Timothy Leary, Los Angeles, 1989
Hindu saying
Is Tim Leary a sadhu? And other unanswered questions,
like, do mountains move east to west
as people around a table do?
Or is “the extra man in the room” –
some of this is derived from other people –
analogous, indeed, identical to, many other…
to go back….
When you study the archaic Teutonic images
that have been preserved as we know them,
you connect the overworld and the underworld:
under the mountain, of dwarves, passageways,
what the mind perceives, believes, and the cosmos relives…
pause. And go back. The baker’s dozen is the wheel.
A spoke is a setting.
Flash on my images, people, they’re yours!
And don’t be afraid to hear what the water
is going to say to you. And if you shiver all day,
uncomfortably never forgetting the hole
and your chord in it, be a stringer, stay along,
and come out where we am in the end.
Don’t be surprised….
Whatever happens now, publisher, or
whoever deems me worthy in the end
of his decision-making process,
remember me learning here in this room,
running through some metaphysical assumptions
(to say nothing of the day, people you love
who have/haven’t gone away…).
All the things come out, you get to know.
This is a living poem, a group tone, as usual.
“I prefer sheer wrestling, not the spiral turning inward,
which it does anyway, so I go feet first, that’s all – ”
Didn’t you know? Speaking, thinking of speaking,
and dreaming (my own Platonic formula) –
noumena in the universe.
“How much for your garbage wagon?” Fair critic,
tenderize your function, because adepts of ardor,
inquisitors of hatred, are sincerely groping.
A hand frozen in the same posture,
forever seizing and holding and releasing
an object, the object of itself, the spirit,
scattered….
Hudson River Valley | April 29-30, 1969
This poem won a prize in Song-of-the-Siren
