Letter to Thomas McGrath

•

I

Robert Bly asked the dead sparrow in his hand
to forgive him for all the hours spent
listening to the radio. Tom, I ask you to forgive me
for all the hours I did not hold your work in my hands.

In 1970 I even betrayed you.
Charged with the task--privilege--of taking the reins
of your returning Crazy Horse
and fresh out of Iowa's writing mill,
I put into that stallion's feedbag the dope of mainstream careerism
and drugged the madness out of him, corporatized
his heroic body.
Mussolini: "Fascism should have been called 'corporatism.'"
Forgive me for that, too.

You said Cal (not Lowell, oh not Lowell) the farmhand
led you to the light but you were too young to enter.
Whenever our paths crossed in Minnesota,
I was too young (culpably so) to enter your light.
Now I miss the conversations we didn't have.

I would have told you of my Irish grandfathers,
the one killed young by his coalmine work
in Southern Illinois in 1900, the other at the same time
excoriating in verse the English in New York's Irish Times.
You, a master curser, boiler of language
over the flame of anger till the pot jumps off the stove,
its scalding syllables flying in all directions,
and believer with Mohammed Dib that
"Nothing is more a sacrament than a curse,"
would have cursed all oppressors everywhere.

And I would have asked about your working on the docks
in Manhattan's Chelsea district, the year I was born.
I went there yesterday to look for your ghost studying
the cries of flying gulls,
but found only the Chelsea Piers, a sports
and entertainment mall. You would not be surprised,
you who no less than Lorca
breathed fire on New York,
he there ten years before you: I want your ghosts
to meet on a bench in Washington Square Park
and passersby to see tiny flame-flakes
where your words dart back and forth between you,
neither Spanish nor English but the language of healing fire.

II

When you sing in high gear,
your X-treme wordmongering and verbal foliation
a form of High Blarney, an aural Book of Kells,
the wind listens and takes notes, reshapes itself
to blow with greater color.

Your six-gun tongue came riding out of the West,
the pain of history's loss translated into
a blazing barrel, an arsenal of waves in the ear.

You were Joycean on a threshing machine, harvesting words.

At the junction of dream and reality,
your Irish gab twisted and turned in the prison
of the barbed world, left elaborate patterns of sound
like star charts on the air.

Tom, your gift as outsider artist
was so great it overflowed its banks
and mapped a continent in searching for the sea.

III

Since "Dakota is everywhere," you are everywhere, too.
When George Bush hides in the White House,
he is hiding from you.

"The Phony War" you wrote of
is ours now, the deaths not phony.
Once again we must
"steam the blood from the dollar bills."

More than thirty years after the war
killed your brother, you were unable to read
"Blues for Jimmy" in public.
You always wrote out of streaming open wounds, like
multiple mouths.

I know your heart burst
deep inside the earth
when Paul Wellstone's plane went down.

And your love for Tomasito
still makes waves crash against the shore.

You promised: "I'll take you, my darlings, over the river
if you open your eyes and slip your foot out of the stone."
It's clear to us all now: you are the Dakotas' Whitman,
the pair of you hand-in-hand
leading us forward on the open road.