UNCLE SAM’S BURLESQUE & OTHER TRAGEDIES

G had too much whimsey thrust upon her unwillingly, and she went mad from time to time.

The last time I saw her, she was sitting on a Haight Street sidewalk near Ashbury. It was barely midmorning, and remnants of the ’60s hung on as wisps (sometimes more, sometimes even less) of fog that would burn away in the sunlight, but settle in again most sea-damp nights. G was beginning to fade in the sunlight, probably humming to herself and not even noticing who walked past.

I did walk past because I was having a nice day with someone else. I wondered how (and when) G got to San Francisco again, and if she were through revealing herself in her journals I always refused to read, in her private music, in her near-Cubist, flat canvases of angels with tears sliding down their cheeks, that she painted in a cold apartment across the hall from me in Dallas.

G’s schizophrenia burlesques the American dream as surely as any comic circus act.

The next-to-last time I saw her, I made her a sandwich and let her use my shower, because she was living on the street listening to her own music. She said she couldn’t help it if other people didn’t hear it.

MEMORY

Poet’s time is wind through a barren landscape.

Poet’s time is circular during a linear journey.

Poet’s time is moments during a non-linear destination.

Poet’s time is an empty dancehall below a dazzling disco ball . . . poet’s time is instruments and mic stands patient on the stage . . . the only sound the rhythm of four ceiling fans . . . the excited whispers of air that will, in a few hours, turn into notes. . . a rite of passage, to be inhaled and exhaled . . . the fans’ sound slowly heard as percussion . . . invisible hands pulling slow, blue sounds from an acoustic guitar on the stage . . . dust slowly moving on the wooden dance floor . . .

. . . poet’s time is through an open window, where a child’s faraway voice sings a wish for something special tonight . . . silence again, except for the fans turning . . .