar-
ried dreamed, mortal changed--Ass and face done with murder.
In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under
pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept.
Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless,
Father in death. Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm
hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not
light or darkness, Dayless Eternity--
Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some
of my Time, now given to Nothing--to praise Thee--But Death
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won-
derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping
--page beyond Psalm--Last change of mine and Naomi--to God's perfect
Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms!
II
Over and over--refrain--of the Hospitals--still haven't written your
history--leave it abstract--a few images
run thru the mind--like the saxophone chorus of houses and years--
remembrance of electrical shocks.
By long nites as a child in Paterson apartment, watching over your
nervousness--you were fat--your next move--
By that afternoon I stayed home from school to take care of you--
once and for all--when I vowed forever that once man disagreed with my
opinion of the cosmos, I was lost--
By my later burden--vow to illuminate mankind--this is release of
particulars--(mad as you)--(sanity a trick of agreement)--
But you stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner, and
spied a mystical assassin from Newark,
So phoned the Doctor--'OK go way for a rest'--so I put on my coat
and walked you downstreet--On the way a grammarschool boy screamed,
unaccountably--'Where you goin Lady to Death'? I shuddered--
and you covered your nose with motheaten fur collar, gas mask
against poison sneaked into downtown atmosphere, sprayed by Grandma--
And was the driver of the cheesebox Public Service bus a member of
the gang? You shuddered at his face, I could hardly get you on--to New
York, very Times Square, to grab another Greyhound--
From Collected Poems 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg, published by Harper
& Row. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Online
Source
Everyone helped me read it,
holding me as stumbled through the words, clumsy with tears.
But it felt good to read and imagine,
and see my life here in between those walking these Lower East Side streets
five decades prior who Ginsberg recalled in his prayer for the dead.
Sarah, our old friend
from Occupy Broadway, was sitting there with us, sharing her stories. She started with another by Ferlinghetti.
I Am Waiting
I am waiting for my
case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of
wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover
America
and wail
and I am
waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic
western frontier
and I am
waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its
wings
and straighten up and
fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be
fought
which will make the
world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final
withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually
awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the
Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious
revival
to sweep thru the
state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of
Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really
American
and I am waiting
to see God on
television
piped onto church
altars
if only they can
find
the right
channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to
be served again
with a strange new
appetizer
and I am perpetually
awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for my
number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army
to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be
blessed
and inherit the
earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and
animals
to reclaim the earth
as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be
devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing
anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and
planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for
lovers and weepers
to lie down together
again
in a new rebirth of
wonder
I am waiting for the
Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously
waiting
for the secret of
eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general
practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for
happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed
Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story
and tv rights
sold in advance to the
natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to
sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of
wonder
I am waiting for the
day
that maketh all things
clear
and I am awaiting
retribution
for what America
did
to Tom
Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in
Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of
innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to
come
to the final darkest
tower
and I am
waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament
conference
in a new rebirth of
wonder
I am waiting
to get some
intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my
early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings
to come again
youth’s dumb green
fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of
unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to
write
the great indelible
poem
and I am waiting
for the last long
careless rapture
and I am perpetually
waiting
for the fleeing lovers
on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up
at last
and embrace
and I am
awaiting
perpetually and
forever
We have not read any
Whitman, noted Johnathan,
reading from his perch on the tree.
Behold this
swarthy and unrefined face—these gray
eyes,
eyes,
This beard—the white
wool, unclipt upon my neck,
My brown hands, and
the silent manner of me, with-
out charm;
out charm;
Yet comes one, a
Manhattanese, and ever at parting,
kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love,
kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love,
And I, in the public
room, or on the crossing of the
street, or on the ship's deck, kiss him in return;
street, or on the ship's deck, kiss him in return;
We observe that salute
of American comrades, land
and sea,
and sea,
We are those two
natural and nonchalant persons.
Afternoon, this
delicious Ninth Month, in my forty-
first year,
first year,
I proceed, for all who
are, or have been, young
men,
men,
To tell the secret of
my nights and days,
JC finished
with a final New York poem, recalling the ways we all celebrate the needs of
our comrades.
Poem
from NYC Variations
Jim Carroll
I have walked these streets so often I could
forge the shadows of skyscrapers as they fall
to rest between the sculptured air of midtown.
Air-conditioned blood drips like rosaries
from glassy facades to the cosmopolitan eye
The fantasies of secretaries are washed to the streets
or trampled beneath thick heels along subway platforms
Engineers in orange helmets point out the flawlessness
of buildings which do not yet exist. My hands
Would drip with boredom or lust. It was time
for evening in Time's Square. There the dim-witted clouds
at once unbuttoned, revealing a nasty aperture beneath
blue cables.
forge the shadows of skyscrapers as they fall
to rest between the sculptured air of midtown.
Air-conditioned blood drips like rosaries
from glassy facades to the cosmopolitan eye
The fantasies of secretaries are washed to the streets
or trampled beneath thick heels along subway platforms
Engineers in orange helmets point out the flawlessness
of buildings which do not yet exist. My hands
Would drip with boredom or lust. It was time
for evening in Time's Square. There the dim-witted clouds
at once unbuttoned, revealing a nasty aperture beneath
blue cables.
***
The thick veins on back my forearm
like the rope of an acrobat
have risen again
like the rope of an acrobat
have risen again
As a line of demarcation
between fields of battle
which vacillate easily but with some small pain
across this flux of anguish between light and dark
past and future ash and flowering flame
between fields of battle
which vacillate easily but with some small pain
across this flux of anguish between light and dark
past and future ash and flowering flame
***
In midtown again the way you stop
Casually to finger your hair
In some gray drugstore window
Across 53rd St. The Museum of Modern Art
That poverty vault
Casually to finger your hair
In some gray drugstore window
Across 53rd St. The Museum of Modern Art
That poverty vault
I fell right through the deep there once
I felt the light of Nolde scratch beneath my fingernails
And I found poverty once more
I felt the light of Nolde scratch beneath my fingernails
And I found poverty once more
So much poverty It follows me through
subway cars
Poverty to die a death within one's own family
Poverty of the darkness across ice Poverty of cataract eyes
Poverty of young men alone behind the stairway
who practice
Alchemy inside bottle caps who know
The altruism of a last syringe.
Poverty to die a death within one's own family
Poverty of the darkness across ice Poverty of cataract eyes
Poverty of young men alone behind the stairway
who practice
Alchemy inside bottle caps who know
The altruism of a last syringe.
***
When he was young in Harlem my father
watched the shadow of St. Anne, the mother
of Our Virgin, walking with shadowed gown
round a church rotunda, white as chalk and swept
with decals of starry blue why should I not believe him?
watched the shadow of St. Anne, the mother
of Our Virgin, walking with shadowed gown
round a church rotunda, white as chalk and swept
with decals of starry blue why should I not believe him?
I cannot return. Never go back. Yet my father's word
has weight in its edges to stand straight like shields
and here I wait in the exhaust of his space and time
rolling my wrist with bandage to check the flow
of spit from the veins, the mucous music sticks
to fixtures on top these hotel dreams, parking lots
behind the Chelsea on West 22nd crowded with monolith
lungs and dew
piles of dancing shoes . . . some guitar claws.
has weight in its edges to stand straight like shields
and here I wait in the exhaust of his space and time
rolling my wrist with bandage to check the flow
of spit from the veins, the mucous music sticks
to fixtures on top these hotel dreams, parking lots
behind the Chelsea on West 22nd crowded with monolith
lungs and dew
piles of dancing shoes . . . some guitar claws.
***
Here I walk with a memory of workers in midtown
returning at day's end to the safe edge of home near water
returning at day's end to the safe edge of home near water
Streets abandoned to a purer grace, until the summit
of tall buildings is where the light of evening sleeps
of tall buildings is where the light of evening sleeps
And in the slit shadow below, blasting my way
through the taxied vapor, I finger the turbine mist
through the taxied vapor, I finger the turbine mist
I wait on the origin of night's sounds waking. I know
that here only the blind man sings, even in rain
that here only the blind man sings, even in rain
The notes of drenched violins rise like warped mirrors'
and the last clouds part slowly, like a cracked wheel.
and the last clouds part slowly, like a cracked wheel.
Finishing, the birds were singing in the trees. We should do this more often a few
noted. Barbara and Judy and I started
talking about Mayday, planning for our Mayday ride this Thursday, starting at
7:15 at Tompkins Square Park.
The afternoon was over, and we all walked home,
with the memories of all that happened before. My dad was gone,
but the friends remained from the streets, and poems
connecting all of us. I walked back to
where our romp began, grabbing my bike and looking at the gardens.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
It is Springtime and mayday was coming.
Join public space party at 7:15 :
·
Thursday, May 1st,
7:15pm Meet in Tompkins Square Park, Center, near the huge Gai, Elm Tree
|
Join Public Space Party for a Dance Ride to Celebrate
International Mayday! Let's end May Day, International Workers' Day, in the
streets, dancing together with tunes from our favorite sound bike. Dress
Festive.
There are actions taking place all day long,
including at Petit Versailles, our beloved community garden.
MAY
DAY
MAY
DAY
DEMONSTRATE &
CELEBRATE
THURSDAY MAY 1.
LE PETIT VERSAILLES GARDEN
346 EAST HOUSTON
ST.@ AVE.C
11AM.
HOUSING IS A HUMAN
RIGHT
STAND UP FOR YOUR
RIGHTS!
JOIN HOUSING
ADVOCATES, LOCAL REPRESENTATIVES AND YOUR NEIGHBOURS TO
RALLY AGAINST ONGOING
GENTRIFICATION, LANDLORD HARASSMENT, LOSS OF GARDENS
AND OUT OF CONTROL
RENT HIKES.
PRESERVE AFFORDABLE
HOUSING NOW !!
12 NOON.
JOIN US TO CELEBRATE
BELTAINE
MAY POLE DECORATING
AND DANCE.
ALL INVITED ALL WELCOME.
And
all weekend long, ht the streets for stores.
Saturday May 3rd- Secrets of Death Avenue
Walking Tour 12pm at 14th st and 9th ave. Join Occupy the Pipeline for our educational, revelatory, fun theatrical walking tour of West
Village! Sunday at 5 PM.
Kim, the poet from our walk,
posted a note about the last rehearsal for the Secret Death Ave Walking Tour.
Last night, we stood on the walkway on the
Hudson River and she swelled so high that it washed over our feet! It was
magical and calming and frightening and exciting. Mama Earth is rising. Start
belonging to her and give yourself over. Give all of your love to her. Stop the
misguided guys from hurting her. This is our tiny little perfect home floating
in an endless universe(s). We are so rare, so fragile and perfect. Money is
transient and meaningless. Community, art, love and connectivity to this
beautiful system we are a part of is the one little chance you get to genuinely
feel it and shine. Do it up! You are the only you and part of an exquisite we.
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