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there was always something between us
your glass of red wine
my eyes full of tears
on the day you entered history
carrying a sack of manuscripts on your back
I watched you like someone
who has been watching a door for twenty years
sees it suddenly blow open
admit a breath of snow and stars
and then blow shut again
perhaps for a lifetime
I watched you lay your athlete's body down
across the railroad earth
to make a bridge for souls
I saw you give your manhood
so generations could wake up from a death
that only you could see with such sad clarity
I watched with tears
for you who blew into the dead winter
of my young womanhood
fresh from America
and filled me with a sound like children laughing
and loved my morning song
were not at peace
I saw it in your eyes
the road ahead of you led through the abyss
you bowed your head and went on through
no time for simple joy
it's all a dream, you said
by dying you proved yourself right
there's nothing between us now
as you pore over the endless scroll of life
and your cats sleep in the sun
the image fades into the light
faint brush strokes on the blinding page
The Responsibility of Allen Ginsberg
(for a friend who said she couldn't put "Allen Ginsberg" and "responsibility"
in the same sentence)
Clearly I have a different definition of the word
I think Allen was one of the most responsible people I've known
He was responsible to his Muse
He was responsible to his friends
He was responsible to all the poets who got busted for smoking grass and
who he bailed out when he was living in a cold water walkup on nothing a year
He was responsible to his job which was waking people up telling the truth
and making his life into poems
He was responsible to all the scared gay guys who now aren't scared any more
He was responsible to the people who still aren't ashamed to call themselves liberals or even socialists
He was responsible to New York San Francisco Denver Mexico Canada and all
the continent in between
He was responsible to the King's English and the queens
He was responsible to Blake and Whitman, to Kerouac and Burroughs and
Cassady, to Corso and Rimbaud and Artaud
He was responsible to the future which is more than you can say for the
motherfuckers who run this country from the president on down (or rather up)
He was responsible to all the kids who burned their draft cards and went to
Canada and to the pacifists of old and to the pacifists who weren't even born yet
He was responsible to Lenny Bruce and free speech and the Bill of Rights
and the ACLU
He was responsible to all the people who got electric shock treatments in
the fifties and who died insane anyway
He was responsible to his mother Naomi who served him uncooked fish and an
inedible childhood and died in Greystone State Mental Hospital eli eli lama
sabachthani
He was responsible to all of us including people who never heard of him and
people who've heard of him but never read him and people who've read him but
can't spell his name
He was responsible to Life
He was responsible to America and we should be so lucky to have one like
him again
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"Sunday Morning" is the first chapter of The Awakener, Helen Weaver's recently completed memoir of Jack Kerouac and the fifties. As a professional literary translator, Helen Weaver has rendered some fifty books from the French. Her translation of The Selected Writings of Antonin Artaud was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is co-author and general editor of The Larousse Encyclopedia of Astrology.
Her book about animal communication, The Daisy Sutra: Conversations
with my Dog, was published in 2001. For further information, go to www.daisysutra.com.
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