What does Poetry
of the Golden Gate do
when its look,
its spell, is cast—
across the world which it knows
but little or not that much?
Far and into Russia
from those City Lights,
across a dozen of zones of space
and time,
so distant and so vast,
from behind a
window of a cable car
with sunlit whiffs from whitish hills,
orange
orchards and wineries
under the skirts and scrawls
of
the low-laid towns
where the Spring
is always close to
becoming—permanent.
That poetry thinks
well, like Kerouac,
the poet, a new centaur,
the one who died
of St. Petersburg,
even
though in Florida—
and it thinks of “a yakking blond
with
an awful, way wide smile,”
willing to grasp
and panhandle
even
this Beatnik & Bohemian
with another beer
Butt and Bud,
and he—the poet—would preach,
would talk and
bubble—
hiccup glasses
with the spirit
and zanism pure
to her display
echoed and the charm,
brimming with corn field heat
and Midwest dust
in the dark that
closes
on a deal—
per some gossip,
& high up star-crossed at the bar.
And there the keeper of the Golden
Gate
Suddenly
saw a man voiceless, oddly depthless,
a chunk and parcel of “the winter sad and broken—
in late cold March,”
a
Russian boxer with a brand of “lostness,
something grim and
Slavic”—reaper-like,
nay, witless
and
“so helpless”—
to make one shudder
from a deadly frozen touch
by
a tomb that blackly gapes
and blankly stares
underneath and nevertheless nearby
the coldest, brutal, lifeless
stone,
a
man-monument—to “old awful sickness”
in which life, a rose, or a breath
of soul
are
not there anymore
than the stink and
gagging pong
of life drained and gutted and life
darkly decomposed.
Oh, what happened to Tchaikovsky?
Or
to Rimski-Korzakov?
Or where did those Chekhov’s
cherries,
their rosy blossoms,
fly
and go?
Or
did perhaps Pushkin himself
trade
his lyre
for a pat on shoulders
with
a mug of moldy kvas
from
some pimp or Putinist oligarch
who was merely one day early
a big shot, a true
communist,
with
a car and a tapped telephone
and one growling, mighty baritone,
and was duly checked and verified?
Where did the lyric wane?
Did
it go like Onegin’s dull and stupid Moon
that could never pardon
the
Plebs—the Bolsheviks
their crimes against the
mores
of French libertines
or their communist sins
against the finest
soirée
etiquette
or their lack of faith in justice
extorted
and exacted
by
the priests of Israel
from the hussies and the slaves?
Where did the ship with Scarlet Sails
and
with the dream
of marrying a nobleman,
her
secret English captain,
turn so devious and wily
for a poor fisherman’s Russian girl
even if the dons and goons
celebrate now every year
the ship’s arrival in
triumph
as the sign of union
and
the New and Golden
Age of Holy Saturn,
even if callous, vicious,
harsh—
like anything that ditched and trampled
conscience,
goodness and a heart?
Once
in Russia, once upon a recent time,
life was sung and thought
to be of light,
when,
in a whisper
that
would usher a burst of flare
made, yet quickly hushed—
a teacher rather old and,
therefore, still a believer,
unlike all the others—already much jaded types,
told
us at some now forgotten lecture
that the USSR was the first and only
where
the Romantics came to build
what Campanella wanted—
a chapel of humanity renewed—
a country of the Sun.
Once
upon a time in Russia
a country was
that
of heroic Titans,
but those were the first to die
and the first who
had been sacrificed
so
that, below and down
their absence, death and prize
left
a lethal gap,
a growing vacant space
from which worthless scum
has
slowly grown and bred its spawn
from
a well kept---underground,
so meticulously served and protected
down
to Hell and all the way
from above
thanks to those late at
night
gentlemen’s agreements—
on surrender or “convergence,”
the greatest sting and power grab.
And the land, as Ferlinghetti noted
from the blackness
of
a bleak—dark March,
from loneliness
and
midnight Moscow airport,
back in 67,
was the realm of Stalingrads,
but
now—already gutted,
for the poet-diagnostician—
done and spirit-broken,
a
concrete coffin
with
a flake,
a shiver of dying—failing coughing
of a Poe-like victim
who
was once loved, but now,
being
buried, and still so early,
gives the living a bout of nausea
with creeping dread.
And in that spirit,
in
memoriam already
and
post mortem
on
the scanner of a Beatnik
who listens always for the inside vibes,
the
land of the Victors
from
wars colossal
was already hanged up,
nailed—
and
dried,
and Judases, the highest
apparatchiks
with the rotten and willing
KGB smarts
started
taking from the carcass
their piece of flesh and fill and cut.
Once upon a time in Russia
the heroes and past glory
turned to shadows
took off and flew
off with silent cranes above
from
the scythes and sickles
of other fruitless Falls—
from the land had been theirs
just a while ago
and
still so close
like the eve of yesterday.
Oh,
no, just a while ago,
Russia
wasn’t yet
this
hollowed land,
it wasn’t yet repainted—
with
drab on gray,
being
still a home
where life was lived
and lovingly held
to have a meaning,
its
deep and true,
own—ennobling sense,
and
like an epiphany
of a poem,
both natural and divine,
its
meaning which was struck
in
the soul like a writ in gold
stood
firm—upright
and
was serious
and still sincere
in
being bent and set
to ascend and climb—
and then—then
it
was swiped and swapped
as
the country’s biosphere
started to change
down
to rats and pigs and slime—
who
carry Saturnian watches,
a
self-adoring decoration
of their rank and pride
made
to the likeness of an eyeless,
fascist skull:
“N’est-ce pas, monsieur Peskov,
playboy et porte-parole de Poutine?”
And that’s where Ferlinghetti
had already smuggled
more
than the line
about “heroin at Taganka”
into
his poem on Moscow
“in
the wilderness”
(that’s
where Satan comes
to a Son of God
on
a fasting diet,
a propos please do note
the sight of an awakening
of the “Kremlin’s horny head
at the poem’s “gut”—its “static” end).
Right from the start
Ferlinghetti
speaks of Segovia—
in Russia’s center, eclipsed heart,
and its “dark ways with
black boulevards,”
and Segovia is McLuhan’s
message
that “has no message”—
for “he is his own message,”
spinning on the wheels of
minds,
and way better than on panzer tigers &
leopards,
like Kali’s whirling swastika—
To
Ferlinghetti’s ears
this Segovia says and means
Nada—
“no meaning”—
for Russia anymore,
and “Segovia bursts thru,
and
Segovia’s hands grasped
Russia’s
steering wheel,
the dark bus” full of dead souls—
“Gogol’s Dark People,”
“Segovia
comes!” “He comes!”
Ferlinghetti
sounds alarm,
so loud and late—
in
the poet’s deafened isolation.
“Segovia keeps on coming & coming
thru
the Russian winters.”
So
who or what
is this nightly ghost
who is “no Goya and no Picasso”—
but who “might have slept
with Franco” too?
Why, Segovia means
(in
Celtic) Victory,
a kin of German Sieg,
the root of which hailed—intoned
overpowering
and absolute possession
of a
country or a woman— or a soul
like
a gush, a flood,
an overriding flow.
And in a nod of seeming mock
Segovia¸ Ferlinghetti’s brooding ghastly, undead
ghost,
warns
his “generation marked
for
result”:
“All that is lost
must be looked for once more.”
Surely—
in the Underworld,
while my music streams
through the tremble
of this heart on shivered—
subtly troubled strings.
“O hope, O Pope! O Nope!”
wrote
Kerouac
Those are the pawns that pawn the country,
whether
it is the Father, Mother—
or another for whom millions
once
fearlessly suffered, fought and died—
while building, teaching, loving
in
one another—a strong, brave spirit
and its godly spark.
But now…what now?
The
spirit and its spark
have
been puttined,
put down—like an animal
by
someone who had it
and had enough
and now—wants to break and abuse other ones,
with
new fresh blood—
For Russia has been
puttanized.
And put on (fire) sale.
In the spate of some old sickness,
“helpless lostness—“
by which nations end…
while the Beatniks sail and blaspheme
as
God, the Poet, conceived—willed,
smuggling souls and spirits
back—into
the bottles of the songs and poems
from which only voices who rebel,
the
beat and free, do sip and drink
in
this worldly night,
and in the one huge emptiness
that breeds in man
horny heads and beasts
and
“monsters’ great gut mouths”—
those poets do their part and dance
and
are dancing still
their vertigo Soleares
and
new Orphic Sorelas,
like heels to Heaven lifting all
that
hasn’t been yet
either sold or nailed.
For even now
as
in any then
the
Zen of Transcendental Brilliance
can be and may combine, and do it well,
a
wonder on the tap,
jazz of bodies
with souls that nip and snap
the vile—the ugly
caught
in damning and in the Beatniks’ spells
so that beauty fresh—
may
pass above the arch of the Golden Gate
and do once more
what
it knows and does the best—
its
old-fashioned good old show and
tell!
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