PROLOGUE

Visiting Father & Friends

I climbed the hillside to the lady’s house.
There was Gregory, dressed as a velvet ape,
japing and laughing, elegant-handed, tumbling
somersaults and consulting with the hostess,
girls and wives familiar, feeding him like a baby.
He looked healthy, remarkable energy, up all night
talking jewelry, winding his watches, hair over his eyes,
jumping from one apartment to another.

Neal Cassady rosy-faced indifferent and affectionate
entertaining himself in company far from China
back in the USA old 1950s–1980s still kicking
his way thru the city, up Riverside Drive without a car.
He hugged me & turned attention to the night ladies
appearing disappearing in the bar, in apartments
and the street, his continued jackanapes wasting his time
& everyone else’s but mysterious, maybe up to something
good—keep us all from committing more crimes,
political wars, or peace protests angrier than wars’
cannonball noises. He needed a place to sleep.

Then my father appeared, lone forlorn & healthy
still living by himself in an apartment a block up
the hill from Peter’s ancient habitual pad, I hadn’t
noticed where Louis lived these days, somehow obliterated
his home condition from my mind, took it for granted
tho never’d been curious enough to visit—but as I’d no place
to go tonight, & wonder’d why I’d not visited him recently,
I asked could I spend the night & bed down

there with him, his place had bedroom and bath
a giant Jewish residence apartment on Riverside Drive
refugees inhabited, driven away from Europe by Hitler,
where now my father lived—I entered, he showed me his couch
& told me get comfortable, I slept the night, but woke
when he shifted his sleeping pad closer to mine I got up
—he’d slept badly on a green inch-thick dusty
foam rubber plastic mattress I’d thrown out years ago,
poor cold mat upon the concrete cellar warehouse floor—
so that was it! He’d given his bed for my comfort!