By Request

Pat Smith and Steven Alfred Dolgin, circa 1974-75. Pat turned seventy, December 10, in St. Louis. I haven't spoken to her in many years.

By request. Gary Davidson poses for Greg Lakebrink, 1974. 223 East Scarritt Street. Springfield, Illinois.

potter's wheel

the year goes cycling on this tour of my life
I mix my bone's ash with seminal fluid
and follow now the woman who won't be captured
in this spinning yin and yang we make this vase
a bottle of Einstein's space, and time
she fills it with roses, I fill it with rhyme

the frescoes of friends glazing my self-described brochures
dark & light daguerrotype, marked in silver the singers
chasten this clay, knead the dough to its consistency,
fasten the chainwheel on the day, follow the girl,
her song vowels in siren, taking shape on the potter's wheel

Phil Dick uses the image of a thrown pot as a hiding place for the deity in his remarkable book, Valis. The idea of the universe as some sort of art studio is interesting to me. The distance between the potter's wheel and the great centrifuge at CERN is just not that great, really. I have to say that my old friend Greg Lakebrink's long term relationship to bicycles and cycling gave me the idea of life as a "tour" and the chainwheel as a tool that we all have in a symbolic way. Perhaps, for me, poetry is like a chainwheel, giving regularity to my imagistic reasoning. Maybe this is useful. Maybe it isn't.

secret arrangement

now that you're disappearing
for another time
my secret arrangement
has begun to collapse

the unspent poems
come out as distillate
the things I swore
not to say
for both our sakes

now that you'll be
in that other land
older with its hints
of your first life
I become free and afraid
your leaves fallen in my attic
your lycanthropic eyes
peering from unused pages
the ones in the white box
which serves as a coffin
for this secret
arrangement


Alison Gaughan went to Ireland with her sister in the mid 1970s. When the chapbook, LNFS, was first printed and put together Knoepfle decided that certain things in it had to be fixed and he had three signatures reprinted, including one for Alison who had thought better about an image that apparently identified her own father ("the amputated man"). These changes were wrought and there was a party at Scarritt to take apart the chapbook, collate in the new signatures, and then re-bind them. Afterward there was a box of the replaced signatures that I couldn't bear to throw away. I put them in the attic on Scarritt where they stayed pretty much until we moved and then I disposed of them, but not in a bunch. I burned them in the backyard at 223 East Scarritt, one sheet at a time, for a couple of hours. Lakebrink was sorely amused.

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

let me take a little dawn
to sing for Sandy Denny,
sweet baby gone.

let me thank you darling
for Tam Lin in St. Louis
three years ago.

life is still here for you
your voice mingles with my breath
frosting on good cake

who know where the time goes, darling?
you do. you do.


Sandy Denny, lead singer for Fairport Convention at various times, died of a brain hemorrhage in her early thirties in approximately 1977. I saw her at the Fox Theatre on Grand Avenue in St. Louis and she was remarkable in every way. She sang, among other things, the ancient brit folk song, "Tam Lin", one of my favorites, while Dave Swarbrick danced his ass off, with an unfiltered cigarette hangin from his lip. She authored, among many other songs, the piece, Who Knows Where the Time Goes, that gives the Judy Collins' album its name. Even today I will think of that lyric and shake my head.