The Canticle of Jack Kerouac

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