Monday, August 5, 2013

thinking of Ginsberg and painting

    For my friend, Misty Brown


    Sunflower Sutra

    I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
    sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
    Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
    box house hills and cry.
    Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
    pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
    of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
    surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
    machinery.
    The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
    sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
    stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
    rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
    on the riverbank, tired and wily.
    Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
    shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
    dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
    --I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
    memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
    and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
    Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
    treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
    poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
    knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
    and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
    past--
    and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
    crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
    and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
    corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
    a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
    soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
    obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
    wire spiderweb,
    leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
    from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
    fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
    Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
    my soul, I loved you then!
    The grime was no man's grime but death and human
    locomotives,
    all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
    skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
    mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
    of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--
    modern--all that civilization spotting your
    crazy golden crown--
    and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
    eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
    home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
    bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
    of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
    tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
    more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
    cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
    milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
    & sphincters of dynamos--all these
    entangled in your mummied roots--and you there
    standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
    in your form!
    A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
    lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
    to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
    grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
    monthly breeze!
    How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
    grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
    railroad and your flower soul?
    Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
    flower? when did you look at your skin and
    decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
    the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
    shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
    You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
    sunflower!
    And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
    not!
    So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
    it at my side like a scepter,
    and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
    too, and anyone who'll listen,
    --We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
    bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
    beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
    by our own seed & golden hairy naked
    accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
    formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
    eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
    riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
    sitdown vision.

      Allen Ginsberg
      Berkeley, 1955

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