To zap the demons of attachment
you told your premature mourners
to place your corpse on a table
strewn with frozen raspberries
*
Today is July 18, 2002,
and the last time I sat in Boulder
was summer 1975--
you arrived, and I was
reading your novels & poems
and saw no more need to
sit at the knee
than with Trungpa--
while inwardly
the connection was
clear as the sun,
consciousness,
another day--
the mystery of Dasein
*
the Poetry Wars had ended
just before my bus arrived
from Oregon, Sept. '74
and though I had written
Martin Fritter : Karmadzong :
from the Dalles or Hood River
homestead where friends
put me up between
sticker picker shifts
at Cascade Locks Lumber
there was a much quieter mode of
whatever: meeting:
than the farewells
of my Oregon friends--
e.g., the first night in town
Country came down the hall
with a couple of monks
and laughed: Lost Horizon
is playing! we walked
to the movie theatre,
call it The Rialto, I dunno
*
Sitting on the hill
mulling over
the visitor's suggestion:
to divest everything
& head for a San Francisco zendo together
my apparatus must have remembered
the guest's announcement
down in the dining hall
that her breasts were growing
suddenly, inexplicably large--
Upstairs--in Pullahari,
was it? red carpet--
sitting there beside her
anyhow, on the hill--
my thingee must
have failed to conceal
my interest--
I wanted those tits!
*
Was it a lesson in nonattachment?
When she did not cotton to
my overt interest in
those tits--
I realized we were all nuts.
That logic would not avail.
That J.H. was right
up at the site near
Red Feather Lakes--
"we're all fuckin' neurotics."
That I was not supposed to
go to San Francisco with her
pretending nonattachment,
a craven, minklike, otterlike
dharma critter in the night.
The logos was not a prefab
pattern, as it were.
We were responsible
--like an improv company
of actors, variously
comic, tragic, pathetic--
for making it up.
But, Phil, that goes without saying.
Right?
*
I'm bigger than you now,
my girth exceeds all
rime & reason
this morning I tried a quieter
voice, the appraisor
arrived
from Peoria, I left him
with my mother
in the aluminum shack
I hope to see
amortized
or whatever.
The dada-
dicticism?
No goal. We must
love the chaos.
If all issues
were resolved--
what dreams, what
guilt-quilts,
what cosmic loneliness
would come
flooding in?
In other words,
when the I
thinks of Boulder
1974-75
it is not
Jim McCurry
any more than
say, Frog #456679
popping a bubble
of some
unlabeled
whatsis
in the swamp
outside
jmccurry@sandburg.edu
which, by
the way,
is my new
signature,
I'm told,
Adios--