Ancestral Collage

Empathy, beauty, understanding,
           mercy for it all.
Mercy to the hands and faces
      in every bit of it all.
Mercy for the trees
      and rocks, and creatures.
      mercy to it all.

Where are the footprints of bohemia?
Beneath the raining fields of earth
                        and history?
Henry Clapp in cups of Pfaff's black coffee,
      those porcelain white pipes
                  he adopted in the France
                  of Baudelaire,
Whitman ringing the bell of Blake,
                              loafing,
      inviting all to oneness in the Grass,
                  the Gita in the leaves.

Bohemia itself chanting "holy, holy, holy,"
      from the lives of visionary angels
      who were visionary angels,
Leaping into rucksacks and mountains
      smoking marijuana on the heights
                        of subterranean ecstasies,
Urizen giving knowledge to the beat,
And peaks like Snyder in the garden,
      Duluoz in silence against the sitting dirt,
                              typing volumes...
            the tender bones of a saint.
And the May King of '65
            frolics in the spirit of Rimbaud,
      lucidity at Naropa's feet.

Percy Shelley in the flowers, in the seeds.
      Percy Shelley, these ecstatic hours.
Shelley in the realm of ghosts,
      talking with Rousseau      before he left
            with his brother, Adonais,
            to the light.

Flowers upon flowers bloom
      in the streets and colors of the Oracle,
Acid Tests, San Francisco on the radio,
      Kundalini in the eyes of October 6, 1966
            revealing Be-Ins in the park,
Flowers and mirrors in words
      and rivers
      to the dhuni of the Avadhuta.