atalie
Jackson's fall last year from the roof of the building where
she and Neal lived, came forward in my consciousness as I began
to sketch for the large memorial portrait of the writers central
to the scene that Ginsberg had created in San Francisco. Natalie
had been so central to all our lives for her short year with
us that she seemed an integral part of any record of the time.
It was somehow her spirit, only one of all the dead I already
knew by then, that ultimately suffused the final painting.
On the floor inside my room at the Wentley
is a little brown paper bag containing six peyote buds that has
been thrown through the transom above my door. I know what they
are, because there is a note from Allen and Peter near them that's
told me how to prepare them. Allen writes to take them with ice
cream. I had no money for ice cream and I liked raw potatoes
which the note likened to their taste, so I sliced them thin
and ate them with tea. Let me tell you, peyote tastes only very
remotely like potatoes.
That trip was very low level. Inexperience
led me to expect more and fail to fully understand the wonderful
subtlety of the things that were happening. I remember the sound
of Mexican banana leaves scratching one another in warm breezes.
There are gigantic red lips, flexing like soft lipsticked muscles,
speaking to me silently from a dark tropical landscape, throbbing
in the space of their own picture plane. I think I hear Philip
Lamantia, who lives next door, drumming on air surreal with the
rhythm of his poems.
Today, January 12, 2001, I call Ira Cohen
in Minnesota where he’s gone to sit with Gregory Corso,
ailing from cancer and being cared for by his newfound daughter,
Sheri. We talk, the first time since New York of 1998 for dinner
at the presentation of AH Allen , Anna Condo’s memorial
book to endow the Ginsberg Scholarships at Naropa Institute.
How well he looked then in his velvet suit. How beautiful and
loving his voice sounds now, writing his way through death. He
lived onward from Fosters, past twenty-nine and into Poet Wisdom!
