Elegy
for Allen
Ah, Allen, you gave America a new shape & now you've lost yours
what a
long accomplished road it was from the bridge o'er Paterson Falls
through
San Francisco's Six Gallery, Prague's May King, Pentagon exorcisms,
mid-America's
Iron Horse, Chicago '68, Jessore Road, Rolling Thunder,
Rocky
Flats, cosmopolitan greetings from NYC's East 12th street,
to heaven, the
bardo, a grasshopper, a gray void, the place where all things
wise
and fair descend, the end of suffering—wherever you are,
the
most curious place in the universe.
Yesterday in your new Lower East Side
loft, I held a clear plastic bag
with
your ashes inside, fine off-white powder, only a few small bone
fragments
visible, boxed inside last Buddhist shrine.
O those armor-piercing eyes will
look out tender photogenic skull no more!
What happens to us? When did we
begin taking this trip from energetic
body-souled
beings traveling the world for democratic freedoms
and
dream-forged poetries
to old-age liver cancer bodies lying softly on hospital
cots near busy city
windows,
searching one last glimpse of old friends & sidewalk lovers,
devoting
life's last energies to finding new ways to breathe?
Why the hell did we accept
this ancient bargain? When did we sign
this
horrific contract for a few mere decades of joy?
Well, you were always
discovering a new breath, a new spiritus, a
no-money-down
person-to-person compassion,
now millions across the globe are chanting “OM”
in your honor,
now you've joined Shelley's children of light, become a portion
of the
loveliness
which once your presence made more so.
But, Allen, how you hung in there!
How you gave them hell over four
decades!
How you bowled over Howl's critics piercing thy innocent breast!
How
you practiced sanity, candor, intelligence, kindness and boundless
imagination
as your weapons!
How you mixed humor and information, utopian yearnings and
minute
particulars!
How you extended and subverted literary traditions in the most interesting
ways and
never tired of formal inventiveness!
How you revealed the academy's shower-curtain'd
secret: poetry could
be
relevant to our lives!
How you taught all nations' youth to dig through the
deadwood of
exploitation
and hypocrisy!
How you were expelled from Prague & erased off primetime radio!
How you showed that a lone human voice well-honed and courageous
could
challenge a multinational corporate bureaucracy!
How you became the Unacknowledged
Democratic Conscience
of
Cold War America!
Allen, you made me laugh a New Aware Laughter for 20
years I knew
your
work and you.
I don't think you would have remembered where we met.
Danny
Shot & I were sitting, 57 Guilden Street, New Brunswick porch,
one
fall afternoon 1976, awaiting your night's event.
A cab pulled up to Kevin
Hayes' apartment across street, you hurried out,
unloading
cardboard boxes from trunk—
your father's manuscripts stored years at
Rutgers' Alexander Library.
We went to help—your friendliness astonished,
I'd just read “Song
of
Myself” & “Howl” first time & decided try poetry—
in one
of your last poems you asked for remembrances like this—
With Danny &
Kevin, I drove you back to Manhattan that night, you
threw
out empty food wrappers & newspapers from my
lemon
orange Vega,
then took us on a radical automobile tour of historic East Village.
Months later, you answered letters Danny & I sent, took ten lines of my
manuscript—using
cross-outs, exclamation points, a few words,
a
reading list, taught my first poetry lesson—
the postcard Danny'd received
weeks earlier still implanted in memory—
each
line shd have wit, humor, imagery, perception, double-meaning,
a
new way of seeing or Poesy in it.
In 1980, I apprenticed with you July at
Naropa—in '82, you gave poems
&
funds to help Danny & I launch Long Shot magazine,
you encouraged my
poems the next fifteen years—
even after that 1986 early morning Naropa
panel where, hungover
&
nervous, I called some of your famous poetfriends crazy.
These last two weeks,
thousands of poets in dozens of countries have
told
tales of your meetings,
Allen, you were loyal & generous to friends & future
generations.
Lucky for the planet your words live on—
Lucky for those
not yet born Holy Soul Jelly Roll! still carries your baritone voice,
your
blues & holy celebrations grab onto mind's lining and refuse to let go,
your
meditative consciousness sits a crosslegged raven on our shoulders
while
we scribble odes & design activist modes,
urging us to write what we saw &
rally out of kindness.
What a beautiful new loft you bought, how sad death
arrived just a few
months
after you moved in: high ceilings, room for your office and
your
stepmother,
clean kitchen for macrobiotic scrapings, wallspace to frame all
yr futuristic
portraits—
two bathrooms, bookcases galore, prophetic volumes lining shelves from
polished
hardwood floor how many hundreds of feet up to the soul's
exit
door?
Oh Allen, you've finally joined Walt's side amid the enduring dead,
how can
that
be all bad?
now you can forget daily terrors, quit worrying which nation's
elected leader
the
CIA will topple during new terms of presidential denial,
which activist friends
will be jailed, which youthful heads will bleed from
Tompkins
Square Chicago L.A. Moscow Peking police nightstick,
where
landlords' eviction armies will helicopter next.
Like Blake's Los you gave
form to Human Error, Moloch the heavy judge,
Plutonium's
devouring ghost lingering a quarter million years,
Unchecked
Capital's skeleton sweeping homeless off the street,
now it's up to those
with flesh on bones to tame our monsters, inside and
out,
to carry your sexy wheel of syllables into peaceful battle
for the next millenium.
Death's phantom steeds have taken one more wondrous
singer—one more
sweetest
wisest soul of all our days and lands—to who knows where?
Praised
be the cosmic mystery,
Extoled the enlightened fire which outlives the initial
spark,
Exalted the echo which rebounds through the universe,
Blessed be
these tears, the tears on cheeks of millions who touched your soft
hands,
your glowing aura, your living voice, your ink'd page, your
Shambhala
coffin,
Allen, you tired your heart lungs liver running years up a zillion
flights of
creaky
lower Manhattan stairs—
I don't know what happens after death—just
that whatever's been written
is
wrong—
Wherever you are now, I hope it has an elevator. Eliot
Katz 1997 |