Walking Kaufman Home

off and on
after your merchant marine
naïve quest for union
justice on land
at sea
after the full net of sun

glinting golden sardines
flying fish
american alchemy changed
to new coins with winged liberty
and dead anglo-american men on them (who

had freely charged their black label
bourbon and branch
sipped in the shade
of mythic history's
indian treaty tree

to slavery lynching
sweat shops' women workers
in mill town methodist factories) there

was the search for the sacred in saki
for divination in drug den
zen

after the twelve-bar blue
black solitary
bulb lit night with white

washed shadows of naked power
where the jail walls dripped mixed bloods
where bail was rarely made like fishes
and loaves

where time was kept
with a nightstick by cops
on the beatniks after bop's break-

light heavy brass-tinted bravura
response to korea
after the long high
noon of stilled all-american moon

shine and vodka sipped in the shade
of a mountain-sized magic mushroom there
is still in silence

this inviting legacy:

wailed triumphs
fires Love
like bird's bebop aubades
that fuse us that never refuse
our darkly lit humaness retelling the u.s.
in us all day after day after lady after-
life man you are still "ON"