Return After Thanksgiving Freshman Year

I'd come in from windy wharves of New Bedford

Bunking with Queequeg over the Pequod tavern

Cold weather mirage, new work clothes

Buttonwood park zoo low spark of high heeled rock 1967

Pet shop Bishop Stang hobby land Route 6

Aunt Lillian died my Mother so sad

 Rehab Thanksgiving in a rest home

Water-coloring over xeroxes of William Blake

As if there was some point 

Bergman death actor the elements of film

On a fence post in country road Amherst

The deliquescent foliage infra-red fur on the hills

Old things not yet erased

November's denouement black and white cartoon rainstorm

Shutters bang off fly the chimney bricks

Leaf vortex in the conquering wind

Small refuge in warm-lit chambers

The stars land on the landscape at night

Did I know anyone in the houses then?

Gone now faded polaroids

Shooting stars just outside peripheral vision

Insights now into half-remembered tales

Age passing for wisdom 

This dam, this falls, this gorge in darkness, 

This purgatory chasm

To make passage in an unexplained mental geography

Knew it as it took place, recognized it as future reflection

Natural land and water ways sound-tracked with music

Hallucinatory universe of manageable proportions

Painted wigwams filled with small fires scented smoke

Float over the inverted lake

The upside-down sky as seen by the mountain's eye

Tomato automata in the darkness of the park

An imaginary drawing room there

From some nocturnal garden--anonymity
The hungry owl led me through a moonlit glade

14 November 2015

Water-color
 early 1970s

re-discovered this painting in a long-neglected box a few weeks ago

It re-surfaces in this poem, an attempt to recall the young mind

 Mass psychosis, or a restorative breather in the march of doom,

 a psychedelic way of life, a dream of co-existence in the living world