A Mini-Mart Near Fresno

"What peaches and what penumbras!"

–Allen Ginsberg

I was a child of love in a flowering town, canary yellows, a daisy chain,

stunned particular of forgetting

which was love,

which was just California stretched like an Indian drum between peace

and Vietnam. Unrequited,

I was greenhoused sativa, the Wandering Jew, a kind of Walt walking

divided streets, united, nostalgic in a placard maze.

I knew Sturm und Drang, Cheech and Chong, Wham-O, "Hell No,

We Won't Go!"

The architecture of God was in the plan of the city: draft zone in the projects, Head Start in the parks, Southern Pacific regularity,

divorce, quietude.

Let's say polling room, intricate busing I was, Black Panthers, blotter blue, ecumenical philosophy, a nuclear 2.2.

Such buzz and then such languor: how the marsh for the mall,

the hill for the cross, the slough for the production

of burning ungents.

How Warlocks, Alarm Clock, Symbionese Liberation...

How probative sensibility, Question Authority, conjurations

of chlorine and myrrh,

this family, country, beehive and molehill, what you can make of it, why. I loved the network of holiday boats, the shape of the hulls

as they delivered the sea...

How eventuality, lull, level sands: whosoever wakes here eat these words:

I was the Golden Hind of Camelot Arms, a little ecstasy, a little neon

plaint: requite, requite, the lyric

mercado I was.