Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 3, Number 2. November 2020. ISSN: 2581-7094
Dandelions
after James
Salter
The
beautiful,
the
ordinary,
all that
sustains or wears down …
it proceeds
for hours and weeks and years
until it
passes
like scenery
on a roadside.
Dandelions
amidst litter.
Men playing
cards on folding chairs.
The guard
house of a gated community.
Whatever
does not
appear on the page
dissolves.
The pets
die,
the house
goes into foreclosure,
the children
drift off,
the family
itself evaporates,
the
dandelions blown away,
and yet
here
is this poem.
Rob Reads Allen Ginberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” to Me in his Mother’s Basement,
Wading River,
Long Island, 1971
the Bay Area
before the love-ins
and the
dayglo and the Grateful Dead
boxcars and
tincans and soot
and a pair
of old friends
trying to
make sense
of fishless
streams
and dirty
locomotives
and flowers
covered in grease
and O! how
that made me stand up
and O! how
that made me cry
and O! when
I remember that now
how I miss
Rob and those afternoons
of suburban
basement time travel beatnik
poem café
sutra visions