"Sunflower Sutra."
Here, I began to attempt to combine the early newspaper
East journalistic preoccupation with facts from William Carlos
Williams, with Kerouac's idea of a fast, emotive writing,
with my own Hebrew soul.
I walked on the banks of the tin can banana dock
and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific
locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house house
hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted, rusty iron
pole, companion.
We thought the same thoughts of the souls,
bleak and blue and sad eyes surrounded by the gnarled steel
roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky.
Sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks.
No fish in that stream.
No hermits in those mounts.
Just ourselves, roomy-eyed and hung over like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the sunflower, he said.
It was a dead, gray shadow against the sky, big as a man,
sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust.
I rushed up and chanted.
It was my first sunflower.
Memories of Blake, my vision, Harlem,
and hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking,
Joe's Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages,
black, treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded,
the poems of the riverbank, condoms and pot.
Steel knives.
Nothing stainless.
Only the dank muck and the razor sharp artifacts
passing into the past.
And the gray sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly,
bleak, and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden
locomotives in its eye, corolla of bleary spikes
pushed down and broken like a battered crown.
Seeds fallen out of its face, soon to be
toothless mouth of sunny air.
Sun rays obliterated on his hairy head like a dried wire
spiderweb.
Leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem.
Gestures from the sawdust roots.
Broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs.
A dead fly in his ear.
Unholy, battered old thing you were.
My sunflower, oh my soul.
I loved you then.
The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives.
All that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin,
that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black misery,
that sooty hand, or phallus, or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt, industrial, modern.
All that civilization spotting your crazy, golden crown.
And those bleary thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below in the home pile of sand
and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery,
the guts and innards of the weeping, coughing car,
the empty lonely tin cans with their rusty tongues alack.
What more could I name?
The smoke ashes of some cock cigar,
the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breaths of cars,
worn out asses out of chairs and sphincters of dynamos.
All these entangled in your roots.
And you there standing before me in the sunset,
all your glory in your form a perfect beauty of a sunflower.
A perfect, excellent, lovely sunflower existence.
A sweet and natural eye to the new, hip moon.
Woke up alive and excited, grasping in the sunset.
Shadow.
Sunrise.
Golden monthly breeze.
How many flies buzz around you, innocent of your grime
while you curse the heavens of the railroad and your flower
soul.
Poor, dead flower.
When did you forget you were a flower?
When did you look at your skin and decide
you were an impotent, dirty, old locomotive?
The ghost of a locomotive?
The specter and shade of a once powerful mad, American
locomotive?
You will never know locomotive, sunflower.
You are a sunflower.
And you, locomotive, you are a locomotive.
Forget me not.
So I grabbed up the skeleton-thick sunflower
and stuck it at my side like a scepter.
And deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too,
and anyone who will listen.
We are not our skin of grime, we're
not dread bleak dusty, imageless locomotive.
We're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside.
We're blessed by our own seed, and golden, hairy, naked,
accomplishment bodies growing in the mad black formal sunflowers
in the sunset, spied on by our eyes
under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank
sunset Frisco hilly tin can, evening, sit down, vision.
[APPLAUSE]