Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Don’t let that horse eat that violin cried Chagall’s mother But he kept right on painting And became famous And kept on painting The Horse With Violin In Mouth And when he finally finished it he jumped up upon the horse and rode away waving the violin And then with a low bow gave it to the first naked nude he ran across And there were no strings attached

The dog trots freely in the street and sees reality and the things he sees are bigger than himself and the things he sees are his reality Drunks in doorways Moons on trees The dog trots freely thru the street and the things he sees are smaller than himself Fish on newsprint Ants in holes Chickens in Chinatown windows their heads a block away The dog trots freely in the street and the things he smells smell something like himself The dog trots freely in the street past puddles and babies cats and cigars poolrooms and policemen He doesn’t hate cops He merely has no use for them and he goes past them and past the dead cows hung up whole in front of the San Francisco Meat Market He would rather eat a tender cow than a tough policeman though either might do And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory and past Coit’s Tower and past Congressman Doyle He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle although what he hears is very discouraging very depressing very absurd to a sad young dog like himself to a serious dog like himself But he has his own free world to live in His own fleas to eat He will not be muzzled Congressman Doyle is just another fire hydrant to him The dog trots freely in the street and has his own dog’s life to live and to think about and to reflect upon touching and tasting and testing everything investigating everything without benefit of perjury a real realist with a real tale to tell and a real tail to tell it with a real live barking democratic dog engaged in real free enterprise with something to say about ontology something to say about reality and how to see it and how to hear it with his head cocked sideways at streetcorners as if he is just about to have his picture taken for Victor Records listening for His Master’s Voice and looking like a living questionmark into the great gramaphone of puzzling existence with its wondrous hollow horn which always seems just about to spout forth some Victorious answer to everything

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of day performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap And he a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence

1. Far from the sea far from the sea of Breton fishermen the white clouds scudding over Lowell and the white birches the bare white birches along the blear night roads flashing by in darkness (where once he rode in Pop’s old Plymouth) And the birch-white face of a Merrimac madonna shadowed in streetlight by Merrimac’s shroudy waters —a leaf blown upon sea wind out of Brittany over endless oceans 2. There is a garden in the memory of America There is a nightbird in its memory There is an andante cantabile in a garden in the memory of America In a secret garden in a private place a song a melody a nightsong echoing in the memory of America In the sound of a nightbird outside a Lowell window In the cry of kids in tenement yards at night In the deep sound of a woman murmuring a woman singing broken melody in a shuttered room in an old wood house in Lowell As the world cracks by thundering like a lost lumber truck on a steep grade in Kerouac America The woman sits silent now rocking backward to Whistler’s Mother in Lowell and all the tough old Canuck mothers and Jack’s Mémère And they continue rocking And may still on stormy nights show through as a phantom after-image on silent TV screens a flickered after-image that will not go away in Moody Street in Beaulieu Street in ‘dirtstreet Sarah Avenue’ in Pawtucketville And in the Church of St. Jean Baptiste 3. And the Old Worthen Bar in Lowell Mass. at midnight in the now of Nineteen Eighty-seven Kerouackian revellers crowd the wood booths ancient with carved initials of a million drinking bouts the clouts of the Shrouded Stranger upon each wood pew where the likes of Kerouack lumberjack feinted their defiance of dung and death Ah the broken wood and the punka fans still turning (pull-cord wavings of the breath of the Buddha) still lost in Lowell’s ‘vast tragedies of darkness’ with Jack 4. And the Four Sisters Diner also known as ‘The Owl’ Sunday morning now March Eighty-seven or any year of Sunday specials Scrambled eggs and chopped ham the bright booths loaded with families Lowell Greek and Gaspé French Joual patois and Argos argot Spartan slaves escaped into the New World here incarnate in rush of blood of American Sunday morning And “Ti-Jean” Jack Kerouac comes smiling in baseball cap cocked up hungry for mass in this Church of All Hungry Saints haunt of all-night Owls blessing every booth ... 5. Ah he the Silent Smiler the one with the lumberjack shirt and cap with flaps askew blowing his hands in winter as if to light a flame The Shrouded Stranger knew him as Ti-Jean the Smiler grooking past redbrick mill buildings down by the riverrun (O mighty Merrimac ‘thunderous husher’) where once upon a midnight then young Ti-Jean danced with Mémère in the moondrowned light And rolled upon the greensward his mother and lover all one with Buddha in his arms 6. And then Ti-Jean Jack with Joual tongue disguised as an American fullback in plaid shirt crossing and recrossing America in speedy cars a Dr. Sax’s shadow shadowing him like a shroudy cloud over the landscape Song of the Open Road sung drunken with Whitman and Jack London and Thomas Wolfe still echoing through a Nineteen Thirties America A Nineteen Forties America an America now long gone except in broken down dusty old Greyhound Bus stations in small lost towns Ti-Jean’s vision of America seen from a moving car window the same as Wolfe’s lonely sweeping vision glimpsed from a coach-train long ago (‘And thus did he see first the dark land’) And so Jack in an angel midnight bar somewhere West of Middle America where one drunk madonna (shades of one on a Merrimac corner) makes him a gesture with her eyes a blue gesture and Ti-Jean answers only with his eyes And the night goes on with them And the light comes up on them making love in a parking lot 7. In the dark of his fellaheen night in the light of the illuminated Stations of the Cross and the illuminated Grotto down behind the Funeral Home by roar of river where now Ti-Jean alone (returned to Lowell in one more doomed Wolfian attempt to Go Home Again) gropes past the Twelve Stations of the Cross reciting aloud the French inscriptions in his Joual accent which makes the plaster French Christ laugh and cry as He hefts His huge Cross up the Eternal Hill And a very real tear drops in the Grotto from the face of the stoned Virgin 8. Light upon light The Mountain keeps still 9. Hands over ears He steals away with the Bell. . . . Writ in Lowell and Conway and Boston Mass. and San Francisco March-April 1987

October – November 1975 Autobus on Paseo de la Reforma with destination signs: bellas artes insurgentes .Exactamente. Just what’s needed: Insurgent Arts.Poesía Insurgente. This is not it ... 1 Bus to Veracruz via Puebla + Xalapa ... Adobe house by highway, with no roof and one wall, covered with words: la luz del mundo . 2 Passing through Puebla late Sunday afternoon. A band concert in a plaza next to a Ferris wheel — I have passed through many places like this, I have seen the toy trains in many amusement parks. When you’ve seen them all you’ve seen One. 3 Halfway to Xalapa a great white volcano snow peak looms up above the hot altiplano— White god haunting Indian dreams. 4 A boy and three burros run across a stubble field, away from the white mountain. He holds a stick. There is no other way. 5 Deep yellow flowers in the dusk by the road, beds of them stretching away into darkness. A moon the same color comes up. 6 As the bus turns + turns down the winding hill, moon swings wildly from side to side. It has had too many pathetic phallusies written about it to stand still for one more. 7 In Xalapa I am a head taller than anyone else in town — A foot of flesh and two languages separate us. 8 At a stand in the park at the center of Xalapa I eat white corn on the cob with a stick in the end, sprinkled with salt, butter, grated cheese + hot sauce. The dark stone Indian who hands it to me has been standing there three thousand years. 9 I’m taking this trip from Mexico City to the Gulf of Mexico and back without any bag or person — only what I can carry in my pockets. The need for baggage is a form of insecurity. 10 Two hours in this town and I feel I might live forever (foreign places affect me that way). The tall church tower tolls its antique sign: pray . 11 In early morning in the great garden of Xalapa, with its terraces and immense jacaranda trees, pines + palms, there are black birds with cries like bells, and others with hollow wooden voices like gourds knocked together. The great white volcano shimmers far off, unreached by the rising sun. 12 Brown men in white palmetto cowboy hats stand about the fountains in groups of three or four, their voices lost to the hollow-sounding birds. Along a sunlit white stone balustrade, student lovers are studying each other,novios awaiting the day. The sun beats down hot and melts not the mountain. 13 On the bus again to Veracruz, dropping down fast to flat coast. A tropical feeling — suddenly coffee plantation + palms — everything small except the landscape, horses the size of burros, small black avocados, small strong men with machetes — each still saying to himself Me llamo yo.

Away above a harborful of caulkless houses among the charley noble chimneypots of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines a woman pastes up sails upon the wind hanging out her morning sheets with wooden pins O lovely mammal her nearly naked breasts throw taut shadows when she stretches up to hang at last the last of her so white washed sins but it is wetly amorous and winds itself about her clinging to her skin So caught with arms upraised she tosses back her head in voiceless laughter and in choiceless gesture then shakes out gold hair while in the reachless seascape spaces between the blown white shrouds stand out the bright steamers to kingdom come

I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day watching the champs of the Dante Billiard Parlor and the French pinball addicts. I am leading a quiet life on lower East Broadway. I am an American. I was an American boy. I read the American Boy Magazine and became a boy scout in the suburbs. I thought I was Tom Sawyer catching crayfish in the Bronx River and imagining the Mississippi. I had a baseball mit and an American Flyer bike. I delivered the Woman’s Home Companion at five in the afternoon or the Herald Trib at five in the morning. I still can hear the paper thump on lost porches. I had an unhappy childhood. I saw Lindbergh land. I looked homeward and saw no angel. I got caught stealing pencils from the Five and Ten Cent Store the same month I made Eagle Scout. I chopped trees for the CCC and sat on them. I landed in Normandy in a rowboat that turned over. I have seen the educated armies on the beach at Dover. I have seen Egyptian pilots in purple clouds shopkeepers rolling up their blinds at midday potato salad and dandelions at anarchist picnics. I am reading ‘Lorna Doone’ and a life of John Most terror of the industrialist a bomb on his desk at all times. I have seen the garbagemen parade in the Columbus Day Parade behind the glib farting trumpeters. I have not been out to the Cloisters in a long time nor to the Tuileries but I still keep thinking of going. I have seen the garbagemen parade when it was snowing. I have eaten hotdogs in ballparks. I have heard the Gettysburg Address and the Ginsberg Address. I like it here and I won’t go back where I came from. I too have ridden boxcars boxcars boxcars. I have travelled among unknown men. I have been in Asia with Noah in the Ark. I was in India when Rome was built. I have been in the Manger with an Ass. I have seen the Eternal Distributor from a White Hill in South San Francisco and the Laughing Woman at Loona Park outside the Fun House in a great rainstorm still laughing. I have heard the sound of revelry by night. I have wandered lonely as a crowd. I am leading a quiet life outside of Mike’s Place every day watching the world walk by in its curious shoes. I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn. That Bridge was too much for me. I have engaged in silence exile and cunning. I flew too near the sun and my wax wings fell off. I am looking for my Old Man whom I never knew. I am looking for the Lost Leader with whom I flew. Young men should be explorers. Home is where one starts from. But Mother never told me there’d be scenes like this. Womb-weary I rest I have travelled. I have seen goof city. I have seen the mass mess. I have heard Kid Ory cry. I have heard a trombone preach. I have heard Debussy strained thru a sheet. I have slept in a hundred islands where books were trees. I have heard the birds that sound like bells. I have worn grey flannel trousers and walked upon the beach of hell. I have dwelt in a hundred cities where trees were books. What subways what taxis what cafes! What women with blind breasts limbs lost among skyscrapers! I have seen the statues of heroes at carrefours. Danton weeping at a metro entrance Columbus in Barcelona pointing Westward up the Ramblas toward the American Express Lincoln in his stony chair And a great Stone Face in North Dakota. I know that Columbus did not invent America. I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds. They should all be freed. It is long since I was a herdsman. I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day reading the Classified columns. I have read the Reader’s Digest from cover to cover and noted the close identification of the United States and the Promised Land where every coin is marked In God We Trust but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves. I read the Want Ads daily looking for a stone a leaf an unfound door. I hear America singing in the Yellow Pages. One could never tell the soul has its rages. I read the papers every day and hear humanity amiss in the sad plethora of print. I see where Walden Pond has been drained to make an amusement park. I see they’re making Melville eat his whale. I see another war is coming but I won’t be there to fight it. I have read the writing on the outhouse wall. I helped Kilroy write it. I marched up Fifth Avenue blowing on a bugle in a tight platoon but hurried back to the Casbah looking for my dog. I see a similarity between dogs and me. Dogs are the true observers walking up and down the world thru the Molloy country. I have walked down alleys too narrow for Chryslers. I have seen a hundred horseless milkwagons in a vacant lot in Astoria. Ben Shahn never painted them but they’re there askew in Astoria. I have heard the junkman’s obbligato. I have ridden superhighways and believed the billboard’s promises Crossed the Jersey Flats and seen the Cities of the Plain And wallowed in the wilds of Westchester with its roving bands of natives in stationwagons. I have seen them. I am the man. I was there. I suffered somewhat. I am an American. I have a passport. I did not suffer in public. And I’m too young to die. I am a selfmade man. And I have plans for the future. I am in line for a top job. I may be moving on to Detroit. I am only temporarily a tie salesman. I am a good Joe. I am an open book to my boss. I am a complete mystery to my closest friends. I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day contemplating my navel. I am a part of the body’s long madness. I have wandered in various nightwoods. I have leaned in drunken doorways. I have written wild stories without punctuation. I am the man. I was there. I suffered somewhat. I have sat in an uneasy chair. I am a tear of the sun. I am a hill where poets run. I invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes who made letters with their legs. I am a lake upon a plain. I am a word in a tree. I am a hill of poetry. I am a raid on the inarticulate. I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale. For I am a still of poetry. I am a bank of song. I am a playerpiano in an abandoned casino on a seaside esplanade in a dense fog still playing. I see a similarity between the Laughing Woman and myself. I have heard the sound of summer in the rain. I have seen girls on boardwalks have complicated sensations. I understand their hesitations. I am a gatherer of fruit. I have seen how kisses cause euphoria. I have risked enchantment. I have seen the Virgin in an appletree at Chartres And Saint Joan burn at the Bella Union. I have seen giraffes in junglejims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances of the world. I have seen the Venus Aphrodite armless in her drafty corridor. I have heard a siren sing at One Fifth Avenue. I have seen the White Goddess dancing in the Rue des Beaux Arts on the Fourteenth of July and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy picking her nose in Chumley’s. She did not speak English. She had yellow hair and a hoarse voice I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day watching the pocket pool players making the minestrone scene wolfing the macaronis and I have read somewhere the Meaning of Existence yet have forgotten just exactly where. But I am the man And I’ll be there. And I may cause the lips of those who are asleep to speak. And I may make my notebooks into sheaves of grass. And I may write my own eponymous epitaph instructing the horsemen to pass.