It’s national poetry month and there’s a poem I’ve been meaning to dig for that crosses my mind every time I make the trek up I-70 to Columbia or Kansas City. I tried to find an online version to cut and paste, but failing that I have decided to retype it in full as gesture of engagement with Ginsberg and a reminder to myself of that odd time in graduate school where we took over the quad and read poetry nonstop for three days.
Kansas City to St. Louis (by Allen Ginsberg)
…Funky barn, black hills approaching Fulton
where Churchill rang down the Curtain
on Consciousness
and set a chill which overspread the world
one icy day in Missouri
not far from the Ozarks-
Provincial ears heard the Spenglerian Iron
Terror Pronouncement
Magnificent Language, they said,
for country ears-
St Louis calling St Louis calling
Twenty years ago,
Thirty years ago
the Burroughs School
Pink Cheeked Kenney with fine blond hair,
his almond eyes aristocrat
gazed,
Morphy teaching English and Rimbaud
at midnight to the fauns
W.S.B. leather cheeked, sardonic
waiting for change of consciousness
unnamed in those days-
coffee, vodka, night for needles,
young bodies
beautiful unknown to themselves
running around St. Louis
on a Friday evening
getting drunk in awe and honor of the
terrific future these
red dry trees at sunset go thru two decades later
They could’ve seen
the animal branches, wrinkled to the sky
& known the gnarled prophecy to come,
if they’d opened their eyes outa the whisky-haze
in Mississippi riverfront bars
and gone into the country with a knapsack to
smell the ground.
Oh grandfather maple and elm!
Antique leafy old oak of Kingdom City in the purple light
come down, year after year,
to the tune
of mellow pianos.
Salute, silent wise ones,
Cranking powers of the ground,
awkward arms of knowledge
reaching blind above the gas station
by the high TV antennae
Stay silent, ugly Teachers
let me & the Radio yell about Vietnam and mustard gas…
The hero surviving his own murder,
his own suicide, his own
addiction, surviving his own
poetry, surviving his own
disappearance from the scene-
returned in new faces, shining
through the tears of new eyes.
New small adolescent hands
on tiny breasts,
pale silken skin at the thighs,
and the cherry-prick raises hard
innocent heat pointed up
from the muscular belly
of Basketball highschool English class spiritual Victory ,
made clean at midnight in the bathtub of old City,
hair combed for love-
millionaire body from Clayton or spade queen from E st louis
laughing together in the TWA lounge
Blue-lit airfields into St Louis
past billboards ruddy neon,
looking for an old hero renewed,
a new decade-
Hill-wink of houses,
Monotone road gray bridging the streets
thin bones of aluminum sentineled dark
on the suburban hump bearing high wires
for thought to traverse
river & wood, from hero to hero-
Crane all’s well, the wanderer returns
from the west with his Powers,
the Shaman with his beard
in full strength
the longhaired Crank with subtle harmonious voice
enters city after city
to kiss the eyes of your high school sailors
and make laughing Blessing
for a new Age in America
spaced with concrete but Souled by yourself
with Desire,
or like yourself of perfect Heart, adorable
and adoring its own millioned population
one by one self-wakened
under the radiant signs
of Power stations stacked above the river
highway spanning highway,
bridged from suburb to suburb.
March 1966
