EARTH ~

Billy Batman & Kirby Doyle

Poem To A Mountain Girl

Slowly, past this day, you sleep
and as you lightly breathe a river burns from me...
all the final voices forever said —


and in your sleep I awake, here,
have eaten an orange,
have gone to the creek and bathed
listening to its thin and liquid speech,
its joy to run so free and clean.


Now, returning to this ragged tent,
sanctuary to your sleep, your real sleep,
I wish for your waking
so that we together could take cool pause
at the hidden pond I found downstream,
our bodies quick and chilled by the water,
our bodies breathing — holding.


Now, here as pen point and shadow
touch this page
I look up almost stunned to
know that from your sleep you have loved me,
and from my awakening I have loved you back.


. . .


Karma
karman; Sanskrit; action —
root — KR, "to act"
Am I flower
--to be fancied of
clouds —
--this pure staring of
faces?
--Am I so overheated
I fume the angels,
the very choirs themselves?
I may speak of angels,
may I not,
for they speak of me —
The gates of Pan's gardens are
never closed


. . .


Come lover light
in my dawn —
come lover dawn
to my bedded cheek
come light in my dawn —


step across me
so that scent of hem
and any flower
that thou art
brings me to the
window to bless thy
leaving till
darkness brings
thee to haunt me.


Come dawn lover
to window rise
thy voice in darkest
dawn —
come upon me
by mountain shine
by quickest beam of
early light, the
sun!
thy lover ever
come down in me.
Hand me by moan
thy face in faintest
air
that kiss
abd breath still
upon me —
with heart within
my head
and my eyes to win
thee —
Come dawn lover
and light in me.


Man mourns
that which he is
and loves that which he is not.
His lover must always
come endlessly
from our eternity;
come flowing as a special
message of you and me.
O come down
dawn lover —
thy one love
upon all is our need.
O come down lover on
we


. .


from the silent world


It is the morning
I eat for breakfast
that yellow meal
of corn within
a white crock bowl —


O foods of my soul,
the wind that scatters
the near spirits
through the trees,
the wind that moves
processionally our ancestors
moves through me.


. . .


from Lyric Poems
(City Lights 1988)

A TRUE BLUE SAN FRANCISCO POET WHO WAS BORN IN SAN FRANCISCO (1932-2003 ). HIS FIRST BOOK OF POEMS WAS SAPPHOBONES (POETS HOUSE, 1966). HE ALSO WROTE PROSE ~ HAPPINESS BASTARD ( 1968) ~ LIKE JACK KEROUAC'S ON THE ROAD, THE TEXT WAS COMPOSED ON ONE CONTINUOUS SCROLL ON A TYPEWRITER. THOSE THAT KNEW HIM NEVER FORGOT HIM; THE REST OF THE WORLD GETS THE UNFORGETTABLE POEMS.