The Brooklyn Rail

Neeli Cherkovski died today—
Where to go? What to do?
Grown men don’t cry
but fight the endless fight
only to be lost at sea.

No more espresso-fueled salons
under Lisbon lemon and avocado trees
where squirrels perform daring acrobatics
while blue jays recite revolutionary poetry.

Your dining room an askew gallery
with vivid black and white photos
with all nine gray zones in between:
Bukowski, Corso, Ferlinghetti,
denizens of the old Black Cat saloon—
your father Sam Cherry
brought them back to life,
if only in my mind’s eye.

No more tales of receiving poems
hot “off the presses”
of the collective unconscious
in pre-dawn Orion light:
You often rose at four a.m.
to receive your Orphic messages
scribbled with a Montblanc pen—
is this when signals pulsed most audibly
in your poet’s blood stream?—

posing that perennial question
since the first of your kind
raised their eyes from the lowly earth
to ponder the starry dome:
What was the ultimate source
of your American ecstasy?—

from way up in the ionosphere
where all the poet voices meet?
Or weathered ghost towns
on the dark side of the moon?

These automatic poems often born “of a piece”
to a hyper-monk busking for mockingbirds
on the gentle slopes of Andover Street
while the rest of San Francisco
was still sleeping.

Neeli Cherkovski died today—
Where to go?  What to do?
Grown men don’t cry
but fight the endless fight
only to be lost at sea. . .