Sonata Moon; That’s a Terrapin Station
Invoke the muse.
Dare ya.
Putting your balls on the chopping block when you invoke the muse. Who are you, Virgil? You think just cuz you got a pen and paper, wine enough to last the night, a broken heart and too much education, you have the right to invoke the muse? You are calling out the gods! They might not answer. Or they might. Who knows which is worse?
Put aside the sash, throw open the window. Old glass, lead-lined and greenish. Wrap your sleeve ’round the heel of your palm and wipe the dust off. Dust will accumulate in this life. Birds outside. There are always birds outside, grackles and wrens and probing ibises. Ignore ’em. You seen one bird, you seen ’em all. There are joggers, too, and junkies and fancy fuckers and failures and postal carriers and lustful teenagers and men growing out their beards and women dreaming of sandwiches, and priests, rabbis, imams, bartenders. These souls, you should pay attention to. One of them is surely Elijah.
O-seh Shalom
B’im romav
Hu ya’ase Shalom,
Aleinu.
You’re gonna die one day, so you might as well invoke the muse. What’s the worst that can happen when the gods pay attention to you?
Adagio for Greenhorns
Robert Hunter was born in California during the Second World War II, but he wasn’t Robert Hunter. He was Robert Burns. This was the name of his father, who was a drunkard. Nice and fucked up childhood. Not like the other kids. Foster homes. Ward of the state. Mother came around for him, eventually, and he took on a new Christian name. Burns to Hunter; a verb replaced by a noun; editing is so important in poetry.
Bookish, one would assume.
Short fling with college. Who can bear a classroom when God gave us California? Met a lop-fingered beatnik at a coffeehouse named St. Michael’s Alley. (Garcia met Bobby in an alley, too. Garcia was an alley kind of cat.) If this were a story, the ‘house would be named after a different saint, a beneficent one, a goodly-hearted cherubim, but it is real life and not a story: St. Michael is the patron of all the world’s greatest assholes. There was a girl involved. There is always a girl involved.
He is not particularly gifted, instrumentally, and cannot sing that well. But he had a car, and that made his voice much sweeter. The boys fall in love. Neither of them would put it like that, but they are both dead and cannot defend themselves from errant eulogizing.
To the West. Saint Horace made it clear what young American men must do. Go to the West. Lay under the stars and feel small. Highways and byways and freeways, cars, and trucks. Shoot some speed. Wrestle with midnight, pin her to the ground. Let midnight bloody your lip, bust your nose. It is good for a man to know what it feels like to be punched, hard, in the nose.
Write a letter. People used to do that. Get one back. That used to happen.
And now California. And now the 60’s. For some, the 60’s began earlier than for others. The Mexicans and negros have reefer, but now there are white men with a new drug. These white men have vague last names, or none at all, and each has a haircut that could get a mortgage with no hassle. Paranoid fellow might even think they were spies. But, shit, ten bucks is ten bucks.
I think I took too much…
Put on a Ravi Shankar record, man.
Ah, Christ, not Ravi Shankar. Don’t we have any Floyd?
No. It’s only 1965.
Skip the early bits. Inchoate, misremembered, and overtold. Beginnings are never as important as we’re led to believe. Very few things are important as we’re led to believe.
London.
It is 1970, and so England is still in black and white and the Luftwaffe make nightly raids. We are near The City, which is ancient and inviolable, and Paddington Station, where gaps are to be minded. All the Jacks are here: Spring-Heel and Ripper and Hawksmoor. It is 1970, and so England is far more foreign than it is now. Mutant outlets cling like ticks to thin walls. There are too many newspapers. Palaces, too. No palaces in California, except for Hearst’s place, and everyone called him an asshole for building it. Marlyebone and Mayfair and secret rivers and cricket grounds. Grosvesnor Square. Mama, mama, many worlds I’ve come since I left the Tenderloin.
The poet has been deterritorialized. Whether or not he had a mustache at this point is unknown, possibly irrelevant.
The windows are open because the windows must be open. It is a sunny day, and there is no air conditioning for thousands of miles. Perhaps one would not stay up. Prop it with a book. Does it matter which book? Only if you’re a poet.
We have fine linen paper and a pen that will never be used to sign a death warrant or an autograph. A desk which sits under the light and does not wobble. Art on the walls. A rug, no carpet. There is a non-zero possibility of a cat. Generally, you find cats where you find poets.
Booze, too.
Cases of wine were wooden back then. Solid, needed a tool to crack ’em open. Another tool for the bottle. Only reason man invented tools was so he could make wine.
The magic of more-than-is-necessary! Enough for days, weeks; enough to stand a round; enough to waste on wastrels. Backed up! Larder stocked! The end will come, the dregs will pour, but not tonight. I got $700, don’t you mess with me.
And it’s just sitting there, the case of wine, sitting there on the threadbare rug next to the lumpy couch–this is 1970 in England and there is not one stick of comfortable furniture on the island–and the poet could swear he saw it glow with the gold of sunshine.
And his cup was empty, so he filled it.
And he filled it again.
The Ballet Section? I Thought I Outlawed the Ballet Section?
If I knew the way. If.
…………………
How hoary that “Rock and Roll Heaven” bullshit is. They’re back together now. That type of thinking is pernicious.
………………….
Robert Hunter never tried to sell me a goddamned thing.
………………….
Without Hunter, the Grateful Dead are an asterisk, an aside. Without Hunter, they would have remained peers to Jefferson Airplane or Quicksilver Messenger Service. Without Hunter, they would have failed.
………………….
Nine out of ten rockyroll songs are about the singer’s dick, and what he wants to do with it. Very few of those tunes from Hunter.
…………………..
Fennario is in America, somewhere. It is next to Yoknapatawpha, and south of Castle Rock and Winesburg, and west of Metropolis, and east of Little Aleppo. Fennario is in America, everywhere.
Black Peter Minuet
Being on a big-time, six-shootin’, titty-twistin’ rockyroll tour is dangerous for all souls involved, but most of all for those with nothing to do. (It’s never good for you to have nothing to do, but at least when you’re home you can get a routine established. Easy enough to get all cyclical about life.) There is no place for a poet on the bus. Everyone is doing cocaine, yelling.
Back to England. The dog, having once found half a hot dog in a bush, will return to that bush forever more. So the poet goes back to England. He plans to live off of royalties. Flaw in the plan: the band does not sell any damn records. He returns to America. Writes more poems, songs, writes more everything. He’s a scribbly little bastard. Loses his hair, gains a mustache.
The guitarist needs words, so he sends them. The guitarist sets some to music, and some he loses.
Albums of his own. His voice, mannered and folkish and so very white, and more of his words–he has so many, and some so surprising–and tours occasionally. The poet marries. The poet translates Riilke. Children arrive.
Slowly, the guitarist is dying. The poet pretends not to write about it, and the guitarist pretends to believe him; they love each other. The songs are no longer about mythical forests and golden fountains, but hotels and Los Angeles. It’s never a good sign when you start writing songs about Los Angeles. The guitarist dies in a strange bed. Perhaps this is the threshold of the story, or perhaps the door. The poet is on stage in front of so very many people, and his hands are shaking, and his pardner is dead. He reads a poem. That is all he can do, so he does it.
Life goes on, even when you don’t trust it any more.
More records, more books, more tours. More children, and then grandchildren. Long afternoons spent collaborating with bodies of water. Bob Dylan swung by, like he does. Illness, too, like it does.
Robert Hunter died in California.
Allegro My Ego
Worry his words like prayer beads; they’ll come to you when your parents die, and in your greatest successes. They are etched in there, and the bark will not heal itself even if it wanted to. Some songs are permanent; some scents can’t be lost; sometimes, the words are in just the right order.
Sometimes, the sun hits the window of a strange apartment just right.
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