"A Letter to Bob Kaufman" by Neeli Cherkovski

  At the Cafe Trieste, North Beach, San Francisco, 1975. 

Left to right: Allen Ginsberg, Harold Norse, Jack Hirschman, 

Michael McClure & Bob Kaufman. Photo by Diana Church, from

http://haroldnorse.com/tag/bob-kaufman

A LETTER TO BOB KAUFMAN

(For Bill Morgan)

Do you hear me, Bobby Kaufman, I

push a crate of olives

uphill, it’s Telegraph Hill, my days are numbered

and so it’s time, we’ll eat again

at the  Wacky Way and drink

at Li Po Bar, and you will stumble home

many starry Van Gogh nights, most impeccable man

of Bayou Saint John, come, come, come love, 

come bouncing your T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens,

Federico Garcia Lorca balls up and down Grant Avenue

until the gendarmes disarm you

and take you downtown

Do you remember my genius rebel black rabbi

old union organizing Five Spot dread of a dream

when I was leaving the jail, freed by the mayor

who had placed a call and you were being brought in

for public drunkenness, “go home, Go home, I’ll see you

in the morning,” you said

and there you were, a thin and wiry miracle

before the door of Caffe Trieste

singing “Prufrock”: and whispering in a grating whisper:

“Music is feeling then, not sound,” o Bobby

I see you on the cover of every book

in my library, I find your words in all the books of poems,

I believe it when you die and we sprinkle your ashes

on San Francisco Bay one clear afternoon

tossing sad beatitudes astern, Ferlinghetti in Greek

Sailor’s cap telling me he’ll retire someday

and live in a boat tied to the docks

“Poets don’t retire,” I told Lawrence.

“But I’ll be old.”

“They don;t grow old, Lawrence, they grow

ancient,” and now he’s 93 and you

are floating in the Bay waters

as it rains.  The Li Po still exists, no one knows

where Eileen is, your wife, mother of you son,

and Lynn is gone, she who called one morning

to say, “The poet Bob Kaufman is dead.”

now it’s March, 2012,

we call you the golden sardine and

the ancient rain. it’s raining so hard

right now,” Oh Bobby, I live with a doctor

from The Philippines, we are on the south slope

of Bernal Hill, time bends, time bleeds,

I love to make your bed at Harwood Alley

which now has your name

in a distant long-ago past Oz and Xanadu

and see you curled up in there

against a passage, in favor of the deep 

in San Francisco Bay

Neeli Cherkovski

16 March 2012

http://www.neelicherkovski.com/

Neeli Cherkovski

Neeli Cherkovski (Santa Monica, CA, 1945) has written many books of poetry, including: From the Canyon Outward, the award-winning Leaning Against Time, Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Animal; two biographies, Bukowski: A Life and Ferlinghetti; his book, Whitman's Wild Children, a collection of critical memoirs, has become an underground classic. Since 1975, Neeli has lived and worked in San Francisco. His papers are housed at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

His latest book is "From the Middle Woods:" http://www.amazon.com/From-Middle-Woods-Neeli-Cherkovski/dp/1883197074/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332272221&sr=1-5