over two decades in the making.
a timeshifting autobiographical poetry collage w/photography.
a diaristic, nearly "daily writing" (ad)venture.
new pieces are posted most days..
**new and in progress** --
recordings of each poem are being added.
these are read by the author & posted to each poem's page.
--Del Ray Cross (contact delraycross at gmail)
Oh come back, whatever heart you have left. It is my life you save. The poem is done. —John Wieners
I can say that again, right? Repetition can be powerful, it can evoke memory (and provoke it), it can also, I suppose, be a sign of some weakness, point a bit too astutely to a lack of memory, for example. I’ve never been one for power, anyway. Attention, perhaps? But Superhero? Not me. And whatever the case, these words arrived, and continue to arrive, and for now, they are a long
river of paradoxical mantras. And so I use them two at
a time and again and again. My gratitude for anyone who puts up with my insistence on echoing my own voice, my own words, and those of many other better voices than mine. There is some consistency, even within such a gemini as, well, myself. Thus the duplicitous mantra spake: The
Oh come back, whatever heart you have left. It is my life you save. The poem is done. —John Wieners
This from the last 3 lines of Wieners’ “A Poem for Painters,” in his San Francisco masterpiece The Hotel Wentley Poems. Somewhere in Polk Gulch, purportedly about being painted by Paul Klee, nine years and ten days before I, myself, crawled through a drainpipe in Fort Smith, Arkansas, ugly and slapped. I cried, too, halfway between San Francisco and Boston, knowing even then, perhaps, that I’d be nowhere but anywhere until I was either here or there. Here being one block down from the eastern tip of Nob Hill, which is just a few short blocks east of Polk Gulch, which, also, to- wards (or almost to), I walk almost daily. This, the neighbor- hood of the Hotel Wentley at a certain time. This is as certain as can be, that it is less than a mile from me, now, sitting at my desk, looking over the rooftops of the Tenderloin to my right, and the nibs of the landmark shortscrapers of the Financial District to my left. I had the great honor of hearing him read from his own voice, in person, a couple of times when he was alive. And also, when he was alive (somewhat, it seemed to me), at the Corbetts’ party in the South End (Boston, of course – so grand were Bill and Beverly’s parties there, so lucky I felt, and if ever there were a man as good at paying homage, be it to greats such as Wieners or to unknowns, such as my lowly self, was when I took my very first poetry class, at
MIT, where it was free to me, an employee, just under 30 years old). This particular party, held shortly after the inaugural of Pressed Wafer, a press the name of which derived from another line of John Wieners’ poetry. It was at this party that I first officially met him, Wieners. I’ve no idea exactly what I said to him but I do remember cradling his hand for a moment, over-excitedly, a hand that, as I do recall, could rarely be seen, only emerging occasionally from whatever longer-than- arms’-length jacket he’d be wearing. But when they did stretch through and out of those overly long sleeves, they’d reach out—through Kentucky and over the Hoover Dam—like a bridge across a fucked- up continent, and to a down and outcast heart, which is how I at least think of mine now, mouldering, even, never quite able to crack, though, like Klee’s poetried portrait of John, or the memory of that lovely and
surreal party held in honor of a man who was and
is a superhero to many, certainly to myself. All of this just clings to my insides, gripping at lung and tarnish, at whatever heart there is or might be. It’d be nothing but a hollow wish, this living, during times like these, were it not for you and yours to come and save. My gratitude to you all,
I finally froze “These are the kinds of poems I’ve been trying to make: light on their feet, fluttery-buttery at the bowels, look-feel-taste fantastic.”
Then you froze at the surface of what looked, at first, like an endless icy wilderness, never to make it into the annals of the
