The Ferlinghetti School of Poetics

“All that we see, or seem, is but a dream within a dream.” Edgar Allen Poe

I: The dream within the dream within the dream

What is it, Ferlinghetti,

Taking star turns in my dreams?

Strolling in front of cars

Haunting alleyways, stairways,

Bars? Beating moth like flitting through

San Francisco’s sex fraught avenues? In North Beach

Where XXX marks art and

Nasty commerce collide, intersect Columbus,

Telegraph Hill, Jack Kerouac Way.

You are fog whispering in from the sea

On another sunny day.

“There’s a breathless hush on the freeway tonight,

Beyond the ledges of concrete/Restaurants fall into dreams

With candlelight couples/Lost Alexandria still burns.” *

Ferlinghetti’s words sink, weighted

On the business end of an invisible fishing line,

Dredging last nights’ dream to surface, gasping for air

Shivering like some catfish

Eyes bulging, wet lake water dripping off its scales.

The knife of memory slices open

That dream, finds me on haunted streets,

Instructing small boy:

“You gotta go to the Ferlinghetti school. It’s totally rad

and completely cool.”

II: Ferlinghetti Makes an Appearance

Phantom audience shouts: “Higher! Higher!”

Egg the poets on – after all, they’re not on the wire.

Higher? We spin the memory wheel until there’s my father

Strolling through his own Coney Island

And there he is again winning a goldfish

The clerk hands it over fish circling in plastic bag

Big Daddy pretends

It’s all for the kids.

He needed to win like that fish needed water.

III: The Poet Reconsiders

Is the skill of life just keeping on

All the gears oiled, the doors open?

Even if the past keeps drowning and the knifed open

Dream fish still swims around?

In dream theater Ferlinghetti arrives.

Was it the Regal, the Royal or the Metreon?

I rise to make room for he who started everything

Got the wheel of poetry turning, broke

Open language, letters. Vaporized

While he drifts

Haunting my dreams.

*From “Wild Dreams of A New Beginning”
by L. Ferlinghetti

September Fifteenth

In one week, summer closes up shop

Pull the shutters, mow the yellowed lawn.

From now on, things will be different.

The pond will freeze, the lake too cold

The forest’s fecundity will go numb.

The visiting will stop - too far to drive.

The ferries are docked. We’ll survive.

Now we enter Equinox

When sun and moon, poised

Cease rotation, equal for a moment

Before the scales tip

And even Indian summer can’t breathe

Life back into the dying light.

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© Copyright, 2014, Joan Gelfand.
All Rights Reserved.