Woodland Coastal Plain Roaming up to Piedmont- Where I Once Began

(Note- I’ve been reading the biography of Allen Ginsberg and keep remembering and forgetting and remembering how far back I’ve wanted to be a poet. The guy was amazing, silly and serious. A politician, an advocate for friends and the common man. A member of the street and the academy. He desperately wanted to be famous and was a fan and friend of others like himself. I met him and talked to him in line at a book signing and poetry reading at Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago on December 1st 1988 where he read from White Shroud. He talked directly to me, like I was a person he had just happened to meet- which I was! He signed my book ‘AH ‘ and then wrote his signature underneath. I looked at it puzzled and said “AH?- What’s that?” (thinking plainly it should be AG). He engaged me with a smile and said “Say it!”….”Ahhhh!” He said it for me, encouraging me to join him. “Ahhh!” I think I followed his lead. “It feels good!” he explained. I can still see him smiling at me, encouraging me, breathing with me. Ah indeed. For this reason I can’t believe he ever died. And there he had seduced another young college boy, who walked away seconds later. This poem is for him).

forest of my youth

diffuse light

mayflower frenzy

dinosaur hole

crouched against the earth

in a plywood-earthen fort

the bum musk

cleansed by a spring in bloom

desolate weed tree

patch of an old field

tick strewn waist high grass

abandoned path

I paced the woods

I saw her across the creek

embracing a new love

a different time

I crouched in darkness

phantom shadows on a high balcony

I slept in the leaves

when the world closed

I mapped your hide

mother of woodland

nest of the old tribe

fallen tree

haunt of the night bird

smoke of the lost brother

the shackle of the rusted camp

the stamp of the milk bottle

rotten porch of the fish shack

neck of the eagle branch

the golden hound

whose got em on the run

– has he?

I post his name

in an icy slick of storm winter day

I hide in electric heater warmth

I drove to a distant city

unable to make it

hauled back by a faint agreement

a steep drive

with a running start

a forgotten plan

a place to mourn

a cot to lay on

an old coin collection

a deep pit to sleep in

driven by the leaves

afternoon shadows

the light through the trees

it brought me through

slack-jawed

and lifted me

to my knees