The Brooklyn Rail

To have knocked, with decency, that a blunt should open. A phone call from Neeli. I am pulling weeds on Russian Hill. He invites me to lunch on the redwood deck. I ask him could I bring anything to lunch, he replies, “Bring me the Nobel Prize in Literature.” I tell him they’re sold out at the Trader Joe’s, but I’ll check Whole Foods if he can give me the bread for it later.

Instant dive into recitations of Pound and Yeats, musing over the wide-rolling western land from which we both crawled, talking about our families, the carrying-on of the bohemian tradition, the espresso-booze fueled thrum of North Beach, its long history and subsequent failures, its victories over the doom loop swooping San Francisco, and as always: the next poem. Neeli knows the names of all my family members within a week and constantly asks for them in between his fits of doubts on his readership and recognition. “Alright my man, talk to you later!” Neeli wants to visit Coolidge in Petaluma, wants to stop at Telford’s Pipe & Cigar on the way, wants to swing in to Jack in the Boxon the way home up Bayshore—don’t tell Jesse. Neeli drops the ember of his pipe in his shoes and it chars the polyester to his feet, I gauze and bandage. Nurse Scrivani on the phone recommends a silver iodide. Neeli combs the frozen section at Safeway for sugar-free ice cream reading the labels like a rabbi. Neeli worries I am getting fat. He worries about joining the Pantheon, about the next poet laureate, he tackles the idea of Whitman’s impending cultural cancellation. Neeli wants to read me a poem he just wrote called notes from the celestial asylum.

To have gathered from the air a live tradition. He has a vactuphone perpetually fastened to his left ear. “What? Speak up!” The trumpet end with the diameter of the Kuiper Belt. Anything and everything that enters his mind, or stored in its many warehouses, became the score. Poetic feat—editorial haystack. Speak to text, text to speech, is never without his comrades stacked beside the writing desk—he moves out of them, he takes the pen where they left off and inches us all a little closer to oblivion. I first thought him to be a bossy poet with lines like: pray like a Talmudic scholar given to untested grammar or pry open monstrous lies of the road and electric grid. Now that he’s gone, it seems more like a nudge than an imperative. “I think, but I don’t know.” He carved petroglyphic lyrics likely from Li Po or something Japanesque: purple lichen clinches obdurate rock and love grabs slender earth. Then there’s the birds in the trees. In old tongues, small absurdities of childhood nursery rhymes led off a cliff, supreme elegies of the fallen and soon-to-be-fallen including himself, a sort of Stone Age futurist who predicted automation in Precambrian odes. My world feels deaf.

Or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame. Being with him was like having a grandson and a grandpa all at once. Neeli, wipe your face. We are crossing the street now. Your phone is in your pocket, my dear. Ultimately he wanted to be read and known. He was the great living American poet (you ask him, he’ll tell you!) To have done instead of doing, this is not vanity. He was insatiable. Hundreds of people have poured in their praises and tributes. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered … I hope this is a call to remind us to give each other roses while we live. The horseman passes by, we are only here for a little while.

I will reach for my phone to see no missed calls from the Cherry Poet where once there were nine. Goddammit, I’ll miss you forever.

Scott Bird
San Francisco
April 19, 2024