John Fahey’s Astral Stomp
Summertime once, and I stood,
Man and his shadow, in a noon hour square.
I cast my eyes at the tower clock,
The hands of which caught time with
Alarmed finesse, a contemptuous cat, feral perhaps,
Looking this way and that. A vendor of jewelry lit
a cigar, its wrapper gold, —
A housewife came to inspect the smoke.
Her boredom was an everyday tableau.
And it was purely Hercule Poirot….
… But what of the senate? So? What of it?
Can she change her heart, she who disdains male
martyrdom?
Of John Fahey (borderline mystic), see how
His hands were brass spoons the day he put
His slide to the strings of his dreadnought guitar,
And the tune was
‘The Dance of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City
Of Bladensburg’. Gave Brits in the USA notice while
Washington flashed his gorget, his patch of colour,
And a super nova rippled, and it was like as when,
Years later, a flag undulated over Fort Sumter….
I was at mid point in life, done with youth.
Time to change course, pension pending.
Would hear a cuckoo do its anthem, and then,
Coming through. Make way for Mr America.
Heavy martyrdom here, louche eyes.
My father once reasoned, saying this:
“Sidestep the levy breathing down your neck.
One thing to be killed by the enemy, but
It’s another to get it from one’s own end.”
What did you expect? We hit the bar.
Talked blue planets, eccentric women.
It was a bad year for the Dodgers – 1967.
He’s dead, my father who was just himself, no ax
To grind. That the bastards are what they are.
Whisky and chaser downed, and wisdom chimed:
The watery element, when boiling hot,
Will soften spuds and make eggs hard.
… Creedence in the air, LBJ disturbed,
The agony of defeat on every channel, —
Cheesecake and strawberries on that funeral train
Hauling a dead Kennedy to D.C.,
And the comedy of it all is yet more gas
Still hanging, mist-like, above Belsen.
For men send payloads into space
Of what it is they manufacture – fine speeches,
Bunker bombs, law that sullies law.
Playing both ends Against the middle, bounty hunters in tight with
Caesar’s sex drive, the resurrected Christ,
Slip the cuffs on every punk Poseidon
While the Born-Again God gets bail.
And somewhere up there, way beyond
Blue Neptune, its deep-seated ice, and a
Camera unfolds like a morning bloom.
Receives light, the most ancient light
That would sexualize a flower…
And perhaps we’ll come to know at last,
By way of galaxies until now unseen,
By way of fresh new lesions in the heart –
Whether sarcasm, joy, or sadistic impulse
Set laughter off at time’s beginning.
