About the same year as this last poem.
Strange now to think of you gone without corsets and I--
while I walk on a sunny pavement of Greenwich Village,
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon.
And I've been up all night talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening
to Ray Charles, blues shout blind on the phonograph,
the rhythm, the rhythm, and your memory
in my head three years after.
And read out of Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud.
Wept, realizing how we suffer, and how
death is that remedy all singers dream of.
Sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem
or the Buddhist Book of Answers and my own imagination
of a withered leaf at dawn.
Dreaming back through life, your time and mine
accelerating toward apocalypse.
The final moment, the flower burning in the day,
and what comes after looking back on the mind
itself that saw an American city, a flash away
and the great dream of me or China--
No, I don't want to read this either.
I don't-- There is a portion I'd like to read though.
The portion in the center, I'm interested in, so--