By 1959 the only labels that she wore all said drip dry,
but as I peered through the sliding pocket door
into her master bedroom, there was Mom
holding against her slip a satin blue Coco Chanel.
She smiled in the floor length mirror\ I swear that dress smiled too.

Instinctively, I knew there must have been a time,
when that dress could tell a story that would be sensational.
Then she sighed, re-folded it and replaced it in the cedar chest.
Clothes are always designed for the young, and
unless it's worn, a dress has no life of its own.

Nowadays, when I see the ocean foam
slick the beach like a colossal latte,
when the autumn forests change
their primary colors playing leaf-frog,
when the jonquils fight up through
springtime snow-melt in defiant coalescence,
I remember that last day I saw you,
your *** swaying in those white shorts,
a mesmerizing metronomic heat in pants.
Ordinarily, I would not speak such things aloud,
but then, regret tends to amplify
walking empty streets at night
with only icy stares from stars to reprove me.
Eventually, I'll slumber beneath my satin comforter,
and dreams will dance like the aurora
at the foot of my half-empty bed.
It's then I'll see those legs again,
emerging from the white cotton shorts,
yet, no cosmic connection will bring
this vision to the woman haunting it.

The Saturday night crowd, all here to see Dave Van Ronk,
sit huddled in the fashion of Antwerp diamond cutters,
sipping cinnamon/marshmallow coffee at the tables.
Caffe Lena is Saratoga's happening place in the 60's and
we're here to forget the war and civil strife in the ghettos.

Sister Mary Katherine, sans frock, is the warmup act,
but no one really gives her any mind,
as she struggles to seat herself upon the stool
intended for the six-foot plus Van Ronk.
Joan Baez prepare to eat your heart out!

Without so much as introduction, she
breaks into a high soprano Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.
Heads pivot like synchronized swimmers toward the stage.
Her silken voice emits notes blinking
into reality from quantum fluctuations in space/time.

Every quivering high-C grafts the audience together.
She's spinning veils of sound,
the like of which our ears are unfamiliar.
The quavers in her throat match the tremors in my coffee.
In the back of the cafe a drunken Van Ronk passes out.

Sadness never signalled us a sign from the cosmos,
left us to decipher the bones of history in quest of omens.
Unheeded, despair overflowed us like a desert sand storm,
buried us in credit ennui and economic laissez-faire.

World leaders formed escalating groups, G-5, G-12, G-20,
still the banks camouflaged in oppressor's language,
invented derivatives against all uncertainty, save their own,
till Wall Street acquired the stench of backed up urinals.

Only when the desperate sallied into the world's streets,
emoting songs that gushered from the wells of outrage,
did rolling blackouts of democracy unearth the buried cities,
freeing a wind that whispers ruin in uncompromising sunlight.

The fundamental phenomena in nature are symmetrical
with respect to interchange of past and future.* --- Richard Feynman

                 Millions for Defense

In the Cabinet room of Monticello, clutching Decatur's letter,
the President removes his wire-rimmed glasses ---
Frigate Philadelphia has been burned.
Decanting a bourbon, he pours and quaffs.
Outside in the piazza the cicadas' din is unbroken.
The Pasha of Tripoli has his tribute!
In three short hours warm rays of sunlight
will greet the outstretched arms of Earth,
but for now the bourbon scintillates.
Ink splatters on the blotter,
as he pounds a clenched fist upon the desk.
Not one cent!, he pronounces to the wall-clock.
Cicadas hold sway in the Charlottsville night,
but on the Barbary Coast a fire is raging.

She's manifested today like a ghost
appearing from a haunted house.
Desertion is that inhabited manor
from which the voices in her head
urge her into exile, urge her phantom existence.
Sitting upon the berm overlooking
the beach and lighthouse of Coos Bay,
she wishes she could ride the setting
Pacific sun to New Guinea or beyond.
Below five athletic young women
contest the physics of a soccer ball,
imagining the red-white lighthouse a goal.
In other times she'd ask to join them,
but she must lose her personal history now,
remain hidden in plain sight.
The loneliness of this subsistence
a charnel house blackening her heart.
She's Amelia Earhart about to crash
the Yukon's heartbroken cry.

They had begun to question consciousness,
turning solid matter into fuzziness in their brains,
rendering not atoms, nor photons, nor particles,
only cold energy, halucenogenic stardust joints.
For the exclusionary few to whom the material
had never meant **** to a tree or a **** to a rabbit,
it was the cash-cow of quantum reality,
ambiguous poetry for a Beat Generation,
Uncertainty in free verse chapbooks.
So they wrote of our interconnectedness ---
the Ginsbergs, the Levertovs, the Ferlinghettis ---
till the gravity of space-mind curved imagination,
a nation falling unheard without a whimper in the forest.